Attacked, delayed, derided – A coffee shop style audioblog update

Today was an… interesting day. Today was the one day when I really, really, needed to get to work on time. So, of course, I was running just late enough that it looked like I’d barely make it. But about a third of the way there, there was a moment. That moment when the adrenaline kicks in, and everything starts going in slow motion, because there’s something drifting towards your car, and even though you can’t see the car in the lane next to you, traffic is dense and you know you can’t safely swerve out of the way.

But the thing drifting towards me was not a deer, or a car, or anything massive enough to actually be dangerous. It was not on the ground. It was in the air. Drifting. A long, slithering, stringy, grayish, translucent mass either came out a window or was kicked up in the air by a car head of me.

And it intersected with my car, wrapping my car lovingly in its tendrily embrace. It wrapped a part of itself firmly around the passenger side mirror, and clung to it for dear life. What it was, I couldn’t be sure. Frayed nylon rope? No, it looked a little too… organic for that.

There was no safe place to pull over. My drive to work involves a quick jaunt on three highways that intersect closely. I couldn’t pull over because my first exit was coming up. And there was nowhere safe to pull over until I got to work. So I drove, distracted by the whipping of the grey, stringy mass firmly entrenched in the seam between my mirror and the rest of the car.

The more it whipped in the wind, the more I was certain, it wasn’t a frayed rope.

I drove along, looking to all the world like a psychotic serial killer slash scalper, with five feet of hair attached to my car, whipping in the wind.

When I finally arrived in the parking lot at work, thankfully there was no one within sight of the right side of my car. It had knotted itself around the mirror, and it took several minutes to extricate it from the crevice. The texture was crinkly and crisp, and my original guess of nylon seemed to be accurate. It looked to be several chunks of a wig or a weave, stuck together in a nearly six foot long chain of seemingly human hair. I couldn’t leave it there… I didn’t want have the police march into my work and demand to know who was murdered near my car. So I was late to work, and thankfully only looked once again like a serial killer slash scalper for the forty seconds it took to walk from my car to the nearest trash can.

I was scheduled to teach the kid’s class at my work today. I work at an arts and crafts store, that will be familiar to most denizens of North America. I won’t say which one, but suffice to say that we have a Joann, A Michel (yes, that’s how her parents spelled it), and we used to have someone with the last name Moore working for us. We’ve never had someone named Hobby or Lobby working with us, but that’s okay, I’d like to think that we wouldn’t hire someone who discriminates against half of the population.

While I find it urgent to show up on time for days when I’m scheduled for the class, it’s only because they never tell me ahead of time what the lesson is going to be. The kids usually don’t show up until half an hour later. I just want the chance to actually look at the lesson plan so I know what I’m going to be teaching them. Of course, today of all days is the first time someone has shown up exactly at ten o’clock for the class. Someone who refused to wait for me to get there, because she intended to simply sign the her two children and two more neighbor’s children up for the class and then dump them for the rest of the morning. The recommended time for each class project is half an hour, and if the children want to stay later they can just play with the various art supplies in the classroom. Apparently we’re the cheapest babysitters in town.

Since the projects were already underway by the time I got there at six after ten, leading me to believe the woman actually showed well before ten and strong armed the manager into opening the classroom early, we decided it was best to let the employee who’d started the project stay until they were done. Of course, this was before we realized that the mother was using us as a cheap babysitting service, and the extra time stretched from half an hour into two hours. At a certain point we did switch and I took over, simply because the other employee was edging into overtime.

Thankfully the children were quite well behaved for such an energetic bunch of siblings slash neighbors, so a good time was had by all. Except, of course, the beancounters back in the corporate office, who had expected the eight dollars paid to more than cover the half hour of employee work that had been intended to be put towards the project.

I relayed my terrifying story of hair horror to most of my coworkers, of course. Since I didn’t cause an accident on the highway or get flagged down as a potential murder suspect, it was funny.

I’m not sure if it would have been funny had those two criteria not been met.

The rest of the day was somewhat uncomfortable. Corporate recently decided to do a manager swap, and the new manager and I got off on the wrong foot originally. We’ve since talked things over, and for the most part there aren’t any problems… but today he seemed to fall into a strange passive-aggressive streak. I’m not sure if it was just aimed at me, but it certainly felt that way. It’s funny, a few years back when corporate decided to try to force us to sign affidavits stating that we would not talk about the company on any public blogs or anything, I had intended to start a small rebellion and make a blog specifically to talk about work. I thought I could be clever, and hide the details so that no one could prove that it was me and I was actually talking about my job.

Yes, even in your late twenties and early thirties, an urge for immature teenage rebellion still surfaces now and then. In the end, I realized that after two or three years of working in the same place, I would only have a half dozen blog posts at most. My job just isn’t that interesting.

Which leads to this. I’m recording this, not because I’m a narcissist who likes to hear the sound of his own voice, but rather because I’m trying to force myself to be more comfortable reading prose into a microphone. I’ve gotten back into writing over the last year or so, and now I’m hoping to diversify into a small publishing company. One that specializes in publishing pulp style audiobooks and audiodramas. Since any small company requires the employees to be versatile enough to handle more than one job, I know I’ll certainly be tasked to take advantage of my music skills to write soundtracks, my writing skills to write scripts and prose, and of course, I’ll more than occasionally have to do just what I’m doing now: blathering into a microphone and making it not sound like crap. In spite of the occasional cold or, as is the case right now, stuffy dose. And the occasional sounds of power tools from the neighbor behind my apartment who has decided that now is a perfect time to use power tools to trim metal pipes in the middle of his driveway.

So from now on, I’m going to try to record all blog posts as audio. As practice for the company I’m trying to make, and hopefully not as an exercise in narcissism.

No promises, though.