According to the Boston Globe, (link) a woman is suing two doctors for the cost of raising her child because one failed to abort her child, and the other failed to notice that she was still pregnant, much later.

“Mommy, do you love me?”
“Well, you know, now that you’re here, sure.”

I hope the woman had enough forsight to factor in the cost of massive therapy for her daughter. Something tells me she’s going to need it.

I have a recommendation. Don’t turn 30. In fact, stay away from 29, too, just to be safe. If you’re reading this too late, well, I’m very sorry.

I reached my 29th birthday without any significant physical problems. I was never gifted as an athlete, but also seemed to be blessed with a degree of robustness. I could eat what I wanted, and do what I wanted, and never worried about getting fat, sick, or injured.

But several months before turning 30, things began to change. I’m starting to feel like the used cars I buy. Here’s a list of stuff that’s broken (and definately out of warranty) in the last two years:

1) I’ve gotten approximately 58 cavities and had two teeth removed.
2) I can no longer eat spicy food. Water gives me heart burn, now.
3) I’ve gained 20 lbs. (But then, who hasn’t.)
4) The formerly 20/10 vision in my right eye is now 20/11,436, and I have so many floaters that the view from inside my head looks like I’m snorkeling in a toilet bowl.
5) I injured my knee in a risky snowboarding maneuver known as “going in a straight line”.
6) I broke my hip.
6) My shoulders and back pop when I raise my arms over my head to put on my glasses.

At this rate of system failure, I’ll be having walker races in the hall of my nursing home by the time I’m 40.

… when the only thing you can think about blogging is the appearance of several very odd and out-of-place porcelein sculptures in the lobby of your office building. Welcome to my world. The sculptures are actually kind of cool, but they should be on Pearl Street in Boulder, or perhaps in Cherry Creek. In their current location, they look like aliens escaping from a government testing facility. That’s how I feel at the end of the work day, so I may be projecting.

I’m about to go to the Five Points DMV to get plates for my recently-acquired, less-old car (a 1997 Saab). One of the few perks of living in the hood is that you don’t have to wait very long at the DMV. Nearly every customer is dispatched with the words, “Like I told you the last time you were here, sir, you need to bring proof of insurance.” Telling that to 15 people takes a surprisingly quick 5 minutes. Another perk is that sometimes your car is still there when you’re finished.

UPDATE:
Wow. It wasn’t like that at all. There was almost no-one there. I pressed the button to get my number, *BING*, my number is put up on the board. The only other people were a couple of professional-looking, honky-chicks, and an old black dude in a wheel chair accompanied by what I took to be his son. The son’s job was, apparently, to react to everything the clerk said with, “That’s bullshit.” Actually, it was more like, “Tha’s boo-shit.”

CLERK: “Hello. What can I do for you today?”

SON: “Tha’s boo-shit.”

Yesterday night, around 9pm, I got paged because a server was down.

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: The monitoring system opened a ticket because the server “ancient-pos-4″ went down earlier today.

ME: What are you paging me?

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: ‘Cause the server went down.

ME: It’s up now.

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: Yes, but when we try to log in, it asks for a password. We don’t know the password.

ME: Yes, but the fact that the server is asking you for a password means that it’s up.

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: Yes, but if we can’t log in, we can’t run the “uptime” command to find out how long it’s been up. If it’s been up more than two hours, we can close the ticket. If it’s been up less than two hours, we have to page you.

ME: When did all this actually occur?

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: In the morning, around 10:00am.

ME: Why am I only now getting paged?

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: We forgot.

ME: So you knew the server was up around 10:00am?

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: Yes. But we couldn’t log in to ..

ME (interrupting): And it’s 9:00pm now.

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: Yes.

ME: And you haven’t gotten any other tickets about the server going down in between then and now?

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: No.

ME: But you’re not sure whether the server has been up for more than two hours?

TIER 1 TECHNICIAN: No, because, like I said, we can’t log into the server to run the “uptime” command.

ME: Buddy, I can buy you a ticket for the Logic Train, but I can’t make you ride.

You know, one of the things I don’t miss about being unemployed is daytime network TV. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t have cable.

As near as I can tell, there are only four things on TV during the day:

1) Soaps starring B-list celebrities
2) Talk shows featuring B-list celebrities and incredibly stupid people
3) Paid programming trying to take money from incredibly stupid people
4) Small-claims court shows featuring incredibly stupid people

The Spanish-language channel is a little better. It has all the same crappy shows, but with mega cleavage. The soaps. The talk show hosts. Even the Spanish version of Judge Judy has a low-cut blouse. (I really hope I don’t catch their version of Judge Joe Brown.)

You’d think that being unemployed, with plenty of time on my hands, would have made me more likely to blog. Yet, it didn’t. I don’t know if that’s because, instead of being relaxed, I spent the entire time in crisis mode, or if it’s because when you sit around the house eight hours a day, seven days a week, you don’t encounter much worth writing about.

Either way, I’m employed again, back in corporate IT. I could kill myself. It’s good to be home.

It’s Monday morning and everything in the World is normal. Which is to say that it’s completely screwed up. Spinach is public-enemy number one in America, Muslims around the world are committing acts of violence to protest the Pope’s suggestion that Islam is a religion of violence, and the Alpha Centauri system still refuses to recall its planetary ambassador, Tom Cruise.

For me, though, it’s another thrilling week of job hunting. Job hunting is great fun, if “fun” is redefined to include shelving books in a library and several outpatient medical procedures.

Job hunting is just like being a sales rep with a single, dubious product, and no budget for swanky client lunches. Some people lie outright about their qualifications, which is very naughty, but everyone has to inflate their own personal wonderfulness a bit in order to get an interview, much less a job. And prospective employers do the same with their open positions. It’s important to remember that while you may be slightly under-qualified for the job you will eventually get, you will probably be underpaid and unsatisfied, too.

Today my “office” is a neighborhood coffee shop that offers free wireless. I’m here because there aren’t any neighborhood pubs that offer free wireless. Which is probably better for my job search. I’m not the only person using this joint as an office: there are some guys who get here early, set up a complete suite of office equipment at their tables, and stay all day. I can only survive until my personal environmental irritation threshold is exceeded. I have been hovering just below this level for over an hour, now, because I am (a) hungry but too cheap to buy anything, and (b) about to go into kidney failure but too grossed out by the bathroom. The threshold has just been blown to smithereens by the arrival of I-don’t-own-a-toothbrush-but-I-breathe-heavily-man, so I’m on my way out the door.

I’m looking for a new job. After seven years of my loyal service and/or web-surfing, the corporation eliminated my position.

I wasn’t unhappy about it. I had already decided that it was time to move on, and if they wanted to finance my job search with a severance package (a bribe the corporation gives a departing employee so he won’t swing by later with an assault rifle and 2,000 rounds of armor-piercing ammo), then so much the better.

The only problem is that every job I’m qualified for appears to involve, well, work. I know - I should be a good little American and happily work 80 hours a week, using my spare time to finish the basement and landscape the yard. But I’ve done a lot of work over the years, and I think it’s overrated.

People have been working since the dawn of history. Probably earlier, in fact, because even back then, there was probably a workaholic caveman who got to work while it was still dark. At first, everyone had the same job, gathering or hunting for food. People probably didn’t even think of it as work. It was just something you had to do in order to eat. Like picking a restaurant, nowadays. When enough food had been gathered, and everyone had eaten, then they just sat around the cave, drawing pictures on the walls and making tools.

Then someone had an idea. He realized that he liked making things more than he liked hunting and gathering, and it occurred to him that if someone else were willing to gather enough food for two people, he could make enough tools for two people, and both of them would be happier. “Hey, Thag. You know how much I hate gathering food, right? How about you gather enough nuts and berries for both of us, and I’ll give you this Ford Taurus.” And that was how the used-car-salesman job was invented. It is also interesting to note that the resale value of Fords is exactly the same.

Now here we are, twenty thousand years later, and we have so many different kinds of jobs that hardly anyone remembers that most of them are desperate attempts to avoid having to gather, grow or hunt your own food. Unless you’re a farmer, in which case you’ve made very little progress. Sorry.

In the past, you at least had the ritual of receiving and depositing a paycheck, and paying the bills, to remind you why you work. Now there’s direct deposit. And automatic bill-pay. You have to remind yourself that the reason you sit in a little box with a desk and drink eight hours of coffee, five days a week, is not because you are an incredibly dull person, but because if you don’t the bank will take your house. Your dullness is an unfortunate side-effect.

What scares me about losing my job is not that I won’t find another job like the one I had. It’s that I will. When I started with the company, my job didn’t pay very well, but it made sense. There was an obvious, logical connection between the work I performed and the successful operation of the company. After years of moving upwards in a company that frequently reorganized, refocused and restructured, any such connection eventually was lured into a dark conference room and tortured to death. I couldn’t have described my job without using a lot of made up words and acronyms, and I couldn’t have told you how it helped the corporation without using a shovel.

One time, a financial analyst asked me to estimate the number of hours expended for a particular project. I calculated, to my dismay, that I had spent 542 hours cajoling, begging and threatening three other people into performing 84 hours of actual labor that would have taken me 40 hours to complete had I been allowed to do it all myself. And that doesn’t include the 7.3 hours of drinking it took me to get over the whole affair.

Until I’m able to figure out how to get paid for doing absolutely no work at all, such as by working for the federal government*, I am going to try to find a job that provides me a decent paycheck, good benefits, and the satisfaction of knowing that I’m actually producing something valuable. And then I’m going to win the lottery, photograph the Yeti, and develop a weight-loss plan which doesn’t require eating less or exercising.

* If you’re a hiring manager for the federal government, please note that this statement does not reflect my actual view of the federal government or any of its parts, and was, in fact, almost certainly inserted by evil hackers. Please hire me.