Of Music, Mistoffelees, Muppets, Merlin…

I took the cargo ops class at school but my teacher explained that it doesn't give a certification and I'd only be okay for ship's crane and the school forklifts. she said I could take an online exam and get my cert. I paid 60 bucks.

I'm googling and I'm seeing a lot of resources saying that the online programs cover the classroom part of the exam but not the in person practical aspect.

29 CFR 1910.178 (l)(2)(ii)

a). I needed to watch that car and

b). That I needed to be careful, because the driver of the car was a massive bitch.

It kind of took me by surprise, because I really had no reason to be beefing with that car, and I also hadn't really had an impression like that since I was religious, which was in my teen years. Right? It'd been a decade since I had a little voice whisper in my ear, and I'd basically written it off as nonsense.

Anyway, I watched the car, because The Spirits or whatever were very insistent that I did. Car drove fine, went into the parking spot, inched forward, and right when it should've just stopped, the driver gunned it for some reason and it ran into the curb and cracked its bumper.

So, the driver got out, and she went to the front of the car to check that yes, she had cracked her bumper, and then she turned to look at me. The parking lot wasn't empty, but we were the only two people standing in that row, and I'd probably been staring at her for tenish seconds now.

She demanded very angrily to know why I hadn't warned her of the curb. And I could have said I didn't know you were about to gun it or is it my job to help every stranger park, or even could you have even heard me, inside your car?

And all of those would have been fine, but I was really, really busy digesting that I had somehow communed with Mormon Jesus again for the first time in fifteen years, and that the communion had mostly been there to let me watch someone park badly (?), so what I responded with was:

"Because it was foretold."

And I can't tell which would be funnier, if she went silent because there's not much to be said to that, or if she went silent because in Utah, she might actually believe me, but we parted ways without more words.

-so much desert that you will get scared 

-seriously from california to new mexico is terrifying like it’s eight straight hours of pale red desert and the sky is so large that everything, even your car, even your hands, looks like a tenuously small and fragile diorama placed on an endless pale red table and left there to dissolve. 

-a gas station that for some reason has large dinosaurs made out of scrap metal. they are 1000% awesome. sometimes they move. take a million pictures.

-a fruit stand that sells the best fruit you have ever eaten. later you won’t quite remember which fruit. strawberries, maybe? peaches?

-small black birds, subtly different in every state. some have gold eyes and some are a little iridescent and some are black from beak to toes. the sparrows they compete with for crumbs look exactly the same wherever you go. 

-a completely empty rest stop. no one eats at the concrete tables. no one plays in the tiny strip of grass or gravel. you will find a small and beautiful stone. 

-a hawaii license plate, somewhere around ohio. i still don’t know how they get the cars across the ocean. i don’t know why anyone would leave hawaii for ohio. i don’t know why anyone lives in ohio. 

-an incredibly weird duck. you had no idea ducks could look so incredibly weird, and you wish you were still ignorant of how incredibly weird ducks can, apparently, look. 

-a small folksy roadside waystation that sells fudge and incredibly tacky statues of eagles and wolves and cowboys. if you like fudge, eat the fudge from here. 

-a lizard doing pushups. if you are particularly fortunate: many lizards doing pushups.

-approximately one gajillion starbucks shops. don’t bother counting them. it will make you angry. 

-a storm somewhere around oklahoma, if you’re lucky. the clouds tower up in fantastic fluffy castles miles and miles into the air and are painted pink and gold and purple and the sky turns a dozen impossible shades of blue and when the rain comes down over your car it sounds like the world is ending. 

-weird burrs will stick to your legs. you’ll flick them out of the car eighty or eight hundred miles from where their parent plant was grown, and not be sure whether you should wish the little hitchikers well or not. 

-a dog wearing sunglasses with his head hanging out of a car window. this will be the high point of the trip. 

-the world’s most depressing restaurant. you will know it when you wind up there and have to eat the terrible food, and listen to the terrible music, and look at all the listless waiters and want to tell them get in my car, for god’s sake get in, i’ll take you out of whatever crapsack little town this is that you can’t get out of on your own. but you won’t say that because it’s rude. maybe they have family here. maybe they even like it here.

-a painting of a sailboat in a motel located at least a hundred miles from any significant body of water. 

-several genuinely hilarious postcards. buy them.

-a cat that will not let you pet it. this will be the low point of the trip. 

-corn. so much corn you will get scared. who the fuck is going to eat all this corn? 

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

“I drew a picture of a cat with wings, and I thought “Oh, what fun! Why shouldn’t a cat have wings!?” and then, “What would happen if they did?” and so there goes the book.