In passing

I've been working all week (You: but...but you're retired, right? WTF? Me: Ummm. Hang on, I'll get there...) and I've been getting up at 4am to get there, so I'm gonna do the old retired guy thing and take a fucking nap.

But first, I wanted to drop in here and throw out some passing thoughts.

So...retired.

Yeah, well. I didn't want to just drop into the rocking chair and find myself dead of some sort of aneurysm six months from now like every other retired dude. I asked around among some friends still in the biz to give me a call if they needed a hand with anything. One did, so I'm dirt-nannying a job up outside the tiny no-longer-a-real-town of Goble up in Columbia County.

It's irritating, like all this dirt-nanny work, but, hey...it helps pay the bills, and it's only for a month or two.

But that wasn't what reminded me of "working". 

It was an e-mail from my last chief engineer, from where I just retired out of.

He said he wanted to talk; specifically about my last annual "bonus" from the outfit we work(ed) for.

I assume if you've worked for any sort of big business you know what I'm talking about. At the end of the calendar year corporate masters hand out an envelope with some extra jack in it.

Or not; if business has been bad there may be nothing. My first workplace, David Newton Associates, tended to have fat years and lean years and the year-end kick tended to vary depending on how fat or how lean. 

One of the lean years our "bonus" was a fucking frozen turkey.

But this last outfit has a peculiar addition to that tradition; your immediate boss is supposed to "tell you about" your bonus - hence the e-mail from the former CE needing to have a FTF with me about this bonus.

What it reminded me was how I hated that little talk with the heat of a million suns.

What it always did was remind me how much my corporate masters seemed to think what a huge fucking favor they were doing me by handing me this cash bolus which my work earned for them in the first place.

It was a sort of 21st Century largesse, the coins tossed into the crowd of grubby proles by the noble on horseback, and the little talk that came with it irked me more every year I heard it.

Didn't matter if the speaker was someone I liked or, as this guy, was someone I wasn't particularly fond of.

It got to the point where I had to bite my tongue to respond with something biting. One thing I did early on was stop thanking the person. 

Why? Why thank them? How in any way was this a gift? I worked, and worked well, for it. I earned it, it wasn't largesse, it was a measure of my value.

But the corporate requirement to present it as a gift, to "talk" about it as such, made the company's rep come off like they were handing it down as a favor that they should be thanked for, and this time - he finally caught me on the phone - was no different.

I didn't thank him; I agreed it was a nice kick, we talked a bit about work, and he buggered off. 

That was my last one of those little talks - I'm no longer a salaried employee, and I'm no longer eligible for the thing.

Good. We may be in the Second Gilded Age. But I don't need an annual reminder that the coal barons still want to shove us back into company towns, thanks.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was the continued Twitter tsuris.

Jim Wright at Stonekettle has a long post about his thoughts - which, as usual, are fairly well-reasoned and to the point - about this flaming trainwreck, but my own perspective on the issue is a peculiar one.

I read a lot of politics and a lot of political blogs, so I hear a lot about the nonsense. And I can see how it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that a high-function autistic, obscenely rich white boy marinated in the toxic shitbrew of apartheid South Africa could, indeed, be an unhinged shitposting MAGA nutball who is turning a social media platform into a fairly accurate resemblance to his own freakish internal headspace.

But the thing is...I don't get my news off the platform. 

I don't use it to communicate with others. 

I pretty much just read; read the content generated by people who write about soccer, or art, or history. I do read some lefty political accounts, like Roy Edroso, but I don't engage with anyone there other than that.

Some, or all, of the people I follow may be taking incoming MAGAt fire...but I'm not in the beaten zone, so I have no idea what the hell that looks like or is.

So...what's kind of weird is that while I know about this shit, I don't really...know it. 

It's like I'm sitting quietly while a knockdown brawl is going on in the next apartment. I hear the thumping and screaming through the walls, raise a brow, cock my head, mutter "Hmmm...", and carry on.

So while Twitter may be just another part of this country overrun with wannabee Blackshirts, looney anti-vaxx 14th Century cosplayers, and Donald Fucking Trump...I'm luckily enough to be in another part of the country.

And I'm fine with that.

Okay. Got to go finish up the paperwork from today's nannying.

But I'll be back in a bit. I've got some more stuff on my mind.

See ya then.