So, how's your employment situation these days?

My employment situation is good, for the time being. But it is very shaky.

A company that hires the guys who hire me decided they don't want to outsource their analytic work anymore. They canceled every product line the guys offer except for one: my econometric models. While this is good for me and my standing with both companies, it's bad because the relationship between my guys and the departing company has really soured. I'm like a child in the middle of a divorce.

My guys want to sever ties completely because of the way the separation agreement has been going along thus far. This will have a significant impact on me, because the departing company accounts for 90% of my billable work.

It's been pretty bad. Save for a few things that have started to trickle in, I haven't had any billable work in three months. It's okay though. When I signed on with the guys I worked out a minimum income guarantee in exchange for the exclusivity agreement they wanted. Until the work comes in, I'll still get paid. I have to make back all that money, of course, assuming I can. But if I can't, the accrual resets to zero every June 30 (otherwise I'd be an indentured servant for the foreseeable future). But it's not like I can expect the guys to do this forever. They're running a business, not a charity.

But it isn't all bad. The guys have seen this coming for a while, so they've formed new alliances that are beginning to bring in contracts for me. And the loss of departing company's business has freed me to take up another product line the guys offer. Sales there are strong right now because of the bad economy. And then there's a new product I developed that we will be marketing later this summer. The company so believes in this new product that they are hiring a PR guy to market it.

Let's hope it takes off.

If it does take off, then it will be really good for me. I am paid by units sold. If the thing really takes off, then I'll get an analyst or two to help push them out cookie-cutter style, over and over and over and over. I'll still get my cut for every single one, because it's my intellectual property. Like a royalty. How cool would that be?

Don't get too excited for me though. We're talking low-volume sales here... 30 a year at best. And these aren't the best of times. Our sector has suffered like a lot of the economy. Sales have slowed overall.

Just the same, never in my life did I ever think I'd fall into something like this. I'm just a lazy dumb redneck from Pennsylvania. But there it is. Right there before me... in the suckiest of economic times.

So, here's to shaky times and good fortune ahead.

I'd love to have seen this

Just HOT!

"Brown alleges Victoria Osteen threw her against a bathroom door and elbowed her in the left breast during an outburst over a stain on her first-class seat."

[SOURCE]

I hung up my whistle 24 years ago

Yesterday I scored my first ocean rescue.

We nearly lost MM yesterday at the beach. Another couple of seconds and she was going under for good. But I got her.

And then she ran away.

And then I became Angry Mom.

And despite it all, we had a wonderful day at Virginia Beach. We had great food and the best server EVER at this place. Court gave us each an envelope with $10 for lunch/spending money. M scored three cute dresses, S bought a hermit crab, and MM added to her sea shell and stuffed animal collections. I got a do-rag.

Today has been a workday and I've spent most of it trying to get a critical query working.

My weekend in a cliché

The thrill of victory,
and the agony of defeat.

Pissy in Pleasantville

I'm still not sleeping right. And I am totally burned out.

I work for a small consulting firm that two major consulting firms hire for analytic number crunching upon which they provide a very expensive array of services. The firms cultivate the business, sign clients, and provide a lot of warm-fuzzy hand holding. We are a quasi-silent partner, providing analysis from the background.

There has been a turn of events with one of the firms my company deals with. Their primary analyst, "J," is leaving. J is brilliant and I have loved working with him. I've learned much from him. He's a gifted analyst. Gifted analysts are rare.

I was the last to know that he's leaving. My company was told weeks before I found out. I was not happy.

That was months ago. In the interim, the parent firm brought in a part-time enrollment expert to take over for J. And they've hired a math teacher with no higher ed consulting experience, a full-time replacement, who only started last week.

Friday is the J's last day, and just today I was told by the client that *I* would serve a primary role in transitioning projects from J to the new analyst. It means that I become the interim project manager for THEIR clients while they get their footing, while still doing all the background stuff.

WTF? This is their transition plan and I am the last to know?

My boss at my company was just as surprised. He emailed for my reaction and I told him I was upset to be the last to know. Had I been brought into the decision-making months ago, I could have told our client their transition plan won't work.

There is a lot I do for my company and their clients during business hours. I cannot do it at my day job. As a state agency everything is monitored, information security is being tightened and everything is being audited. I can't spend hours of state time conducting LiveMeeting conference calls with clients unless I take annual leave to do it. And I can't use state equipment or state internet access for these purposes. But that's how the business is conducted; on the phone and over the Internet. It's just not possible to meet the obligation of transitioning clients from one analyst to another in this context.

Secondly, it's not in the agreement I have with my company. I'm paid to run the numbers, build the tool, answer questions, and offer advice. Our client is charging, by the $10Ks, a lot more per project than I get paid to do my part of each project.

And then there's Amanda. I think she's crashing again. It's been a bad week for her (and me). I'm not available to take on additional responsibility right now. Had we discussed the transition plan before now, I would have told the client this. The client is aware that Amanda was hospitalized and that I am needed at home.

So there. I'm annoyed about consulting and I'm worried about Amanda. But then there's Court.

Two weeks ago Court and I had the closest thing, for us, to a fight. I'm not going to get into it except to say it was a situation where we both wanted the same thing, but in the offering we managed to hurt each other deeply. I made Court cry and she so rarely cries. We were "off" for quite a few days, but were able to talk and finally resolve things on Monday. It's sort of like we fought and made up, but without any nastiness.

Oh. My. God.

The making up has been so good that it can't be good for a woman my age. Court and I are having our best couple time EVER. It's like a whole new world has opened up... like I've been living in Pleasantville all my adult life and I'm just now seeing things in color.

Sunday Cluster Fuck

Cluster Fuck.

I don't know a better description for what happened to the Trop family this morning.

Our best friend in the world, Eleanor, who stood for Courtney when Court and I married, found a new church she really likes. She'd been looking for a long time. We were curious. She felt strongly that we would be welcome there as a family. So, because we love and respect Eleanor, and we enjoy time spent with her, we said we'd check it out some Sunday.

Today was our first opportunity to check it out, so check it out we did.

Personally, from the moment we sat down, I felt it was a mistake for me to be there. With the exception of when my friend Tina's daughter died and I went to the funeral, I haven't set foot in a Christian church in over six years. As I sat down and looked around I realized I am too far divorced from the Christianity of my upbringing to believe in it, let alone practice it.

I felt sad to be there. I really envy people of faith; so many times I've wished I could be like them. But I'm not like them. And that fills me with profound sadness. Amanda even caught me wiping a tear from my eye.

The cluster fuck happened during the sermon, when the minister mentioned homosexuality, the" love the sinner hate the sin" thing, what is and isn't a family, and the usual stuff we hear all the time. I started to cry.

No, I wept.

I was so hurt. Amanda, bless her, grabbed my hand and held on hard. Court held my other hand. Amanda offered to walk out with me. I couldn't move. I really didn't want to make a scene, but all I could do was weep for MY family; my family whom I love and who has been through so much lately.

I couldn't stop weeping. At one point I made a loud snort, and with that the whole church knew I was weeping. And Eleanor knew. She must have felt awful. When it finally came time for the last hymn, Eleanor grabbed my hand and led us all out the back of the church.

The minister ran after us. He grabbed me and I pushed him away. Eleanor told him what should have been obvious when we were introduced before the service. He came after me again, grabbed me and said "I had no idea you are a lesbian couple." I just looked at him and said, "We are a family." Then he started telling me what a sinner he used to be, how he committed adultery and was full of sin and how he didn't know happiness until he knew Christ. I told him I found happiness when I met Court and then broke his grip and went to my car.

It was awful.

I feel so bad for Eleanor. She must feel awful. And she must feel so disillusioned.

Like I said; it was a complete cluster fuck.



And if that isn't bad enough, it's 300 laps into the 400-lap Dover race, and Tony is a lap down, in 20th place. At least the Steelers won today.

I'm back

I dodged a bullet this week.

On Tuesday I experienced my second-worst day of dread EVER, and I've been in some pretty dreadful situations.

At about 9:55am, I stepped out of my office. Best Friend Forever Vice President (BFFVP, the guy who made my daughter's electric bass) had a grim look on his face and motioned me into his office. He turned his computer screen for me to see and started reading an email that our food service vendor, who is suing my employer for discrimination, sent to our corporate office. It was also sent to my boss, and eventually found it's way to the state attorney general. As he read I could plainly see the URL to my former blog. My face went hot, my stomach churned, and my legs turned to rubber. I did an about face back to my office and deleted my blog.

Then I told Court. She was upset and wanted to come over to my office (we work at the same place). I advised against that, because I wasn't supposed to know that my blog had been pulled into the legal dispute between my employer and our food vendor.

The vendor was claiming libel, slander and defamation of character. This is the offending post:


I'm not sure how our vendor found out about the post. My best guess is the sociopath/ narcissist Googled himself and found it. Fucker. I checked my theory and sure enough, the post came up as the fourth or fifth URL in the search results. Damn. And deleting the blog didn't solve my problem because Google had it in their cache.

That's when I emailed Syd for help. And it came in droves. I really appreciate the way so many of our readers rallied around me. Syd, I love you. Meanwhile, Court went to work creating a bogus blog under the same name, so that Google's crawler could cache it.

About 45 minutes into my crisis, I stuck my finger in the wind to see how bad it was blowing. I went to see my boss. I needed to reschedule our weekly meeting on account EAP appointment that afternoon. He didn't say a thing and didn't seem agitated. If he read the blog he sure wasn't showing it (the most recent post had been about him!).

So far so good.

At that point Court and I got off campus (it was the lunch hour) and went home to take a breath and assess the situation. We are both devastated at the loss of the blog. I didn't back up anything (stupid). It chronicled our courtship, our near break-up, our wedding and honeymoon, and our happy life. It's gone. I loved that blog. So did Court.

I kept a low profile the rest of Tuesday.

Wednesday morning I checked with BFFVP for an update. He was encouraging. At about 9:15am I got a call from my boss. He explained the situation and said he needed a copy of the blog post for the attorney general to assess the damage. Luckily, it was still in Google's cache. I took a screen shot of the post, showed it to my boss (he chuckled) and he forwarded it to the AG.

That afternoon we heard from the AG, who determined that everything in my post was factual, and because I didn’t name the vendor's LLC or my employer explicitly, the litigants didn’t have a case against me or the post.

Throughout this whole crisis I never got a reprimand from my boss. It could come at our next weekly meeting, but I'll gladly take it.

And that's pretty much the whole sordid tale.

Welcome to my new blog. I've set it up so that it will not be connected to the old blog in any way (crossing fingers). I look at it as being in the witness protection program: new identity, new location.