Family

I wanted to add something that is entirely unrelated to the Phlegm Monster and my Costco/Walgreens/Walmart stocker upper habits.

Last night I met my brother Chuck (One of my two favorite brothers, the other is Jim, and one day I'll post about Jim.) and his fiancé Mayra and her son's sister-in-law at Bank One Ballpark. Now it's Chase Field, as my good friend Roy, who works for Chase, was quick to point out when I called it BOB, but, well, it's engraved in stone the wrong way and to me it will always be BOB.

Anyway, I met them at 'Will Call' because Chuck works for the Tucson Sidewinders, a minor league team attached to the Diamondbacks, and his boss had called in free tickets for the four of us. Well, when I met them at the ballpark Chuck went to the G-I window and the lady told him that in order to look up the comped tickets, he would have to give her the name of the person who works for the Diamondbacks. They were referenced by the person who works for the team, then by the person the tickets were for. She couldn't look it up by his name, so he came back to us, a little hot. He stood there calling his people from the Sidewinders, trying to get a hold of someone who knew the lady's name. Of course he was fuming, as I or anyone else would be, but he said something that got me. When I term 'got me', I mean, I had a warm, fuzzy, odd moment of unity with another person I so seldom feel, if ever.

Let me background my family. We're family from a distance, and frankly, my mother held us together. I might not hear from any of my brothers for a year, but they would always call her on her birthday. If we're all living near by, maybe we get together for a holiday, and when my mother was fighting her cancer, my brothers Chuck and Jim, and my sister Mary, visited a couple times a year, including Thanksgiving. My brother Max would show up out of the blue, but I always felt that was for a spot inspection to make sure I was taking good care of our mother, not to drop in to say 'hello'.
When Mom died, we scattered, or I scattered, not really keeping track of anyone, perhaps because I was at ground Zero of the whole Mom illness and I feel guilty I didn't talk her into continuing chemo. I let their mother die, I let my mother die. I have dreams sometimes that my mother and I are on a road trip and we stop at a hotel. I make her comfortable in the room, settle her in, and then I go to buy a pack of cigarettes or something. When I return, the hotel isn't there, or I can't find the hotel, or I find I've driven a hundred miles away and can't remember how to get back to her. It's all guilt, and I feel like I let everyone down by not advising my mother, when she asked, to keep fighting. It's hard to call people you feel you've let down.

Anyway, back to the ballpark. I'm standing there with Mayra, her son's sister-in-law, and my fuming brother. Now, we as a people don't stomp around and yell, it is not the way of the Heeman, and he looks perfectly calm, but I get the subtlety. He's irate because the game just started and we're not in the ballpark yet. And then he said something that got me, that brought me something I haven't had in a long time, peace. "If Eric doesn't call me back with the name of the woman who called in the comp tickets, this is the last day I work for the Sidewinders. He's left me out here with my family, waiting for tickets. Unforgivable."

So, I don't care who Eric is, and seriously, I don't care whether or not we get tickets. I can enjoy my brother and everyone over a nice dinner, just hang out like people do. Of course, a minute later Eric called him back with the person's name, Chuck went back to the Will Call booth and got the tickets, and we enjoyed a great game. We beat the Dodgers 6-2. But the way he said 'my family' eased a tension I've felt for over two years, and really, the thirty-three years before that. Even before the Mom thing, I always felt disconnected from the older relatives (although, like me, Chuck will always be a bit juvenile, which endears him to me as one of my two favorites) and in that one moment I felt—accepted into the family.

It's good to be a dork!

Also, in companion to my last blog post, let me tell you about other things that have come up recently that accentuate my dorkiness for the entire world to behold.
When I'm sick I have a habit of buying every cold medicine known to man. I throw everything at it, in hopes something will get the nasty monster. I have a big, blue Rubbermaid tub that has gone with me from Arizona, to Northern California, to Oregon, back to Arizona, back to Oregon, and back to Arizona again—full of OTC meds, old hair clips I might use again, stuff I don't throw away until I'm sure I'll never ever use it again, etc. I've been fortunate enough to have a year or two of good luck, so I haven't needed anything from the blue tub, and frankly, I forgot what was in there.
So, last week I develop, once again, what I like to call Phlegm Monster. I have stuff in my lungs, I cough like a freak, I choke up—well I'll spare you the rest, but—ewwww. So, I'm also on the broke side, as the new job isn't yet paying me the happy overtime I like to earn to allow me to do things, like, afford to be sick. I have to be at work because I'm in training, and if I miss training I'll be so behind I'll never catch up. Also, being the new kid who never shows up isn't the way to begin a business relationship.
So, I open the blue tub, and it's like opening the Arc of the Covenant. Apparently during the last fight with the Phlegm Monster (I remember my mom was still alive because attached to the stuff I bought is a sticky note from my mother listing all the stuff I should buy. I miss my Mom. She totally got the evil genius of my 'stocking up' dorkiness.) I bought the enormous Costco size Mucinex DM (Two bottles of 140 pills each. Wow!), Tylenol Cold and Flu, Tylenol Allergy Sinus, Dayquil, Nyquil, Airborne, Wallgreens knockoff of Airborne, Emergen-C, Vitamin C, Vitamin B-Complex that is made up of a bazillion B vitamins to give energy, fish oil capsules (a friend of a friend of a friend at my mother's church recommended those, and I don't know what they do, but it was on Mom's list so I bought it) and three unopened boxes of Superduper Soft Kleenex tissues, which are nice to see because my runny nose has been irritated by store brand scratchy Kleenex.
It's as though my past self knew the Phlegm Monster would be coming back and made a time capsule just for me. Also, my past self bought a kit to clean the wax out of my ears, including a thing that looks like one of those snot sucker balls you use on babies. I had been thinking my ears were feeling a little cloggy and needed a deep cleaning. How did 'Past Me' know? That chick rocked!
To throw in some irony, drugs have an expiration date, and most of these drugs expire October of 2007.

Not cool enough to be a nerd...but close...

Welcome to the level dork I am, behold my dorkiness. I was playing on my computer yesterday when my wireless keyboard died. I love my wireless keyboard, it loves me, and we've been very happy together. I try everything I can to revive it, but it just won't type anything, so I go looking for my wired keyboard.
When I had the whole 'Find a new job or starve-palooza' I stayed with my sister and was able to access my email and horoscopes online, but I noticed her spacebar stuck. It drove me insane, so I gave her my one wired keyboard (which is probably in the stacks, and stacks of junk in her house and not being put to use, because the spacebar never bothered Mary so that it bothered me wouldn't matter to her) so I can't use my wired keyboard. I can't run out and spend $80 on a new wireless keyboard and mouse, as they come in a set, so I'm stuck, staring at my lovely monitor, which won't do anything without, you know, input.
I'm about to have a nerd meltdown when I start looking at all the boxes full of stuff that inhabit my dining room area (you Know I can't unpack because the moment I get comfortable I'll have to move for some reason, it's the law) and I see a Logitech keyboard box. I assumed it was for my current wireless keyboard/mouse set, and maybe it'll have the manual in it that will explain the keyboard meltdown and how to fix it. I look on the box and it's an entirely different looking keyboard and mouse set. Er?
Then I remember two years ago when I bought my fabulous wireless keyboard and mouse set, I couldn't make them work, so I called Logitech and complained, and they sent another unit to me, so I tossed the original set per their instructions, and the new set (the one that just had the meltdown) didn't work, so they sent me another set. One day I was playing around with the second set, realizing it was OE that was conflicting with the set (Operator Error), and they worked just fine. So, when the third set came in the mail I tossed it aside and went on happily using the second set.
So, in short, the second set died on me and being the level dork I am, I just happen to have a brand new wireless keyboard and mouse that work brilliantly.
Also, the first and second sets had the annoying charger that sometimes charged the mouse well, and sometimes didn't, but this set all runs on AA batteries, and according to the instructions, the batteries last for months and months and months, so this set is better than both prior sets. Muahahahaaaaa!

Why is the cart following that horse?

I've started working for Charles Schwab and I've begun with training, as I would with all other companies. I've been in training with employees 'fresh from the world', pulled into an avalanche of information with the purpose of bringing new people into the fight. The first three weeks of training is on the computer systems, of which they seem to have 8 or 9 that an employee must use in tandem to handle the plethora of questions that an employee must field. The thing is, as I and a one other lady are fresh from the world, the other 30 people in our training class are in different stages of their training, pooled into this class to learn the systems. There are Schwab bank associates, newbies who've already been in training for a couple months, paid solely to pass their Series 7 exam and now that they've passed, they need to know the computer systems. Already they have knowledge of the industry and when they ask questions of the instructor, they throw out terms I've never heard before. Put, Call, Lot, short sell—er? So, I have no idea. On top of having no idea what they're talking about, the curiosity has been killing me. It isn't that knowing now will make me a better employee, as they're going to put me through a similar training as my jealous-making coworkers have had. I'll know it all eventually, but I have a vengeful need to know that nags at me. The nagging makes me note the terms and concepts I don't understand and look them up on the internet when I should be enjoying my three day weekend.

I'm endlessly fascinated by the new job because it's a company built around investments, and all importantly, money. I've never had money, real money, so I'm riveted when people buy commodities and gamble on a huge scale to make more money. I think of all the times I've contributed money into a 401(k) knowing that it's something about investing and supposed to give me money for my retirement, but who really knows what else goes on? I mean, I helped proofread the booklets that they send out detailing the performance of the mutual fund, big numbers going up, and sometimes down, but I didn't think to find out what the numbers meant. A mutual fund is a bunch of people risking their retirement money, banking on the past performance of the stocks and the smarts of the fund manager or managing company. It's, I'm finding, all about trust. As much as its dollars and cents, or dollars and sense, it is also trusting that the companies you've invested in will continually improve.

When the whole Enron thing happened I had no idea what happened, why it happened, and all I knew was that the upper management were lying liars when it came to the company profits. Their lying effected the employees who had their personal retirement riding on the success of the company, ruining the retirement of, at least, all the older employees who had decades of investment in the company that took a dive through the floor. I watched an interview on NBC with two employees, an older lady in her late fifties who had been with the company for over 20 years, and the other was a fresh-faced business school grad who had taken a position with Enron a year before. For the younger woman it was just about finding a new job with Enron on her resume, but for the older woman it was her life savings that she'd invested into the company she'd trusted blindly from the minute she was hired. I didn't know anything about investments, buying company stock, retirement funds and all that, but I knew poor. I knew the loss of this woman's savings and when she looked about ready to cry, I was ready to cry with her. Well, now I'm learning the structure of the deal, how it was all lost, and my contempt for lying liars is developing a whole new layer, the nuts and bolts of the stock market.

Granted, I'm five days on the job and I know enough to know I don't know anything yet, but I can see subject matter that will keep me interested for a good, long time. Of course, that's dependant on passing systems class. Hopefully after the systems class, the other lady and I will be tossed in with other people who aren't light years ahead of us in the stock market learning curve. But then, I might not be as jolted into studying the subject matter if I weren't already feeling so far behind. I feel like I'm learning to walk while everyone is taking flying lessons, but I'm loving every minute of it.