Begging Pardon...

 I know, the name of the place includes the word "Day" implying daily.  Yeah, I do my best.

It occurred to me this evening as I was walking my dogs and contemplating the wreckage of weekend plans I had due to more overtime needed at my employer.  And I mentally castigated myself anyway.  I got what i wished for.

Back in 2009, when I was laid off by my last technology employer who, regrettably, went out of business when the founder/owner decided, due to certain personal issues, to end his own life, and thus killing the business, that was his choice.  And I suffered a number of issues, not the least of which was losing a decent technology job in an economy that was utterly unlike anything we'd seen in my lifetime.

Which also included taking the home I'd fought to keep for my wife and children, which was, I suppose, a very slight bit of good luck because the amount of work that place had required by the time we left it was ... well, bloody overwhelming.  The water softener had died and required replacement, as did the central air conditioner, and we'd already replaced the refrigerator, the freezer, the stove, the washer, the water heater, and a good portion of the furnace.

So yeah, we got out in time, I guess.  But I spent five years looking for a job.  And in the end, I took a position in a retail store because they would hire me, I could do the work, and it had taken my wife falling onto the land mine and getting hired first as a part-time cashier to make more money.  When I met with the hiring manager, she asked me if I understood that she could not pay me what I had made in my last job, which at the time was $58,000 a year.

I told her I was very aware of the pay scale, but the job application I had to fill out on-line required I enter my previous income, and I pointed out to her that even minimum wage (which was where I and everyone else started back then) was more than I had been making while sitting at home.  And so they hired me, and for six years, there were two letters that one did not utter in close conjunction near a supervisor for they would develop unsavory personal tics and other behavior that would cause them to escort one to a time clock and make sure they punched out so no one crossed that mythical, theoretical border into Overtime.

In fact, during the six years I worked there, I regularly volunteered to work on the holidays that the store was open (which was, at the beginning, all but three of them, and by the end, it was down to only two days a year they were closed).  I did that because working on the holiday did pay overtime - and for a greedy bastard such as myself, one could work nearly 48 hours that week.  And that was ... great money for those days.

Then came along the current job offer and my current job.  I leapt at the chance to make another $2.50 an hour, and do so from mostly the wider part of my back.  It required a lot more of what I stored between my ears, behind my eyes, and a lot less of my back and my arms.  And, once I got to a point where I was considered fully trained and useful, I was permitted to volunteer for the occasional overtime.

Back in those days of yore, when most of us worked in a thing called an office, those days mostly clumped around the end of the year, though the occasional opportunity arose to commit a few hours on a Saturday if one wished, and the opportunity was available.  But back on March 21, 2020, I was told to take my computer, my keyboard, my monitors, my ... well, pretty much everything I would need, and head home.  And I started on the kitchen table, moved downstairs, and in the end, had to move my desk into the corner of my bedroom.

And last October, I took off a week around October 20th to celebrate with my wife our 30th anniversary.  Our gigantic plans ... came to nothing.  But shortly after that vacation came to an end, yet another Month End rolled in upon us, and the overtime started.  And then, starting in early November, we started preparing for the end of the year.  And since that point, I've been working 50+ hour weeks, and nearly every single Saturday.

And as the line from the movie goes, I'm tired, boss.  I'm just flat freaking exhausted.  Rung out, burned out, and fried crispy.  It helps not at all that my work computer is running slower than my personal computer, which is a sad statement as my home bomputer is an older model of Dell which I picked up used some 6 years ago.  It had a whole 4 gigs of RAM, which was a huge improvement over the 1 gig my previous machine had.  But my work computer, with a more powerful processor and twice the RAM, has experienced some badly borked updates, and so it's got a rather large number of software conflicts.

All of that serves as my way of saying "look, I'm doing the best I can."  

Which still, in my brain, does not excuse certain lapses.  In fact, it makes them worse.

Over the years I've been pouring brain cells onto this keyboard in a fashion that somehow makes me feel better that I am doing something which I should be doing, I've met some honestly decent people.  People who, for whatever reason, have chosen to call me their friend.  And for another reason I do not understand, I'm the lousy fellow who loses touch.

And what is absolutely and truly hell for me is the fact that this modern method of congregating, introducing ourselves, and getting to know one another is done entirely through an ephemeral conduit.  I often wonder what might happen if, in a hundred thousand, or million years from now, should our society suffer some sort of catastrophic collapse, what would our following species - if any - think of us?  I mean, some of our sculpture and construction, or elements of it, might survive, but then these future archeologists will be forced to conclude that we completely eschewed written communication and failed to produce anything.  I have no tangible evidence I ever communicated with these people because my email records, over the years, are spotty.  Sure, I have backups.  But the tools which could read those backups have changed.  

And last night, I found out another person who had been a good friend to me passed away.  Nine years ago.  So I'm the bastard.  I feel terrible, because he was a good man.  But that is the way it is, I guess.  Hoping today will be better.  Especially since I've remembered to post this now.