Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

lindsay

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What do you think an eBusiness’s worst nightmare would be? Actually, i’ve been involved in two over the course of the last 24 hours so, by all means, let me share. First, you should know your worst nightmares by type. There’s the illusionary worst nightmares, which paralyze you in fear but have no bearing on your business. Then, there’s the Sisyphean nightmares that totally cripple a single aspect of your operation by rendering it useless. And, finally, a global nightmare – which is basically like living in some sort of eTwilight-Zone.

Yesterday was my first post-tonsil day back at work, and when i arrived i was greeted by a daunting task: someone had ordered over $2,000 of rock records, and it was my job to swiftly pull them and prepare them for shipping. Of course, swiftly is a relative concept when you have to individually track down over two hundred records, but i attacked the task with as much enthusiasm as i could muster. Meanwhile, my supervisors were at once ecstatic and suspicious of the fortuitous turn of events. But, everything checked out: the billing address matched the credit card, the shipping address matched the billing address, the credit card company enthusiastically approved the charge, and we even spoke to a real live person at the contact number provided with the order. How could it possibly be bogus?

Well, it was, and i can’t even explain it because no one’s taken the time to explain it to me, but after spending almost a solid eight-hour day getting this order together i’ll be spending another day tomorrow integrating it back into our inventory. And, while everyone’s pretty pissed about someone trying to scam us, no one actually spent more than a few minutes working on the actual order other than me, so i’m really pissed. Thus, the Sisyphean nightmare.


The specific nightmare was more dramatic, and even more annoying. Lindsay and i got to work this morning a whole twenty minutes before 9AM, hoping to spend a short day in the office. However, when i flicked the light switch in our room nothing happened. I found this to be especially strange because our lighting is florescent and copious … not the sort of thing that burns out. We chalked it up to random strangeness and headed into the warehouse, only to find it similarly cloaked in darkness. Just then, one of the owners grumped down the hallway and muttered to us “power’s out, working on it.”

Yes, the power. Out. Not in the whole building, mind you. Not in the hallways, or the kitchen, or in the office of our webdesign unit. Oh no. Just in our offices. Which meant no light for shelving, no orders being printed, no fans to blow cool air on the network servers, and no servers to be blown at. Our webpage is served externally, so we weren’t totally out of commission, but the eight of us that eventually turned up for work could only drink coffee and alphabetize in the hallway for four hours before our electrician glibly informed us that he fixed the problem (before being reamed out by the IT person in charge of our in-house servers).

So, if you thought internet outages and being out of ink were the worst of eBusiness’s worries, think again. And don’t think that anything that happens is easily fixed by specialized problem solvers like the ones in that never-ending IBM ad campaign, either. No multinational fortune 500 company can protect you from your electrician randomly flipping breakers, and no amount of fraud protection can protect you from bogus orders that aren’t really fraud.


And now, back to enjoying the ceiling lights.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85180314/

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Sometimes i forget how excited i was last summer when Erika and Lindsay agreed to have me as their roommate, and sometimes i find myself squeezed onto the couch with them stuck on level 8-3 of Mario Brothers trying to get past those hammer tossing fuckers. I mean, who knew Lindsay had memorized where every secret block was in all of the first Mario game? It’s not like i interviewed her that extensively before moving in with her…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85110008/

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I try to listen to my body when it screams at me.

Earlier in the evening it seemed as though everyone suddenly needed to talk to me. Lindsay had locked herself out and needed me to let her in, our friend Chris called to leave a mysterious message about how “important” it was for me to call him, members of my music fraternity were hounding me via email and instant messenger. Just as suddenly, i needed to go to sleep. It wasn’t even midnight yet, and i didn’t feel tired; my body just didn’t want to operate. I couldn’t type, or think, just slide into a dreamy haze every time i relaxed and listened to the music i had on.

I bid everyone a farewell for the night, started a cd on tenth track, and was asleep before the end of the eleventh.

It was in that same manner that i woke up: ostensibly because i heard a noise, but really because my body needed fuel. Lately I seem to have found myself on a sort of a diet, which is to say that i’m not eating a pint of ice cream every third day and i’m not eating half a pound of chocolate as a midnight snack. I know, though, what waking up like that means: i need some sort of fuel.

Down in the kitchen my body was like a compass: milk rather than juice & two small pieces of chocolate. I was obviously a little dehydrated and a little low on sugar, though i would have never noticed it on my own. In retrospect, i had hardly drank anything yesterday – definitely not the half gallon of water that’s suggested. Similarly, i had only had sugar from a fruit salad much earlier in the day.

My body knew exactly what i needed once i was in the kitchen, but did it send me down there as well? Did i wake up with the explicit purpose of needing a drink? Was the vaguely disturbing dream i had been having my subconscious mind’s way of waking me up to refuel? The dream i had been having was definitely strange … the nearest i could come to describing it would be to say that the Borg were drugrunning from a largish warehouse that was being fronted as an Acme Supermarket that my mother and i drove into by mistake, and that our only means of survival were pretending to have been already assimilated and making sure to sell out of our small stock of vintage G.I. Joes (who would apparently inform their child owners of the distress we were in, because all of the adults were on the drugs). The overall tone of it was one of horror … knowing that the tiniest slip would make everyone aware that i wasn’t who i was pretending to be.

The birds are already trumpeting sunlight, and my body seems to be through with telling me what it needs to keep it going. If only the rest my life were so succinct.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85009938/

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I did not get an Easter basket this year because i did not get Easter this year, and so i do not get to complain. Still, it somehow feels like that interminable bunny took a long hop over my life while he was on his route. Lindsay didn’t even go home, and yet she returned on Sunday evening with a basket chock full of fake grass and foil wrapped chocolate.

I ate all of her Smidgens; really, it couldn’t be helped. I was told to eat them, but not told from which basket i should take them, and since everyone has a basket with Smidgens you could hardly expect that i would’ve known that i had devoured all of the peanut-buttery bunnies in Lindsay’s basket which, truth be told, i’m highly skeptical of in the first place. After all, how the hell did the rabbit know where to find her?

On our way to work this afternoon Lindsay shoved a fistful of shiny chocolate eggs into the side pocket of her new Gap bag, leaving a spare few littering the crinkly grass in her basket. It was those few i found myself eyeing a few minutes ago. We have a bag of seasonally wrapped Hershey’s Kisses, but i didn’t want those; i wanted the last vestiges of chocolate to be found in that pastel wicker basket, those gleaming pieces buried under strands of what is, for all intents and purposes, Easter tinsel. Yes, tinsel. Let’s not kid ourselves.

Looking back upon my encounter with the basket, i couldn’t tell you why i craved those room temperature eggs rather than the firm kisses i could have eaten. All i know is that now there’s only a few lemon jellybeans and a lonely misplaced kiss left in that pile of matte green tinsel, and they’re all safe from my appetite. For now.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/75054025/

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My fan is acting in the place of crickets and i peck as softly as i can at the keys. She yells at me for beating on her keyboard sometimes, because i seem to be under the impression that the harder i type the more effective my words will be. She’s asleep, i think, and here i am being gentler with my own keyboard than i usually am with hers.

The fan is acting in the place of crickets because everything has been rendered silent by the cool air it is pulling in from outside, with just enough chill in it to remind me that it’s not quite spring yet. I love wrapping myself up in that air and my blankets, but i am always sorry for it in the morning when i am redressed in a scratchy throat and dewy skin.

Erika has disappeared for the night. Lindsay has flown off to another state entirely. The neighbor has his lights off and his blinds closed. Kat is across the house from here, silent if not asleep. The fan and my tiny clacking keys are the only sounds in this room other than breath slowly sighing, and when i remember to breathe. It is only me that’s left to tiptoe to my bed, careful not to interrupt this perfect peace i have found myself situated within.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75015620/