Hello, my dears. Come on in and grab a cup. Disregard the fact that I’m crying. Just before you got here, I took a sip of my own black gold and choked on it. You’d think that a fully grown adult who drinks coffee every single day would learn how to do it without choking by now. Practice makes perfect.

Anyway, today’s soundtrack is The Chronic by the fabulous Dr. Dre. On Monday morning, I was at work listening to my entire music collection on random per usual when an Ice Cube song came on. I decided it needed to be an old school hip hop day. By old school, I mean everything from from its infancy in the 1970s through roughly the year 2000.

If you know nothing about hip hop, that’s a ton of shit, so it became an old school hip hop week. Golden age hip hop is defined as the mid-80s through the early to mid-90s, depending on who you ask, but I extended it all the way through the 20th century.

I never took a side in the east-west coast rap feuds since a) hip hop wasn’t my primary musical genre and b) I lived in Detroit at the time and Detroit is neither east nor west. I like Biggie Smalls and Tupac. I love the members of N.W.A. and Wu-Tang Clan. Anyway, this album is still tits over 20 years later.

…………..

Moving on. What else happened this week? You know how I work for a tag team made up of my former boss (but not my boss now) and his mom? Well, at the beginning of July, mom came into work, and with two days notice, said that her doctor told her she needed to take a month off because of stress. Where can I find a doctor like that?

At the beginning of August, mom came back, and with one week’s notice, said she was going to retire. Responsibility and giving a shit is for other people apparently. Well, okay then. This doesn’t really impact me much since all she did for me was write purchase orders for the product I decided to use.

This week, the owner of the company appeared like a magic trick. He does that. He just shows up sometimes and leaves again with as much fanfare.

On Wednesday, we had a retirement party for mom. It was held at the restaurant that caters our office parties. This restaurant is just one tepid step up from Denny’s, but way more money. I call it white people food, because it is very bland and it comes in monstrous Midwestern portions.

At our Christmas party–I guess since most of the people in the warehouse are Mexican and they make up the majority of us–they catered soggy, lukewarm fajitas from this white people food restaurant. This is Los Angeles. You can get excellent Mexican food by walking 200 yards in any direction from wherever you are. Never order Mexican food from a white people food restaurant or seafood from a restaurant any more than 200 miles from the sea.

At the retirement party, at least we could order whatever bland, white people food we wanted, and it came hot and not soggy from the kitchen, so there’s that. The owner introduced her as if we didn’t know who she was, and mom got up and stumbled and stammered her way through a strange motivational speech she had written on loose leaf paper. “You’re all so smart. You can do this without me!” Um, we’ve been doing it without you for a month already. It was awkward.

At our company, lunch is in two shifts 12 and 1pm. I go at noon. The retirement party didn’t start until 1:30 for some reason, so by the time we got our food after the awkward speech, we were all starving. We got back to the office at 3 and they expected us, as usual, to just go back to work. Thanks.

The next day, at 11am, my division was supposed to have a meeting with the owner. 35 minutes late, he called us all into the conference room where there weren’t enough chairs by half. I got there first because I know that if you snooze, you stand.

The owner told us that he’s in talks with someone to replace mom, but he’s not just going to be responsible for mom’s job he’s going to do X-Y-Z, too. This means, of course, that this new “big picture” dude won’t be doing the integral day to day minutiae that mom was doing and it will all fall on us. If there’s one thing we do not need, it’s more management. We need administrative services, but that’s exactly what we won’t get. But, let’s all be excited about yet another end of level boss, m’kay?

He said, “I want to meet with you in three groups: warehouse, customer service and office. I specifically scheduled this meeting at 11am, so it wouldn’t interfere with lunch.” The clock on the wall above the owner’s head that I glanced at the moment those idiotic words flopped out of his mouth said 11:38am. Lunch was in 22 minutes and I was in the third group. I don’t know what time they do lunch in New Jersey where his office is, but out here on the west coast, we do lunch at 12 and 1pm respectively.

The first group met for an hour. At 12:42, after waiting around through 42 minutes of my lunch hour, he told us that he had an appointment at 1pm, so we’d have to meet when he got back. He didn’t give any more clarity than “when I get back,” whenever the fuck that is. This was the second day in a row that the owner had fucked with my lunch hour.

When he got back around 3, he met with the second group. At 4:19pm, he said he wanted to meet with the third group, mine, in 10 minutes. If our group took an hour to meet like the first two groups, that means our meeting would end at 5:29pm.

The only good thing about my job is that I never, ever work overtime. We leave at 5. At 4:58pm on the nose, I clock out every single day. If I don’t clock out at 4:58, I have to wait for the entire warehouse to clock out, because there’s only one time-clock and everyone in the whole building clocks in and out at the same time, so I wouldn’t be able to leave until 5:07. Fuck that. I clock out at 4:58. At 4:25, he said we’d just meet on Friday morning.

His definition of morning seems to be as loose as his definition of lunch. It was after 11am when he showed up to work. Technically, I guess that’s morning. At 11:45, I went into my former boss-but not my boss’ office and said, “I wonder if he’s going to mess with our lunch hour for the third day in a row.” Former boss asked the owner, and he said we’d meet in the afternoon. Friday came and went and we never met.

So, my week was spent waiting around for something that never happened. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about management in the decades that I’ve been working, it’s that they just don’t give a fuck. And this owner in particular, doesn’t have even one tiny fuck to give. It’s okay though since I don’t have any little fucks to give to him or his shitty company either. Fuck ’em.

…………..

Let’s see, what else? Oh, I have a new hater, who might just be my absolute favorite so far.

I have about a dozen posts that continue to get views long after I wrote them, and for whatever reason, I get a lot of haters. My comment policy used to be approving and replying to hate. Then, I changed it to approving and not replying. Finally, I changed it to not even approving haters, because fuck them. This is my world. I don’t have to allow hate here if I don’t want to.

Still, even though I don’t approve them anymore, I do read them before I trash them. The other day, I got this comment on one of my least controversial posts about being old, and what we did in the days before PCs and cell phones called 12 Things We Did Before Technology:

SOMETHING YOU SAID IN HERE IS THE MOST GODDAMN DUMBEST FUCKING BULLSHIT I’VE EVERY READ. NO WONDER GOD DOESN’T LOVE YOU.

-Jeffrey SATAN

First, I loved the specificity of it. I don’t know what it was, but something you said was dumb fucking bullshit. Second, that last line made me chuckle right out loud. Well, I don’t love god either, so we’re even.

Two minutes later, Mr. SATAN chimed in again with this:

SOMETHING I READ HERE IS THE MOST GODDAMN FUCKING SHIT DUMBEST RETARDED FUCKING GODDAMN SHIT I’VE EVER READ!!!!!!! FUCK WHAT GOD SAYS ABOUT BEING NICE TO EVERYONE!!!!!!!! YOU’RE A GODDAMN RETARD!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHEN YOU DIE, YOU WILL BURN IN HELL FOR ETERNITY!!!!!!!!!!
-Jeffrey SATAN

I’m an atheist and I only read parts of the Bible on Sundays when I was a kid, but I am fairly certain that nowhere in there is a quote from God about “BEING NICE TO EVERYONE!!!!!!!!” with or without exclamation points and all caps.

One minute after that, came this:

WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY GODDAMN COMMENTS?!!!!!!!!!!
-Jeffrey SATAN

Obviously, Mr. SATAN isn’t familiar with the concept of comment moderation. If you’ve never commented here before, my blog holds your comment just to make sure you’re not Jeffrey SATAN.

Sorry, Mr. SATAN, but I won’t be approving your mellifluous words. I hope this post will suffice. Here’s your fifteen minutes of fame:

That’s about it for now. I’m going to go get dim sum now. Mmm.

Whatch’all been up too?