The existence of 401(k)s serves as an admission that salaries/wages are too depressed to extend into retirement the coverage of costs associated with the standard of living a former employee enjoyed while employed. We are goaded, then, to play the game, to be complicit participants, lest we one day lose the comforts to which we’ve…
One of the staples of air travel is selling out to a corporate giant: every refreshment napkin received on this trip prominently featured Coca-Cola. Delta’s napkins could’ve even come from a restaurant, as the airline had no presence on them whatsoever. Instead, two red coke bottles bordered by fireworks bursts and the words “open happiness”…
Priceless inquiry overheard in the workplace: do coffee, chocolate, and cocaine all come from the same bean? How appropriate that it was a Central America native in an adjacent cubicle who set the sorely misinformed employee straight. Being put on hold after dialing a military base building phone number, the soundtrack is a cross between…
What’s scarier: unexpected turbulence or turbulence announced before it strikes? That the latter will be severe is suggested by the fact that cockpit instruments could measure it and that the pilot considered it worthy of mention. If the former is severe, one wonders why an announcement beforehand wasn’t made, i.e. what sort of undetectable air…
Sometimes, upper management is not well enough aware of their employees’ backgrounds that they’ll delegate a task ill-suited to the worker’s experience. In such cases, it’s easier for the employee to accept the new job responsibility than to respectfully refuse it on the basis of being under-qualified. Reasons for the ease of acceptance/difficulty of refusal:…
One of my ongoing projects is to work through end-of-chapter problems in my EE textbooks. The reminiscence of this activity to late nights spent making mentally taxing progress on homework during past school years is obvious, but now the problem solving is accompanied by an ever-present sense of accomplished inconsequence. The feeling is strongest when…
Every day at work there are lulls where I’m left on my own to spend an hour or two as I wish. I’ve heard from former interns who recall with theatrical exhaustion the weeks they spent in certain departments without being tasked with anything, and how their time in these departments was characterized by boredom….
My employer’s logo is a castle. It’s not as glorious as having my own castle ruins to live in would be, but it suggests that things are moving in the right direction on that front. I relish the 25 minute walk between the building where I work and where the bus drops me off/picks me…
Apartment hunting took little more than two days. Before I left Fairbanks I thought I’d get a place in the Government Hill neighborhood since it would just be a walk from work, but three things converged to result in my never even visiting the complex: I never heard from them after faxing in my application,…
I’ve written several times of my interest in becoming a certified EMT, the intrinsic rush of pulling a damaged body away from the alluring blankets of effortless death that would smother and asphyxiate. I would also like to substitute teach high school math and physics. In anticipation of the inevitable lament “When are we ever…
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