This week, a man who works with me (but doesn’t work for the same company) came in to work out of our office for a while. He does this a couple of days a week, and we’re getting to know each other. He looks like Joel Osteen.
As we chat, in the space of five minutes, he tells me that his ex-wife is moving for her job. Still local to Charlotte but more north. He details the conversation that he had with his ex and her husband – the man who, incidentally, she left him for after having an affair.
Ex-wife’s husband mentions that he can work anywhere, after all, he doesn’t have a career. He works at a fast food place. As an acting manager. Which means that they don’t have a manager and don’t really consider him manager material, or they’d have given him the job, yes? Man that I work with is a successful career man. Then he showed us a picture of what they all looked like when the affair/split happened (which, by the way, split up a fairly successful gospel singing group comprised of the cheaters and their spouses). She left him for a troll. Who works in fast food.
The Joel Osteen lookalike? Is dating a woman with 7 children. SEVEN. He has three. Can you say “Cheaper By the Dozen“? I can’t make this shit up. His stories kill me.
So he drops all this on me, in like five minutes. He and I are both giggling about it, my CEO is confused cause he just doesn’t get it. Tells me it’s not nice to laugh at guys whose wives left them for other men. I immediately worry about karma.
Which bit me in the ass in the form of my air conditioner going out. In late June. Holy crap.
Downstairs unit fixed. Upstairs will be fixed next week, for a small $5K price tag.
I want to say I will think twice before making fun of or laughing at someone again. But I know I won’t, I’ll do it right here and pay the price. But karma, really – it would have been just as effective to have someone make fun of me, right?
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Sigh.
In an effort to NOT post what I really wanted to post about, I tried to post about my stitches again.
So I take it as a sign that I should just get this off my chest:
Earlier this year, in my capacity as message board owner, I lost a moderator to cancer. Needless to say, this was hard on all of us as the situation played out from diagnosis to death. One of our members attended his funeral.
In addition to the board, this person was on my friends list on Facebook and MySpace. Every now and then, as I am playing a game or for some other reason going through my friends list, I will see his name. Every time, it’s like someone has slapped me.
I never met this man in person. I never spoke to him on the phone. I did, however, trust him to access my account at the company he worked for when he volunteered to help me with a problem I was having (completely within the scope of his job and nothing that I couldn’t have accomplished by calling customer service, he just saved me the trouble of calling – no special treatment or anything unethical.) I trusted him with the backend of our software, and to keep our secrets. On the other side of the coin, he never met me, either, and yet he was loyal, doggedly so, and on the occasions when someone would badmouth us on the internet he was always the first one there to defend us. I have absolutely no doubt that if my person were ever threatened and he found out about it, he would have slept on my doorstep to protect me.
And we never met.
It’s been five months since we lost John, and there are days when I don’t think of him, or the fact that he’s gone; then I see his name and it startles me, the realization. It’s a conundrum, really, in the end: I know it will be some time before I take down the announcement on the board, perhaps in a couple of months. Social networking sites are a different animal, it seems … cold and deliberate to remove him from my friends list. Fortunately, my friends list is fairly big, so I don’t see it every day, but I do see it.
I think I will leave it there, with the hope that in time, the effect will be lessened and his name on my friends list will bring a smile rather than a sad sigh when I see it.
