Yesterday I lost my job. The company founders called me into the office and broke the happy news. They brought up the following reasons for my termination:

• I came in late three times in past two months.
• I was expected to work more than eight hours every day.
• They felt they had to coddle me through their company policies and procedures.
• They had no confidence in me as a designer.

I addressed these points as follows:

• I was late three times but it was never more than ten minutes each time and I stayed well past 5:00 whenever this occurred. You would have known this if you did not leave at 5:15 everyday.
• If I had known the job required me to pull ten hour days (which I was never told) I would have not accepted it in the first place.
• I was never given any briefing on company policies, expectations or any formal or informal training. I recall my first day (which neither one of you even offered to take me to lunch on), I was thrust in front of a computer and told to, "Be an Art Director."
• I spent the past two months editing files and websites other people developed. I produced one original design. You hated it. The client loved it. Is that not how a designer measures success?

The corporate culture over at Gas Sack, Inc. (my new pet name for that fuck circus) was more oppressive than a concentration camp. Granted, nobody was getting shoved into an oven, but I have never witnessed employees operating under such intense fear; fear of making a mistake, fear of failure, fear of good design. I can recall only two times when I heard people laughing in the office. Two times. In two months. And both times the founders were gone for the day. The art on the walls even sucked. Oil maps of Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico and this. Which is appropriate for a homosexual ski lodge but not so much for an Investor Relations consulting firm.

So now I am back to firing off resumes (seven today), eating ketchup sandwiches and watching Judge Joe Brown and my wife is back to questioning why she married such an unemployable sack of shit.

Labels: career, unemployment

The wife and I threw a housewarming party on Saturday night, inviting our friends and family over to destroy all the hard work we put into the place over the past few months. Some highlights:

• Japanese Whiskey is a great housewarming gift and a fun treat for Grandma.
• My four-year-old nephew held court over the fire of a citronella candle waxing philosophical to numerous adults on Star Wars, baseball, war and gladiators.
• Johnny Ballgame rolled up in a new truck named "The Licorice Whip." New is a relative term as said truck is an early 80s Chevy Half-Ton with visible fire damage and more miles on it than 50-year-old stripper. Jake reported that it died twice during the convenience store cigarette run. The convenience store is a quarter mile from the house.
• My neighbor Kevin (who I have talked to three times) walked into the house grabbed a cup from our kitchen and poured himself a keg beer. He than greeted us and proceeded to hang out for the next six hours.
• A pack of youngsters found kitty's second confirmed kill in our backyard. That brings the body count to two in less than one week.
  
• Most decadent housewarming gift: 80+ ounces of Grey Goose vodka.
• Number of partygoers that threatened to Top Shelf one of the bathrooms: 2.
• Number of partygoers that requested Journey's Greatest Hits for a musical selection: 7.
• Number of partygoers that had to be called a cab at 3 AM due to someone "taking their keys": 2.
• Number of partygoers that drank the bottle of rum they brought as a housewarming gift: 2.
• Approximate time on Sunday that my hangover wore off and I was able to able to stand up without getting lightheaded: 4 PM.

Labels: drinking, kitty, the greens, tomfoolery, weekend that was, wife

Last night I walked downstairs to adjust the settings on the sprinkler control box and noticed a mess of feathers strewn about the basement. There I found our kitten, MJ, sitting cocksure over a dead bird with her smooth, serpentine tail slapping against the cold concrete floor. I caught her primal gaze and a bursting sense of pride welled up inside me. "Take that you stupid bird," I thought. Then I did what any parent would do after they learned their child had just committed murder: lavish praise on said child (or in this case, said kitty) and than dispose of the body.

Labels: death, killing, kitty

Yesterday the wife and I took in a Father's Day barbecue and a 100-degree scorcher at my sister's house out on the plains. I stayed inside with the air conditioning most of the day and had a glorious nap as the final round of the US Open played out before me. The male contingent of the barbecue were emotionally invested in the tournament, getting excited at good shots, sizing up the leader board and making the standard comments that professional golf fans make ("He can hit a (insert club here) that far?" or "They all make it look so effortless.") Although I play golf a handful of times each year, I have no desire to watch it played professionally nor do I care if a nobody from Argentina wins the thing. I did discover that professional golf woos me to sleep as if I were an infant wrapped tightly to her warm, bare bosom. Sit me in your rocking chair and sing me a lullaby, professional golf. Your sweet baby boy has a stomach full of bratwurst and needs the sleepy.

Labels: sleep, sports, wife

I am a burrito junkie. I used to make last call pilgrimages with my boys to the Original Chubby's in Denver for some desayuno especial or a smothered beef and bean. Before the neighborhood gentrified, Chubby's was not a good place for a lanky white guy with a shaved head and goatee to be at two in the morning. Chubby's, you see, is a run-down burrito shack. Upon ordering you either took your meal home or you ate it off the hood of your car and were left to watch the police arrest the perpetrators of a gang fight in the nearby 7-Eleven parking lot or bought a pack of Newports for a dollar from a guy that shoplifted them from the nearby 7-Eleven or heard the pleas of female drinking companions from the back seat of the car urging me to take them home. I was thrilled when Chipotles started popping up all over the Denver metro area. The burritos are big, tasty and inexpensive. But something was missing from these burritos. Something I could not put my finger on it until I started frequenting Illegal Pete's. At the end of burrito making process at Pete's, they take a spoon and mix the ingredients of your burrito before wrapping it. This ensures an even distribution of flavor with every mouthful as opposed to a bite of just rice/sour cream/chicken/cheese. Illegal Pete's is a fifteen minute walk from my office (ten if I take the mall shuttle) and I stroll by three Chipotles (including one directly across the street) just to get there. Shall I cross the Rubicon at Chipotle and ask them to start mixing my ingredients with a spoon upon wrapping my burrito? I should probably learn how to say, "Please mix it with a spoon" in Spanish just to cover all my bases.

Labels: 16th street mall, burritos, chubbys, denver

For those uninitiated with high plains landscaping, juniper bushes are abundant as they flourish in arid soil and spread faster than an STD on a college campus. My hatred for this vile shrub dates back to my high school years when I worked at a golf course and spent much of one summer removing throngs of this coniferous abortion. Upon purchasing our house, I knew that cutting up the overgrown junipers in our front yard would be imminent. This weekend, while the wife was playing in a softball tournament, I chainsawed one bush to the ground. The work was taxing and sweat poured from every orifice but it was also satisfying. The plan is to remove all the junipers in the next few weeks and plant more aesthetically pleasing and manageable shrubs in their place. I will have some excellent before and afters shots on Flickr when the work is done.

Aside: I have yet to finalize a method for pulling the stumps/roots out of the ground. I have narrowed it down to three ways:

1. The Firestarter Method. Pour kerosene/gasoline on the stumps. Wait three weeks until root dies. Remove.
2. Granpappy's String-To-Tooth-To-Door-And-Slam Method. Tie one end of chain around root base and the other end to a truck trailer hitch (truck must have four wheel drive). Accelerate and remove.
3. Aquaman Method. Saturate root with water. Remove with pickaxe.

What up, shrub killas? Is there a better way to peel these roots caps back?

Labels: landscaping, the greens

Nameless Coworker: You had three calls come in for you in the past ten minutes.
Me: Oh really?
Nameless Coworker: Yeah. Where were you?
Me: Even Art Directors have to take shits.
Nameless Coworker: Nice.

Labels: poop, tomfoolery

I just received a web change request from a woman named Kitty Pryde. I am planning to post the following to her Wikipedia page under "Powers and Abilities":

Additional to phasing through objects, being a computer genius and skilled in multiple martial art disciplines, Kitty also works as an administrative assistant for a nameless Canadian oil & gas company performing the heroic tasks of finalizing Power Point presentations, providing vector-based logos, approving ad copy and being the primary contact for all web edits.

Labels: comics, tomfoolery