today i am less baffled by my incompetence than yesterday. yesterday, that was eye-closing. chest-tightening. there are so many things that go wrong, and as a 1-man-shop i have to cover all the possibilities, fix every problem, and it gets confusing. it gets bothersome. i used to manage employees. i delegated. i trusted people to do the jobs they were qualified to do. that was 8 years ago, and i do not miss corporate for one hot second, but some days i just can‘t keep up. i can not do all those jobs that all those others used to do. i nearly cried yesterday. those tears would have burned. hurt. really. they would have seared my face no less than a branding iron hot off the campfire. so today i wake up, face immediate aggravation of being unable to log in to the ID theft protection service to which i subscribe. every single time i try ot use that service to get a current credit report i encounter some password bugaboo, snafu, shamu. every single time i have to re-set the password, answer questions about my mother, my sweet dead mother, i have to answer questions about my father, my suicided father, and then if i am allowed the privilege of accessing my credit report i virtually always find errors and bullshit therein. and then i could not print the motherfucking credit report because my wifi printer decided to disappear again. heart attack on a plate that.
boo hoo. having a staff of tech support peoples to deal with this stuff would not make things any easier. workflow. org charts. reporting structures. priorities. meetings. corner offices. pods. RFPs. RFCs. (i can‘t remember the difference.) vacations. personal days. layoffs. more meetings. more meetings. more meetings.
yah, i‘m better off fixing shit myself.
yesterday‘s overpowering incompetence was placated today by a few swell foops of getting everything right the first time. i know myself and my brute force techniques of getting things done, and i simply have to fail fail fail and fail again to get things right.
strangely, it reminds me of Alice. Alice was the elderly woman, insane, who appeared at my door one morning, as i was off to work, i opened the door and she was standing right there, her voice hissing with senility, asking me to help her fix her freezer. i forget now exactly what she said but i think she said her ice maker was busted. i offered to help. she lived upstairs from me. she led the way, up the stairs, taking one step at a time, each step taking 20 seconds, the urgency of the situation neither gaining nor losing anything from the suddenly deliberate inertness of the journey. i followed Alice upstairs, to her apartment. she unlocked the door to let me in, whispering again that the freezer was broken, the ice tray. she opened the door and i walked in to a hive of roaches. carpets of them. thick blankets of live cockroaches on the woman‘s bed, on the floor, in the kitchen. i have never seen anything like it. i walked to the kitchen on tip toes, not wanting to step too deeply into the thicket of roaches. she explained that the ice tray did not fit in to the freezer. she opened the freezer to show me. roaches poured out. she handed me the ice tray, roaches scrambled off the ice tray. i held the ice tray by its corners, shaking the roaches off. i slid the tray back in to the slot in the freezer. it fit perfectly. i demonstrated to Alice that the ice tray fit in to the freezer just fine, all you had to do was slide it in straight and even. she was impressed. i looked toward the window of her kitchen and saw roaches in the sink, roaches filing into and out of the cabinets, roaches climbing up the window glass and along the window pane.
Alice seemed pleased that i had solved her ice tray problem. i turned and, on tip toes, left the tiny apartment, politely shutting the door gently and then scampering down the stairs, swatting roaches imagined and maybe not so imagined off my pants and ass, rejoicing young man in thine youth (i remembered that declamation from the frieze of the local YMCA) and going onward to work. to work. to work.
yesterday‘s anguish reminded me of Alice not on account of the roaches, which vigorously reminded me of the roaches that crawled into my mouth while i slept t the Parc Lincoln. no, the afraid of yesterday and today reminded me of Alice on account of the ice tray. how easy it was to slide in the ice tray into Alice‘s freezer, bypassing her insanity, showing her how easy it is, and her placation which followed. that was how i felt this morning. everything from yesterday that seemed so baffling and impossible suddenly flowed like shit from months-long constipation. today‘s work sailed as smooth as Alice‘s ice tray.