I’ve got a bad case of Phone-itus

A couple of weeks ago my cell phone just blanked out. No rhyme or reason, it was working fine one moment and bang the next it was completely useless.

Oh it did manage to annoy the hell out of me be telling me it was receiving messages and phone calls but wouldn’t let me actually see the messages or answer the calls or in fact control it at all.

I pulled the battery, I pulled the sim card, I rebooted it, nothing worked. The next day finds me in my local cell phone store. They confirmed that yep the phone wasn’t working right. So we start the process where the phone insurance sends me a new phone and we’re good.

While I’m there I see this beautiful new smartphone. Wow! nifty display, cameras front and back, 4G THE WORKS! (Yeah I’m a techno whore! SO What?) I’m drooling and I’m thinking hey maybe I should just upgrade to this beautiful baby and keep the phone the insurance is going to send me as a backup.

Mind you we’re talking about a 400.00 upgrade here.

The internal justification was all that more reasonable when I was told that I wouldn’t have a working phone for at least 4 days in large part thanks to a Google mapping mistake.

A lot of  companies  are using Google to verify shipping addresses. In my case, Google has my address in the wrong city. This has on more than one occasion  prevented products from being sent to my house.

This time the insurance / cell phone company couldn’t verify the address and categorically refused to send the replacement phone. This means that I’m going to have the phone sent to the other halfs workplace, because after all the house that I’ve lived in for 20 years is suddenly non-existent! Google says so, it must be true!

The whole time, the little voice is saying “Dude, you gotta have a phone… This one is freakin beautiful and you KNOW you’ll be happier with it than your old phone.”

I’m weakening in my resolve to do the right thing, and frankly PISSED off that Google has refused to correct the mistake that is now impacting my life on a fairly regular basis.

After a lot of back & forth in my head, I’ve finally beaten the fuck out of that little “Angelic guy on my shoulder” and decided to go for it.

The new phone, and an assortment of accessories is sitting on the counter. The clerk is scanning the bar codes and the total isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I’m starting to get excited “Oh boy a new top of the line phone… goodie, goodie”, it’s like Christmas.

Shut up, I know it sounds insane. You should see me with a new car…

Just sayin…

The clerk asks me for the sim card out of my messed up phone. I pop the back off, pull the battery, pull the sim and hand it to her.  Because I’ve now got pieces of phone filling both hands I pop the battery back in the phone, and snap the back cover in place. After all I want to caress, hold, and watch the new phone as it powers up.

“Oh goodie, goodie, almost there. New phone! this is gonna be so cool!”

Out of the corner of my eye I see a light that I shouldn’t see. I try to ignore it, then I hear a start up tone and bigger than shit my “broken” phone is powering up normally. It’s sitting in my hand with a bright crisp clear display asking where the hell the sim card is.

DAMN!!!! I MEAN DAMN!!!

The “Angelic guy on my shoulder jumps up and says I told you so!”, The “Devil guy is stomping around screaming fuck, fuck!, fuckity, fuck!” The techno whore in me is whining in a most un-masculine fashion “But I waaaaannntttt it!”

I look at the clerk, Hoping that she’s gonna pull an I dream of Jeanie blink and my old phone will be dead again. She doesn’t.

Ever so reluctantly I tell her that we have to cancel the deal.

I can’t justify it anymore, I’ve got a working phone in my hands, that unconsciously I’m trying to strangle… Nope, the paper thin justification is gone. I can’t do it. It’s a chunk of change that I don’t need to be spending right now.

The clerk hands me back the sim card. I put it back in my old phone hoping against all reason that the damn thing doesn’t power up again. Nope, there’s the start-up tone, and the display is working right… Well SHIT!

I leave the store bummed, annoyed and feeling like a kid that got socks instead of a new bike for his birthday.

I had to do the adult thing. I know it was the right thing. Doesn’t make it any easier….

I will say this… the Next time my phone screws up… It’s outta here! And the latest new beautiful smart phone is going to be in my greedy techno whore hands!

On with the business of living…

Hope everyone had a nice 3 day weekend.

(Note: when I started this post I was pissed off… By the time I got to the end I was chuckling because this is so often typical of my life.)

I’m now on furlough instead of actually being layed off.

Here is a snippet of an email exchange with one of my co-workers. In re-reading it, I note that I’m pretty pissed off and it comes through loud and clear. I’d actually tried to tone it down a bit. Sheesh if this is toned down I wish I’d saved the original draft! I’d have made my Marine friends proud with the colorful use of swearing!

Furlough instead of layoffs is almost as bad as just continuing along the layoff course that they had chosen. This is FAR more stressful since YET AGAIN the company has thrown everyone into a state of uncertainty. I’m actually FAR MORE PISSED about this than anything else. I mean I’m supposed to hang out waiting for the 20th? Ooooo there may be an immediate start date but no one has a clue when? We ALL know we cant run our lives like this… Why does the company think they can run a business like this?

I’m angry because it appears that the company may well be simply maneuvering so that that can screw people out of their severance pay. I never did buy that BS line that billing  no-work burned the employees severance.

I suspect that they may have found out they didn’t have a leg to stand on and all the sudden they’re looking at $$$ and have decided that they don’t want to cough up the bucks.

The real problem is the none of the retained employees will ever trust the management again. If those employees are smart they’ll go ahead and keep looking for something else. Either in another division or a completely different company. Most probably a competitor.

I don’t believe for a New York Minute that there is any project, or last minute save. I think that the 20th will come and go and then we’ll have the furloughs extended another 30 days then we’ll be out of work.

Everything they have done over the past 60 -90 days seems shadier and shadier with each change in direction.  I firmly believe that something else is going on and that the company is not playing above board or dare I say it? Ethically?

 I took the furlough because it extended my effective health care benefits. I figure the longer I can go without having to pay the outrageous COBRA rates the better…

I’ve just finished the process of filling out the unemployment forms online.

I anticipated that this process would be an extremely annoying process, something akin to having an old railroad tie shoved unceremoniously up my ass…  So I put it off until today.

I  didn’t want to go into the weekend in a sour mood because of the stupidity of dealing with bureaucratic crap.

Turns out… I made a good call!

The forms read like RAP. Did ya, ba dom ding, Diiid ya, ba dom ding ba dom ding Did ya, Did ya, Did ya. I pretty much HATE RAP!  This form did a pretty good job of sending me off the deep end. Of course this was AFTER me spending 2 weeks trying to actually call Employment Development to find out if I was even eligible due to the furlough. The Employment Development Department is apparently so busy that they can’t even answer their phones.

I figured what the hell? I’ll fill out their forms online and then we’ll have a negotiation when one of their people CALLS me.

During the filling out of the forms I found out that my company had fucked us all in Oh, so subtle ways.

The Employment Development department asks this…

Provide your employment history for the past 18 months, including your very last employer. If you worked for a temporary agency, a labor contractor, an agent for actors, or an employer where wages are reported under a corporate name, your wages may have been reported under that employer name. You may want to refer to your check stub(s) or W-2(s) to obtain the name of your employer.

Note: Failure to report all your employers, periods of employment and wages correctly may result in your benefits being delayed or denied.


Employer Name     Beginning             Ending                   Wages       How were you Paid?
                           (mm/dd/yyyy)     (mm/dd/yyyy)           Earned ($)

I read the question to mean, Put your employer name for the last 18 months. Well I’ve had the same employer since 2007 so the beginning date is 2007 and the ending date is 2011, pretty easy right???

But then the Wages question becomes inclusive of the whole beginning / ending period.

This leads me to try to come up with total YTD earnings for the past 5 year period. Which then leads me to discoveries about the lack of information and difficulty in obtaining it from my company.

First, they went “Green” so they have us all sign up for direct deposit. Then they tell us that the will not be sending paycheck statements any more and that we’ll have to look at our statements online.

Then they take the ability for us to look at our paycheck statements from our own computers at home away. Initially, we could print the statements in PDF format to a file so that we could keep offline copies for our records from our home computers. About a year ago the brilliant IT people did away with the PDF option, leaving only XPS.

Now the only way to see or get a copy of your paystub is by being connected directly to the company network and OH yeah it’s against the company policy for you to attach personal storage devices to your work computer so you have to store the image of the paystub as XPS, then email it to yourself, and it has to be zipped and encrypted.

The XPS format is great if you’re a windows user. But if you’re a Linux or Mac user… OH Well… you’re screwed because you’re different! You chose not to drink the Microsoft Kool Aid, your problem not ours. (I’ve since found viewers for Linux and Mac. and I know a couple of little tricks that have gotten me past this problem.)

The above is frustrating… But the kicker is when you finally work through all this other shit and  look at your paystubs.  The magic works, the page is viewable and you find that most don’t  have YTD information. In fact only one year in the past 5 actually has the YTD data.

Ya just want to throttle someone. GRRRRRRRR!

I ended up pulling what tax records I have (lost all the records in a fire in 2008) and having to call the accountant for other records. For the rest of the information, I had to open each and every paystub and manually add the information that I needed.

All of which just fed my frustration…

At one point, in my efforts to answer this single question (EDD wouldn’t let you move on if it was blank) I had 3 computers up and running and more total computing horsepower at my fingertips than was used to send men to the moon.

Don’t ask.. it just worked out that way.

If you ever had any doubt that I’m a QA person…

All you need to know is that this kind of thing happens to me all the time. The absolutely simplest thing turns into a raging furball.

It’s as if I just notice stuff others don’t.

Or else the Gremlins of our high technology world seem to really enjoy messing with me…

Maybe I need to make a Gremlin repellant and then retire to a tropical island.

Me, the Ocean, a nice hut, and no freakin technology…  Except the boat would sink with me on it, in sight of the island…

Happy 4th

I hope that everyone has a safe and relaxing day with your families and friends.

The plan for me today is quiet time, a workout, some writing, and maybe a movie or two.

Hope your day is as pleasant.

Wonder if Heinlein may have been right

Noticed this article about a drug that shows promise in treating Progeria .

The natural evolution of this discovery is that it becomes an anti-agathic.

Since Progeria is a relatively rare disease, one wonders if the drug  or other discoveries due to the research will become a rejuvenation treatment reserved for the wealthy elite and powerful of the world.

Imagine the possibilities.

Those who can afford the treatment live 250 years or more. The poor live normal lifespans.

The class / caste systems take on WHOLE new meanings don’t they?

You have the Lazarus class and the normal class.

What happens when the normal class decides that they don’t want to die either?

Will the rich and famous be as liberal about making the rejuvenation treatments available to everyone, as they are about universal health care, welfare, internet, cable TV, etc?

Or will the elite finally admit that perhaps access to various programs is dependent on a persons contribution to society?

I wonder just how close to reality Heinlein may have been. We may live long enough to find out….

Moving VERY slow this morning

I didn’t get home until after 2 and didn’t get to bed until almost 3:30 it was worth it.

I visited an acquaintance / friend  last night. I had the nicest time and shared intimacy with him that is often rare between two men regardless of their orientation. Perhaps due to this intimacy I’m inclined to think of him more as a friend and less as an acquaintance now.

My friend has recently been through a life changing event. He experienced a Patellar tendon rupture while playing volleyball.

He’s been through the surgery to repair the damage and as we talked I realized that he had been through this whole mess pretty much on his own. He’s had one or two friends that looked in on him during the initial phases of the injury and recovery. After that, essentially he’s been on his own. He’s healing nicely, still wearing a brace but the mobility of his knee is pretty good albeit slow and careful.

As we talked he mentioned that immediately after the injury, In between his thinking “GOD that hurts” and “But this is my good leg” he also had the depressing thought that all of his travel plans for the summer were shot to hell.

He’s also found that he had more than a few “Fair Weather Friends” With him out of commission several folks have simply vanished. Not the least of which was a model he’d been seeing that was pushing for a relationship after only a few dates. This person was oblivious to how life altering it is to one moment be playing volleyball in the sun, and the next to be hobbling around on crutches. Or how depressing it is when you’re facing at least one surgery and a fairly long recovery time, with the possibility of NEVER being back to normal.

A couple of days ago my friend broke it off with the model, the hell of it was that he wasn’t sure that the model was really out of the previous relationship anyway.

His birthday is within the next week. I asked him what he’d like for his birthday.

He said “some cuddle time. To be touched and held for just a little while.”

Dinner was over, the bill paid, wine glasses empty, it was time to take him back to his place. He’s pretty mobile but slow. I held doors for him, helped where I could and stayed out of the way when it looked like he was handling things ok.

There’s this really fine line between helping someone with an injury and just being in the way. That line varies by individual, terrain, situation, and type of injury. It’s never inappropriate to offer a helping hand to anyone.

If you offer to help… have the grace to accept that your offer may be turned down and not take it personally.

My friend was grateful to be home. It showed on his face. Even though he seemed to feel that he needed to entertain me as his guest. I wasn’t comfortable with him trying to be a good host…

So I sent him to his room.

Then I went to the kitchen, found a nice bottle of wine, two glasses, an ice pack from his freezer, and joined him in his room.

I don’t know if I’m unique in this, but another mans bedroom is a sacred space. Off limits, unless you’re invited in. The other thing about a mans bedroom is that his scent, (no not stinky stuff) is strongest there.

Each man has a very unique scent. Some pleasant, some not so much… however all are unique. My friends room and scent were pleasant. Despite his recent injury and subsequent recovery process his room was comfortable and neat.

His personal scent was clean, spicy, with a light touch of musk (not the cologne kind) and earthy. These scents are indicators that reach me on an instinctive level about a mans general health. Personally, I’m always suspicious of anyone that wears really heavy colognes and if their room or home reeks of it then I’m really put off.

He was lying on his bed wincing a bit as he settled in. He’d taken off the brace but still had his shoes on and was out of breath from moving in unnatural ways to protect the knee.

He smiled when he saw the wine, and grinned when he saw the ice pack. If he’d been a dog he’d have been wagging his tail and panting.

I started to hand him the pack, but he asked if I’d position it. He really looked tired I suspected that an earlier physical therapy appointment, his day, and dinner had really taken a toll on him. He closed his eyes and breathed a big sigh when the cool pack touched his knee.

I poured the wine and handed him a glass, then helped him get his shoes off.

While next to him on the bed with my wine, we talked about life, the universe, everything. He talked about the model, the strangeness of the short lived relationship, and the confusion he felt about the models desire to take the relationship beyond casual so quickly.

I think he’s happier to be out of that relationship than he’s willing to admit. He’s also perhaps a little regretful because after all it was a model, He’s a guy, and like most of us he’s primarily visually oriented. After all we all like to know we’re with the hottest person in the room.

My friend is a muscular massage therapist. (A REAL massage therapist, not one of those butt rub twinks that wants to jerk you off for $120 calling it a massage.)

I thought about his birthday request and that he’s a massage therapist and came to a decision.

“Would you like for me to give you a massage? I’m completely unskilled but I’ll do my best.”

He looked at me and without hesitation said “Yes, that would be very nice.”

I helped him out of his clothes and then got out of mine. Skin cleans easier than clothes, especially if you’re working with lotions or oils. It’s not like he hadn’t seen me naked before. I’ve subjected myself to his “Tender Mercies” (aka screaming like a school girl) on several occasions.

As I started working on his neck and shoulders he just groaned. He told me that I was one of the few people he knew that had ever offered to massage him. I suggested that people were intimidated and fearful that he would be judging their technique because he was a professional CMT. I kept working on him asking if I was hurting him.

He groaned, as I rubbed the tense muscles following his spine and the boundary between his trapezius and deltoid. “That’s nice..”

Slowly over the next couple of hours with breaks for occasional refills of our glasses and swapping out his ice packs, I worked as methodically as I could down his body. I was using what I remembered from being on the receiving end of good massages and my personal training experience to target his over used muscles.

Realize, that having an injury which affects your ability to walk puts stress on many muscles outside the injury  because they’re called upon to work in unusual ways. It’s a natural part of your body protecting the injury site and trying to redistribute the load so that your injury can heal.

I went to go get him another ice pack. When I came back to the room he was reclining with a big smile. “That was nice. I had to roll over ’cause my body doesn’t like being in that position for too long. I can’t even sleep face down.”

I put the new ice pack in place and crawled onto the bed beside him. He pretty much bear hugged me and told me thank you.  We talked for a while about more of life, the universe, and everything while I worked on his pecs. After I’d done all I could I just laid down beside him.

We were quiet for a while. Just two men, relaxed, no masks, no fear, no expectations, no demands. Listening to each others hearts and breathing on a warm summer night, somehow this time was as healing to me as I hope it was to him.

After an indeterminate time, he groaned.

“What?” I asked.

“Oh there are some flexibility exercises I still need to do. Would you help me?”

“Of course, you’ll need to walk me through what I need to do.”

So I helped him with the exercises mostly as a spotter and sometimes as a brake when his muscles gave out.

After his exercises we held each other for a while longer. I was gently caressing him, drawing the occasional sigh of contentment.

I was also enjoying a bit of one of my recently discovered / admitted to kinks. I was enjoying “serving”. It was emotionally satisfying for me to serve, help, and comfort this man.

A while later he invited me to join him in a shower, we bathed each other cleaning the lotion, and sweat off each other,  again enjoying the intimate peace between us.

Standing there in the shower watching me while I washed his legs and gingerly cleaned his swollen knee he gets this big grin and says “I’ve got some great chocolate ice cream, you want some?”

“Of course!” Hey I’m a sucker for good chocolate! The only thing I like better is sorbet…

While we were munching our well after midnight snack. He commented about how nice it was to have spent the time together the way we did. The intimacy was just what he needed.

Many people that he works with or socializes with are about sex. Admittedly, I can see why. My friend is a big handsome guy. He has always been an athlete and that lifelong habit shows in every aspect of his body. He’s got a bit of a body builders physique and well… god was generous in other ways too.

We were talking about the difference between just sex… (Usually fun), Intimate loving sex… (Fucking great), and Intimacy which we both agree is all too infrequent.

The problem seems to be that intimacy requires vulnerability. You can’t be intimate if you’ve got your guard up. If you’re having a casual fuck you’re likely to be somewhat guarded eve as you pump your load out in a gut wrenching orgasm. Casual fucking is fun don’t get me wrong, but by it’s nature, it’s not very intimate.

Even in relationships there are times when you just don’t want to be vulnerable. The trouble seems to be that we habitually keep our guard up even with those that we should be intimate with. We forget how to be unguarded and completely honest with each other.

I suppose that’s why the time last night was so special.

For several hours I was able to be completely myself, at peace, and had the pleasure of sharing that with someone else who was equally unguarded.

It may never happen again with him. It could have been simply that he was forced to be vulnerable because hes injured. It doesn’t matter why,  it’s a memory that I’ll always appreciate.

I’m going to have to be more open to the possibilities too.

Now that I’ve had a taste…. I want MORE.