Entire Week: Fired

Here's the tally so far, with semicolons:

- One coworker's family member killed in a motorcycle accident; services are this weekend, so I have offered to cover being on-call for someone else on the team, who knew them better and wants to attend
- Dad's back in the hospital for adverse conditions after his back surgery last week; he's in pain and understandably concerned (discomfort from either a reaction to the pain management drugs, or something else, so he's in for observation and new pain management stuff)
- Kim's machine wiped an entire partition and puked out its ability to grok TCP/IP; currently reinstalling Vista after replacing the NIC and backing up to a restore point. Current suspects for the heinous fuckery are Rhapsody and Norton.
- One buddy getting jerked around by various sanctioning bodies in the midst of an arduous job search
- One buddy getting jerked around by his ex and the financial markets
- THE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT BEING MADE OF FUCKSTICKS; can't leave that out, though it's not confined to this week

When the high point of one's day is getting a line on government paperwork....

Oh, one other good thing this week, other than the usual enjoyable conversations with the usual suspects; I believe I've made the best pot of coffee, ever.

Equal parts Christopher Bean "White Christmas" and Coffee Shop of Horrors "Graveyard Shift."


.... and, in the process of composing this, I actually got one of those bot-generated Coho/Salmon IMs; this is the first one that actually makes the first bit of sense, and is even realistic.

[07:01] DressedUpCoho: Listen, asshat, I just caught my son reading your blog and I'm fucking pissed off.

Bravo, DUC, for being the first of these I'd have actually replied to had I not known any better.

Real Fish of Genius...... Faux-outraged swimming upstream to mate and die guyyyyyyyyyyy!

My understanding of shit going splat.

tirani: riddle me this:
etcet: 42
tirani: Paulson and Bush keep screaming that we're on the edge of finanical diseaster
tirani: have they bothered to spell out exactly what that disaster will be if we don't hand them over 700 Big with no strings attached?
etcet: broad hints at systemic financial collapse; if the holders of those shitty securities take a sharp kick to the nads, they have insurance. the companies that insured them are, in a word, completely exposed, under-capitalized to cover those policies, and utterly fucked.
etcet: in short, the complete collapse of several massive insurance entities, the equivalent of the bank runs that led to the great depression, albeit at one remove.
etcet: that said, i am not entirely convinced this is entirely a bad or horrible thing, and think that, fundamentally, those who engage in risky behavior, at whatever scale, do need to be responsible for the downside to that risk.
tirani: I'm kind of sitting on the fence of "Would it be so bad for all t hose fuckers who did this bad uber risky shit to get their comupance for it?"
etcet: as long as it doesn't fuck me and mine? let 'em burn.
etcet: the talk about the credit market going in the tank is an empty, bullshit threat.

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http://tbm.thebigmoney.com/features/todays-business-press/2008/09/26/sucker-could-go-down
[link courtesy of eBear (matociquala), whose summation is pitch-perfect: The sheer terror inspired by this situation isn't quite enough to cancel out the Schadenfreude.]

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This kind of dovetails with an email I sent to the executive suite at my company this morning:

With all the apparent gloom and doom coming out of the financial and mainstream news outlets regarding the "financial meltdown," there may be a lot of folks, both employees and members, who are worried about how well [COMPANY] is going to weather the coming storm (if one is even coming), whatever it may be. Even as recently as last night, with the collapse of Washington Mutual, it looks and sounds like there is bad news at every turn.

I'm personally operating under the belief that we are more or less avoiding the unpleasantness, due to our status as a Credit Union, and therefore unaffiliated with much of the brouhaha regarding bailout speculation and the ancillary market risks and subsequent fallout. Given our penchant for sensible and responsible stewardship, I suspect that we're more or less immune from the chaos that's dominating the headlines and airwaves, but others might not be as serene about the situation. Is there any value in making an announcement to employees or members regarding our status in the current environment?

My innate "PEOPLE, CHILL THE FUCK OUT" spidey-sense is tingling.

Phear Up, Emu Squid

( Holy bleeding Jesus on a steam-powered dildo, it's a lyrics post. )

This is going to be missed, and shouldn't be.

http://pecunium.livejournal.com/340199.html