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| 11/25/2003 |
| Worst Nightmare |
Great. The guy who hit me is being a jerk about it. I was really hoping things weren't going to go this way, but here we go.
Here's a recap of the last few days: The idio... uh, moro... ummmm... fellow hit me as I was sitting still at a light Thursday night. He backed into me. We pulled over, I asked for insurance information. He hemmed and hawwed. It wasn't his car, it was his girlfriend's, he said. Bad sign, I thought, but I blew it off. He did give me a name and phone number. I copied down the license plate of his car. He said, "I'll get my insurance guy to call you. Obviously, it's my fault." My car is drivable, looks like all the damage is cosmetic.
The next morning, I called my insurance company to see what I needed to do. They told me I needed the insurance info of the owner of the car, so I told them I'd call the guy and tell him that. I called at a reasonable hour, and got the fellow's voicemail. I left a polite message, asking if "he could help me out" by getting me the desired information.
I called him back an hour later, to see if he had gotten the message. This time he himself answered, and from his tone, it was obvious that he had. He was agitated, and he immediately started yelling at me for "calling him four times" that day. I politely informed him that this was indeed only the second time I had ever dialed his number. During the conversation, I bent over backwards to try to explain that I was not being even one bit adversarial, I just wanted to get the whole thing handled. "I'm on the other line with my insurance guy, I'm HANDLING IT," he snapped. He said he'd call me back, and hung up. Let me tell you, I wasn't feeling very good about the situation.
Later that day, he left a voicemail at home asking me to call. I did, and the first thing I did was apologize, telling him that I had not intended to upset him during our earlier conversation. He seemed a bit taken aback by this. I asked what his insurance guy said. He then went into a long ramble which eventually boiled down to the apparent fact that his insurance guy advised him to pay for the repairs out-of-pocket. I didn't like that idea one bit, but I didn't say anything. I really wanted all of this to go smoothly at that point - and I had a weird feeling that this guy wasn't exactly the picture of a Man On An Even Keel. He asked me to get an estimate, and call him back. I agreed to this plan.
The estimate came to almost $2300 worth of damage. The repairs are going to take a week, and I can't afford to be without a car for that long. And hey, this wasn't my fault, hello, and I'm entitled to a rental car while mine gets repaired - but only if I go through this guy's insurance (which I wonder now if he even has). I called my State Farm agent again, and told them what had happened, and about my misgivings about Backup Man. We agreed that it was time to process a claim, and that they would now be doing the talking with this guy and his company from now on. I never called the guy back with the estimate, so of course he had no idea about any of this. My guess was that he would react badly if he knew.
Sometimes I hate being right.
Today, he called my house looking for me (I gave him the home number the night of the incident), and unfortunately Beta Girl was home on vacation and answered the phone. He was unhappy. He wanted me to call him. At some point, their discussion got a bit heated, and the guy actually said to Beta Girl, "Well, maybe it wasn't my fault! Where there any witnesses?" Yes, there were, but I didn't bother getting their names at the time. I didn't call the cops. He knows this, he was there. If our case went to court, I'm sure I'd win. I mean, it's not like his telephone conversation with Beta Girl wouldn't sound awfully suspicious to a judge. But... you know, if our roles were reversed, I would never have given him any trouble. I would've taken responsibility that I messed up. This is what insurance is for. If my rates were to go up because of it, oh well. I don't know what this guy's problem is.
If this thing keeps dragging on, I can use my own insurance to pay for the repairs, though I'd have to pay my $500 deductible, which I MIGHT get back from the guy's insurance (assuming it exists) someday, though there's no guarantee of that. But right now, I'm standing firm. I'm going to wait and see, and hopefully this guy will come to his senses, and do this the right way. Should I hold my breath? |
| 4:42:45 PM |
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| 11/20/2003 |
| Crash, Tinkle, Bang |
Today was a decent day until about 35 minutes ago. That was when, as I was sitting, stopped at a light in the left-turn lane, the guy in front of me (also stopped) suddenly decided that now was the time to back up. I saw his reverse lights come on; I had time to think, "Oh, he needs to back up, OK, I can help out and back up, too," but see, he was already COMING RIGHT BACK AT ME RIGHT NOW, AH, JESUS H. CHRIST, WHERE'S THE HORN -
SIGGGGGGGGGGGGH. New car, man. I've had it six months, man. Great.
He couldn't have hit me that hard, I was maybe 8 feet away from him before his ill-timed backward romp, and how much speed could he have gotten up, anyway? But he has one of those big SUVs with a really high back bumper, and I have one of those sleek sporty wagons with a really low front profile, and his really high bumper hit me in the perfect spot to make my hood buckle up and get all bent. At least I wasn't hurt. At least the thing is drivable. It's his fault, I don't have to pay money, right? Is that how this works? I've never been in an accident before, so I have no idea. What's bothering me right now, is not the guy. He was nice about it, he knew he screwed up. What's bugging me is all the CRAP I have to do now to get the car fixed. Talking with insurance companies. Taking my car somewhere where they fix these things. Leaving it there, and having no car (do I get a rental?). Waiting. All this crap is going to be a really, really, really big pain in my arse.
OK, perspective. I'm uninjured. I am not at fault. I'm lucky that I've made it this far in life without having to deal with something like this. I am lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Lucky me.
Oh, work is going fine, too, I was going to write about that tonight but now I don't feel like it. |
| 8:30:32 PM |
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| 11/12/2003 |
| All Too Easy? |
Well, then.
See, yesterday threw a wrench into my plans for the next couple of weeks. The plans were to be really hunkered down on the PC every day (Monday through Friday, natch), really working on getting my head back into coding, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, all that stuff I've been earning my bread with the last four years. Get back into it after my four-month break, get it back to second nature, only pausing to go out for another job interview, or to take a phone call from a recruiter who had a lead on a new job. Because I'm rusty, man. That aforementioned four months off - I haven't thought about code for even one day of it. Well, OK, I made a few updates on the Web site, but really - my skills were buried under four months of cobwebs. It was gonna be a several week task to clean 'em off.
I had an interview in Olympia for a possible job down there Monday morning. Working in Olympia would have given me a daily round-trip commute of 130 miles. But the money being talked about was really good, the assignment scheduled to last only through the end of January - I could handle a long commute for that long, especially with the large dollars being bandied about. The interview went badly, though. I realized during it that I had forgotten all about interviewing for a job. Hadn't really done it since 1999. I forgot that when you interview for tech jobs, in addition to the part where you smile a lot and try to get them to think you're a groovy person, there's the "math test" part of the thing. Where they stand you up in front of a white board and ask you to give them code samples. "Give me a SQL query that will do this," they say. "Write me a method in C# that takes these parameters and returns this result," they say.
My problem with the Olympia interview wasn't that they asked me a lot of stuff that I didn't know. It's that in the moment, my mind failed me in providing ways to explain to them what I knew. They tossed me some pretty fat softballs that left me all tongue-tied. It's like the difference between knowing how to get somewhere, and knowing how to give someone else directions to get somewhere. Those "giving directions" brain muscles failed me Monday morning.
So, as I drove home the 65 miles from Olympia, feeling stupid, feeling inadequate, feeling unemployable, I tried to talk myself into thinking of the glass I'd just been handed as one that is half full. I'd be more prepared for the next interview, I thought. Now I know some topics to review so I won't get caught flat-footed and stuttering next time, I thought. My thoughts turned to a phone interview, a so-called "screening interview" that I had that very afternoon, at 3 PM. This was for a contract position at Big Daddy Bill Gates' playground, That Really Big Software Company We Got Up Here, ya get me? I got home from Olympia at 2, giving me an hour to cram for the phone interview. My mind was getting to the exploding point, but this one was supposed to just be a "screener." To be followed later by a "face-to-face." They just wanted to know that I wasn't some bum off the street who didn't know anything. Of course, four months removed from all this stuff, I kinda was feeling like I didn't know anything.
I called the conference service at 3 PM sharp. This was a conference call with me and two guys at The Big Software Company. I'm on hold. I hear a beep. It's my recruiter on the other line! He says they need to the reschedule the call to the next day, one of them got pulled into a meeting. I have a reprieve! A whole night to review and cram and try to reignite the dormant code engines in my brain.
So of course, I spent most of the evening playing XBox until I was too tired to see straight. I went to bed. The conference call was to happen at 9:30 AM Tuesday.
The conference call went off as scheduled, and again, on my side, the conversation was filled with sinking feelings. The group these guys are part of is doing some cool stuff, it's a job that would completely be interesting, AND it's in REDMOND, the same town my old job has been in for four years. I was motivated, "I can do this stuff they are talking about," I was thinking. So why couldn't I seem to be impressive when answering questions? Why did I keep misunderstanding what they were asking, why was I constantly asking them to clarify things? They were polite. They asked me if I had any questions for them, a question I was supposed to jump at, in fact, I was supposed to have a LIST of questions of my own, all to indicate to them my intense interest. I said: "You know, I did have some questions... but I can't think of them right now."
LAME!
They said, "We're making decisions today, we're talking to more people. You'll know today."
I hung up. I was realizing that this getting a new job thing was going to be a long haul. Time to crack the books. Do the exercises. Time to re-design the Web sites, re-code them from scratch. No problem, I...
The phone was ringing. It was the recruiter who set up the phone interview. I told him I kinda sucked in the interview.
There was a beat. He said, "They must've thought you did OK. They want to make you an offer."
What?!?
And so here I am. They didn't bother with a "face-to-face." They made me an offer based on the phone conversation, I accepted it, I'll start working there next week some time. Sitting here, it hasn't sunk in. I'm still geared up for weeks upon weeks of study, working hard, begging the recruiters to get me just ONE MORE SHOT, PLEASE, I'll NAIL it this time. But none of that's going to be necessary. I filled out my paperwork today. Soon I'll have one of those card keys again, one of those parking passes hanging from my rearview mirror again. I won't be unemployed anymore.
It wasn't supposed to happen this way. I hadn't even been job-hunting for a week yet.
Huh. I guess I should just shut up and be grateful, right? |
| 9:41:51 PM |
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| 11/5/2003 |
| Inevitability |
Tonight I was driving on the I-90 back to Snoqualmie after running an errand in Issaquah. Once you get past Issaquah heading east, the highway starts to get pretty wooded on both sides. It was just after sunset as I hit the section of road where it widens to four lanes, and there's a posted increase in the speed limit, from 60 to 70 MPH. I got into the far left lane, and glanced to my right. In the far right lane, I could see, outlined in the headlights of the oncoming cars, a young doe stepping gingerly out onto the highway. It was just a flash - in an instant, I had passed the deer and I couldn't see it behind me. But my heart sank - and one word appeared in my mind: inevitability. I would be willing to bet that as I sit here, twenty minutes later or so, that deer is no longer among the living. It made me sad, but I guess it's likely that that deer probably wouldn't even know what hit it. It was looking away from the oncoming traffic. I tried to imagine what a busy expressway must look like to a deer. I would think it would be awfully alien, and therefore suspect. If I'm a deer, I don't wanna step on one of those weird things.
Now that my mind had gotten started, I continued following the "inevitability" thread where it took me. I flashed to the photos I'd seen of people trapped in the higher floors of the World Trade Center towers after the terrorist planes hit them. People looking out of the windows, many eventually leaping to their deaths from them. Inevitability must have been in their minds. You wonder what that must feel like - what feeling comes over you? Would it just be fear? Mad panic? Possibly a calm acceptance?
I remember one time back in 1990, I was driving to a gig in Nags Head, North Carolina from Norfolk, Virginia. It was a two-lane road. I remember I came around a curve, and a black sports car came out of nowhere, right behind me, and zipped into the left lane, just missing me, passing me. No one was approaching in the oncoming lane, luckily. But I looked at that car as it peeled out of sight around another bend, and thought, "That guy is going to hit somebody."
About ten miles later, on the left side of the road, I came upon an accident scene. It had just happened, no police or emergency vehicles had yet arrived. Two cars had collided in the left lane. There were people milling around, other cars that hadn't been involved had stopped and the people in them had spilled out, looking to assist. There were people lying in the grass on the shoulder of the road. They were bloody. I realized as I passed that one of the cars was indeed that black sports car. There must have been a moment when the people in the two cars that crashed just... knew. I drove the rest of the way to the gig in stunned silence. Sort of how I continued my drive home tonight. |
| 7:30:40 PM |
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| 11/3/2003 |
| Things Are Different Here |
So there's news recently about how Dreamworks is selling it's music division to some other big label because the music business is not really a good business to be in these days if you want to make money. Normally, I wouldn't give a rat's ass about a story like that, except that it is likely to affect the release of the new album by my beloved Self, and that sucks. Dang. I'm really looking forward to that thing, I hope it will still come out.
TiVo is a fabulous thing. I just finished watching the five episodes of HBO's "Carnivale" that I missed while I was away. It's a really cool show, not as easily likable as say "The Sopranos" or "Six Feet Under", but it's good all the same. It's creepy in the way that "The X Files" used to be. I dig it.
Getting back into the swing of "real life" again. Close to booking some new shows for the band, talking with recruiters about getting back to work. I've got to get my head back into coding on a daily basis, I've been on a long break from it.
One of the unexpected things that happened to me on the recent trip was falling under the spell of this book. I recommend it unreservedly. It's effecting very large changes in me right this minute, which is where the title of this entry has come from. Things are changing a lot, and the changes aren't even close to finished yet, which is why I'm refraining from talking about them too much right now. But very important distinctions have been made by me recently that will affect every aspect of my life very soon. In a good way. I'll get into what I mean by that in future writings, when it seems appropriate. |
| 7:17:10 PM |
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| 11/1/2003 |
| 9,674 Miles Later |
I'm home. I made it in about an hour ago, after deciding to damn the elements, and make one, long, FINAL push for home today.
That last push was 1,159 miles long.
Yeah. I'm insane. And I'm really tired after sifting through more than 2,000 pieces of spam in the email inbox. Methinks it's now sleepy time.
At least I'm in my OWN bed. ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz. |
| 5:06:51 AM |
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