Monday, November 26, 2012

I Wish It Came With Actual Weight Loss

Perhaps I was somehow prescient in buying a bottle of wine on Sunday.

"Don't get upset over a job that wasn't even paying you minimum wage," Dan told me over the phone. But hey, here I am, and I'm...kinda upset. I also know that I'm kinda breaking a paramount rule of blogging, which is don't blog about work. Ever.

Thing is, I learned a few hours ago I've been downsized. So here goes...

I loved my job, even though it didn't pay very much and I wasn't close to full-time. The people in the upper echelons of the place simply relied too much on the tourist dollar to carry them through - and, believe it or not, Hurricane Sandy threw a serious wrench in their financial works (I can believe it. Seriously, I can.)  Some good people who were there full-time and who worked hard are out of jobs, too, and the status of my boss - who is one of the great bosses of the world - has changed as well. And me? I'm back at home most of the week, wondering what in the heck happened to me in the past year.

There were some firsts with this job: it was my first time in a cubicle, behind a desk, looking at a computer screen and manipulating social media for a semi-constant paycheck. It was my first time in a work situation where I encountered more than one or two other people whenever I went into the workplace. My first web-published articles that I was paid over $10 for. This was also the year I dived into Twitter and swam in the sea of hashtags, higher-profile-than-we accounts, and other quirks of the 140-charactersphere - and now I can confess that my favorite hashtag EVER has got to be #CruiseLikeANorwegian. I somehow picture myself sliding about in floor-length furs on a freezing deck as I'm being catered to by Scandinavian cooking maestro Andreas Viestad, all while barely holding on to a 98.6-degree body temperature in the process - but I digress...

The ubiquitous "they" everyone talks about ad nauseum say that certain bad things come in threes, and boy, did I get them. It's definitely been one hell of an autumn. And I'll be kicking off my winter by turning forty. AH-HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

The good news? Thanks to my in-laws, I now own a Nook e-reader. Strangely enough, I tried configuring it to download e-books from the public library here and was able to start reading the NOPL's digital copy of Cloud Atlas - on my Android phone. I'll get there yet, but 'til then, I'll be reading Pride and Prejudice, which came with the e-reader. I haven't read it since the eleventh grade. Mr. Darcy, be ever-so-rude to Miss Bennet, make like Calgon and take me away...

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