Two-thousand-five was the year of thinking outside the box. I couldn't find the box. I don't know what box everyone was talking about. Every box I have was from Amazon.com, and all were 20 times bigger than the item they contained. Still, they weren't big enough for me to get inside to think outside, so I stayed outside the box, but then no thoughts came to me. I couldn't even figure out how to get rid of the new balloon packing materials Amazonians were using.
I ordered a cubicle from Amazon, stood outside. Too noisy. Couldn't think. Went back in and decorated. Hooked up my iPod to 12 speakers that cost ten times what the iPod did. There's a thought I should have rethought. But at least I got 1443 songs on an iPod mini, my personal best for 2005. I've yet to make it past 513 songs before the battery dies, and so there are still some songs I haven't heard since AM radio was invented.
Then in December my hard drive crashed on my laptop, the laptop on which I kept my iTunes. The nine songs I bought during the year were gone. But they were backed up on disk, but they were formatted in Applese which, as everyone knows has nothing to do with ease. So I called Apple, and I called Sony, and I called Dell, and Dell was the only helpful company and they had nothing to do with the laptop or iTunes, but I thought I'd mention them because their service was not only the only good service I got during 2005, it was great service.
I'm also telling you this entire scenario because when people ask you what you did during 2005, I don't want you to forget the things that took up at least half your time: setting stuff up, repairing stuff, getting new stuff, setting that stuff up, and finally calling the Geek Squad to correct how you set up the stuff to begin with. I even had to call the Geek Squad when Earthlink's customer "service" gave me the wrong instructions for a network which instead of setting up a network completely disabled the network, all wireless connections and a few wired ones as well, and raised my blood pressure by 60 points in two days which then cost me a couple of hours at the doctor's office, a fact which may or may not be pertinent to the paragraph after next.
So on top of assembly and disassembly, stuffing music and unstuffing music, making up data on surveys that the Bureau of Labor Statistics never conducted but should have, counting the unemployed to the nearest acre and extrapolating from that to the state of the economy, I kept very busy. I'm surprised that I had any time at all to get real work done considering how many repairs I was doing. And 2005 was so boring to boot. Congress was fighting with itself so they had little time to pass any real legislation that affected work or the workplace.
This wasn't a good year for me health-wise: I was sure I was incontinent (Asia, perhaps). I thought I found a new doctor in Bill Frist who showed an amazing ability to diagnose consciousness from video tape. But then Penn and Teller advised against him. Said it was done with smoke and mirrors. Then I was going to go with Dr. Howard Dean, but he wouldn't answer any of my or anyone else's questions. It turned out I wasn't incontinent. All the leaking was being done in the federal government. In fact, there was so much leakage in the government, it's amazing that the ship of state didn't sink.
I digress. I digress because I am, a saying from Rene Descartes or Euclid or was Euclid the guy who discovered the zero? I come closest to the guy who discovered the zero; in 2005, I discovered less than zero ... unless the fact that Paris Hilton isn't a hotel was a real discovery. According to TV news and all the papers, the most important people in 2005 were some bodies named Brittany Spears and Tom Cruise. From what little I read, if ever there was proof against intelligent design, it was Brittany and Tom. Of course, Tom was also proof that some people don't evolve as much as others though he played a damn good chimp on Oprah one day.
2005 was a year of excesses and since I wasn't part of the excess, it was a lousy year. I tried to get fired because getting fired seems to be the best way to get a $30 million severance package. Ah, but that's the problem in owning your own company. So I went to my board only to find out that I didn't have one. Obviously, I was thinking outside the box 30 years ago.
The thing to do before I could collect severance was to be hired as a CEO somewhere. By March 33, I had applied to 575 companies. One of the first was Southern Bell, a Baby Bell spun off from Ma Bell in the 70s when Congress was paying attention. Now I see that SBC bought AT&T. There's something very Oedipal about the whole thing. The company that is really making a fortune, however, is the sign company for what was Pac Bell Park, which then became SBC Park, and will now be called AT&T Park.
But I redigress. Where was I? Oh, yes. .I had applied to 575 companies in an attempt to ultimately get fired and collect severance. It turns out that, in order to get millions in severance, you have to have caused huge losses in the company that hired you. I'm not good at that. The worst I've been able to do is break even.
But the worst part was that, after all the mergers and acquisitions, of 575 companies, there were only three left at year-end. Well, there were actually 12, but seven were airlines, and two were automobile companies, and all of those were owned by the federal government. Since I couldn't get a job with the three solvent companies, my new plan of attack was to get hired by US, the federal government. I've always wanted to be of some service to my government, maybe head up the diplomatic corpse or the IRS. So I took the job as the head judge at the local Arabian horse farm and have begun working my way up. Next year I will head FUMA!
And they said I couldn't think outside the box.
All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2006. E. A. Winning Associates, Inc.