2007-05-07
lot on my mind lately
I know, it’s been forever since I updated. It’s not for lack of things going on, it’s more about the effort it takes to document them. Fine, I’ve gotten lazy … lazier. Perhaps I should dictate the days and have someone transcribe them for me? Ha, like anything in my life would be worth that cost!
Work is going well. I am very busy which means the days fly by. I love that part of it. I did have an incident with a coworker giving one of my trainees a hard time, then being rude to me about it. I wrote her up and notified her supervisor of the incident. My supervisor said he’d back me on any action I wanted to take. Her supervisor tried to brush it under a rug and I didn’t let her. Stood up to her in fact. I got my way. This was very odd for me because I’ve never had to deal with any insubordination from an employee and the person’s supervisor used to be my supervisor. We are equal classifications now, but she has more duties. It was an incident that really opened my eyes to the way my job is changing. I was told I had authority and I could consider myself a supervisor. It took a few days to get my jaw back up into it’s normal place.
I also found out a few weeks back now why I am training the new people. My dept. head said “what was being done wasn’t working” so it was decided I was the answer to that. That one really messed me up. The people who were training have been here a billion years. Most everyone in the dept. has been trained by one or the other of them, myself included. For a long time it was pretty much accepted that some people I work with are just not so bright. To hear that perhaps they just weren’t trained in a way they could learn was interesting. To hear that perhaps I can train people so they can learn was very cool.
The other thing on my mind, especially since it came up again this weekend, was trying to get an old friend to get a clue … I don’t want to be friends any more. She and I met at a concert almost 18 years ago. For many years it was a good friendship, even if I didn’t always agree with some of the things she did. Then she started dating the guy who would eventually become her husband. He’s a big time drinker and has no hesitation to drive drunk. She called me in tears one day saying she was leaving him, moving out, and that him coming home drunk and passing out at her feet was the last straw. Then a few days later all was well. After all, he said he was sorry. A week later she calls me crying because she’s pregnant. I asked if they had been using birth control. She told me she’d gone off the pill because of some vague problems they caused her. I then asked what they’d decided to do if they got pregnant since they weren’t using protection. She wouldn’t answer this … because I fully believe she didn’t tell him she was off the pill.
They ended up marrying and eventually building a really big house in a very swanky neighborhood. They then broke neighborhood rules by letting their dog run all around and having snowmobiles on a trailer in the driveway (even though they built a 4 car garage.) When their association got after them for both these, they did what anyone would do. Moved. They weren’t going to stay where “fucking people told them what they fuck to do.” Especially since their dog was nice and so were the snowmobiles. Apparently rules don’t apply to them. They built a bigger house on a big enough plot of land that no one can bother them.
While all the building, moving, etc. was going on they also had a second child. Since she had two kids she needed a nice big suv. Sure. Ok. When we’d talk the conversations would be either about how much money things for her house cost or how her husband didn’t pay enough attention to her and she was in contact with a few ex-boyfriends. Hello, you don’t work and your husband built not one, but two houses for you with his own two hands. You trapped him into marriage, deal with it!
I also have to add that she and her husband are responsible for M and I meeting. M and her husband worked together. Her husband was talking about his own car crash injuries and then talked about me. M wanted to meet me, he thought I sounded cool. My friend called me and told me about him, then said at the very least I’d get a vacation and jewelry from him. She then casually dropped into the conversation about how if I got pregnant he’d marry me and I’d be taken care of …
For a while I didn’t want to meet M because I thought he might be an idiot if he let women use him like that. I decided to go out with him once, figuring it would at least be an experience. After we’d been dating a while I told him that I was not like her and didn’t want to trap him. He was shocked to hear this, mostly because he knew that her husband often wondered if he’d been trapped.
Since then, whenever we talk she’s asked when we are getting married. When I say we aren’t going to marry she reminds me that it would be easy to get knocked up and he’d marry me.
What I want to say is “I don’t believe in doing shit like that!” and a host of other things. Instead I just say “no thanks.”
Every year she pesters me to come to her daughter’s birthday party. For the last few years I’ve told her I couldn’t because it happens to be the same weekend as my great niece’s birthday. She has actually had the nerve to say I should come to her daughter’s because I’ve known her daughter longer …
How do you tell someone you cannot stand who they have become and want nothing to do with them, without hurting their feelings?
I haven’t called her in ages, I can’t tell you the name of her son even, and I don’t want to see her bigger better house with the expensive things that she’ll TELL me are expensive. She doesn’t get a hint! She called the house while I was gone and asked M and I to drive to their house to see them. Might I add that she called on a Sunday morning and expected US to drive the hour plus drive each way. He told her no. She left me a cell phone message whining about how much she misses me.
She has turned into all the things that annoy me about people. It’s all material things and image. She even went through foot surgery because she thought her feet were ugly.
So not me. So not my world.