Half-truths and non-truths

I picked up on two things last night when I dropped my kid brother off at the house. First, Rob is jealous of my relationship with Shane, which only exists because there was such a void for a male role model in his life that I felt obligated to step in and fill it. How different things might have been for me if someone had done the same when I was his age. Second, Rob is dying to know what I said about him in the book. He may even be desperate enough to read it. If I'd had enough money to make an audio version, he'd give it a listen, no doubt.

He was out in the driveway with his partner-in-moronity Pat Donovan. In a sense, nothing has changed since I was Shane's age. Well, there's one significant difference. Nowadays they smoke the occasional blunt while knocking back their Olympias. Donovan's kid runs the High and Tight Dispensary over in West Seattle. Donovan helps out by sampling the merchandise. When Shane got out of the car, Rob came up to my window and said, "Shane tells me you wrote a book." I was caught a little off guard. I mean, I never asked Shane to keep it a secret, but it would have been nice if he'd warned me. I didn't figure the odds were too great Rob would ever stumble onto it on his own, considering he hasn't done much reading since his Dick & Jane days.

While I was still mulling over my best response, Rob asked, "Am I in it?" Again I paused to think before responding. "Well," I finally said, "it would be kind of hard to write a memoir without mentioning my family." Through his glassy eyes, I could see the wheels of his tiny mouse brain spinning. After about 15 seconds, he blew out a cloud of skunk and said, "Only good stuff, right?" Perhaps I should have warned him when I was in kindergarten that some day I'd write a book. If he cared so much about being immortalized in the printed page (okay, on the ebook page), maybe he would have gone about things differently. "Yeah," I said. "It's nothing big. Don't worry about it." Judging by the way he glared at me as I backed out, that didn't satisfy him.

The big day is here at last!

Wake up, America. It's a brand new day. Yeah, I still have to go to work and suffer through the fallout of certain co-workers being promoted. (Maximum Smug Level will undoubtedly be achieved.) But at least I get to celebrate the release of my new book. Yeah, the one I've been telling you and telling you about. It's here at last. And if you enjoy this blog, well, you're going to love the book.

So, get on it. Please. Fire up those ereaders and download away. (And the brilliant part is, if you read on a phone, you can probably do it right at your desk and  your boss won't even notice, as long as you don't laugh out loud too much.)

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JDPQ154

Nook: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-first-world-problems-of-jason-van-otterloo-james-bailey/1129736330?ean=2940161919613

Everything else (Apple, Kobo, more): https://www.books2read.com/b/3L0X7w

The rise of the incompetents

Remember last week's post about the Facebook incident at work? The woman who caused all that trouble, Helen Figgins-Crabbe (again, I'll reiterate that that's not her real name, because she's the kind of person that would either sue me for libel or for the profits off this blog (zero) just for mentioning her) got promoted today. Yep, we got an email just before lunch announcing that she and another woman (let's call her Sally Sue Smith, even though she doesn't seem all that litigious) got bumped up from Senior Content Specialist to Content Analyst. For perspective, I'm the same job title/level they were, and I have worked circles around both of them since about two days after I started. (This is not meant to be boastful. Everyone else has too. And if you knew how boring my job was, you'd know that's nothing to brag about.)

My company has a policy where they won't promote anyone who hasn't been in their current position for at least 12 months. I got promoted on the one-year anniversary of my hire date. As did about half the people who were hired that summer. Helen and Sally Sue, who are both in their mid-50s, I'll guess, got promoted to Senior Content Specialists after the wave of all of us younger generation, because my boss took pity on them and wanted to reward their loyalty. They are the ones who are always befuddled every time we have to implement a new procedure or install new software, etc. At least Sally Sue isn't annoying about it. She seems to try, it just takes her a while to pick up on certain things. Helen's the one who wanders the cube farm lamenting change and wondering what was wrong with the old system, on and on, ad infinitum. She needs hand-holding and reassurance on everything. Though I should give her some credit, because she wrote a nice email to my boss once after I wrote up some documentation to help her learn how to create a fillable PDF. That helped me get my promotion. So she did serve a purpose at least once.

Happy 20th Anniversary to The Royle Family

Here's an anniversary that might have passed you by yesterday. Of course, maybe the entire series passed you by. The final episode of the first season of The Royle Family ran on October 19, 1998. I was 10 at the time, so I missed out on it the first time around. Then again, so did everyone else around here, because it was on BBC Two in England. But that's the beauty of streaming television. Everything that ever played on TV anywhere is available now. There's no excuse not to catch up.

Still, I might never have found it if not for Drew's girlfriend having spent her gap year in Manchester, England. She introduced us to the Royles. Made me feel kind of like I had a blind spot I didn't even know about. Hence it being a blind spot, I guess. But me, having grown up in such a dysfunctional environment, I should have been all over this show. Then again, without some kind of super spy satellite dish I would have had to have had some fine-tuned international messed-up family radar or something.

They could never have made a show about us like The Royle Family. We were hardly ever all in the same room. Maybe if they did a split screen they could have showed Rob out in the garage downing tall boys while Janice and I ate our mac and cheese. That would have been some riveting entertainment right there.

Anyway, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, here's a little taste of life with the Royles. And for those of you who are, this just never gets old, does it?

Looking out for the next generation

My employer is big on volunteering. The cynical side of me says they just want to look good to the wider community, but it's hard to knock a program that benefits the world around us, even if most of my co-workers use their time at their own kid's school, chaperoning field trips or whatever parents do in schools. I wouldn't know. Rob and Janice weren't the volunteery type.

We're allowed up to 24 hours of paid volunteer time per year, to be broken down however we want. You could do three 8-hour days, or mix in some half-days, or whatever works with your chosen project. I take mine in 2-hour blocks. One afternoon every month, I pick Shane up from school and we spend a couple of hours talking about life, big picture and small picture stuff, depending on what's on his mind. I told my boss I mentor troubled youth. I left out the part about it being my brother. But he's just as entitled to clear his head as any other random kid, right?

We'll usually grab a bite to eat or go shopping or fire up the PS4 at my apartment. Yesterday we did Java Joan's. It's not my favorite coffee shop, but it's close and it's never very crowded, especially right after school. He didn't believe me that it used to be a massage parlor when I was his age. The happy-ending kind. I bet Rob hit it once or twice. It got closed down a year or two after I graduated high school. One too many raids. The building sat vacant forever after that. About five years ago they finally renovated it, and it became a calzone takeout joint. There wasn't much market for calzone takeout, though. When that failed, Joan moved in, and brought a very different clientele to the neighborhood. Like most of her regulars, Joan's a lesbian. Like most of her regulars, she looks like she could whup my ass with one hand while not spilling a drop from the espresso macchiato she's holding in the other.

Adios, Mrs. Cabbage Patch

If nothing else comes out of this book, it did at least spark a reunion last night with my old friend Bick, whom I hadn’t seen in seven years. We lost touch after he got married, or more specifically, after he overheard me tell Drew I thought his wife resembled a Cabbage Patch Kid. To be fair, she did. But it still wasn’t the nicest thing to say. I thought he was in the men’s room, but it turned out someone had thrown up in the hall outside the restrooms, so he abandoned his urinal quest and was standing right behind me when I said it.

Imagine this doll with green eyes and it's
almost a dead ringer for Bick's ex-wife.

Anyway, I wanted to ask Bick’s permission before including his email replies in the book, so first I had to track him down. Which would have been easier if I hadn’t deleted Facebook. The only other social media he does is LinkedIn, and his bio there was three years out of date. I finally had to call his mom, who, judging by the change in her tone of voice after I identified myself, still blames me for Bick not getting into med school. (He’s the programming director for a Christian radio station, so you judge for yourself just how far he missed his calling in the surgical world.) It took me three days to finally work up the nerve to call him. Well, most of that time I was trying to talk Drew into doing it for me, just in case Bick was still hacked off about the Cabbage Patch comment. Even after I washed dishes three nights in a row, Drew refused. He just kept saying, “Grow up, dude.”

So I finally dialed the number … and Bick couldn’t have been more pleasant. He sounded genuinely happy to hear from me. Turns out he and Mrs. Cabbage Patch got divorced last year. She had an emotional affair with a guy in her office. Which turned physical. So a standard affair, with the emotional and the physical and the sneaking and plus a whopping lie about a business trip to San Jose, for which Bick even drove her to the airport. In the end, he found out about it on Facebook. Someone she worked with posted a picture of her and her work hubby getting chummy at the office Christmas party. Bick was already suspicious by then. When he confronted her, she didn’t even try to deny it. So he no longer minds that I insulted her, and we actually shared a laugh over it.

We (Drew and I) met him up at Conagliatelli’s in Greenwood. Not a lot has changed there since we were in high school. The video games have been updated, but the pizza is as good as ever. We sat in the same corner booth we always used to sit at. Bick had to run after a couple of hours, because he’s got a brand new puppy at home. His wife got the dog in the split, which hardly seems fair. Bick’s too nice. He should have hired a tougher lawyer to win the custody fight. At least there were no human kids to mess up. I bet their dog will come through it all without too much long-term emotional damage.

The Facebook incident

Hello again, everyone. Okay, Drew pointed something out from my post the other day. He said it was a cheap trick to mention this big Facebook episode and then not explain it. So today I’m going to explain, for the first time, why, exactly, I quit Facebook. And, no, it has nothing to do with them stealing all our data. Though that probably should have been a good enough reason on its own, the more I read about it.

No, the real reason was all about something that happened at work. And I’m going to change names here, and it probably won’t even help, because if one of my fine colleagues somehow finds this blog, they’ll more than likely rehash it all again just because they feed on drama. But, whatever; life’s full of risks, right? I could get shit on by a seagull just walking to the bus stop, but I can't just stay in my apartment all day.

What happened was my boss started this name game thing on the white board in the alcove off the kitchenette. She does these things that are supposed to be motivational team builders, but two-thirds of them devolve into sniping and negativity. She should have learned before now that most of my co-workers just like to bitch about stuff. If you offered everyone there a 10 percent raise with the stipulation they could never complain about anything ever again, they’d rather take the 1.7 percent raise we all got last spring and maintain the right to whinge nonstop. Anyway, the name game thing was just meant to be fun and spark some creative thinking. She kicked it off with Pete Moss and Sandy Beach, and other people added their own. There were a few decent ones, like Rick O’Shea and Noah Fence. Then we worked our way down to the tier C stuff, like Sue Mee and June Bugg.

I’m back, and other breaking news

Hello, Internet. Or should I say, hello again? Yes, I’m back. It’s been a while. What’d I miss?

Okay, it’s not exactly accurate to say I’ve been away from the web all this time. I’ve surfed, I’ve lurked, I’ve Facebooked (regrettably). I was content lingering on the fringes of cyberspace. Then something my therapist said (yeah, I’ll get to that bit, give me a moment) started the wheels spinning a couple months ago. Spinning in mud, really, until last weekend. She said, and I’m paraphrasing, we’re all social beings, and deep down we all need to connect, but the way most of us do is so unhealthy we’d be better off unplugging and staring at our toenails. Social media should come with warnings about all the side effects, just like medications you see advertised on television. “May cause paranoia, rage, and suicidal thoughts.” She was speaking generally, not about my reactions specifically. My side effects could better be summed up as disdain for my fellow man. You’ve probably been there.

Her advice was to never seek connection in short soundbites. Facebook and Twitter have robbed us of the ways we used to communicate, in long form. We try to be witty and sharp and wind up missing the mark more often than not. We obsess over how many Likes and Retweets we get, instead of sharing our authentic selves. This all came up after an incident at work over the summer. A stupid, inconsequential incident that blew up into a four-alarm inferno, thanks to a comment I posted on Facebook. My last ever FB comment, actually. I deleted my account the next day. I haven’t missed it for a second.

But I have missed … this. Stringing thoughts together into paragraphs, and paragraphs into posts. I loved blogging once upon a time, even if it did feel mildly narcissistic on occasion. I still have them all. The night I killed my blog, I archived it all—every post, every picture—on a thumb drive. Just in case I changed my mind. I honestly thought I would. I figured I could just repost it all and not say anything and no one would even notice it had been missing.