Waiting For The Axe To Fall

For a few weeks now it’s been pretty much an accepted fact that there are big, big, really, really fucking huge layoffs coming soon at my company.
There have been all of the usual indicators: a lot of vague talk about changes in direction and paradigm shifts coming from on high, talk of some new business plan being presented to the Board, rampant speculation in the press, lots of rumors swirling around inside the company, stories about people being told to find themselves new jobs ASAP, and, of course, we just had a much more lavish than usual “beer bash” on Thursday.
The general consensus seems to be that the axe will be falling sometime within the next few days.
At this point I have no idea whether or not I’ll be reporting in to work come Thursday morning, which, despite my efforts to keep from panicking, has led to some amount of anxiety.
I’m sure I’ll be okay no matter what happens, but I just really, really don’t feel like having to find a new job. After all, any new job I get is likely to mean more work for less money.
Whether or not my job does survive this round, the fact remains that eventually my job is going to go away. It’s inevitable. I was just hoping that “eventually” would come a lot later, preferably after I’d moved on to something else.
Of course, given that I’ve been in this job for closing in on 4 years, the odds of me moving on to something else without first being pushed don’t really seem tot be in my favor….
In any case, at work over the past few days there had been a sort of funereal gloom hanging in the air...as opposed to the more typical venereal gloom.
But whatever; there’s not much I can do other than hope that I won’t be getting a call in the middle of the week and that come Thursday morning my badge lets me into the building…
I have to say that after a few days back in it I’m really damn sick of the heat and humidity.
In the UP it was about 10 degrees cooler and 75% less humid. In fact, there were a couple of nights on which it got downright chilly (One of those being the night my sister and her family slept in a tent in my parents’ yard. Losers.).
This morning, after I talked to my mother, I made myself some pancakes, sat around for a bit, and downloaded the first two episodes of that new Sci-Fi Channel show Eureka.
A couple of people have told me that I should check it out, so I did, and they were right.
In a way it kind of reminds me of the Jack B. Quick stories Alan Moore wrote for his comic Alan Moore’s Tomorrow Stories, what with all of the super-science running rampant and the humorous tone.
Definitely worth checking out if you’re at all geeky.
Speaking of geeky, over the weekend Scott and I discovered another comic book newsgroup in which people post scans of current comics. Like, every current comic (minus all the Walt Disney and Archie crap that fills the other newsgroups to overflowing). It was like dying and going to comic book geek heaven.
(As a total aside, what’s with the summer of 1990 flashback going on with my MP3s? I’ve got them playing on shuffle and so far every song has been off of an album released then. Weird.)
After watching the first episode of Eureka it was time for lunch, so I opted to head out to a Chinese buffet place here in Leesburg.
I thought about giving Brian and Kathleen a holler and asking if they wanted to join me, but decided against it.
Not because I didn’t want their company, but because I tend to operate on the assumption that, unlike me, other people have shit to do, and that while I appreciate the invitations I get to things (even if I don’t always accept), if I were to just, out of the blue, call someone up, I would be intruding.
(At last: a song from the 21st century.)
In particular I don’t want to bother Brian and Kathleen on a Sunday, as it’s the only day of the week that neither of them is working (and will hopefully remain so, by which I mean that I hope neither of them gets laid off).
So I went out solo, as per usual, ate quickly, hit the Super Target to get something for dinner tonight, and came back and watched the second episode of Eureka.
And that’s been my day so far.

I’ve Got Mad Cyberstalking Skills Department:
The other day at work I caught a whiff of a smoker walking past on his way back from a smoking break and thought about how, despite how sick smoking made me, the smell of cigarette smoke still smells pretty good to me most of the time.
The one exception is when I smell it on my clothes after having been in a smoke-filled place, such as Champions, Brian and Kathleen’s local watering hole, where I’d joined them for dinner on Friday night. When I got home my clothes stunk to high-heaven for cigarette smoke, and it was not at all appealing.
Normally I wouldn’t go anywhere on a Friday night, as doing so would (and did) keep me up past my bedtime, but when Brian beeped me on the Nextel in the car on the way home and said, “…inner…amps…oin us,” and I dug my phone out of the little cranny I’d had it tucked in, turned down the Nick Cave, and responded with, “Didn’t copy that,” and he repeated, “We’re having dinner at Champs if you want to join us,” I decided that I might as well.
Anyway, that little anecdote aside, when I caught that whiff of cigarette smoke, it made me think about my recent outing and mini-relapse in Minnesota, which led me, inevitably, to thinking about that girl Jess (and her sweet rack).
It then occurred to me that, given that I knew her name, where she graduated from college, and what she majored in, I could probably find a picture of her online.
And I did.
(For some reason Blogger will not let me put the entire URL into a link, and keeps turning it into a link if I try just posting the URL. Maybe it disapproves of stalking? In any case, since, for whatever reason, I am unable to link to the picture, I’ll simply post a copy of it here.)
It’s too bad the picture doesn’t do justice to her rack the way that low-cut, spaghetti-strap tank top she was wearing did, though.
Given that I’m not psychotic/ambitious enough to take things any further, I stopped there, amused and a little unnerved at just how easy it can be to find people you encountered briefly half a country away.
Still, because she had asked me what the Internet is, it occurred to me that it would be kind of funny to find some contact information for her and send her something saying, “The Internet is a tool that makes it really easy for lonely weirdoes to track down pretty girls.”
However, the funny would be overshadowed by the crazy, so I never considered the idea beyond simply chuckling at the thought of it.
On the other side of things, to satisfy my curiosity about my other dinner companion that evening, I’d done another search and found him as well.
As you can see from his bio, it turns out that apparently he wasn’t as full of shit as he seemed, and has actually accomplished rather a lot in his young life.
Of course, it’s not like that makes me like him any better. In fact, that he has actually done the stuff he was talking about makes me like him less. Lousy overachieving punk.
Seriously, though, the kid came off as sleazy as a snake-oil salesman and his false modesty about his achievements was really off-putting.
Then again, my anti-social dislike for most people probably had a lot to do with my reaction to him.
Oh well.

In any case, that proved to be the conclusion to my foray into the world of high-tech stalking, and this is proving to be the conclusion of this post.