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not fired yet
Monday, April 7 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Last night an email from the woman who works as director of operations (and HR) at my new job wrote me a cryptic message saying to get in touch with her "first thing" today. It was exactly the kind of message one gets when one is being fired. I've just started working there and it's a little early to be fired already, but perhaps something about me had come to their attention; there are, after all, lots of things I've done (or written) that would raise an employer's eyebrows. So last night I ended up drinking too much and taking pills I hoped were ambien. Instead, though, I think they were celexas, whose main effect was to make it impossible for me to achieve orgasm.
When I checked in with the director of operations this morning, all she wanted to do was correct a discrepancy in my time sheet, one she couldn't do automatically from data collected from my key fob because I hadn't been checking out at the end of every workday. (One has to use a key fob to get in the building, but not to leave). So, no, I hadn't been fired. Not yet, anyway.
I spent most of the day hammering at a problem getting a .NET library called System.Memory to work with a set of C# services written in the old .Net 4.8 framework, using ChatGPT numerous times to tell me what to do in response to errors. This usually works pretty well (especially with Arduino code), but ended up just going in circles, probably because the thing I was trying to do was either extremely difficult or impossible, something confirmed when I discussed the matter at some point with the lead developer.
Bring some leftover polenta from last night that I heated in the microwave, I went 15 minutes late to the upstairs lunch ritual, the thing I've been complaining about for days. But on Mondays, the king of the lunchroom court doesn't come to the office, so his toxic charms weren't polluting the experience. I ended chatting with the project manager guy and one of the developers about sanders and other power tools, telling them what a piece of junk a Harbor Freight belt sander turned out to be. (The side of the belt acted like a saw and cut into the plastic housing as it moved, among other things.)
Later this evening, I met Gretchen for dinner at the Garden Café, which was had a red bean soup as a special (such a welcomed piece of news that I picked the Garden over the Bear Cantina). We ate with our friends Greg and Lynn. Among the things discussed was the news that their adult daughter, the one who'd attended a web development bootcamp, had finally landed a job within commuting distance from her home in Brooklyn. It only pays $70k/year, but as a first job as a rookie developer, that's not bad at all. Later in the conversation, Gretchen told about her recent experience with being hypnotized (via Zoom), an effort she attempting to get herself to like certain vegetables (like avocado and cucumber) that she currently despises. I was surprised to learn that Gretchen was indeed so suggestible that the hypnotist managed to partially paralyze her just by suggestion. From there, Greg talked at some length about his use of hypnotism in his psychoanalysis practice. But I always find the stories he tells from his work life incredibly boring for some reason.
Back home in Hurley, Gretchen and I watched the season three finale of the The White Lotus. It was great television, but it wasn't as amazing as Greg had led us to expect.
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