Gawd I Miss Joe

Here is the final cover, offical release date is 19 June 2006. Will let you know when it is available through my publishers website for pre-release orders.

FADE TO SIX MONTHS AGO, PHOENIX ARIZONA

Well, to start, I quit my job. For the moment, my one and only e-mail address is xxxx@cox.net. I had been working for Honeywell Avionics. I loved the people I worked with, and the work itself wasn't bad.

However, the management on the East Coast, the ones calling all the shots, not one of them could find their butts with both hands, even if you pinned their wrists to their butt-cheeks and repeatedly burried your foot up their ass for added emphasis. Chief idiot is Honeywell's CEO, himself.

David Cote has been called by one of his former bosses, "the most ignorant man to ever reach any senior level of management." The year after he signed on as CEO of Honeywell, Fortune magazine named him one of the twelve most "piggy" CEO's in America. He came in third. Under his "leadership", Honeywell has seen its marketshare go straight into the friggen toilet. Three years ago, we were the clear market dominators.

Now, Honeywell will be lucky if they can keep their existing contracts. Unless the avionics divisions get sold soon, or unless Cote and the entire BOD are involved in some gloriously horrible, catastrophic accident that thankfully reduces them to naught but pond scum, I cannot see how the avionics division of Honeywell will exist in any meaningful form in two >>years. Hell, one could argue they don't exist in any "meaningful" form now.

Anyway, I've got a new job, starting October 14th. I'm going to be working with Boeing, working on aircraft what blow "shhhhtuff" up!!!!

Beyond that, life's been, well, typical for me. I had to trade in my van a few weeks ago for a car. I got the van from my folks last year, when my truck's engine suddenly dumped all its oil while I was travelling down the highway. By the time I could work my way across traffic to the side of the road, my engine had siezed. Not completely sure what circumstances would lead to that. You'd think there'd be residual oil in the engine to prevent that, but apparently not.

Bye-bye truck. Hello van.

Well, the van was a '95. It'd been up to Alaska a couple times. Suffice it to say, it'd seen better days. Anyway, I live about 20 miles from where I worked. It's been costing me over $60 a week just to put gas in that thing. On top of that, it was getting temperamental, and the maintenance costs were becoming more than the thing was worth.

So, I traded it in for a 2006 VW turbodiesel Jetta. It's not the car I wanted. I wanted a Golf - a no frills compact economy car (I'm a horrendously practical person. When my wife caught me looking at an expensive car, and I told her I was thinking about having my mid-life crisis, she patted me on the shoulder and asked, "you do realize, that Jaguar you're looking at, it's a station wagon, right?"

Yeah, I knew, but hell, if I'm going to fork over that kind of dough on a car, the damned thing better be able to haul something). Anyway, because of the gas situation, the closest dealership with a TDI Golf was in Pittsburg. So, I took the Jetta.

It was a pretty fine car ... for all of three days. On the fourth day, as I was going to pass someone travelling 40 mph on the highway, I hear a pop, and suddenly the car is enveloped in thick black smoke. I hadn't even coasted to a stop before there was a motorcycle cop behind me. He yanked me out of the car, and had me stand 10 feet on the other side of a guard-rail. He'd thought the car was on fire. Shortly after that, another police car pulled up. This guy'd been traveling on the other side of the highway, and he'd thought I'd exploded.

Turns out, the turbo had exploded. When I got it into the dealership, and they took the engine apart, they discovered that the turbo had been malformed during manufacture. The compressor wheel (see diagram: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/jag/vw/engine/turbo/garrai3.jpg) had disintegrated under the high RPM, and shot shrapnel down the exhaust system. This took out an O2 sensor and the catalytic converter.

At this point, I asked for a new car, and here's where the "Lemon Laws" actually bound up my hands. They aren't actually required to refund or give me a new car unless the one I have has been in the shop for more than 30 days, or has been in more than 4 times for the same problem. So, I had to let them try and fix it. Besides, I've still got my GodSmack and Rammstein CD's in the player, and they're holding them hostage.

Well, the things been in their shop for 11 days. The service rep keeps telling me that everything is fixed, except the "cat", and she doesn't know when they can get that part in. I ended up calling VW's national service hotline, and lighting a fire under their asses, and that seemed to bust up the log-jam. I got someone to call me back, and he said, "Yes sir, the parts been expedited. It's been put on a truck in Mexico, and should be to Phoenix in 3 to 5 days."

I commented, "Mexico, you say? Well, I think I can guess as to why the freakin' turbo blew up." In my work, we deal with contractors for parts out of Mexico, and the parts coming back from Mexico generally have a 14 to 50 percent failure rate. But hey, they're cheaper labor, and that's all that matters, right?

Other than that, lifes been ... peachy.

:)

- Joe

NOW FLASH FORWARD TO TODAY

Wow ... and now, in the "how could things possibly get worse" category.

Well, if you've been wondering, "why hasn't Joe written in awhile," although I can't imagine why you'd be wondering that, but bear with me, here's the scoop:

When last I left you, I was trying to get my brand new Volkswagen fixed. Well, after waiting a month for these morons to try and fix the damned thing, by Arizona law, it officially became a lemon. Like the majority of companies high on the outsourcing craze these days, they tried to stick it to me - assuming consumers are sheep and morons and won't demand their rights, even as these companies rape and murder the US economy. Well, instead, I gave THEM the shaft, so to speak. I had to go and hire a lawyer, and sue Volkswagen. I have no idea why they tried to fight me on it because they had absolutely no legal footing to stand on, but after a very brief hearing, they were forced to pay me back not only all the money I paid them, but also all my legal fees. On top of that, they were stuck with a busted car they cannot legally sell. All this, because they refused to simply take the car back, fix it at their leisure, and put me in a new vehicle, when they had the chance.

Morons ... absolute morons.

Ok, that was in October through November. In the meantime, Lori (my better half) went in for minor surgery at the end of October. It wasn't anything serious. It was preventative surgery, and she was in and out of the hospital in less than a day.

Well, towards the end of November, I started having a problem with my feet. I got a rash on one of my left toes that wouldn't heal. At first it was nothing, it was just an irritant. My doctor said it was athletes foot, so I was treated it with everything I could think of, from athlete's foot creams and powders to topical antibiotics. Nothing quite worked. Suddenly, a couple days before Christmas, it got dramatically worse. In less than eight hours, my toe suddenly swelled from the size of my pinky to the size of my thumb. It was screamingly painful. It hurt so bad, I wanted to open up the toe with a razor blade, no joke. Luckily, my folks were visiting, and my dad drove me in to see my doctor. I went in and told him, "This is not any damned athletes foot!" Because the foot was SO infected, he put me on maximum strength antibiotics. Within a day, the swelling was down considerably.

Now, cutting back to Lori, all during this time, she'd had a spreading rash on her abdomin. HER doctor said it was a yeast infection, and was treating her for that. Well, when I went in for a follow-up for my foot, I noticed what were like little pimples on my side, which were mirror images to the rashes Lori had. My doctor immediately identified them as being the same kind of infection that had nearly taken my foot, and upped my antibiotics, saying there must be something in my environment that was contaminated. The very next day, Lori and I were in her doctor's office, and I said, "That's no damned yeast infection - that's a staph infection. She needs antibiotics, right now!" With that, her doctor sent Lori in to have a full batter of tests done (up to this point, the doctor had only ever done very rudimentary visual inspections). Well, the lab results came back, stating it was MRSA. MRSA is the most virulent form of flesh eating bacteria. It's also the hardest to kill, because it's immune to just about everything. They immediately put Lori on maximum strength antibiotics, which she had to continue taking for almost a month.

This is where everything kinda clicked. People infected with MRSA normally contract it in a hospital or other medical setting. When they get it, it can take upwards of three months before the first symptoms show up. It usually first shows up like a rash or a pimple, at which point it will readily spread to anyone who physically comes into contact with the sore. Once a family becomes infected, it can ping-pong back and forth between family members, even those who were previously cured. What we figure is Lori got it when she had her surgery. A month later, she developed a minor rash or pimple, which she didn't think anything of. Somehow, I got the bacteria on my foot, which probably got in under the skin through a scratch. Weeks after that, my toe explodes, and everything transpires as above.

So far, the antibiotics seems to have worked, knock on particle board. There are, however, strains of MRSA, coming out of California, for which only one antibiotic is known to be effective. Scary stuff.

Ok, so now we cut to the job situation. As I mentioned before, I'd quit my job with Honeywell because the east coast "leaders" were vigorously driving the business into the ground. That, likewise, was back in October. From October until recently, I was working as a subcontracter with Boeing, working on upgrading the software on Apache attack helicopters. When I signed on, the contract was for six months, but the hiring manager said he couldn't foresee the job ending in anything less than a year. Here's what I have learned. Managers lack foresight. Either that, or they're natural born liars. Surprise, surprise - at the end of six months, I'd finished up all the work I'd been assigned, only to discover I'd worked myself out of a job.

Actually, I wasn't all that crushed when the boss said they had nothing more for me to do. I was commuting 42 miles one way to get to the job. For those of you in Alaska, that may not seem like much. However, this commute took me through the worst of Phoenix traffic. Imagine, if you will, and endless sea of cars, all of which are driven by congenital retards, most of which can't spell their own names, and all of which have death wishes, and you get a sense of how much "fun" I've been having driving to and from work these past six months.

So, this past Monday, I started work with a new company here in Phoenix. This one is MUCH closer to where I live. It's another avionics firm, and oddly enough, it feels a bit like a homecoming for me. The majority of the employees at the company I'm working for now are ex-Honeywellers.

Anyway, that's what's been up with me lately. Haven't meant to be anti-social, but I've been somewhat distracted. ;)

- Joe