The musings of a madman...

       As the two of you may (or probably not) remember, I bumped into a manager from  a company I had previously pulled my time-wasting job interview trick on and wound up getting offered a sham position in order to become eligible to play for their corporate softball league... I am providing passes for forgetting because October was ten months ago, so you can start with this here link and report back to this post to brush up.     Welcome back... Well as promised, I was contacted in late June with my check for seven stacks and a 1099 to file my taxes for an independent contractor position that only technically existed.  In this month and a half since then, I have still not stepped a toe on this company's property since LAST June.  Managing my lawn care schedule and my own work schedule with after-work softball practices and insisting the team meet on Sundays for batting cage visits, I was kind of fashioned as the team's de facto coach....

  "Hey buddy, you remember me?"      I'mma keep it all the way funky with y'all... When someone asks me some shit like that and I wasn't looking to have already determined whether or not I'd ever met them, I adopt a "lie first and then sort it out" approach. I've found that this helps keep my ass out of situations I might not desire to be in. I turned around... Me: "Um... I can't say that I d--..." Him: "I interviewed you for the job at [company] back at the beginning of the the summer." Me: "Wait... The ones who kicked me out when I told the story about getting fired over the softball game?" Him: "Okay, so you DO remember!" Me: "Yeah man, my friends thought that shit was WILD funny." Him: "To be frank, so did everyone else in the office when we told them about it." Me:  "'we?'...  'everyone else?'...  How many damn people did you speak of my misfortune to?...

       For the sake of moving this along... The weeks between December 17rd and February 7st was one of the most trying periods of my life and involved not one but THREE visits to the hospital, once through the ER. The months since have been a minefield of minding how I live and follow-up visits. If you know, you know... If you don't, well you get it.      The way my off time goes at my full time job, I am allotted 248 hours a year of off time in one bank for use for both vacation and sick time. I am allowed to roll over up to 40 hours at the end of the year, and that is a wise thing to have banked on some just-in-case shit. 18 years with the company, I've always had at least 25-30 hours to roll as a cushion until my allotment begins to build back up. This time, however, that late-year hospital stay set fire to nearly ALL of my leave time and I approached January with only like two hours. Because of this, I've spent the first half of this year S...