Weasel Of Doom

Bill lost his job on Friday. On the game board of life, we are back on “you are so screwed.” And I am so tired of being there.

But you know what? It can be much worse. (God, if you are listening, please don’t take this as an invitation to show me just how much worse it can get. You gave me a good imagination, and I have been using it, to the detriment of my mental health.)

So I am shutting up. Here, enjoy some songs from my young adulthood instead. Have you ever heard of Fancy?

And you very likely have never heard of Kino (“Legend”):

Or DDT (“Autumn”):

Or Nautilus Pompilius (“I want to be with you”):

(Masha, if you are reading this – you are Russian, of course you know these songs :P)

I do not handle stress well when I am depressed. Undepressed, I rise to the occasion and get things done. Depressed, I sit around, twitch, and do nothing. On Friday, a number of projects got promoted to “should have been done yesterday” status. Except, of course, they weren’t done on Thursday, and things weren’t looking good for them to get done on Friday, either.

Long story short – I left work at 6 am on Saturday. Two of the big projects got done. I still have one that needs to get done before Monday, and one to do first thing on Monday.

On my way out, I ran into the guy who was one of the reasons I had to work a 20-hour day. He was just coming in to work. When he asked me what I was doing, I told him I was going home, and explained that I had to work all night to finish the projects he decided were top priority. Needless to say, I did not get a “OMG, you should not have worried about it!” back. He told me to have a good weekend. Let’s see.

• I did not go swimming with X
• I did not get to hang out with the gaming group
• I screwed up my internal clock because I went to bed at 6:30 am
• Kids did not go to gymnastics because I was asleep and Bill was not feeling well
• Because I was asleep, Bill did not get any time to work on his work projects

I am not sure if “good” is a word we are looking for here…

So… Office A receives notifications about something for Office B. Office C was supposed to add Office B to the list that gets notifications, but didn’t. Fast forward a few weeks. Office C receives a distraught email from Office B. Office C is contrite and fixes the problem.

BUT, while all this was going on – why haven’t Office A called Office B and said, “Hey, we keep seeing your stuff come through, and it keeps sitting there – are you getting it?” And why haven’t Office B said, “Hey, how come we have not received any notifications for weeks now?”

It’s like Office C dropped the ball, and Offices A and B are standing around watching the ball and waiting for it to explode instead of, you know, actually picking up the ball and throwing it back to Office C. *sigh*

The bell tower at my work got struck by lightning. Think God is trying to tell us something?

[I am wallowing in self-pity. You have been warned.]

So far, this trip has been totally not what I expected. From my mother’s comments on my weight — “Look at Aunt T., do you want to be like her? Nobody will say it to your face, but privately they will say K. and J. are thin, and you are fat.” When she talks to her friends, she tells them how much weight I have gained. My Dad told me I have become “square-shaped.” It hurts so much.

I am going slowly insane being with the kids all day long. It is becoming crystal-clear to me that I should never had children to begin with.

D. keeps destroying things. Almost every day, he breaks a toy, or throws one away, and then he expects us to fix it or get it back or buy him a new one. Nothing I do or say gets through to him.

S. keeps whining about everything. EVERYTHING. I am so sick and tired of it. He treats X. roughly, starts fights with D. and then complains when D. retaliates, disobeys simple rules (“don’t touch the TV” should not be this hard to master, now should it?). As above, nothing I do or say gets through.

X. does not want to drink milk. I only nurse him once or twice a day, and he sees these sessions as an opportunity to bite my boobs. He is eating tons of solid food (almost as much as his brothers) but I am worried that he is not getting enough liquids. I know he is not dehydrated because he drools and cries with tears, but he absolutely refuses to drink milk from the bottle. I don’t know what to do.

I am struggling to put in 20 hours of work a week. In part it’s because the only time I can be assured of no interruptions is after the kids go to bed, which sometimes means 11:30 pm. In the mornings Dad takes the older boys outside, and Mom watches X, but sometimes I sleep then because I am not sleeping at nights and because when I do sleep D. and S. are in bed with me, and they are restless sleepers.

I did not realize that going part-time would mean having to pay my employer’s share of health insurance, which is more than what they will pay me for 20 hours a week, so when I get back to being full-time in September, money will be subtracted from my paychecks to cover the difference. It has cost us so much financially to come here (tickets, visas for the boys, loss of income, fine for pulling X. out of summer day care) and now that I am here, it sucks.

My parents don’t really talk to me. When I try to explain things to them, they don’t understand. When I complain about things, they play the devil’s advocate (“If the higher-ups at your work are so stupid, how come they are the management, and you are in a dead-end position where nobody listens to you?”) Mom tells me I should find things for the kids to do, but does not offer any suggestions (Sorry, Mom, but it seems like the only thing they like doing is getting into trouble, and you are against that). We are like strangers sharing a house. This sounds so pathetic, but I don’t think they like me.

I know things will get better. Lights at the end of tunnels, etc. Right now, though, it all just looks so bleak, I want to cry.

You’d think automatically putting people who leave an organization under unhappy circumstances on a DO NOT SOLICIT list should be a no-brainer. You’d be wrong.

Apparently, the people who got laid off from my place of employment three weeks ago are now receiving “please give money” letters from us. Not surprisingly, at least one of those people is not too thrilled about it.

God willing, there will be a minor shit-storm about this latest clusterfuck on Monday.

A few days ago, I posted a status message critical of the Administration on my (friends-only) Facebook page. One of my “friends” then informed everybody in the aforementioned administration about it. They are not happy. It remains to be seen if I will get fired because of it. I wish I could say something amusingly sarcastic about the situation, but the truth is I cry every day and just wish this was over, one way or another.

Somewhat paraphrased statement from my boss, who lost his job in the “great pruning exercise of 2009″:

“You should do everything you can to keep your job. Over the past few years, [the guy who will now be my boss] has repeatedly asked if your position is needed. I kept telling him it is strategic, and needed. Maybe I have lost my job by not nominating your position to be cut, but I know I made the right decision.”

Fucking A.

Got an email from Lynne yesterday. She found a quote for me:

(drum roll, please)

I’d tell you to go to hell, but I work there & I don’t want to see you every day…

I am still laughing.

The axe has fallen, and my position was not among those cut. But oh dear God, what a clusterfuck this has been. From my work to yours, here’s a primer on how to maximize employee misery in these tough economic times:

1) Be as vague as possible. Your workers’ paranoia will rise to hitherto unseen levels as everybody compiles mental lists of “Ten People We Can Definitely Do Without now that HMS Higher Education is sinking.”

2) Don’t acknowledge the possibility that YOU might have had something to do with the dire straits the company is in. Instead, blame the economy. Do not mention gross financial mismanagement that went on for the last five years. Pretend that you don’t have a development team that, for the most part, is (to steal an expression) “pathologically incapable of finding their own ass with a roadmap, a flashlight and a native guide,” let alone raise money. Blame the economy some more.

3) Say that The LORD will take care of those whose positions were cut, because He loves us. Yeah, and He loved Jesus, too, and we all know how that story ended. Loving had never stood in the way of crucifixion. The Bible is littered with corpses of those whom God loved. So, yeah, not very comforting for those of us still in this vale of tears, trying to look for a job in a market that has reached rock bottom and started to dig.

4) Announce the layoffs and program cuts thusly: “It is done. Those affected have been notified. If you haven’t been notified, you are still employed. Good luck figuring out who the unlucky 18 are, because we respect their privacy and won’t tell you.” (I kid, I kid, though the above is a pretty accurate summary. What you should really do is print out a vague 2-page letter on expensive stationery and put it in expensive envelopes, because nothing says “budget crisis” like 2-page letters on official stationary in official envelopes in 1,000 mail boxes. Especially when it is the third such letter in a month. Just saying.)

5) Make sure that it is impossible to figure out the rationale behind the cuts. For example, get rid of part-time receptionists (because, apparently, it does not matter who answers your phones and greets your visitors). And a secretary that supported 60 people (many of whom do not know know a copier from a printer – stay tuned as hilarity ensues when they try to type up their own exams and make their own copies). And the person in charge of phones and card access system (who need that, right?). You get the idea.

6) Be VERY SURPRISED when the shit hits the fan.

Well, my place of employment decided to get on the “let’s screw people while they are down” bandwagon, and announced that there will be program and staff cuts come March. Why yes, I wanted to spend the whole month of February wondering about job security, thank you very much. (For the record, I do not feel that my job is very secure, hence the hint of bitterness you are tasting :-)

My Dad has been badgering me on GoogleTalk (I have only myself to blame for teaching the parental units how to use the internet for long-distance parenting) about my plans in case I do get laid off. The conversation went something like this:

[Dad]: So what do you want to do if you are laid off?
[Me]: Sit at home, read books, play computer games, knit, and crochet.
[Dad]: The bank will foreclose on your home.
[Me]: Then I will sit in my cardboard box.
[Dad]: What about the children?
I considered typing “they will sit in their individual cardboard boxes, of course!” but decided Dad will not find it amusing.
[Me]: We will send them to live with Grandma and Grandpa in Russia.
At this point Dad went to have a smoking break.

Still, one has to plan for the future, so I did some brainstorming. Ladies and gentlemen, you have been warned!

Weasel’s Plan For Staying Solvent

1. Sell BelovedSpouse’s organs on the black market. (This assumes his organs are worth something. Must investigate further.)
2. Become a gestational surrogate. (I figure I have about 10 years of child-bearing left in me. Awesome bonus – somebody gets to have a baby out of it, who otherwise wouldn’t have.)
3. Market BelovedSpouse as a sperm donor (“Guaranteed* to have a boy!” *Guarantee based on past performance, not a predictor of future performance, no money back in case of girl.)
4. Commercial egg donation. (Include pics of cute kids. You can’t tell what little pains in the butt they can be from the photographs.)
5. Prostitution. (Someone must want a middle-aged somewhat-overweight Russian-accented hooker, right? Right? I mean, there is no accounting for taste, right? Nothing some darkness and a lot of alcohol won’t cure…)
6. If all else fails, give plasma. (Yes, it does not pay much, but better than nothing, right?)

Did I miss anything?

But if my mother-in-law tells us one more time how when she was laid off she actually made money because she did not have to pay for daycare, and how it was so great and she had no stress and got to spend time with her kids, I am going to SCREAM. Loudly.

God, how I need a cigarette….

P.S. Sorry for swearing, Karen :-(

One of the higher-ups at my workplace emailed us the following today:

So I went online and looked up various translations of the verse in question.

• NIV: The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.
• King James: A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left.
• Contemporary English: Sensible thoughts lead you to do right; foolish thoughts lead you to do wrong.
• New Living Translation: A wise person chooses the right road; a fool takes the wrong one.

(translations courtesy of BibleGateway.com)

And now I am so, so pissed off… And dammit, I was in a good mood today before that little gem arrived in my inbox.

P.S. For those of us unencumbered by religious teachings, the right/left thing is referring to the belief that an angel sits on our right shoulder, and a devil on our left, so our decisions should be pleasing to god (on the right side), and not the devil (on the left side). That is also why in Russia we spit over our left shoulder (into the devil’s face) when we don’t want something bad to happen. That is also why the priest got so mad at Dad at my baptism, when Dad accidentally crossed himself left-to-right instead of right-to-left. It has NOTHING to do with politics.

Or so it feels, judging by the amount we pay for daycare…

Consider:

In 2005, we spent $6,600 on daycare (DemonChild, 9 months).
In 2006, we spent $10,300 (DemonChild, 12 months; Squeeker, 1 month).
In 2007, we spent $18,600 (DemonChild and Squeeker, 12 months).
In 2008, we spent $20,300 (DemonChild and Squeeker, 12 months; ChairmanMao, 2 months).

Two months for three kids is roughly $5,000. Multiply that by six, and we are looking at around $30,000 for 2009 (I am SO not kidding when I tell people I work so my kids can go to daycare… that and have health insurance).

Now let’s take a look at UW-Milwaukee’s full-time off-campus Fall 2008 tuition for Wisconsin residents, conveniently listed for us on their website, and calculate what it would have cost to send all three kids there for a year:

Undergraduate: $19,600 ($3,265.56 per child per semester).
Graduate: $26,500 ($4,413.28 per child per semester).
Masters, Business: $30,660 ($5,110.24 per child per semester).
Masters, Health Science: $31,780 ($5,295.76 per child per semester).

Years from now, we will be guilt-tripping our kids with “We put you through daycare, and THIS is the gratitude we get???” I can’t wait ;-)