I‘ve got maybe 15 minutes to fill all of you in on what’s going down here in the world of Rusty. I neglected my blogging duties yesterday due to UPS, my seasonal employer, calling me in with little notice and keeping me working until it was dark outside. After the mind-numbing math required to throw together the NCAA picks results, I had no energy left for griping or rumination.

Yesterday’s “driver helper” orientation lasted an hour and a half, which was totally unnecessary. There are only so many ways you can tell someone “put the box down on the porch and don’t make it obviously visible from the road if possible” before your brain cells start to boil. They misspelled “flammable” in one of the training videos. Awesome.

Then there was a forty-five-minute drive from Alpharetta to meet my driver at a Marietta Waffle House. He wasn’t there when I arrived, so I bought an All Star plate and sat down. Damn… sausage, eggs, a waffle, grits and cola in the middle of the day really hits the spot.

Oops, driver shows up just as I finish the first piece of sausage. “Do what you’ve gotta do and I’ll be back in 20 minutes,” he said. Commence wolfing down All Star Platter. Commence sadness in spending $9 on that when I could have just bought a protein ass-tasting shake and derived the same amount of pleasure from it.

bumper stickerA bumper sticker I saw out on my route yesterday

Things went smoother when it was just he and I driving around, cussing at pedestrians and cussing at corporate headquarters and, really, cussing at anything that moved and many objects that didn’t. The machinery operates noticeably smoother without a bunch of corporate dildos standing in the way to muck it up.

Being a “helper” means I get to do 85 percent of the legwork. That sucks since lots of rich assholes have really long driveways. Many of them are uphill. I’m sore today. To give you a mental picture, I was often sprinting through peoples’ yards, holding packages under one arm like a tailback, busting through bushes and shrubs like they were an undersized defensive line, dropping the package, ringing the bell, and running away like I would from a military op gone FUBAR. “Fixed bayonets!” “Umm, fuck that sir, I’m saving my own ass.”

This morning isn’t off to a great start. I pretty well bombed in a phone pre-interview for a technical writing job. The human resources/corporate recruiter type gave me four days to prepare, and there was still a painfully long pause when she asked me, “What do you see yourself doing in five to ten years?” You’d think after hearing that question 78 times in the past year I’d have had an answer for her, but no. If I had a plan, do you think I’d be in the mess I’m in now? I can never answer that question, because there’s not anything I really want to be doing in ten years. I suppose I could bullshit, but there’d be as many holes in the story as there were in the 1934 Ford Bonnie and Clyde were shot in.

The driver’s route runs directly through my neighborhood, so he’ll pick me up at my doorstep in about half an hour. This is a huge bonus since I can quantify gas costs as a double-digit percentage of my paycheck. Somebody shoot me in the head.

UPDATE: Damn, all that rushing to get my shit together for nothing. I’m not leaving til 11:30 now. That means I probably won’t get off ’til four or five. See, I forgot to mention being a “helper” means you’re not on any sort of formal time clock. They say you go in about 10:30 and leave about 2 or 2:30, but apparently that’s a pretty loose standard.

Web stats tell me one semi-regular reader has a real job with UPS. I know who it is, but I don’t know if (s)he would want me mentioning it, so I won’t. Hopefully, (s)he won’t out me for talking about Brown on here, but search engines will probably do the job soon enough anyway.