It's getting harder to talk to the guy. His memory is shot or at least the way he files away his memories. The only way to get him to remember names and places is like playing some game show where you have to give clues until you hit that secret password that will unlock his memory.

"Devon starts today" J said.

"Who?" D asked.

Devon's not a common name and he has had more than one conversation about Devon, one of which was where he was saying that Devon should be hired back. I mention the conversation he had, he said he still didn't know the guy.

"The guy that moved to Georgia and then wanted to come back, you spoke to the boss about hiring him."

"I don't remember"

"He worked with TK on *that project*"

No reply other than a blank stare.

"The big black guy"

More blank stare.

"Looks like Willie" was the last thing I said before I gave up.

He probably didn't know who Willie was either.


...

During the drive home, a bird darted across the road. I knew it was going to be close but then birds do that sort of thing all the time. I had a SUV full of sleeping passengers and one all too attentive grandmother in the passenger seat. Hitting the brakes wasn't really an option; I took my foot off the gas petal.

I lost sight of the bird as it dipped below my line of sight; it was flying about head light level when I heard the faint thump. I checked my driver's side view mirror. There was a little bird with black wings and a bright red body lying just over the double yellow line. I hadn't noticed the red coloring while I knew it to be living.

I thought about pulling over but didn't. I just continued to drive, angry with the bird and his poor sense of judgment.

....

He seems to think the office falls apart without him. It causes him undue stress.

.....

Things go down at the day job frequently mainly because the whole place is moderately retarded. And when things go down that's when you get the phone calls from people who seem to want to chat you up. The trouble with that is you can't really say "Can we cut out all this nicey nicey bullshit and get to the matter because you don't really care how I'm doing because if you did you wouldn't be wasting my time by asking me how I'm doing," all the while you got some guy at your desk requesting something that I cannot let him do while I am caressing the printer to print just one more copy because somebody didn't give the required three month lead time for ordering supplies, namely solid ink.

And then the division manager walks by and asks "How are things?" while you have the printer open holding a certain thing a certain way to trick the printer that it does have ink even though it doesn't and you say "A lot like shit" and then the division manager just walks away because he knows he's about to get an earful just like he always gets when he asks how things are going when things are going poorly.

How about stop having pompous jackasses setting up systems that they know nothing about?

How about when someone asks for a certain amount of redundancy and/or flexibility, you just build it in instead of taking the contractor at his word that those things will be unnecessary?

How about when folks ask what happens when that machine goes down, there is a different answer than 'we'll worry about that when it happens'?

How about you stop trusting the contractor's word after he has screwed us over for the umpteenth time?

......

I stole that from someone. I'm a thief. Intellectual property.

.......

Dude, just because you're not in work mode after being out on vacation for a week doesn't mean that I don't need to get stuff done.

........

"How comes you aren't wearing the appropriate shirt like your sister is?"

She just looked at him and her expression went from anger to exasperation to just being weary. She didn't say a word; she just looked away.

I laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"Because she was going to explain it to you but then she knows we've been over this before and so she just gave up."

"We've been told before?"

"Yes"

"Oh, I forget. Then don't tell me."

We didn't.

.........

I couldn't find the wrapping paper so I was going to just wrap it in some custom paper I had on hand. The item was small, a one gig memory card, so a regular size sheet of would have been plenty big. Looking through the fancy paper I spied a piece of black corrugated cardboard so then I decided to make a custom box.

I tied the box with a red ribbon.

I still wonder where that wrapping paper is.