goodies! (goodiegoodieyumyum...)
January 16, 2007

Night sweats, waking up groggy and bleary, extreme cold and wind, joint aches�all these things should translate to a bad mood. But for some odd reason, today is not a bad mood day. I�m feeling mentally sharp, cheerful, gregarious and generally--pretty okay.

I hate it when my brain gets all perverse and makes me perky.

But the sun is shining, so that may be the logical answer to my mysterious good cheer.

When I was a kid, this ran on Iowa Public Television on Saturday nights, and I was exposed to it around the same time I found Monty Python. And I was insane over it. It was the funniest and most absurd thing I�d ever seen, and really one of the first bits of television that was weird enough to really suit me.

It was on for a couple of all-too-short seasons, and then it was gone. Unlike Python, or Benny Hill, or even Dave Allen At Large, it was never recycled on public TV in Iowa, Illinois, or Wisconsin. It was just a memory. And in the days before VCRs, that was that.

Until last night, when I found my fondly remembered trio (Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor, and Bill Oddie) once more. Bliss. Maybe a soupcon less funny and cutting-edge than I remembered, but bliss, nonetheless.

Can I even say how much I love YouTube?

Now, if somebody were to upload old Ellery Queen episodes, I�d never get out of my chair.

But when you take a good look at my history, you see that I�ve worked for three different individual companies and in four different capacities during that time. Even though I don�t leave, my jobs have. One of them hit three different western states before migrating to India, and the very first one doesn�t even exist anymore, having been replaced with automation (Which I was required to help design. Ouch.). The last one save the current was taken away from me while I was on vacation, due to budget cuts, and I was repositioned into my current hell.

I�ve had numerous bosses, male and female, good, bad, indifferent, absentee and micro-manager. I even went for nearly two years without any boss at all, or any boss�s boss either�reporting directly to my VP. I quite enjoyed that at times.

I�ve been promoted four times and denied promotion four times. I received 10 annual reviews, 9 above average and one average (fuckin� asshole).

I�ve commuted nearly 150,000 miles, and paid several thousand dollars in tolls. I�m on the fourth vehicle, and the sixth set of tires, since I started.

It�s been a long one and one-tenths decades.