Checking In

Sorry for the lack of new stories, folks. I've been kind of busy. We have a deadline approaching for ELK'S RUN that's been keeping me busy, combined with POSTCARDS. There're going to be some announcement coming soon that are going to make heads fucking spin.

So, keep with it. The Live Journal (link to the right) is being updated time and again, there's a feature for POSTCARDS going up on CBR this week (maybe even today). All will be explained, soon. So sit tight.

I also found out the story I planned on posting today - well - it can get me in trouble. So I need to tone it down a bit.

Long Island: Learning to Trip (And Failing)

About a month after rescuing a project and getting its budget quadrupled I was off to Long Island for the first of my many two-week long business trips. These trips will end up becoming the loneliest chunks of time I’ve yet to live through.

I didn’t have a license. I just got my license three years ago. Part laziness, partly no need to get one, but the fact remains that I couldn’t rent a car. So I took a taxicab from JFK to the office out in Long Island, a trip that ended up coming close to a hundred-bucks (with tip) and left me hoping that TAO would reimburse me (for subsequent trips I reserved a town car – much cheaper).

I get to the office and Roger assigns me to a cubicle which was a pleasant break from the roomy office I had back in DC (that was internet-sarcasm, doesn’t always work well). Thankfully, over the past seven years, MH was the only company to put me in a cubicle. When I ended up applying for my second job my requests were “X-dollars per year and an office” (I got a signing bonus, too, though).

I don’t even know what I ended up doing in Long Island. Same shit I’d end up doing in DC except without any friends, honestly. It was pretty obvious having me work on Long Island was Roger’s grand plan to get me to leave TAO to work for MH and I think it goes on the record as being the worst plan of all time. You want to steal a 22-year-old kid who impressed the shit out of you away from his current employer? Truckloads of money. Don’t take him away from his home for weeks at a time and constantly ask him if he’d like to move down here for good. Money. That’s how my second job won me over. I went into TAO to tell them I was leaving, my boss said they’d like to make a counter-offer, I told them what the new job was paying, and my boss said, “Fuck – that’s a lot of money.” That’s all MH had to do.

Anyway, after work one of the guys from MH dropped me off at my hotel – an Extended Stay America. ESA – no bar attached, no pool – nothing. A snack machine. Two blocks away was a Costco and a Hostess outlet (does that make sense – do they even have Hostess outlets?) A couple of blocks further on and you had a diner and a Wendy’s. And that was it. I was done with work by six or so and had nothing to do but go to Wendy’s or the diner for dinner. I couldn’t even go to Costco’s since I didn’t have a membership.

I watched a lot of TV. Ordered Domino’s. Drank a six-pack daily to wash the “two packs of smokes” taste out of my mouth. Called Robin almost every night. She was back in Boston at this point, finishing up her last year of school. I’d call my parents, read a book at the diner. I didn’t have a laptop at this point so that took out the possibility of playing video games or watching DVDs. It was honest-to-shit the most depressing two weeks imaginable. Luckily I have plenty of family and friends in Brooklyn because Friday I hopped on the LIR and spent the weekend having some fun.

Masturbated a lot, obviously. Had to use my imagination, though, since the room didn’t have pay-per-view porn. There wasn’t even a convenience store nearby where I could get a porno mag. Want to know what the definition of pathetic is? Guessing what potential porno phone-line numbers could be so I can have something to spank to. I’ve never called a porno line but here I was dialing 888-123-4CUM because it could have been one.

It was sad. Sad, sad, sad.

I didn’t know the rules of reimbursement – if I was going to be paid back for cab rides. First business trip and all, you get worried, you know? So I just stayed in that hotel room and watched Seinfeld reruns.

I took baths. I’m not a bath guy. I’ll take a cold one on occasion if it’s wicked hot out but here I was, in an Extended Stay America, taking a bath to pass the time.

No bubbles. Just bath water.

One time I go to the ATM outside of the Wendy’s. The girl in front of me leaves her card in the machine. I get so excited; I think this is my chance to make a friend. I take her card out and flag her down. Give her the card and tell her she left it in the machine, try to let her know I’m a nice guy.

“You didn’t take any money out, right?”

“What? No!”

“You know they got cameras on there and they’ll find you?”

“I didn’t take any money out!”

“Better not.”

She storms off. I get a chicken sandwich from Wendy’s.

That’s it. Two weeks out of every month. No-one at GH got really friendly with me; they didn’t understand why I was there. I wasn’t an employee and all Roger did was say how great I was. I didn’t understand why I was there. My second trip down there they invited me to join their Wallyball league. I’m a decent Volleyball player but the whole time playing Walleyball consisted of me fucking up and my team rolling their eyes.

A couple of months into it all Roger suggested I stay down in Long Island full-time. Thankfully my boss stuck up for me on that one. I swear, I was ready to leave my job, fuck the bonuses and the raises.

Thank God for James coming on-board. That’s when Long Island got a little more fun. That’s when we discovered how to make money on these business trips, too. Fuck it, if we were going to get shipped out to LI every month we might as well make some paper doing it, right?

Long Island: The Day Trip

Two months into my job at TAO and my boss decided to see if I was worth my salary. They put me on a lame-duck project – I was doing some work for a major contractor, we’ll call them MH. It was actually a fairly large programming project for the Navy, the guy at our company that was working on it up and quit about a month before it was due.

He did nothing.

TAO believed our involvement in the project will come to an end shortly, since we spent a chunk of money to do jack shit, so they put me as the main guy on it in order to get me used to heading a project.

I had to write code – something I’ve never done in the past. But I looked at all the shit we had, read some books, and after a month I put something together that was thoroughly incomplete but looked decent. I also put together a balls-to-the-wall presentation that was 80% marketing, 20% progress report.

One of my bosses (Bob) and ADEA (pronounced ah-dea and stood for A.D. Eats Ass, A.D. being ADEA’s real name – he’ll be in the peanut gallery eventually), and I flew down to Long Island to meet with MH. We rent a car, drive down to MH and check in with security. Roger, the prime on the project, shakes our hands and shows us to the conference room. We all sit down, get comfortable, and Roger starts the meeting off by saying:

“I want to get this straight. TAO will no longer be working on this project. This meeting is solely so you can transition the software to us. We will only release enough funds to transition the software.”

Bob, ADEA and I were, well, speechless. Bob gathers his composure and gives his little update about where we are, money-wise, and then introduces me.

Here I am with this marketing presentation when just ten minutes ago Roger tells us we’re done working on this project. I figure, “what the fuck,” and I just go for it.

I spend an hour up there, giving my presentation and answering questions. Honestly. If any of the MH guys asked if we can do something and we couldn’t do it – I’d tell them “no” but say what we can do. I was just on the ball – commanding the room.

When I was done we decided to take a fifteen minute break. I was in the bathroom taking a leak when Roger asked me if I wanted to work for them. I politely told him “no”, said I was happy with TAO, and if he wanted to keep me on the project he’d need to send us some more funds.

When we reconvened for the remainder of the meeting, the tone was much different.

We had 60k left on our contract. They upped it to 250k and added more work for us to do. Our transition meeting turned into a planning meeting. Afterwards we shook hands, Roger offered me a job one last time, within earshot of my boss, and we were on our way.

The plus side? I got a ten-percent raise and a ten-percent bonus. I also got to hire my friend James to work on the project which got me a 5k referral bonus and a buddy at work. Between bonuses, raises and referrals that little trip netted me an extra 15k that year and job security for as long as I wanted to stay there. 22 year-old kid not only rescues a project but quadruples the budget.

The downside, in an effort to get me to work for them, Roger put a clause in the contract that stated I needed to spend two weeks out of every month working onsite at MH. For about eight months I spent half my time in Long Island. And there’s no amount of money in the world that’s worth that.

Furnishings

I haven’t been around here in a while and I apologize for that. Work, traveling, and POSTCARDS been keeping me busy. Over the next couple of months I’ll be in NYC, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, somewhere in Iowa, and San Diego – if you’re in any of those cities and if I like you send me an email and maybe we can get a beer.

Real quick, POSTCARDS is shaping up nice, the Live Journal is being updated more frequently than MITC, and I’ll probably have a themed week here next week – all about Long Island.


As mentioned, our new place on Connecticut Avenue had nothing but a suitcase filled with clothes, an air mattress, and some ramen noodles for the first week we lived in it. We didn’t have much money to spend on furniture so we needed to prioritize our purchases.

We stole towels from the hotel so we didn’t really need those yet. We got a skillet and a sauce pan to make dinner. Stole some plastic forks, knives, spoons and sporks from a variety of fast food restaurants. As far as necessities for survival went – we were doing ok.

So the next obvious step was to purchase a TV.

A 32-inch RCA that I got for free at Radio Shack in exchange for signing up for MSN for five years; an agreement I ultimately defaulted on and, to my surprise, they never tried to collect what I owed them. The Radio Shack was about ten blocks downhill from our apartment and there was no way in fuck I was going to carry that monstrous TV uphill. Brought that shit on the bus, pushed everybody out of the way. Even the bus driver said I shouldn’t bring the TV on the bus but I gave him this sad look and explained it was only for ten blocks.

Get the TV home and drag that shit up to our fourth floor apartment. Robin’s chilling at home and I walk in with this TV and surprise her – she was all worried that she was going to miss WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? The shit we do for love.

Of course, I realized I forgot to buy an antenna for the TV (no cable at this point) so I go all the way back to Radio Shack to buy one. We got everything set just in time for prime time shows and fought with the antenna all night to try and get a better reception. The next day we ordered cable.

You’d think our second purchase would be a futon or, perhaps, a couple of stools to put around the little kitchen island so we didn’t need to eat our breakfast on the floor. What we actually purchased was, well, kind of embarrassing.

A Papasan Chair from Pier 1 Imports.

There was a Pier 1 about seven blocks downhill from us. We were in there pricing furniture when Robin pointed out they had Papasan Chairs, something she ALWAYS wanted, on sale. So we bought one.

I carried it home, of course.

Shortly after that the packages I had in storage in Boston showed up and we found ourselves with a bunch of books and trinkets – things that seem like high priority in college but when you don’t have anywhere to put them you realize how ridiculous they are.

So, third item? A book shelf. Pier 1, again.

I carried it home, of course.

Finally got some stools and a little cabinet for the TV. Around this time, though, the air mattress started to grow tumors. The stitches were popping out and our bodies would be draped across a semicircle as we slept – we’d wake up with back and neck pain. We finally had to buckle down and get a futon.

After getting denied because of bad credit at two mattress stores, we finally found a place that would sell us a futon. Big-ass thing, cherry stained wood frame, queen sized, extra plush mattress.

We got that one delivered, thankfully.

So, after a month we had the apartment relatively well furnished. Most of it on credit, of course.