For the past couple of years I’ve been logging about 55-60 hour work weeks and it has been getting to me. Last night when I finally logged off the VPN a half hour into the Big Game, I kind of freaked out because I could actually not remember what I had accomplished on Saturday. I checked my home computer email logs and doc files – nothing. Then I remembered that Saturday was spent in the office all day. Pathetic. Maybe it is my age (going on 55), but I remember working even more hours back in the early eighties designing automotive test electronics and loving it. Maybe it the stress of knowing that you do what you do because you have a wife and daughter that absolutely need you employed with insurance, combined with psychotic management that, in their relative youth, cannot comprehend that some people would rather not rise all the way to the top – instead just be enormously competent two or three levels down. In the past year, in a town of less than 3,000 people, our company has shed more than 500 manufacturing and probably 150 engineering/admin jobs (hable Espanol or Cantonese?). I think we are down to around a hundred souls from what was, ten years ago, about sixteen hundred.

It fell to me (because I volunteered .. because nobody else would do it) to scan and catalog about 1000 photos from various sources taken in the office and plant floor over the past thirty years. At first it was fun; all the guys back then looked like John Holmes wannabees and all the women had big hair. But it got to me by the time the project was finished. We are now all ghosts, some of us actually dead, others just old. I see many of the old ones regularly – as I said its a small town – and even those who were once close friends somehow make me feel as though I betrayed them because I am still there and they are not.

Now we have these asshats that seem to have a problem paying their own taxes telling me that I’ve got to fork over to pay for rubbers, community organizers, and whatever socialist item is on The One’s list of chits that he owes. Okay, but at the same time it is the group of, what – 40% of the population that doesn’t even pay taxes (not counting Democrat politicians; they get Extra Special treatment) – that will be the recipients of my largesse?

My fallback plan was to work at home, maybe even 55-60 hours a week, blogging for Pajamas Media. That is not looking very good (not that it ever did – I can only write well when it is technical and/or dry).

Fuck it, it don’t mean nothin’. I think I need a vacation.