to Hell at the speed of light

Tuesday, April 6, 2010


6:20 AM

Today’s journal entry will also be a blog. Let me remind myself of that before I start naming names.

I stayed home sick yesterday, not because I didn’t feel up to going to work but because I was sneezing and blowing my nose so frequently that it would only make my coworkers paranoid. Today I am still sneezing, but I can’t bear to spend one more day in this apartment. Duty calls.

As an ambassador for the company’s community service program, I research nonprofit organizations and make arrangements with them for my coworkers to come and help them out. My coworkers seem appreciative enough. However, the enthusiasm and excitement they demonstrate is embarrassingly short-lived.

Today we have a small group going out to a halfway home for adults with mental disabilities to refinish their kitchen cabinets. This group originally consisted of a foreman, my counterpart in the community service program, and twelve team members. In the past two work days, I have had half of the team cancel, and I have been unable to recruit replacements. Now, I must also go and be on this short-staffed team and recruit help in finding us (and the residents of the home) lunch while the kitchen is being updated. I had planned on doing that task myself, which also has had its pitfalls. With all the local box lunch caterers requiring over 48 hours advance notice for an order, I assumed that I would spend at least a couple of hours just getting the lunch together. Now I have to try and find someone else to do it for me. I don’t have time to be angry about it, but next time I am not going through all this.

It’s really a symptom of the degradation of our society. There is no value in a person’s word anymore. You can say anything and never back it up, and it doesn’t matter. Case in point, you can say, “I do” and be single again in less than a year. This is what we have “evolved” into.