So sorry, I've been suffering from blogus inactivus for days now. I've just started a new temp position where I'm actually kept busy throughout the day. Worse, their network blocks web access to AOL, so I can't check email. It's like being in prison, except I have a fabulous 16-story view up and down Park Avenue at 54th Street. The girl in the cubicle next to me is from my hometown of Beaverton, Oregon, but she went to Aloha High School, which explains so much.
I'm only temporarily sitting by her, because the person I'll be replacing is still there, and I'll take over her spot on Friday. But this Aloha HS chick thinks I'm her assistant now by virtue of proximity, even though she already has one. Today she asked me to make 30 copies of a document and paper clip them. "Paper clip them?" I asked. "Yes," she said. So I did that and then gave them to her and she said, "You know what? Maybe these should be stapled."
Tomorrow I'm pointing out that her assistant is that blond chick by the ficus.
Anyway, in addition to being deprived of checking email, I only barely had time to glance at news headlines. So here's what's been going on in the past couple of days:
Congress is poised to pass sweeping new bankruptcy legislation that will protect the poor, defenseless credit industry, which only made a paltry $30 billion profit last year, by making it harder for individuals to declare bankruptcy. This despite the fact that research proves that the vast majority of new bankruptcies in America are due to medical debt (and 75% of those people had insurance, by the way), job loss and divorce. Yes, there are irresponsible people out there spending more than they can hope to pay back, but they're statistically insignificant.
As with all acts of Congress, there's a loophole. If you're fabulously wealthy, you can put your money in a special bank account in any of five states -- and you don't have to be a resident of the state -- or you can deposit it overseas, so that when you declare bankruptcy the courts can't touch that money.
Just to make sure that you stay in debt for the rest of your life and then some, Congress also today nixed two separate proposals to raise the minimum wage. Republicans say keeping the minimum wage at $5.15/hr is good for America. Fellow blogger Thunder Jones did a little math and discovered the average CEO makes over $4,000 an hour.
President Bush has nominated John Bolton to be the new American ambassador to the United Nations. This is a guy who thinks international law is irrelevant. This is a guy who opposes the bans on chemical and nuclear weapons testing, opposes the ban on landmines, opposes Kyoto, opposes the anti-ballistic missile treaty, and is also opposed to teddy bears and sunny days. So much for the warm-fuzzy feelings of optimism after Bush's European Fence-Mending Tour: nominating this guy to represent us at the U.N. is tantamount to mooning the rest of the world.
In international news, Michael Jackson is demanding Martha Stewart's immediate withdrawal from Lebanon after she apparently shot an Italian journalist in Baghdad.
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4 comments:
Staple indecision? Sheesh micromangement and incompetence all rolled into one. The fact taht you aren't even her assistance tops it. Hopefully, she'll figure things out when you move.
Yeah, what I really didn't understand was that she handed them to me and said she needed them within 10 minutes because she was leaving for a presentation -- if speed was the point, isn't it better to let the copier do the stapling?
I don't understand what's going on with that bankruptcy legislation. Why it has so much congressional support is beyond me (unless they're really that beholden to the credit card companies' interests).
What's worse, on a CNN poll today, support for the legislation was topping non-support.
*sigh*
No, I just stapled them. What really got me is that it's not like I wasn't busy; this spot is just go, go, go and what she asks me to do are always stupid little things that she could probably do herself, like make 30 copies. I'm assisting her boss, hello.
So today when she asked, "Did you set up that conference call I told you about yesterday?" I very pointedly said, "No, I had your assistant do it."
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