Scenic Route

The Presbytery is my oldest, most loyal and most important client. They literally pay my rent. Half-a-large is electronically dumped into my business account on the last day of the month. I transfer it to my personal account on the first and write the rent check on the second.

My performance on the Presbytery site has been less than stellar lately. A week ago today I got a phone call from the Executive Presbyter (a position equivalent to a Bishop) saying she and the Associate Executive Presbyter (my direct report) wanted to have a meeting. We decided on lunch, Thursday at Mykonos, just down the block.

The little voice in my head started in, “I told you. You weren’t doing all the work or any of it on-time. Now they’re going to fire you, you won’t be able to pay the rent and you’ll be living in a box under the expressway by June.”

“No,” I told it. “It takes longer than that for an eviction proceeding. Maybe August.”

“Either way,” it replied, “you don’t even have a laptop. You can’t even lurk outside a café to get on the Internet to do the rest of your work. Even if you could do the rest of your work.”

“There’s still the library.”

“How long do you think that’ll last when you have no place to shower?”

“I could get another job. They’re always looking for people at the grocery store.”

“Oh, right. Mister big-shot night shelf stocker. It’d take three full-time weeks a month to just pay the rent. And you think your sleep is fucked-up now? Just wait until you have to work all night.”

And so it went for the next four days.

Thursday my guts were churning so badly I could barely stand in the shower. I kept dropping the soap because my hands were shaking so badly. Somehow I got through it. Didn’t cut myself shaving and even managed to iron a shirt and a pair of Dockers.

After ordering, they got to it. Expressed concern over my well-being. Eh? Not getting fired?

“If we were going to fire you,” laughed the EP, “do you think we’d buy you lunch?”

Hmmm, I thought. Maybe I won’t puke it up when I get home after all.

As it turns out, the AEP and I had similar ideas on how to resolve the issue, although she came at it from a different perspective.

“If you think about program and enmeshed relationships,” she started, “you might find that you have an enmeshed relationship with your apartment.

“There’s no clear delineation between work and your personal life. Personal problems can then easily intrude on work, and work intrudes on your personal time. You need to get out more.”

“I was thinking that myself,” I replied. “I’ve thought all week about one of those shared office suites. There’s one near home and another near the library.”

“What would you say to working out of our office for a couple of days a week? And remember, the decaf is free…”

“I was afraid to ask, but I was kinda hoping we could work something like that out.”

The rest was just logistics. There’s a room on the second floor off the Resource Center that’s too small for much of anything, but too open for storage. It has a window that opens and a LAN drop right outside the doorway.

I offered to bring one of my PCs, even as I wondered how I’d manage switching back to a single monitor, let alone a 15 inch one.

“That’s where we’re going to put the media center PC after the grant comes through,” said the AEP. “Do you think our spare PC would work for you?”

I was planning to take Heckle, a 500MHz Pentium-III with 256MB of RAM. The spare is a 450MHz P-III with 128MB of RAM. “Sure,” I replied. “And I have some RAM kicking around the house to upgrade it.”

“Fine. Now you’ll need two monitors, so what I was thinking was we could purchase the ones for the media center PC in advance of the grant, then use the grant to pay back the budget.”

So that problem went away too, without so much as the stroke of a pen.

After lunch we all went back to the office to make sure our little plan would work, and to call their equipment vendor for a quote on a pair of 17” and a pair of 19” LCD monitors and a video card to drive them.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll work Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10am–2pm at the Presbytery office. I can hardly wait.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2005 at 10:10 am EDT and is filed under Generic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.