12 February 2009

oh yeah, well fuck you too...

Yeah, I've been out of blogging mode for a while, and while part of that has to do with just being busy, part of it has to do with internal dialogues about sharing too much vs. not being interesting to read. I guess I'm in one of those transitional areas where I'm skittish about potentially sounding like just a complainer, but also not interested in being boring or composing something eminently disposable.

Well, it kind of pushed me over the edge, this day of mine. That which, over the course of the day included:

- Day 3 of getting through a cold/flu.

- Having to listen to constant, yet subtle insinuated and veiled racist, sexist, homophobic chit chat among people working in the SE Michigan auto industry. Yes, I'm talking to you, Big Three/UAW. You have a huge culture problem among your mid/high-seniority people - they are a bad example to the younger generation of workers, and offensive to anyone with a decent bone in their body. It's not one incident, it's not "just a few bad apples". I'm so tired of it, but like many people these days, I need the job, and that means not being "difficult" about such things, so I just keep my mouth shut and my blood pressure down.

- Noticing multiple, clearly intentional scratches on my car that indicate that I got the "key those fuckers" treatment in the parking lot at a GM site. I don't drive a GM vehicle, and in your actions, you've ensured that I never will. You can't intimidate people into buying your cars. It's not surprising that Toyota & Honda are kicking your ass in sales and quality. I have no sympathy for you, or your austerity measures caused by your bailout. The only power consumers have to negotiate with is their wallets and feet - walk away or not. So fuck you - my dollars will go elsewhere.

- Getting home to a message on the machine from the fraud prevention division of my credit card company about suspicious purchases on my card, which turned out to be good that they called me. Seems that someone wanted to buy some World of Warcraft and other computer gaming crap, as well as a hotel room in the UK, with my card. Well, I'm glad they (fraud prevention people) caught it, but I'm not happy about it, for obvious reasons. Having my card declined last night now makes sense, and now it's canceled and chopped into tiny pieces.

- Idiots commenting.

There was more... more that made today bad. And I was soaking in it, riding it somewhere mushrooms would grow. Somewhere with dark, and damp, and stone, and shit. Imagining all sorts of this or that - wishing bad fortune, imagining revenge, darkly fantasizing here and there. But the The Clash came on, and a little ska is something that it's hard to maintain a hateful spiteful attitude through. So I'm done... I'm sure it will come back to me, but tomorrow starts everything over again, and I'm just going to move on through another cycle of night and day.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have two words for the US auto industry:
No Sympathy.

Okay, maybe I'll lighten that up a bit:
Little Sympathy

After hearing over two decades of crap just like you mentioned it gets a little old.

Anonymous said...

Oops. Fat fingered the return key before I was ready to post.

Anyway, when I heard some engineer from GM call into an NPR show about the auto industry meltdown and complain that NPR didn't get the facts right, that the American auto industry was hampered by negative reporting, that American auto quality had caught up with Honda and Toyota, etc.--all of this nearly shouted out in indignation--I couldn't help but think that some types in the industry can find whole new ways of being arrogant and pigheaded in the midst of the worst scenarios.

It's curious that folks promote "Buy American" by causing property damage. Would folks still key cars if they knew they were made by Americans in Marysville, Ohio? Probably. Maybe we could promote "Dispel Ignorance" by defecating on their SUVs.



- G