Author: wwducat

For all the Mom’s out there kissing Boo Boos and bandaging scraped knees.

Thank You

I hope all of you are taken out to breakfasts and treated to the trash being taken out without you asking, and that you have the whole day spent with your feet up enjoying your families.

Or I spend too much time driving…

Probably a bit of both.

It takes until my “Sunday” to recharge enough to have my brain actually start to fire on all cylinders again.

Just in time to shut my head down again to deal with the demands of work.

By my “Friday” my head is tapioca. I’m mentally and physically exhausted. Typically I’m in bed by 6:00 PM. I’ll sleep until 6:00 AM then wake up, and still be bone tired.

I’ll have a cup of coffee, some breakfast, then clean up the apartment, and get on the road to my house… It’s a tough drive.

When I get to the house, I start laundry, and decide if the yard work has to be done. Often I’ll vaccum, but lately I’ve been so tired it’s all I can do to get up the freeway. The past two weeks I’ve been physically hurting. The aching doesn’t stop until the afternoon of my “Sunday”. Just in time for me to hop back on the freeway and slug my way down the freeway again.

Then the grind starts all over again.

I’m on a hamster wheel, so that annoying squeeking you’re hearing is me running in place.

The alternative however is less enticing than this, so I’ve been applying the philosophy,

“Close your eyes, and think of England.”

Hey, whatever works!

This morning as I was sitting in nightmarish traffic caused by an accident, I had a bit of an epiphany.

As the minutes ticked by I realized I was going to be late to work. I would be dinged a half point because I was late, even though it was through no fault of my own. (The folks in the fatality accident were having a much worse morning than I so I couldn’t bring myself to be upset about my issue.)

The thoughts that went through my head are these; I’m going to be late, I’m going to be punished for being late, the company’s rules will see to that. If I’m going to be dinged a half point for being late, and still have to sit through 8 hours of annoyance why shouldn’t I take a whole point hit, and take the day off?

After all, if I’m going to be beaten either way why not take some time for myself?

So I called out of work and the company was short handed by me, and whoever else may have come to the same conclusion.

In less enlightened times, I’d have called my boss and told them I was on my way but stuck in traffic and would be in as soon as possible. My boss would have said, “Sure no problem, I’ll see you when you get here.”  

That was back in the Stone Age when people could actually be people, and human stuff wasn’t frowned upon. Obviously if you were chronically late that was another matter, but occasionally being late was simply a fact of life.

With the advent of Zero Tolerance policies… that civility is gone. We’ve moved closer to the mechanized society of Orwells “1984”, Star Trek’s Borg, and well beyond the fear even the most ardent of Luddite followers ever ginned up.

The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and weavers in the 19th century who destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting the use of machinery in a “fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labour practices.[1] Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste as machines would replace their role in the industry.[2] It is a misconception that the Luddites protested against the machinery itself in an attempt to halt progress of technology. However, the term has come to mean one opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation or new technologies in general.[3] The Luddite movement began in Nottingham and culminated in a region-wide rebellion that lasted from 1811 to 1816. Mill owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was brutally suppressed with military force.

As I was sitting there in traffic It occurred to me that in machines and machining, you absolutely can’t have Zero Tolerance. If there is no tolerance for the pieces to move, then the machine won’t work. There has to be some tolerance, even if it’s a micron or less, otherwise you’ve just built a very complex and expensive brick.

Sitting there, trying to figure out how best to get back home so I could go back to bed, I wondered how it is that we’ve come to expect humans to act like an imaginary “Perfect” machine.

Humans are about as random and variably toleranced as it gets. Attempting to force people to meet impossible expectations is bound to fail, on it’s face. No further evaluation is needed. Yet all over the country we have corporations and institutions touting Zero Tolerance policies. 

Ironically, the authors of these policies often have “Tolerance and CoExist” bumper stickers plastered on their vehicles.

I think it’s another case of unintended consequences. I just got a text from a friend at work saying it’s insanely busy there. Perhaps I’m not the only person who ran the same equation and came up with the same answer.

Ahh Well, not my problem today. Off to have some fun!

The sign informed us that BPA was contained in cans and other things and that the sate of California had determined that this chemical had been shown to cause reproductive harm to women.

What went through my mind was WTF? 

For years it’s been known or at least surmised that this same chemical caused reproduductive harm to men and boys. But apparently it’s only important when it’s also affecting women.

After all why be gender specific?

Why not simply say this material has been shown to cause repoductive harm in general?

As I’ve said before, the war on women is biasing what we think is important. 

If BPA causes limp dicks in men and testosterone imbalances in young boys… It’s a sure bet that it’s going to cause reproductive problems across the board.

Why is it that this is only “important” when women are involved?

We are a binary gendered species and, as the old saying goes “It takes two to tango.” 

A better question is why if we’ve known this from EU studies for several years, then why haven’t we outright banned the substance if only out of an over abundance of caution?

I thought at first it was just me. I thought, “Dude, you’ve lived away from huge herds of people for too long.” Well, that is a true statement. I thought I was just too sensitive and reactive to strange noises. The difference between living in a house in the mountains, to living in an apartment in the middle of a city.

I thought I’d adapt in time…

Well time has passed, and I’ve adapted. BUT there’s only so much I can do without gouging my ears out.

The problem:

Guy downstairs, he’s really kind of messed up. But he’s not the problem. It’s his son, who has a girlfriend who lives her life like she’s in a telenovella. I’ve come to believe that it is physically impossible for this woman to walk past anything with hinges and not slam it. Doors, Cabinets, Car doors, Car trunks, you name it. About the only thing that she can’t seem to slam shut is her legs.

She seems to think that arguments are foreplay. And from the many, many, many, sleepless nights I’ve had she seems to like sex a lot. 

Picture a Fran Dressher voice, only not as nice… Screaming obscenities, punctuated with “Don’t you love me?” At the top of her lungs all night, every night. When she decides to have a fight, (easier to count them times when she’s not fighting, screaming, and bitching.) she starts by slamming every available door in reach. We’re talking slamming doors so hard that the whole building shakes. There have been a few times when my bed moved like we were having an earthquake. But no it’s just this tempestuous ball biting bitch.

That’s not all. 

When she slams the front door and storms out of the apartment downstairs she always comes back. Usually to find she’s locked herself out of the apartment (or been locked out) then she starts beating on the door to be let back in. When that fails, she starts pounding on the bedroom window (right below my window) or she climbs over the railing to their patio then starts pounding on the sliding glass doors.

If she were in a house, it would still be unseemly but it wouldn’t be keeping everyone in the general area awake with the pounding on the doors and windows while screaming like a harpie, (maybe banshee is a better description.)

Last night was particularly bad. She didn’t end her howling until well after 2 am.

This was the fourth night in a row.

This morning after I called out sick at work, I did get a couple hours of sleep. Only to have her start bitching and screaming at 5 am.

Yup, I was awakened AGAIN. 

I thought about yelling down to her boyfriend, “Thow a bone in her or buy her a big fucking vibrator!” In the end, I though better of that course of action. Instead, I showered, shaved, had breakfast, then went to the property manager’s office.

We had a nice chat. Turns out that she’s well aware of the problem and the circus is being evicted on Friday. Hum, apparently I’m not the only one in the complex who’s tired of not having any sleep. So I’ve been thinking about buying a patio chair and plenty of popcorn for the last episode of this Telenovella. I can sit on my patio with my feet up, a stiff drink, popcorn, and watch the Sheriff toss this trash out on the curb. Hopefully there’s going to be violence, so the whole lot of ’em get tossed in jail, and that goes for her nasty little dog too!

 I think there’ll be a block party when these people go.

I know I’ll dance a little jig, just before I lay down on my bed for well deserved sleep.