Not Dead Yet

I’m too tired and sore to be in heaven and none of my friends are here so I can’t be in hell.

Actually, the post title doesn’t even refer to me. I’m just sitting down to write about the ghastliness that was yesterday before I compartmentalize it all away in the part of my brain responsible for flushing memories.

As I reckon I’ve mentioned, I’m a newspaperman in 2010. I might as well be in hoop-skirt repair, or moustache wax refinishing. But because I have no other marketable skills, I keep banging away at that old industry, even though it just lies there, looking at the ceiling, counting the minutes till it’s all over. And that clock is running down.

Meantime, it tries to kill me on a weekly basis, just to let me know it resents me continuing to bang away at it (“I’m fucking dead—what does an industry have to do to get some rest around here?”). This week was a perfect case in point.

The Boss finally got back to me Monday about whether or in what shape my job would follow me from Christmas Island to Fun City, Idaho, and the news wasn’t good. The gist of it boiled down to: Gee, it would be a lot easier for us to replace you than jump through the hoops it would take to retain your services.

But that’s just background info. It was about exactly what I expected. Hell, I don’t even blame them. It would be a lot easier to just hand me my walking papers.

Also Monday, the fellow from the main office with whom I work on the major paper I do every week got news that his Dad had died. This was especially bad news as said paper is an English/Spanish publication and I only speak enough Spanish to pass as a Gringo who hasn’t bothered to learn the language. I sound like John Wayne without the swagger. “Uh-adi-ose, ameegoh.” (I can also say, “His name is Francis but we all call him Uncle Frank” but have never had the opportunity in real life yet.)

So the one guy I can regularly count on to rise to the occasion and actually give 100% at that place was a basket case—no pun intended.

Additionally, a colleague in another remote office was going on vacation, so I inherited her daily paper for the first three days this week.

I woke up at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday in a panic because I had only gotten three articles from the guy at the main office, whereas usually the paper is all but done by then, with maybe three stories yet to come in. When I couldn’t get back to sleep, I sat down in the pre-dawn hours and started pulling copy—again, with extra difficulty added because I don’t speak Spanish. I had to scan Spanish headlines for words I recognized (Immigration, Obama, etc.), Google-translate them then search the AP site for matching headlines in English. Captions needed translating, formatting had to be done, house styles applied… time went by.

About 9 a.m., minutes before I was about to call our supervisor in desperation (and to cover my behind), the guy calls me up and says he’s about to send me more copy. I told him I’ve already pulled a shitload of copy and I’ll send it to him for approval/tweaking.

Of course, then, this was the day that Comcast decided to cancel my primary email account about mid-morning. Which I didn’t know until I asked the guy hours later about the copy I’d sent him and he wearily replied that he hadn’t gotten any. So I said “Fuck it,” and just went ahead and placed my copy. Let the heads roll where they may.

While I was doing everything else, I also spent about 25 minutes on the phone with Crumcast to finally be advised that my account, and any mail people had sent to me at it, was gone. Including all the stuff I had sent to my editor. Curiously enough, I was still receiving some emails at the Comcast account, but not all.

Then the power went out, just on the plug my iMac is plugged into, and I lost everything I was working on. The power never came back on and I didn’t have time to go hunting for the fuse box so I just plugged the power strip in a different outlet and started again. Backing up—and back-saving—the document I was working on every few minutes and uploading it to an ftp site I could access from my laptop in a coffee shop if need be. Tick tock, tick tock…

Then the dishwashing machine repair guy showed up with our new unit, but I was too busy to remember to warn him about all the standing water going putrid in the old dishwasher. Didn’t remember till The Boy came running back to my office to tell me about the “funny water” the repair guy had sloshed all over the kitchen floor. So we also had a huge, reeking mess on the kitchen and dining room floors to deal with.

This, too, was the first day The Missus had been extremely busy in preparation for her exacting new job, and therefore absent from the homefront; with her gone, there went my I-T person as well as co-caregiver for The Boy. Both capacities in which she would have served as a life-saver yesterday. And which she did indeed prove to be when all compulsory errands had been run, including an emergency trip to Petco for more dog food for the White Whale.

Then the printer emailed me (thanks!) with the news that the paper I was filling in on was having font problems. All the headlines had gone Courier. In my befuddlement, it took me three passes to resolve that dilemma. I’d used the same exact fonts and document for three days now; this was the day it went wonky.

In between everything else, I was trying to trouble-shoot the email problem, devise a short-term work-around, parent The Boy responsibly and control the dog, a giant 50+ pounder who thinks he is still shoebox-sized.

As it turned out, the real hero of the whole ugly ordeal was The Boy, who stayed in a good mood all day and whose presence forced me to rise gracefully to the occasion instead of doing what I usually do, which is let my wrath make me its bitch. He was consistently funny and interesting and saying new shit I’d never heard him express before. The close quarters these last couple weeks have  yielded unexpectedly delightful results. The new environ is really bringing out the best in him... He definitely did not get that from my side of the family.

To be fair, I was unusually accommodating to his various demands, especially where his requests for TV-watching were involved. I could do that “with” him while I continued working. We watched a lot of Justice League and Kung Fu before the grieving main office guy resurfaced and the TV became too much of a distraction to the fusillade of phone calls that followed.

Oddly enough, it was the first day since we got here that I’ve felt good about myself. I know, it’s an over-rated commodity, but like being tickled, every once in a while it feels good. I worked my ass off, way exceeded my job description and in the end, somehow delivered a viable product in spite of a cascading series of adversities. It was the first time in ages I wasn’t doing something that someone else could have done better or without me.

The kicker is, my colleague’s father isn’t dead yet. He’s actually conscious and lucid, albeit in a hospital waiting for the end. It seems my editor received a call from an estranged family member telling him his Dad was dead as either a tactical maneuver or a malicious prank. Now he’s got to go back to work while alternately deflecting expressions of condolence and explaining what happened without opening up a whole can of family worms.

Just when you think you got problems, someone else’s Dad goes and doesn’t die yet. I guess in the proper perspective—and with the necessary motivation—anything can be recontextualized into something sunnier than the actual experience itself.

Thanks for the motivation, Boy! I’m not dead yet, not even close.