Friday Night Fights

ahhh. it's nice, after a longlonglong week of working with and for imbeciles, to get home, turn up the heat (it will, after all, get to a low 19 degrees tonight) and tip a beer or 6.
it's amazing what my job has morphed into in only two and a half little months. my business card says "lab services manager". but i seem to be spending more and more time acting as a project manager. to be blunt, the two real project managers in my office are really: 1) a salesman, and 2) a glorified field inspector. not that they don't have their merits and strengths. i'm just hard pressed to visualize them when i'm asked to handle client needs and ignorance that only a certified engineer should be involved with. i can answer most questions regarding asphalt and concrete, but i have to preface every answer with "this is not the answer, this is only my experienced opinion". which, of course, should make a client wonder why they're even talking to me in the first place.
and, again, i wonder when clients call or email me directly as lab manager, because they are not getting a response from the project manager.
this week i had to:
tell a project manager to clean up his equipment that he left lying around in my lab or he would find all of it on his desk the next morning;
force a project manager to define the word "we", because he kept asking me if "we" had made a phone call and had "we" gotten results from another lab and were we taking care of a client's needs (needless to say, "we" meant me and no, i hadn't and no, i wasn't about to);
inform that same manager that he was going to actually have to do some of his own work every now and then;
listen to the "salesman" expound on how we have control of 98% of all of the work on our peninsula, but in the same breath tell me how "we" couldn't afford to have someone spend a couple of hours creating 3 or 4 excel spreadsheets for the lab;
listen to several snide comments by the "salesman" about smokers, smoking, butts and lawsuits;
have the "salesman" take me over to another lab whose equipment we bought so i could inventory it and decide what goes to me and what goes to other offices and tell me that we're not in a huge rush to clear it out, then have him confront me each of the next two days about why i wasn't over there getting stuff out posthaste;
deal with another office's manager who hates mine (it's a hate/hate relationship evidently) about a sample that was not tested, because their manager claims i called him up and cancelled the test (when, in my reality, i told him he had two boxes of the same sample and to run the test on only one of the boxes so that my office wouldn't get charged twice);
learned over and over and over and over again that my "salesman" is a liar in the first degree and will not hesitate to cast blame on someone else if it deflects attention away from him;
heard a rumor that he wants to install a suveillance camera out back of the lab with the video monitor on his desk (hmmm, counting smoke breaks? or looking for cells of insubordination? i remember once at my first job in this industry when the office manager decreed that no more than two people could stand together outside the office at one time [mustang knows what i'm talking about]. we figured he was afraid that, because he was in the shitter with corporate, we were all outside talking about him. he was fairly right).

but then i arrive home an hour early (because when i work the weekend i take that time back during the week) and there is a brown package sitting on my doorstep. i call out to the gardener and say "hey julio, you dropped your unit on my porch. shearing accident?" but he says no.
lo and behold, it's a present from my very good friend blake. he sent me a present. two cds by the most excellent band the Pogues. plus, a couple of his own original compilations (by that, i mean that he is an amazing muscician who records his own music). by the way blake, i have that cd already, so i'll be damning people's souls to eternal purgatory when i give them out. just like i'm doing to you with this picture, but if aughra from badnewsblonde can give out naughty photos of herself in exchange for pressies, so can i. feast (and then scrub) your eyes on this!

so, i get to "end" the week with awesome music while sitting inside my toasty home with frosty beverages. okay, i'm not ending the week since i'm working in the lab tomorrow and sunday, but you get my drift. i'm getting drunk tonight (which i do so much less frequently than i did when in the 'no), eating a zucchini salad (now now, children. it's not what you think or hope unless you're lecram), listening to both the Pogues and the Trike Shop, and watching Wallace and Gromit's new movie.
does it get any better than that?
well, if you loathe ann coulter...it DOES!!!

“When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty,” Coulter said in an address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.”