The free stretch when I wrote the last entry was pretty much the only such stretch this whole week and the little things have been breaking me ever since but finally – finally – it’s a day of rest. Relatively. All I have to do today is make a test run to the storage unit and a separate run to Goodwill to divest of all the crap I couldn’t at the yard sale and yet another run to the Academy for last-minute camping gear and then at home organize everything for the U-Haul to storage tomorrow and start cleaning the apartment and… fuck me. Did I say recently I like being busy? Fuck me.
The sale yesterday went well, netting almost $300 in four hours. Many thanks to Rick, who took over while Brandy and I went to the bank to get her access to my safety deposit box; figure he probably brought in more money than I would have during the hour we were gone because he’s a much better salesman. He also told me not to expect too much when I took the remaining books and DVDs to Half-Price and that was sage advice as that was where he was most recently a salesman, but it still didn’t prepare me for the slap-in-the-face reality of only $28 for five full boxes of reading and viewing material. I spent more than that on just one season of the The Sopranos there last year. Fuck me sideways.
Worse, I turned around and gave $100 of the day's proceeds to Joanie in recompense for the damage to my nice hardwood floor I discovered Thursday night – somewhere around 400 tiny diamond-shaped indentations in a perfect grid where I’d laid down that plastic floormat bought for $10 at the second-hand office store on Lamar, the mat intended to protect the very same hardwood floor from getting torn up by the casters on the desk chair. Talk about good intentions gone astray… I could have covered it up with a shitty throw rug and left without saying a word but that’s no way to treat the people who didn't raise the rent once in almost five years.
A C-note isn’t near enough but
apart from the damn couch I still can’t find a buyer for I really don’t
have
anything else to offer and they won’t take the couch because of the
cat-residue
and the kid’s allergies. Joanie
hasn’t pressed me for more – yet.
They’re going to be tearing up part of the floor when they
renovate the
upstairs anyway but the room where the damage is was, prior to the other
night’s
discovery, the one part worth keeping.
I predict this is going to be sitting on my conscience longer
than, say,
any mistreatment of people at work.
On that subject, the less said about my last few days on the job the better. A number of people made no effort to say goodbye to me nor me to them, Millie and Cathy included. Millie stood right outside my door listening to someone else say goodbye, then laughed and walked off. Nadine not only didn’t say goodbye but didn’t even let me know staff were let go early Friday afternoon for the holiday weekend. She did, however, make sure to disable my ID card – three full days before my employment officially ends – which made for an unpleasant surprise when I took the bus home.
None of this is really that unexpected. All it does is make me wonder why the fuck I stayed there as long as I did.
Oh, that’s right. It was partially for the other people, the good ones: Freya and Dialtone and YF, who did make the effort to come by when they could just to acknowledge how much they appreciated my work. Sarah, who kidnapped me my last day and took me to a 2-hour lunch at Chuys. Audra, of course, and various other colleagues who told me “good for you for getting out.” So never mind the Nadines and the Millies and the Nutjobs and Cherrybombs and all the other dung-throwing residents of that little zoo. You take away a few good friends and/or testimonials, it’s all worth it.
So the job’s over, and with it my tenure (urgh… I will never again hear that word without cringing now I know what it makes people become) in Austin. And with that this journal. This is either my last or next-to-last Ear entry; I’ll start another one, as befits entering a new phase of life, when I figure out what to call it. I’ll let you know where, of course, although it may not be for a few weeks yet. Once I return the home modem to Time-Warner on my way out of town Tuesday morning, Internet access is likely to be shall we say a little spotty where I’m going.
Wherever that is. Well, good for me for getting out.
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