Awhile ago - Almost the End

Since last we met, I have been rustling around like an orgy of crispy brown leaves in the slithering moonlight of an Autumnal Equinox. I’m always here not There, but when I’m here, my mind is There, my hair is fair, and my stare is bare of emotive flare. Repetitive keyboarding tasks collect their daily toll by allowing me to speed in and out of Carpal Tunnel. Aside from the busy work, I had to prepare for my “Management Trainee” interview which took place at the end of last week, and then I had to actually do the interview.

Feedback on my presentation has been doting and embarrassingly flattering. Sachin’s Big Dawg boss, Fred, told Sachin that he thought my presentation was one of the best, and Jody, the head and shoulders of College Recruiting, told me that the judges thought I was an attractive mixture of comedic, professional, and romantic. She took back the romantic part (OK fine, she never said it) but did say that she thought I had “just the cutest little personality.” I told her if she ever talked down to me like that again she would find herself living on a black fiberboard torture table in the middle of the Gobi desert. Jody happens to be my favorite Chrysler representative, what with a persona that could make an orphaned and clipped-winged titmouse chirp with pleasure.

My interview went exceedingly average. I didn’t really develop a repertoire with any of the ladies that questioned me, but I made them believe what I wanted them to believe. During the first of the two meetings, I was asked what skills I had planned to work on during my time here. I responded, quite quickly, with: my Communication skills, my Organizational skills, and my Political Savvy as it pertains to Office Olympics (Office Politics.) I talked about both communication in the workplace and my adeptness at thrashing my drowning body around the corporate kiddie pool, and wrapped up my thoughts quite nicely. They said “what about the third thing you mentioned.” What thing? Organization? I had totally forgotten what I wanted to say about organization, and the following is what I came up with on the spot: “Well I have a bad habit of being unorganized. So, coming into this summer, I wanted to work on that flaw. So I made myself keep the left side of my work area very neat and organized. I let the right side go wild, papers everywhere, but, again, the left side is very neat. Also, I keep the files on my computer in different, specific folders.”

I slammed my head into the conference room table and prayed for death. The two ladies exchanged glances of incredulity and just flipped to the next page in their book of questions, having just sat through what may come to be known as The Worst Answer Ever Given During an Interview. During the next half hour meeting, the only stupid thing I told my inquisitors was that I have bad handwriting. As you can see, I have a habit of undermining myself when under pressure. I don’t stammer, and I never blush, but I’m not afraid to say “Hey, look at me! I have freckles and bad handwriting and I was born in Vermont.” Enough said.

July 24th - August 5

It’s been awhile. I have been up to so much lately I have been feeling down. The other day I had to vacate my desk and take several deep breaths out in the hallway. The software changeover that I hinted at in early May, and which the department has been putting off for 6 months, is finally here. Today is officially the last day we can go back into the old system to do our job; we are required to be totally independent of it by Monday. Thank God and his many schoolmates that it is the weekend.

This entire week has been a buffet of stress-related tasks. With our end-of-summer presentation coming up this Monday, I was pressured by Sachin to meet for one hour everyday to practice. This unhappily coincided with the busy work week of the summer thus far. The end of all real thought hangs like a convicted criminal, just days out of reach; after the presentation on Monday, I refuse to waste time on ideas or conscious reflections through the remainder of my time here.

In the middle of the week, just as I was beginning to reflect on how busy I had been lately, a nice gentleman from some neglected corner of the office materialized out of the air and informed Erica and I that we would be working on a new project. As we were acquiring the necessary information to do our jobs, the question came up as to who had taken care of this project before. The answer was no one. Of course, the follow up question was whether or not anyone would use the information we would gather. The answer was no. I narrowed my little snake eyes in a visible disgust and vowed never to trust again.

The roommate and I are burrowing over to the western coast of Michigan for Coast Guard weekend. After we whale-watch on Saturday, we will be attending a conference on the evaporating concept of monogamy in the spirit community titled Ghosts, Gods, and Fast Women: The Lure of the Mormon Lifestyle.

Just finished the presentation and overall things went over with the swiftness of a slamming file drawer. I talked at a pace nearing the speed of light, but I think my demeanor and class-act will win the judges over and they will give me a good score. My joke was one of only two on the day that got a laugh out of the judges table, the other being one Greg told, which I gave to him. I’m thinking they should hire me as a speech writer for the CEO or at the very least offer me a severance package never to stab their ears with my horrible humor ever again.

July 17th - July 23rd

This last week has been an era of preparation both for my upcoming internship presentation and for my ability to allegorically sell emotionally abused Rottweilers to dog-bite victims. My charge is to get up on stage and in less than three minutes convince the audience that not only did I add value to the company over the summer but I also spent each and every minute of my time helping Chrysler to become more competitive in the market. In an effort to hide the fact that I may not have been the busiest prostitute in the whorehouse I plan to use a shock-and-awe strategy. No, I will not be shooting off fireworks or reciting the names of the Presidents in order from cutest to nudist, but I will start things out with a self-effacing jest. I will lull them into a sense of camaraderie and then smack them in the jowls with backhanded (crit and witt)icisms; the end result hopefully being that I don’t insult anyone enough to get a bad reference, but still leave them sufficiently chastised.


The only other job-related happenings in recent history were the wind tunnel tour and the offering of a full-time job to Sachin by Chrysler. Being a moderate supporter of financial stability, I was interested in the difference between how much he would be paying for law school vs. taking a job and classes at the same time. Seeing as Chrysler pays for school if you are signed on with them, Sachin could potentially end up making 200K+ as opposed to spending 150K over the next four years. Interesting as this information may be, after consulting with relatives the curry-lover has decided that it would be very hard to do school and work simultaneously. Most of our financial discussion took place while we were on the wind tunnel tour.

The caverns beneath hold many a treasure. It felt like we were touring the remnants of some fallen spaceship. We walked into the darkened square mouth of the tunnel, around curves and meshed doorways, until finally arriving at a fan the size of a gargantuan Mexican shanty. Other parts of the basement held massive antennas which shoot frequent frequency bullets at any vehicles in the testing phase. One testing room was snowing, and another was blowing 125 degree air. These test vehicles live a passionate life devoid of reason. One minute they are being singed by giant microwaves, and the next they are thrashing around on a snowy concrete floor.

Over the weekend Greg and I tore over to East Lansing to spend some time with my family. We went out to a pizza dinner with my sister’s volleyball team, half of whom I didn’t and still don’t know. Looks like Big Red (my sister) is growing up, she is second in command and the idea of her at the helm should scare the most iron-hearted soul. My siblings, Greg, and I were able to convince one of Vanessa’s more gullible teammates that Greg was a foster child whom my family had adopted and sheltered during high school. The story went: Greg and Vanessa almost got married during Greg’s senior year, but had to call the wedding off because I suffered from severe bouts of jealousy and what doctors discovered was “Full Nest Syndrome,” the lesser known step-cousin to Empty Nest Syndrome. Greg then decided to go to school out of state, and we (Greg and I) didn’t talk for two years, but then shockingly ended up not only getting the same internship but being placed in the same apartment. We managed to make up, but not before I put Greg in the hospital with a gun shot injury to the knee. Greg showed Vanessa’s teammate his recently acquired knee-scar, and the story’s validity was successfully cemented.

My family, excluding Big Red, followed me back to Auburn Hills to allegedly relax but more realistically to eat. The next night we rolled in and out of Chinese food rivers, covering our bodies and coating our colons in sodium-laced delicacies. I pointed out to all who would listen that the Powers That Be had recently decided to put stop signs on top of the speed bumps that spend the days humping the roads of our apartment complex. In an effort to show my solidarity to the anti-stop sign movement, every time I go over a bump I come to a compete stop right after my front tires hit. As I stare into the sky and wonder why the stop signs are necessary, I cross myself and say a simple prayer to the lesser Godlets of Michigan asking that stop signs be disinvented. After I finally get out of the neighborhood, I blow every stop sign and stoplight that I can find and laugh at my own sincere disregard of the State’s laws. You can spell S-L-A-W with LAWS, and I’ve always hated slaw, cole or otherwise, so please bring me a tastier side dish, legislators.

Salvador has unwittingly revealed one of his few flaws to me in recent weeks, and I have yet to figure out how to use it to my advantage. The first few times he committed the foul, my brain skipped over it, losing the meaning of his slip because of his accent. When I finally realized what he was saying, I very nearly laughed at his face (which coincidently, according to Greg, resembles Mario). Sal pointed at his computer screen and said, “See this asteroid here? This means… ah, what is this? Show me another screen!” The computer, of course, doesn’t respond to his verbal cues, and just sits there, not showing him another screen. I failed to see the asteroid, only seeing an asterisk. And then it hit me. He continued, “When you see the asteroid sitting at the end of the body model it means it applies to all vehicles. The asteroid means… the asteroid. You see?” He then turned to me seeking acknowledgment, but I was already sprinting to the nearest hallway to squeal in laughter. My laugh floated off into space, only to be narrowly missed by a passing asterisk…

(Chess record 16-2)

July 10th - July 16th

At the center of the puddle, close to where the issue lies, floats a packet of mustard. The packet requests more responsibilities, receives word that more tasks are forthcoming: Maybe a job with a ballpark pretzel, says the boss. Perhaps a partially nude hotdog will come along in need of some flavoring. The mustard acquiesces, swelling with a sense of self-worth.

Weeks pass. The puddle is drying up. Plants that have sprouted from the puddle are shutting down or shedding unnecessary limbs. The mustard floats unused, but never unkempt. After an indefinable length of time, another meeting is called. The boss asks the mustard how things are progressing. The mustard was raised to bleed honesty, and tells the truth. The truth sets the mustard free.
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I wore a yellow long sleeve today. I look like a squirt of something that came from the condiment line. Yesterday I was called in by my boss’s boss to talk over how my summer is trotting along. Rumor is I might get some more work. This vicious if not ephemeral rumor has plagued my life before. I reserve the right to get excited. Let’s just say that right has yet to be exercised.

Last night was Frisbee night, the two week anniversary of my arm injury. I played with enthusiasm for two hours, and my legs are bowing and thanking me today for the great workout. Unfortunately, it is hard to walk when your legs are paying you penance by flopping lifelessly against the floor.

Last Friday I invented something that will be remembered by historians as the single greatest addition to office productivity this century. It call it Excel Chess. Excel, which is normally used for spreadsheets, consists of a screen of cells (the jail theme just won’t go away!) that hold either formulae or numbers that “business” people use to “make decisions.” I resized all the cells to be square, and alternated the non-colors black and white in each row. I used clip-art images for chess pieces, and sent the template of the chessboard out to several in-mates. The simplexity of it all is that you just send the moves over e-mail, and the games commence. Side note: as of this writing, my record is 5-0 ladies!

I asked for a résumé review from the Office of Career Development at the B-School and got the feedback from them yesterday. They gave me a lot of bread-winning tips which should propel my piece of paper from the middle of the stack a little closer to the top. It seems like a losing battle, but I have to keep in mind that I am winning the war. I have and experience that no one else does: I’m writing this from an office cubicle with a ruler balanced on my head. Nobody else can say that. Nobody.

I have only 30 working days left in an assignment that started out with 115. I’m thinking of extravagant ways to celebrate. At the moment, I’m leaning toward having a costume party where everyone must dress as their favorite car. Those cars that have nothing to do with Chrysler will receive a taser upon entering. No one will be allowed to leave until the tasers run out of juice. Anyone thirsty?

July 3rd - July 10th

Playing Frisbee on Tuesday night (July 1^st), I successfully put the masses to shame with my courage and ambidexterity. Diving for an errant throw, I planted my right arm on the ground, felt my shoulder shake loose of its socket and break for the exits, and landed on my stomach. When I rolled over to get up, my shoulder came back and sat back down in its fleshy hollow. I held my arm at my right side for the rest of the game, throwing accurately but without much pizzazz. To finish the game I made a diving catch in the end zone with my left hand, and everyone celebrated except for the other team and the neuronal pathways that carry pain messages from my limbs to my brain.

On Wednesday night I drove Greg to the Detroit Metro airport so he could flee the state of Michigan and gain asylum under the waiting breast of California. When he was getting out of the car to leave, he tried to give me a hug, and I had to remind him that he was going to be gone for only three days. He wasn’t going to war. He wasn’t even going to the zoo, where he could potentially be mauled by a wily animal. Because of all this, and the fact that I cringe at the slightest human touch, I kicked him with my steel-toed boots when he extended his arms. No one was going to check his carry-on bag if he was crying and acting as if he had just had upper thigh surgery, so I feel safe assuming I did him a favor.

While it is untrue that Greg has ever had thigh-work done, there was a quietly sinister medical melodrama playing out in our apartment on Tuesday night, two nights prior to his departure, which ended up involving some microsurgery. Right before the Frisbee game was to start, Greg and I were bouncing a volleyball back and forth to each other, practicing our soccer skills. The ball rolled under our glass table, and Greg, for some reason lost on me, tried to crawl over the table to get the ball. Instead of gliding over it like the fairy he thinks he is, his knee smashed through the glass. His knee produced a laceration approximately 1 inch in length, and Greg jetted off to the nearest medical clinic.

____________________________

The weekend pounced upon me with a patriotic viciousness. I knew that we had Friday off of work but it didn’t dawn on me until late Thursday evening that it was going to be Independence Day. On the 4^th, I ended up sitting on the edge of a dock with Bert, gazing across the river at colorful explosions of phosphate and some other chemicals I learned about when such things pretended to matter. At some point during the show two drunken gentlemen floated up to us in a canoe, docked the boat as if it was their spot, and proceeded to take 15 minutes to stumble onto land. One offered us an oil-spotted can of beer. We declined. They walked the length of the weather-beaten boardwalk, shoulder to shoulder, and disappeared into the night. When the fireworks ended, I heard one of them shout something that had more of an idiotic than patriotic bent. Something like “Merry Intern Pendants Day.” Sometimes my ears hear what they want to hear.

On Saturday night, I watched a kid's Pixar movie about a debonair rodent chef. I’ve seen the movie twice, but for some reason I can’t remember the rat’s name. The movie was well-attended, having been set up in Bert’s backyard with a bed sheet and my projector. On Sunday, I watched my sister play volleyball for 4 hours. I ate the better part of a bag of sunflower seeds and pondered how God decides who among a family is going receive a full dose of athleticism. For example, how come He decided to give George Bush a rock-strewn set of abs and the reflexes of a harpoonist, but Jeb got the shafted end of the stick? At some point during my pondering, I must’ve crept too far into the sun’s deadly rays, because when I awoke on Monday morning my lower lip looked like it had been put through the business end of a meat grinder. See Below…

…I have a history of having very odd reactions to the sun. Four years ago, at a Michigan football game in late October, I melted. I did not realize at the game, or even on the way home, that I had ingested some foreign poison which was to change the way I lived the next four day. The next morning my face felt weird, collapsed and exploded at the same time, so I glanced at the mirror. I then locked the door and dove under the covers of my high-school bed and vowed never to come out. My face! The sweet, previously unblemished love of my life. It looked accursed. You could barely see my eyes. My cheeks appeared to be stuffed with slices of pizza. My skin, from the neck up, looked victim to some exotic jungle virus; Ebola, perhaps, or face-AIDS.

Forward, to the present. The sun had baked to life a crustacean claw where my mouth used to be, but what made the injury notable was the salt from the seeds had that seeped into the cracks. White scabs, not dissimilar to what you might expect a Yeti's knuckles to look like, became prominent on my lip. Only now, four days later, does it appear to be healing.

Work is very quiet this week, but I learned at a very young age that silence can throw a tarp over the worst of life’s problems and then release them when you least expect it. These next two weeks mark Chrysler’s mandatory two-week vacation time, where 70% of the workforce is forced to take vacation. I’m very used to the rules not applying to me, but this time it is to my disadvantage. No boss creeps nearby, both a blessing and a curse. Just when I start to stretch out and wonder if I am going deaf, an order roars out from somebeast two cubicle rows over, telling me to get some work done.

I really wish one of my slacking co-workers looked more like a druggie so that I could make a joke about which was more fulfilling: free-riding the waves of a slumping company and collecting ridiculous wages for doing nothing, or free-basing off a cafeteria spoon in the unisex bathroom at the headquarters of one of the biggest companies in the state? Immediately after wondering about this, I realize how much time I really have on my hands. And then I wonder: how could time be on my hands?

a cuter, smaller bert.

July 1st

I’ve gotten a wider load of busy work, but it still only manages to make me wet until lunchtime, drying up quickly after that.

Yesterday, the interns received a reprieve for the second half of the work day; we participated in the last intern event, which was a tour of a car plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan. Safety glasses glued to our demure eyes, we slid from one side of the factory to the other in a pimped-out golf cart, making jokes about how hard the robots were working and watching as cars went from being just pieces of gray metal to lumps of color that, if Chrysler is lucky, 1 out of 60 car buyers will consider purchasing.

Greg is fleeing to Sand Diego for this weekend – the 4^th. California fireworks have lower emissions, I’m sure, so I hope he goes especially environMental in front of his girlfriend’s parents. In the apartment, we have moved everything out of the living room to better play soccer with a volleyball. Everything is fluid when you are my age, even floor space.