Donnerwetter

I’m on my couch, listening to the rain beat down hard outside. I am thinking of my grandmother.

My grandmother loved storms. Donnerwetter, she called it – one of her occasional shifts back to the German she grew up speaking at home as a first-generation American. She loved to sit out on the back porch on an old chaise covered in brightly-colored ’60s flowery vinyl and watch the lightning. She’d open the front door to smell the rain, though I’m sure that made my cost-conscious grandfather crazy during the summer (when storms were best) while the window unit air conditioner hummed behind the solid wood door.

I remember, as a child, sleeping in the back bedroom of their old duplex in Philadelphia during visits, worrying that lightning would strike the window unit in the bedroom I was in. Even as a kid, I was a worrier. It stood to reason, to me, that a window air conditioner would serve as an attraction for the blue-bright streaks of light that arced through the sky. I was not afraid of storms, and I was not afraid of lightning. I was only afraid of the lightning hitting the air conditioner, and the fire I imagined would start after that.

Well, that, and the really creepy shadow cast by the Infant of Prague statue that stood atop the highboy dresser in the glow of the nightlight below. It’s probably bad to hate a statue of Jesus. Oh well.

When I was little, my mother used to gather Sisters 1 and 2 and me and we’d all watch any storm that came through. Sometimes it was on my parents’ bed. Sometimes it was on our back porch. I think she did it to make sure we weren’t afraid of that particular power in nature, and I’m glad, because to this day, I’ll stand out on my balcony in a fierce squall to watch it happen. When I lived in the midwest, I rarely feared the systems that frequently threatened tornadoes. After a long enough time living there, I learned to know what color the sky had to be before a twister could ever approach, and when it turned that color I simply went inside and into the basement. (My father sometimes shot baskets at the hoop in the driveway, for which we all thought he was crazy, but I now believe he was keeping watch.) When I was in college, I was the one who watched the TV weather reports to spot the bow echoes that could give rise to the fearsome whirls while my roommate, a lifelong midwesterner, locked herself in the bathroom.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandparents lately, all four of them, all gone now. I’ve had several dreams about my grandfather who passed away in February. He’s been scattered between the nightmares I mentioned in my last post, looking strong and well and ten years younger. He doesn’t seem to want to tell me anything, or visit, or convey any significance. He just shows up in little vignettes, and when I remember I’ve dreamed about him, I smile.

About an hour ago, I blew out a candle that had reached its bottom. In the heavy air, the scent of the wax lingered longer than usual. It reminded me of holidays with my other grandparents.

I miss them all. I’m glad of the little things that remind me of them in our day-to-day lives. And I sleep better when it rains.

Can King George III Please Bring Me Some BBQ?

It’s another national holiday I’m missing due to work obligations! So everyone – hop aboard the Bitter Bus to thesinglecell’s 4th of July! There won’t be fireworks, but I still might blow some stuff up!

I can’t call it Independence Day, because I have yet to liberate myself from this job.

Let me state very clearly right up front that I am well aware of how many people don’t have jobs, and I certainly count myself fortunate not to be among them. I take that seriously, and on my worst days, my relief at being gainfully employed has served as my consolation. My heart breaks for people who can’t find work, and given that I’ve been looking for alternative employment for two years, I know it’s incredibly difficult. So everything that follows really is not borne of me being unappreciative of my employment; rather, it is borne of my employers being unappreciative of their employees. You’ll find that much of this reads as an anti-management rant. Understand: I have chosen, against the recommendations of colleagues, not to be a manager in my business because it frankly lacks any and all trace of anything enjoyable. Therefore, I have a certain respect for the poor fools who have ascended the ranks to those management positions. Also understand: this is not a general gripe about all managers across the board. It’s just about the ones in my business (and I’ve worked for LOTS in my three jobs within my 14-year career).

I work in a business that never takes a holiday. And yes, I knew this when I signed up. Back then, when I loved the thrill of my job and thought that every day was just full of fun challenges to conquer, I felt that having to work socially prohibitive hours on every single blessed freaking holiday was a small price to pay for being able to do something I loved.

God, I was an idiot.

No… I’m kidding. I truly did love my career for the first ten years of it, solid, and maybe for another two after that, but slightly less. Then some stuff happened right at the same time as I apparently hit my limit on Days I Don’t Mind Having Chest Pain and/or Crying On the Drive Home, and my feelings on the issue took a decided turn for the worse.

And yet, here I sit, working on another holiday. I have not had one single holiday off in the three years I’ve worked at this job, and I can’t remember before that. Not Christmas. Not Thanksgiving. Not Labor Day (irony, anyone?) or Memorial Day. Not New Year’s Eve or Day. Not even Halloween.

Wait. Maybe Easter, 2009. I might have had that day off. But I’m not kidding. That was it.

And I am, as you likely have come to sense, totally over the crap I thought about it being worth it. Don’t get me wrong; I’m willing to work almost every holiday. The only ones I ever actually ask to have off are Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Fat lot of good that does me.

And so, on this July 4th, I would like to point out a few of King George III’s abuses and usurpations documented in our great nation’s Declaration of Independence and disturbingly similar to those carried out by my employers.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them

Nothing gets done if the decisions are left to the managers. Nuh. Thing. And yet, the decisions have to be left to the managers. Because they’re the managers, and we are the underlings who can’t decide anything because, even though we have equal or superior skills at both theory and application, and equal or greater experience, it shows excess gumption (initiative is encouraged by lip service only).

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

I live an hour away and have had to come in for meetings either several hours early or on my days off. Granted, my living an hour away is my choice. But as the meetings are generally stupid, I think I should be excused from them, or allowed to attend via conference call.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

I don’t have any examples to back this up. We don’t have any Representative Houses unless you count unions, and my bosses can’t dissolve those. I just giggle when I read “opposing with manly firmness his invasions.” Is that an implicit opposition to gay marriage?

Okay. Next:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

At varying levels, we’ve been forbidden from hiring, no matter how understaffed we are. We don’t have enough people to do what we do. It’s chronic, and in our business, it’s crippling and it subverts (old English word) our efficacy (another one!) by compromising our abilities. Not that anyone cares. Example:  the manager who does schedules somehow managed to not schedule anyone to do one of the two most important, all-consuming and challenging jobs of the day yesterday. Which meant I got a phone call at 10:30am from another underling, telling me that the manager had told her to tell me that I had to do that job in addition to the one I was scheduled to do. Which meant I had to cancel my pre-work plans to go in early and do way too much, on an occasion for which we were critically understaffed and therefore I had no help. Management fail=my problem.

 Also, with regard to the migrations hither: they refused to pay for me to move when I got hired here. They used to pay for those kinds of things.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

Does the phrase “my way or the highway” mean anything to you?

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

Management vs. underlings. Management always wins. Pisses me off.

Now, stay with me here:

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

When part of our company that has nothing to do with us shut down and had to lay off union workers, the company forced us to absorb the more senior workers into our place, where they took over the jobs of other underlings who got laid off, and immediately began to suck at said jobs, since the jobs were not material to their previous jobs and they had no idea what they were doing.

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

Let’s just say someone nearly cost me my job and did cause me quite a bit of anxiety just because he’s a widely recognized poophead, and my spineless bosses, who told me to my face several times before the ultimate action that they didn’t like the poophead, then for official purposes sided with said poophead and gave me a choice: get fired or take a huge demotion.

Wow. I wrote that just like Thomas Jefferson would have. Lots of commas and everything.

Whereas:
This series of abuses and usurpations has led unbidden to a life of servitude compensated by only legally required wages and largely ineffective health insurance at my cost,

And whereas:
I have to work every flipping holiday ever instituted in the history of holidays, be they minor or major, PLUS weekends, and my supposedly regular days off frequently are changed on a whim and without consultation,

And whereas:
Said abuse and usurpation has directly or indirectly contributed to loss of relations with friends, family and significant others,

And whereas:
I have this day been denied the barbecue, potato salad, macaroni salad and deviled eggs that were rightfully to have been mine,

I hereby, while in full and understood possession of my Big Girl “Just Deal With It” Panties, and being in no way too big for said britches, but rather having worn them out from their oft-required usage, declare my intended independence.

Not unlike the actual Declaration of Independence, this personal declaration shall not be signed by signatories until such time as all parties are agreed (aka when I have found another job).

My kingdom for a deviled egg.

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Featured image from jewlicious.com. Seriously.

Losing My $&%*

I warned you it would happen. In my last post, I said it would happen.

It is 88 degrees in my apartment.

Yes. IN.

See?

Remember how I spent 90 minutes sweating and swearing, installing new energy-efficient curtains because I knew it was going to be uber-hot this week and my entire living/dining room wall is windows and they face west?

The curtains have done nothing.

Except make it very dark.

Last night I got home from work at 11pm to find that it was 88 degrees then, too. And the A/C was not running, even though the thermostat clearly understood that I had set it at 76. I “cycled the unit” (aka turned it off and back on) and it kicked on. After running continuously for two hours, the temperature had dropped from 88 to a manageable 81. (I celebrated each degree with a little “woo-hoo!” and upwardly-thrust arms.) By the time I woke up this morning, it was at 76 where it belonged. But an hour and a half later, it was creeping upward. The A/C was still running, so rather than throwing things in frustration for having spent $200+ on useless curtains and God knows how much more on wasted energy, I started hypothesizing about why this was happening.

First of all, the thermostat is on a shared wall. My Budd-ish neighbor, whose name is Toni but who goes by Shanti-Mayi (this year), lives on the other side of the wall, and I suspect that heat from her side of the building is seeping through. Secondly, the thermostat is about six feet from the un-air conditioned hallway, so I think it’s picking up some heat from there. And third, it’s about four feet from the ceiling, and I live on the top floor, which means I suspect it’s picking up heat from the roof. It’s not really 88 in here… it’s probably more like a stuffy 84, but it’s well above what it’s supposed to be.

Can’t fix any of that.

On top of this, my power company has a program that cycles the electricity the program’s subscribers use. They do it to prevent brown-outs on high-demand days. When you live in a house and have an efficient and effective HVAC system, this saves you some coin, even if it gets a little warmer than you’d like during the day, when you’re not home, because you have a normal 9-5 job. When you live in an apartment complex, the management company forces you to participate, and you don’t really save any money but you suffer the lack of full power, particularly when you work nights and weekends and the 99-degree day is your day off. I think that’s a big part of the problem here, since the banner at the top of my thermostat’s screen currently says SAVINGS and I can hear the unit kicking through various power levels.

Two and a half hours ago, when I got home from running errands in my air-conditioned car, and after a trip to the perfectly cooled grocery store, it was 88 in here and the unit wasn’t running at all. So I “cycled” it, and it kicked back on and has been running on some variant of power ever since.

It is still 88 in here.

It had dropped to 87, but then I moved.

I told Brad about this via Facebook IM. “You should call them,” he said.

“Call who?”

“Maintenance.”

“It’s not broken. It works. It blows cold air. The thermostat is a lie and the power company is cycling the power levels.”

“But it’s hot?”

“Huh?”

“It’s still hot.”

“Yes.”

“So call them.”

“Call who?”

“Maintenance. They have to figure out a way to fix it.”

“They can’t fix it. It’s not broken.”

“Something’s wrong though.”

“Yes. The thermostat is in a stupid place. But they can’t move it.”

“Still.”

Now I started typing pretty hard. “Um, unless they can air-condition the hallway or paint the roof with heat-repelling paint in the next hour, there is zero point in calling them.”

“Call the power company.”

At this point I logged off of Facebook because I was grumpy and Brad was making it worse.

And then you know what I wondered? The HVAC vents are directly below the curtains. I wondered if my A/C was blowing up between the windows and the curtains and getting trapped there by the energy-efficient, hot-and-cold blocking panels.

So now all my dining room chairs are pushed up against my curtains to keep them back from the vents.

It doesn’t appear to be working. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.

I’m pretty sure I’m hosed, here, at least until the sun that is 93% blocked out of my apartment goes down entirely.

I can’t do anything. I can’t clean or the temperature will go up because my body heat will go up. I can’t turn on the oven, so I’m cooking in the Crock Pot to keep the entire (tiny) kitchen from heating up. All the lights are off. The stupid curtains are closed (as closed as they can be, since they’re not wide enough) and smooshed up against the windows. I can’t do laundry, because the dryer will make it hotter in here.  The cat, who I tend to rename Scarlet in the summer because she’s very dramatic about heat, is wandering around sort of bleary-eyed and then heaving sighs and flopping down on various relatively cool surfaces: the coffee table, the bathroom floor. Sometimes she lays down behind the oscillating fan that’s on full-blast in my bedroom. (Behind it, because she doesn’t like being blown on.)

I am in some sort of Pakistani cave.

Even Osama bin Laden didn’t live like this.

Turns out.

I moved into this place on August 27th of last year. I had this temperature problem then, though it wasn’t above 84 in here at any point. It is currently June 8th, which leads me to believe the summer can, and will, get hotter. I am hoping for some sort of monster storm to knock back this soul-melting, mood-morphing heat… but then the power could go out and leave everyone totally screwed.

Still, I’d go stand in the rain.

Sigh.

If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the refrigerator.