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House

With three adults and four cats, the house is turning into a total disaster.  It doesn't help that I am a bit of a dumpster diver (thanks, dad!) and throw everything into the back of my truck that might be useful.  Today, I netted 2 benches, but they were purple, so I went with it because they kind of match the blue fence.

I went to town on the yard Friday night with an industrial strength weed wacker and the lawnmower and my lower back (owie).  So the outside looks cool, but the inside......

The inside is getting funky, though.  I have had to tape tinfoil on the edges of the furniture so Bertrand (cat) doesn't scratch what is left of the only furniture I didn't find or inherit (thanks, dad!).  There are giant balls of fur everywhere and the bookcase looks like some insane person reinvented the Dewey Decimal System.  That insane person, is, apparently, me.

I like books.  I have carted some of them around for 25 years (most prized possessions are The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy signed by Douglas Adams and a copy of The Onion signed by Smooth B).  Both of my parents have also written books which makes me feel like a dork because I should have written one by now.  I guess I could schlep my travel logs into one and publish it on Amazon, but only about three people would get the humor and one of them is me.  That doesn't keep me from cracking up at myself, but that might be kind of sad to the outside world.  The Kookaburra story and the Pink Elephant story are total keepers, though.

Today I had to make a presentation in front of the Board of Directors and I promptly left shaking like an earthquake and began to dig through dumpsters in the U District.  I love summer when the students move out and leave their leavings.  Bikes, tools, furniture, the odd pillow (I didn't keep that one) and a plethora of books.  I am reading a biology text book, an anthology of English lit and a CAD drawing book at the same time.  The CAD book is a surefire way to fall asleep at night, which I have a really hard time doing.  I actually showed up for work at 5 p.m. one Sunday thinking it was 5 a.m. on Monday and couldn't figure out where everyone was until about 10 - I don't have a window.

There is a thingey that is supposed to pull the screen door shut next to the door, two broken vacuums and a pile of icky dishes I can't bring myself to touch to put into the dishwasher.  Toothpaste spit and old food make for quite a combo.  There is a pile of cat litter on the floor which the cats have decided is the new litter box.  I would feel badly about this if I hadn't been at a meeting earlier in the week when a woman confessed to getting hammered and peeing on the floor and covering it up with litter.  It is those moments when I truly love humanity.  When you own something that weird, you have conquered it.  It is your bitch.


In September, I am going to NY and Costa Rica with my best friends in the world.  Nothing bad could happen, right?  Does Costa Rica have an extradition treaty with the US?

Pretty

Sometimes I like to think about all the crazy things that happen in HR - the investigations into drugs, sex at work, violence, stalking, theft.  I think about the people I fired and if it was just.  Often it wasn't.  I had one job for 2 years where I fired about 6 people a week, mostly for dumb things like being late too many times or taking too long on a phone call or taking too long to use the bathroom.  

Of course, there are the people I wish I could have fired - the cruel, the bullies, the plant barfers.  And like the people that are always walking around at different events naked, they are never the ones you want to see naked.  Or employed.  

After 18 years of doing this, I like to think I understand people and their motivations, but I have been very very wrong several times, been fooled and driven by misplaced compassion.

There was a woman who was 8 months pregnant and her husband was stationed in Iraq.  She came to me one day crying with her supervisor because she said she was being stalked by another employee.  She recounted how they hadn’t met, but began talking on the phone and emailing each other.  She was lonely and he was showing her attention.  Then he showed her his photo.  Gorgeous dark brown hair, green eyes, a mouth I shouldn’t have thoughts about on a 20 year old kid. 

They arranged to meet for coffee and she never showed.  He began texting her, asking where she was, why didn’t she want to meet him.  She said she knew it was wrong.  She showed me the texts, some were flirty, but not violent or overtly sexual – but she was terrified.  Shaking. 

She showed me another text where he said enough creepy things that I was sure we needed to get rid of this guy, to protect a vulnerable employee and to protect the company.  No way was I going to have a pregnant Iraq vet’s wife hurt or threatened by another employee.

In stalking cases, I generally call in the police – so the victim can file a report and the police can decide if they want to arrest the suspect or just scare him or her (yep, there are lots of hers).  I did that in this case, had approval from legal, documented all of my sources – I was just waiting for IT to pull the rest of the emails so I could make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

I had him in the room next to me sitting with his supervisor, terrified.  He wasn’t the guy in the photo, he was a chubby, kind of smelly, unattractive guy.  He admitted he had sent the other photo to her so she would go out with him.  When I read the emails, they were awful – very sexually inappropriate and all generated from her.  He responded, it wasn’t like he wasn’t interested, and he was inappropriate, but nothing compared to her.

When I spoke to him about what on earth had happened, he admitted the flirting and that they had planned to meet, but when he showed up and texted her that he was waiting at the front door, she had taken one look at him and run.  His texts were little more than asking if she was OK and why she hadn’t shown up. 

I was pissed.  I had the cops there, all the pieces ready, and I asked her why she had lied to me.  She said, “he was ugly”.