Title-less.

I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah.
I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now.
But the airwaves are clean and there’s nobody singing to me now.
No change, I can’t change, I can’t change, I can’t change,
But I’m here in my mold, I am here in my mold.
And I’m a million different people from one day to the next
I can’t change my mold, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony this life.
Trying to make ends meet, trying to find some money then you die.
Bittersweet Symphony, The Verve

The love of my life has decided that he no longer wishes to be a part of my life. I’m not really sure what to say about the matter. I love him and this sucks. But, you can’t force someone to want to be with you. Part of me thought he’d come back around. But, as the time passes, I realize that’s not likely. It looks like I’m going to be doing this on my own.

the princess saves herself in this one

Quarantine day: I’ve lost count

I dyed my hair today. It looks absolutely terrible. That’s okay though. We’re trying to accept change for what it is and move forward, even if the top of our head resembles that of a fire hydrant. Yes, we’re referring to ourself in third person now. Ourselves?

I mentioned a few weeks back that I was considering cutting my hair myself. Well, I never really gathered the guts to do that, so I decided that dying it was a much better idea instead.

Perhaps I’ll dye it again? I’m good at a lot of things in this life but logic is definitely one of my strong suits.

It’s been an eventful week. The tectonic plates beneath my feet have shifted and life will no longer be the same. As I stare at the chaos around me, waiting for the dust to settle, I realize that I have a choice to make. Do I live in the wreckage and pretend that it’s the home I remember, or do I crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild elsewhere? I’ll have to get back to you on that one because I really don’t have any answers. At least not right now. That seems to be par for the course in my life, though.

I’m beating up on myself tonight. I don’t want to be, it’s just the mood that I’m in. I was in this exact same room ten years ago today. Ten years ago. It’s crazy to me that, as much as has changed over the past ten years, nothing has seemingly changed. Did I really accomplish anything at all? Not likely. Time plays tricks on us. It really does. One minute your whole life is in front of you and the next minute it’s ten years later and you’re in the exact same place. Sure people have grown, some have even gone grey. But, for the most part, nothing has really changed. Everyone’s still the same they’ve always been. I guess I shouldn’t really judge. I’m not exactly the poster child of accomplishment. I always just assumed I was meant for so much more.

Perhaps it’s the quarantine talking… whatever it is, though, maybe it’s time I start adjusting to the world and stop waiting for it to adjust to what I desire. Because if the past is any indication of the future, I’m definitely not going to get what I want and hard-work plays absolutely zero factor in that.

Angry vaguebooking

It’s 3:50 a.m.

I am still awake. I don’t reckon I’ll sleep at all.

I’ve been googling how to mend a broken heart tonight. How cliché, right? I’ve yet to find something to make me feel any better. So, I just sit here in the dark listening to sad songs.

I’m supposed to be celebrating. This is supposed to be an amazing time. And that’s been taken from me.

Fuck.

It takes a lot to piss me off. Congratulations for making it seem effortless.

I don’t even really know what to say. I’m just so fucking mad. I’m going to go ruminate for a few hours or days. Maybe a lifetime. Who knows.

Never underestimate the power to adapt

One thing that I hope continues after self-quarantine is over is birthday parades. Watching oodles of people parade down the street with balloons and stuffed animals and birthday signs all over their vehicles with a steady stream of honks and waves and strangers screaming ‘Happy Birthday’ just to put a smile on neighbours faces, to celebrate kids birthday’s who cannot have a party, to make loved ones smile, that is a true indication of the human spirit.

In a local town there’s actually a ‘Parade Group’ online. For people that have wanted birthday parades the past couple of months, if they posted on the local community webpage, not just the friends and family show up, but sometimes 20 or 30 extra cars of people show up with their cars decorated to the max. It’s just been a past time for some people to deck out their cars and take part in birthday parades. All you have to do is post the date, time and location of the parade and everyone shows up to make the parade that much longer and that much louder.

I love that.

Oh chocolate, how could you do this?

Yesterday I was cleaning out a desk that belonged to my brother before he moved to Denmark in 2009. This desk was filled with old homework from his university days, pictures of his friends, some random bits and bobs (including a pocket knife, some drill bits, etc) and a stash of chocolate.

I got scared when I found the chocolate.

I needed to clean out this desk so that my parents could sell it. I genuinely don’t believe anyone has touched it since my brother left for Denmark.

There was a stash of chocolate in the desk that included Kit Kat Bars. The wrappers of one of the Kit Kat Bars was open as though he’d taken a bite out of it and then never finished it. The wrapper said that the expiry for the Kit Kat was November 2010.

There was no a speck of mould on this chocolate bar. It wasn’t even dried out. I touched it thinking that it would be rock hard because of how long the package had been open. Nope. I held my fingers against it and it started to melt from the warmth of my fingers, but otherwise, it was pretty much just a regular chocolate bar, even though it had expired ten years ago.

Nothing was wrong with it.

It looked like a brand new, perfectly good chocolate bar.

I could have broken off a piece and given it to one of my family members and they could’ve easily believed I’d just gone to the store and bought it.

10 years expired and looks brand new. Think about that next time you eat chocolate.

P.s. I showed a piece of it on my Instagram story if you want to see it. lol

The master manipulator part three

Picture this: a beautiful August night in a deep amidst the skyscrapers of a major Canadian city. Myself and a few delegates from across the country had just wrapped up one of the ‘booziest’ business meetings I’d ever sat through and the plan was to head back to the hotel, change and meet at the hotel restaurant for a nice dinner in one hour’s time.

Sounds great, right?

The meeting was the equivalent of five city blocks from the hotel.

Five city blocks isn’t far. All of these men had been drinking, a lot. (Oh the joys of working for a company that’s sponsored by a major international alcohol distributor) They’re just going to walk. Right? Right?

Wrong.

The thing about arrogance is that it leads people to believe they’re invincible. It leads people to believe they can do no wrong and that no harm will ever come to them for the choices they make. Even if that choice includes being five drinks deep and asking the valet to bring your car.

I don’t know why the valet didn’t stop them that night.

I tried to stop them that night. And, after being physically shoved into the front door of the building with great force, one of the building’s workers came over to check if I was alright. The master manipulator looked at me and told me, with some serious snark to her tone, that I should mind my own damn business and that if they were going to drive, they were going to drive.

The man who worked at the meeting space was very kind. He sat me down, calmed me down and asked me if I’d like the police called due to the physical altercation that had just taken place with one of the other delegates.

You want to know the definition of being between a rock and a hard place? When people you have to work with decide they’re going to get behind the wheel while drunk and your boss leads you to believe that your job could be at risk if you dare try to stop them. That’s an impossible situation that no person should ever have to be put in.

The man who worked there and saw that they were getting into their vehicles drunk ended up calling the police. Not because I told him to but because he knew these four were drunk and he didn’t want them hurting anyone. He asked me what hotel everyone was staying at to tell the police where they were headed. And I, I set off on my way… walking.

I walked particularly slow back to the hotel… on purpose. I’ll admit to that. After what had just happened, I didn’t want to get there in a hurry. I was upset, I was angry and I really didn’t want to be at dinner with any of these people after I’d been physically shoved into a door for trying to stop them from driving drunk.

As I approached the hotel I could see there were police cars at the front of the hotel with their lights flashing. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but it had been more than 15 minutes since the man at the meeting space had told me he was going to call the police, so I presumed this was why.

Upon reaching the front door, I noticed that there was something amiss with the front of the hotel….

One of the vehicles I’d just watched the delegates leave in, it was parked under the covered area drop-off zone next to the front door and it was damaged. It had a giant dent in it. I’m talking GIANT dent. This was a rented Tahoe (basically the SUV equivalent of a tank) so seeing such major damage got me scared that these guys had hit someone, or something between the meeting space and our hotel. I ran closer to the door and I noticed there was a giant chunk missing out of the pillar at the edge of the covered drop-off area.

These fucking idiots had ran into the structural pillars that were holding up the covered car-port area at the front of the hotel. They’d hit it so hard that they wrecked the Tahoe and taken a giant chunk out of the pillar.

I walked into the building to see what was happening and they were lined up in the lobby talking to the police officers.

The master manipulator was there, of course. She always has a hand in everything.

I watched her blatantly outright lie to the police officers and tell them that no one had been drinking that afternoon. I watched her tell the police officers that it was an honest mistake, that none of them had ever driven a Tahoe before, or a vehicle quite so large, so they didn’t realize where the edge of the vehicle was. Then I watched her start to flirt with the police officers.

She actually tried to give two of the police officers her phone number. While they didn’t take it, you could tell that they were quite engaged with her and what she was ‘putting out’. Her fiancee wasn’t there at this point. I’m honestly not sure what he would have done had he been watching her manipulate these cops into not doing anything.

The cops asked the hotel manager if he wanted to press charges against them for destruction of property and almost instantaneously, the master manipulator turned around and started flirting with the hotel manager. Honestly, she was rubbing his back, patting him on the shoulder ensuring him this was just a big misunderstanding and that she’d write a cheque that would cover all of the damages. And the manager fell for it.

The manager told the cops that everything was fine. And the cops left. They fucking left. They left the scene of an incident where four individuals who’d been drinking drove two vehicles back to a hotel, one crashing into a pillar at the front door of the hotel. They’d been told by the man at the meeting space who called them that drinking was involved. And they left.

They left because the master manipulator is that fucking good at what she does.

She’s like a scorpion that poisons men with her manipulation tactics.

I skipped dinner that night. I didn’t feel like being around a bunch of wealthy men and the master manipulator after they’d talked their way out of any repercussions for drunk driving and destruction of hotel property. When I asked the master manipulator what she wanted to do about the rental, she said ‘That’s an issue for tomorrow. Just have the valet get it away from the front door’.

YEAH. They fucking wrecked a rental Tahoe and decided that it was a problem for tomorrow and they were going to go to the hotel restaurant and continue their drinking and laugh the night away over an expensive dinner being charged to the company.

I sat in my hotel room cooled down for about two hours and then I wrote a very thorough, poignant email to our CEO explaining what happened and how the master manipulator acted, as well as that there was a Tahoe seemingly parked under the hotel right now that was going to need to be explained to the rental company.

I wasn’t there the next day when the master manipulator had the Tahoe towed back to the rental place. I opted to go to the airport on an earlier shuttle. (Told her that I wanted to use the airport gym ahead of the flight) In reality, I just figured she was going to do something fucking stupid and I didn’t want to bear witness. And realistically, she did. If you wreck a fucking rental car, don’t tow it back and put it in the front of their business door. Phone them and tell them so that they don’t have a wrecked vehicle on display for the world to see that day.

Ugh.

Nevermind.

I took a shuttle to the airport early. We got on the same flight but thankfully wound up seated in completely separate rows. The other four idiots got back on flights to their home provinces.

So how did this all end?

Our company took the blame for the accident.

Our CEO wrote a cheque for $72,000 to the hotel to fix the pillar outside their front door.

Our CEO had to pay the deductible on the rental and the rental company told us they would no longer rent to our employees. They threatened legal action but the CEO did something that made them back off. (Discussions that I wasn’t privy too)

A police report was made because the police showed up to the scene so they were required to report what happened by law.

None of the four individuals in those vehicles drunk got any repercussions for what happened. Not our CEO nor the master manipulator sought any sort of financial compensation to help cover for the damages our company was now paying for.

They drove drunk and got off scott-free. And it was five blocks. Five fucking blocks that they couldn’t walk. Or call a cab. Or call an uber. Or let someone sober drive.

One day, a few weeks after this all went down, the master manipulator brought me with her into the CEO’s office. We had a sit down chat and I was told that I was never to bring up this incident again. I was told that the public was never to find out a police report was made because if they did it could mean serious ramifications for our company. I was also told that I was no longer invited to these meetings. And I was reprimanded for 1) Not being of assistance to the master manipulator when she was trying to deal with the police and 2) Not attending the dinner and making our organization look bad after everything happened.

She let them drive our rental whilst drunk. She told them it was fine. She never once said anything wrong was done on their part. Somehow I got in trouble at work for the situation. Apparently I’m a poor ‘team player’. Because if you really want to fit in at work what you’re supposed to do is let people drive drunk…

Le sigh.

This story is a part of an ongoing series about work-life and the truth about what goes on behind the scenes. Read parts one and two by clicking on either of the following links:

The master manipulator

The master manipulator part deux