3/2/10

I think I screwed up a little bit this time around. I'm not a very likable dude but, in small doses and on an infrequent basis, people seem to find me tolerable. As I was working my way through the month of February, waking each day to find one more hassle around the corner, I had several conversations with friends back home. "Pretty soon," was the consistent message in terms of when I would be back in town. Then one thing leads to another, problems arise, delays are encountered, and I end up telling a few more people that I'll be home in the near future.

Once I finally got my chance to set my home time in motion, I had to decide how many days to request. For reasons that amount to nothing more than a gut instinct, I expect that we're going off an economic cliff at the end of this summer. I don't have data points to argue or any of that. I don't know anything that you don't know. Just playing a hunch. Anyhow, since nobody likes being caught off guard in an economic crisis (see 2008), I'm inclined to bank some extra cash and hunker down a little bit. In that light, and in light of all of the unintended down time that I've had lately, I didn't really feel like burning a whole week at home. So I settled on five days. In retrospect, that's probably not enough time.

I got into town last night and gave my paperwork to the local dispatcher. The impending time crunch had occurred to me on the way home, but I assumed that I would just take my five days and deal with it. He said to me, "You have 23 days available. When are you coming back?" No mention of the five day thing. Beauty. So I told him that I would be back on Monday morning. One extra day to spend socializing and whatnot. Then I had a few cold ones at the pub last night, whacked down a bunch more at home after hours, and slept through half of today. The rest of the day was spent running around and handling tedious business (deposit some checks at the bank, mail my state tax return, transfer files to a new computer, etc.). One day down, five to go. I'm not sure how the rest of the week is going to play out, but I suspect that I'll be on the move quite a bit. I probably should have gone for a week off when I had the chance.

Time for a side note: My new cell phone is a Blackberry, so I spent a few minutes browsing the applications that are available. For $2.99, I saw one called Call Blocker Professional. I thumbed over three bucks from my PayPal account, downloaded the application, and then blocked my buddy Brian's phone number. He tried to call me and, before the phone even rang, the app took his call and hung up on him. That... was... awesome! Quite possibly the best three bucks that I've ever spent.

Godfather - 1, Nuisance phone calls - 0. I win, mofos.