The Final Days: Meddlesome Mama Bear & Casanova

I am pleased to announce that I am in my final week here at Other People's Money. After months of sweating every time I deposited my paycheck, countless interviews and resume postings, I have finally landed a job at The Financial Institution of a New England State. I begin on the 21st. Of course my final day at OPM is the 15th (w00t! w00t!). What shall I do with myself for my 5 days of unemployment? In a word: drink. Heavily. I've also got some friends in West Palm and Ft. Lauderdale I haven't visited since they moved down there--free places to crash + diabolical friends = mini road trip.

Things are proceeding as normal at OPM since giving my notice. I spend most of my time going back and forth with Charlie obsessing over verb tenses, commas and punctuation while ignoring investor phone calls and transcribing frothing at the mouth voicemails. Mama Bear is "sorry to see me go" and they're both worried that they won't be able to fix things that break anymore since it's all tied together with hot glue and string. This should hardly be surprising for Mama Bear, since she likes to meddle and rummage through people's computers. She found a copy of my resume and cover letter. (I got sloppy and was hitting career builder while Charlie was bitching about all the incompetent fools that he employs.) Lynette is annoyed because I can't wipe the smug grin off my face. And I gloat. A lot. I even dance around a little.

Speaking of Meddlesome Mama Bear, she broke their home network this weekend and I had to go over and suffer through close proximity with Charlie to fix it. The storms this weekend knocked out their Internet connection temporarily. The first holy law of tech support is "if it breaks, turn it off, count to ten, then turn it back on." Do not under any circumstance fiddle with settings, unplug every wire and jam a paper clip into the itty bitty "re-set" hole. Especially if you understand the equipment poorly. You will 1.) Reconnect the wires wrong and 2.) Erase all the settings and put them back into factory default mode. At the very least, attempt to call the person who put the whole rig together and see what they suggest. So that burned through half of my day, calling the phone company and sitting on hold while they restored the correct settings to the DSL modem and I re-established the gateway-to-gateway VPN (those things can be a bitch, the encryption settings are ALWAYS different between devices. grrr.)

One of my favorite bloggers is a 30 something woman who makes fun of "mommybloggers" (bloggers who write about their oh so cuuuuuute kiddies, sharing details like when they poop their pants ensuring plenty of material for teasing and torment in later years--the Internet is forever dufuses.) and rambles about life lessons and things that piss her off. When I read this post I about died. Mama Bear goes through nannies like tissue. I swear, this is her to a "t." When I showed Lynette she burst out laughing which I'm sure the whole office heard, blowing our cover of pretending to do actual work. This triggered a few instant messages from fellow employees. Such as . . .

Casanova is a new-ish Finance employee. I picked this nickname because he's a bit of a perv. He makes lots of suggestive comments to Lynette that would be horribly inappropriate at a real job. He also once walked into her office without pants on to see how long it would take her to notice. Blake describes working with him like "sitting next to an 8 year old all day." From an internal office instant messenger conversation:

Casanova: What're you doing?

MHGT: I'm very very very very very busy. This momentary interruption has caused incalculable disruption and could doom us all.

Casanova: Yeah whatever. Wanna play rock paper scissors over the internet?

MHGT: Sure
One
Two
Three

Casanova: Rock

MHGT: Improvised Explosive Device.
I win.

Casanova: Shit!
One
Two
Three

MHGT: This game bores me.

Casanova: Paper!