Greetings and salutations my old friends, enemies, and acquaintances with whom I have shared much uncomfortable silence with!!
It's been over a year since the last time I logged on and I'm a much poorer man for it. I had to leave suddenly when my entire life collapsed. But hey, these things happen. In that time I don't think I've done any significant role-playing of any sort, and I can't stand it anymore! I couldn't stop thinking about how some of the best times I ever had RPing was right here. So, I'm back. 8)
First, I would like to apologize to anyone I left hanging by leaving suddenly without saying anything. I was cooking up some interesting stuff with a few people and then just vanished. Just to allay any fears, no it was not anything that happened or anyone of you who "drove me away", it was entirely real life issues that caused it (an explanation of that is forthcoming).
Second, I like to thank everyone who makes this place as addictive as it is, and burrowed into my brain over the past year as I slept and sent mind-control beams convincing me to login once again. Without you I might still be playing WoW. *Shudder*
Third, there is no third. Figment of your imagination. Nope. No third.
Forth, what the hell happened to me? Well it all started last year when my girlfriend and I were still living with a roommate. I had spent the previous year trying desperately to find a job I could live with, and bouncing from one company to another. I thought I had something good going with a nice tech support job I had lined up around the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007.
Then, all of a sudden I get fired from that job with no explanation whatsoever (at will employment laws FTW :evil: ). So I start looking for work once again. The roommate, however, is a crotchety old fart who was simple-minded in the extreme (his brain was probably nothing more than a hamster wheel with a legally brain-damaged hamster in it suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, but I digress).
His take on such things was that you go out and get any job you can, and then while working that one you look for a better one. Sounds great in theory, but then so does communism. It never occurred to him that in an at will employment state such as this 1 or 2 absences, to go do interviews or whatever, is more than enough excuse to fire your ass on the spot. Most low-end jobs don't have much tolerance for that sort of thing and so that tends to be precisely what happens. Their attitude is "we don't need you, we have plenty of desperate souls who are willing to work for subsistence wages and who will toe the line and completely put aside any ambitions, aspirations or other aspects of their life to be good little worker drone".
But the roommate is also crotchety and old, so you can't reason with him, and my frequent stretches of unemployment (resulting in delays in getting him the rent) were not sitting well with him. He also didn't like the fact that I wasn't spending every waking moment obsessing over a job. As I was looking for a somewhat good job it involved contacting temp agencies, submitting resumes, etc, which then involved a lot of waiting to see what opportunities became available and what kinds of responses I would get.
The upside of this was that it gave me a lot of time to play EfU, the downside of that was that he knew that’s what I was doing and was getting pissed at the fact. After the tech support gig dried up he started leveling vague threats and I knew something was going to break soon if I didn’t act. It was around this time that there was enough of a blowup that I went in and uninstalled all the games from my system. I didn’t like it, but it shut him up… for awhile. Then I took a shit job from one of the temp agencies and started making barely enough to survive.
It was readily apparent from about the third day in that the job would be intolerable and I called my temp agency to request something else. It was then that I found out about a wonderful new “feature” they offered companies that got temps from them. Apparently the company I was working for got an exclusive deal on their employees, as long as you were temped out to this company, the agency would not place you in any other job. You were locked in; you could look for a job, but not with that agency. The bastards now actually sabotage your attempts to move up in the world because they know the job sucks so much that the turnover rate is murder to them, and so they get to nip that in the bud by limiting your options to go elsewhere. I no long wonder why disgruntled individuals walk into crowded places, gun down a few locals, and then need 75 state troopers to bring them down. I just smile and nod.
So I start looking for work elsewhere and through other agencies, and along the way I get to prove to that fat, old, crotchety bastard that I was right. After only the second day that I called in “sick” to go out and do a job interview, they fired me. There, finally, was real life proof of what I was trying to tell him; you cannot go out and look for good jobs effectively while working a shit job. It takes time out of your day, which you are expected to spend flipping burgers, waiting tables, or in my case, entering data. But, here at last was also where my luck had turned, that interview that day was for a new tech support job that paid even more that my last one, and just as I was fired from the one job I was hired on the other. And that job is the one I have been working at since.
So is that it? Is that all that kept me away? Oh, hell no. You see, life like to deal these little kicks to the groin in GROUPS. After all that there were frequent breakdowns of the car, desperate attempts to keep my credit cards afloat so I could build up enough credit to get out of that hellhole, and just a sprinkling of medical emergencies to round out the year as far as the disaster side of the ledger went. On the positive side, the other things that kept me busy started when I suddenly got handed a $1500 line of credit (which is more than I had ever had up to that point). On the strength of that I was able to get my bank to match it with their credit line, and I was able to finally get the hell out of the roommate situation.
So the past 5 months have been centered around preparing to move, the moving itself, unpacking, buying vast amounts of stuff that would allow us to actually live independently in an apartment of our own (we shared a great many things with the roommate), and all the usual settling in type stuff one would expect. If that doesn’t seem like that big a deal maybe the fact that this is my first apartment on my own might persuade you (At the age of 27, I know it’s pretty sad).
Ah! All settled in, now we can get back to normal, right? Wait, what is that? Could that be the next round of groin soccer I hear? *OOF* *in a high squeaky voice* why yes it is…
Mid December - Got sick enough to have to go to the doctor, miss work. Gotta love that Sinusitis. Less income + medical expenses right after an expensive move, bravo!
New Years Day Surprise – Surprise! It’s Montezuma’s Revenge! Contract stomach flu so vile you can’t do anything but stay curled up in the fetal position for about 2 days. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars because you missed more work and have no sick days.
Mid January – Get sick again, go to the doctor again. Sinusitis again. Pay more for doctor visit and prescriptions again. Have a nervous breakdown again as the credit card bills looks like the beaches of Normandy the morning after they were stormed.
Mid January again, just days after the doctor visit – The car finally gives up, blows a head gasket, total engine replacement needed. Cost of such, as much as I paid for the car… that already had 140,000 miles on it. Put a bullet in it and put it out of its misery. New car time! Back to making car payment but now I’m driving something under warranty that doesn’t suck.
Present Day – Sick again, for the 4th time in slightly more than 2 months. Ah, to hell with it, time to go back to EfU! *cough* *cough* *wheeze*
And that’s pretty much it. Compared to all the years before it for me, I would rate it a pretty dull year.
So what about the future? Well, looks like most all of the characters I interacted with before are gone. Whatever plans I had that involved them are pretty much dust. No matter, I can’t remember what half of them were anyway. Looks like Winston has moved back into the Beacon and the old place is still hanging in there. It appears EfU really hasn’t changed much in any truly major way. I stepped out of the Beacon and within minutes of logging in for the first time in a year I was almost killed. Damn, it’s good to be home!
Now tell me, what have I missed? What’s been going on with YOU for the past year?
