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 �what is Man? a miserable little pile of secrets.� - andr� malraux "i desire to live in peace and to continue the life i have begun under the motto, to live well you must live unseen." - rene descartes note random entry image credit design by : ilazarn ikmal powered by : diaryland |
to be blissfully unaware.
2017-06-07 @ 9:37 p.m.
ER called me to ask what i wanted for lunch this afternoon and also told me that one of our very frequent and longtime customers (and by now, boss's friend) LD died. it was really sudden - a heart attack in a car in a parking lot. i was pretty upset to hear this, because like i said, he is frequently at our place. i see him at least once a week, and just last week? i think it was, i drove him to pick up his car somewhere and he was telling me about how excited he was for his kid to go to prom, and the one was away at college and was coming home, and his summer plans. he was such a great guy, and so young. boss found out because he called LD this morning, but his son answered and gave him the news. ER said that boss was shaking so badly he almost dropped the phone. we've heard of a lot of people dying (both our employees and customers are all of an older age group, like late 40s-50s+), but none of us have ever seen boss so upset. i walked into the office after lunch and he was just standing at his desk, absently staring out the window. when he saw my curious face, he said i don't know why this rattled me so much. it's so scary. LD's son had said that he thought it was due to the stress LD had been under lately (there was a lot going on with his ex wife, some legal stuff, money stuff, etc). so i think the over stressed thing really spoke to boss. LD is like ... 4-5 years younger than boss, as well, and i think it kind of made him have to accept his mortality. he and i have talked about depression and death and religion and all kinds of stuff, and he fully admits that he is the kind of person who literally never thinks about death. it's not even a thing on his radar. i remember one time specifically we were driving on the bridge back from philly and having some weird conversation that lead me to say, "boss, you DO realize that you're going to die some day, right?" and he's like, "what are you talking about? i'm going to live forever." and i laughed nervously because he was dead fucking serious. and he said, "i just can't accept it." then a month or so ago his dad had a health scare and went into the hospital and i said, "i hate to be the one to say this, but your dad is 85 years old. he's not going to live forever. you kind of need to consider that."* and he just looked at me with this completely blank expression, as though i had just spoken to him in a language he didn't understand. so, i felt pretty bad today, watching him feel like that. i was filing and he just came in and started rolling around in a desk chair and talking to me about LD and how upset he was, and how he thinks he really needs to stop going so hard all the time. i wanted to ask him why did he even come back into the office, since he just came in and talked to me a few minutes and then left without doing anything. he's never a guy to just sit around. but i realize he just wanted to talk to someone. as i looked out the window this afternoon, i caught him a few times in the parking lot, just standing there staring. i don't know, as a person who thinks about death extremely often, probably unhealthily often, i can only imagine how disturbing it must be to be a "normal" person for whom death is just on the periphery of your awareness, only for it to be suddenly thrust upon you. the questions, the fears, the worries, the regrets. all of these preoccupy my daily existence so i'm just kind of like yeah, that shit's horrible, right? but if you're a person who's just been blissfully existing, floating along the river of life unaware and unaccepting that one day you will reach that waterfall, and you will never see it coming? it's probably really fucked up. anyway, that was today. oh, also boss was like hey help me think of a nice way to fire new guy. and i was like wow dude really? but ER was telling me during lunch today that new guy's kid has been really rude to him the past couple weeks (new guy brings his kid to work after school), so when boss found out about that (and that new guy has been telling this story about how he's homeless but actually isn't?), he just kind of decided that that was enough for him, that he's losing money keeping him anyway because he works so slowly he barely breaks even. so i told him to just go with the classic "i'm cutting your hours" and just keep cutting them. and of course i told him not to be a scumbag and tell the guy that he's going to do it in two weeks, or a month or whatever. and then in another two weeks to a month, cut them again. hopefully that will give him enough time to find something else. i see the advice lately to oversell yourself on your resume and shit and at the interview, you know, do absolutely anything to get the job. and that's cool and everything, but then when you start the job and you clearly aren't as qualified and experienced as you said you were, where do you go from there? that's new guy. we were all excited when we took him on because he said he had experience doing absolutely everything we do. we were like ahh, finally! someone who can help lighten the load. the essential people can leave to do other things because new guy will be a capable person left at the office. i actually got a little nervous that he was going to steal some of my responsibilities. but it only took a month or so to see that he really couldn't do like ... 75% of the stuff he said he could, and has kind of been dead weight. AND he's been having personality clashes with everyone (well, except for me because i am never in his area). so i don't know. i feel really bad about it on one hand, but on the other i don't. ok i'm done now. * this sounds super rude taken out of context, but there was this super long story about how he ended up in the hospital that was related to an issue at work and i just don't have the time for all that. the super basic tl;dr is that i'm saying his dad is old and maybe needs to chill out, boss cannot even comprehend this idea. |