There has been an important constant in my life that I've only hinted at or lightly touched upon in this forum, going back many years now, as far back as the Nit-tastic Tales thread in BBV, and I've never fully addressed it in print. I feel that now is the time to do so...so here goes.
I started my current job in the summer of 2006 after coming back from my first stint in Las Vegas, and with the exception of the interlude of my second Las Vegas stint from 2018-2021, I have held this same job ever since.
I ****ing hate my job. I have
always hated it. I have never warmed to it, in any capacity. I love my bosses, mind you. They are two small business partners who are doing their best. They've been more than fair to me. They've been both kind and generous, time after time. It's the job that gets me. The goddamned job.
I sell replacement parts and accessories for large industrial machines. The machine manufacturers sell their own replacement parts, but they gouge them at a huge markup, leaving room for independent aftermarket distributors to find out where the parts come from and then offer them at a fair price. So we're sort of the NAPA Auto Parts, but for industrial machines instead of cars.
I am not mechanically inclined. I'm the opposite of that. After all these years at this job, I still wouldn't be able to install 90% of the things that I sell. I could, maybe 50% of the time, point out the general area on the machine where the part goes.
Most of the replacement parts come from overseas. Lead times for them are generally a few weeks to a few months. When a machine that consists of these parts breaks down, the manufacturer's entire production line often crashes and starts to hemorrhage money at an alarming rate, and thus the parts are needed today, and not 3 months from now.
This is a maintenance supervisor's and a purchasing manager's worst nightmare come true. For me, it's a Tuesday, a small part of a Tuesday. I'm on the other end of the line with the bad news when they call in or email with their desperate missives.
I have recently taken to mumbling, "I ****ing hate this job" over and over again, hundreds of times a day while at work. Eastern philosophy, Western cognitive/behavioral psychology and New Age conventional wisdom all basically agree that this is not a good mantra. So I've been trying to break myself of that obsessive behavior by keeping track of how often I mumble it, and endeavoring to extend the time between incidents. Here are the intervals between mumblings, in minutes, during my first attempt...
2,8,16,13,24,50,45,3.
I had a little breakdown at the end, but you can see that I was making some overall progress. I did much better that afternoon, scoring a 2 hour interval at one point.
So here's the plan: I'm going back to playing the live cash games full time. My parents live close by, and they are in their mid-80's, so I'll be staying in the area for the next few years to be around them. The Springfield MGM $2/$5 game runs often enough for me to make this happen, if I can hack it.
I still need a bigger bankroll, so I will try to be playing more often, and I want to take my two weeks of vacation this year before I quit. My current goal is to start playing full time again in the fall of this year.
Lets go.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 01-21-2023 at 11:53 AM.