On Friday night we visited a friend who, until recently, was more of an acquaintance. She's been going through a hard time after a long-time relationship ended, but since she was the dumper she's doing better than him. (Thankfully we didn't know him very well). However, she's been gracefully sending out signals that she could use some friends right now, even if those friends are a former coworker (me) and his wife.
I met her while working at the TSA. In theory, she should have been my subordinate. We were hired at TSA at the same time. I got the job through my roommate, and I went in, delirious at my nearly doubled salary, and fully confident in my abilities. Well, it didn't take long to realize that my bullshit tolerance threshold (BTT) was far lower than working in a federal government bureaucracy demands. She, on the other hand, excelled. In fact, she was so good at the job that I soon happily deferred to her opinions, decisions and ideas. To get some idea of my truly galactic-sized level of humility, I should probably tell you that she was about 23 years old, and I was 30 at the time.
Eventually I left TSA, my confidence shattered, my future seeming bleak, my salary cut by $20,000 per year. (As my wife will tell you, it was a good trade--salary for sanity). My co-worker/friend stayed on for a while, but then moved to another organization and made piles more money.
That's the background. Now here I am struggling to carve a niche in REI, and she's, for the moment, still at the current job.
We're sitting there sharing a bottle of wine, (Grace is being a good mother and having tea), and she says, "I need to learn to drive." She's from New York, you see, and never needed to learn. Could we help her? Sure, I thought, relieved that for once I knew how to do something better than this kid.
"Thinking about getting a car?" I said.
"Well, sort of. You see, we were having a meeting with [gigantic automotive conglomerate] and the vice president asked me if I'd like to talk to him about career opportunities. Long story short, they need an executive vice president of PR for the northern hemisphere, and would I be interested? If so, they're going to give me one hundred cubic buttloads of cash, and an E-class Mercedes. It's such a pain. I didn't want to have to learn to drive."
"Yeah," I said, finishing my glass of wine and pouring myself another. "Life's a bitch."
2 comments:
LMAO! Great story!
Funny story!
Those demotivational pictures are a riot! My favorite is the failure one- "When your best just isn't good enough." I had it as a screen saver for awhile, but it got too depressing to look at, as it pretty much summed up my life at the time.
Post a Comment