Update

So, the oven has begun working again.

Additional support for my Unified Theory of Inattention.

Wednesday

What happened today:

I learned that the impression I've been harboring is, in fact, correct. It's not a good idea until SOMEONE ELSE comes up with it. Good to know; takes the pressure off.
I need to just stop thinking--everyone else is happier that way.

I learned that my boss at CHFJ, while nice enough, has the attention span of the average slow-witted six-year-old. She wears this weird multi-colored ring, though, which distracts me when I talk to her. It's like I'm a bird or something. On the bright side, I find that if I only half pay attention to our conversations, they're less one-sided.

I went to the gym and did not desire to vomit. I call it progress.

I got shoes! For the wedding! They are fucking adorable! I danced about the house! Jessica Simpson is a talentless pop tart, but wow. She slaps her name on some cute ass shoes.

I absolutely aborted this recipe from Gourmet. I don't even know why I bother with recipes for anything except baked goods, anyway. It's like a have a constitutional inability to follow them, or even remember to buy the right goddmamn ingredients. Which is how I wound up with "crushed tomatoes" (what I would call fucking tomato sauce, if I hadn't bought the organic shit) instead of diced tomatoes, and wound up substituting gin for vermouth. I knew I didn't have the right liquor at the house, and I thought about stopping to buy it. Thank god I didn't though, because I remembered the recipe as reading sherry. Which, yeah. Not the same. The gin was fine, though. I guess. Next time I'm going to just ignore the fucking recipe entirely.

Two minutes for the garlic? My undulating right buttock.

And finally? Oven rebellion. As we were wrapping up dinner--an entirely stove-top affair I might add--the oven began to beep in a truly annoying manner. And the oven latch which is put in place for the self cleaning function had decided to engage itself. So, basically, my oven locked itself in its room like a petulant teenager.
Meanwhile, the shitty LED display showed some error code, a quick Google of which indicated that it is some kind of error having to do with, you guessed it, the door latch.

We finally unplugged it to make the beeping stop. It's like The Boy says, "It's the fucking appendix of the oven." I have used that self-cleaning "feature" exactly once, right when bought the house. I don't really get the point. I don't frequently spill grease and shit in my oven, so it I guess I don't feel it's that dirty. Further, it's regularly hot as hell because it is a goddamn oven after all, so I figure it's already reasonably sterile. If I had need of a kiln I might have an opportunity to put this to use. As it is, this is sizing up to be a plot to make me part with money on something lame. Like a new lock sensor or some horseshit.

*sigh*

I'm going to bed.

Eat Me, Republicans

I started this post off in a much more restrained and civilized manner. I did. But it was wrong. It set the wrong tone; communicated the wrong message. So. Let me try again.

FUCK YOU, REPUBLICANS. FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! I wish your mothers had, collectively, ABORTED your worthless fucking dick waving fucktard asses when they had the chance. The best part of you dried to the sheets on the unholy day of your conceptions. Fuckwit asshole fucks.

Last summer, I wrote at some length about Ledbetter v. Goodyear, in which the Supreme Court decided that in cases of pay discrimination under Title VII , a woman had 180 days from the day that discrimination took place (read: the first time someone screwed her over), not 180 days from the time she discovered the discrimination (read: when she realized she had an uninvited cock in her ass). Basically, continuing to underpay someone on the basis of their unfortunate vagina does not constitute a continuing intent to discriminate. I don't know what DOES, exactly, they don't get into that...because it's BULLSHIT.

Well, some members of Congress were paying attention. They realized that, well, that was NOT how Title VII was expected to work. That, as a matter of fact, using that method pretty much guaranteed that Title VII wouldn't work at all. Instead, they introduced the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was intended to return the act to the reading that had long been embraced by juries and courts, that is, that each paycheck constituted a NEW incident of intent to discriminate. Basically, the clock doesn't start ticking until 180 days after the asshole employer stops screwing his unwitting employee.

Well, the bill made it out of the House. It arrived in the Senate, where it died on the vine. Under threat of veto (big fucking shocker there) 41 Republicans, plus Harry Reid for some procedural reason that I don't understand but whatever, decided not to vote for cloture--thus preventing a vote and leaving the bill to languish ad infinitum.

Among the reasons for this asinine act is the Republican's altruistic urge to protect women from the grasping claws of trial lawyers. Tell you what, guys. You continue to protect the interests of religious wackos and the filthy rich, and I'll mind my own self-interest, 'kay? 'Kay. More info with fewer profanities here.

So, here's to you, Republican Senators, for making a mockery of justice and equality. Hell? I hear it's warm, and hard to get ice for champagne.

And, just so you know, Fucking McCain didn't vote--which is the same as voting against cloture and for killing the bill. I'm sure there are those among you who might be considering voting for McCain. That's fine and all, it's a free country. But please, for the love of god, don't fucking talk to me about it. Me and my vagina are SUPER pissed off right now and will take it very, very personally.

Quality of Life, CHFJ Style

Today we had yet another meeting at Corporate Happy Fun Job. I don't know why it still surprises me the sheer number of meetings that occur there and the subset of those to which my attendance is compulsory. It is abundantly clear that I have nothing to say that anyone wants to hear; a feeling which is, I must admit, mutual. Frankly, there isn't anything that they have to communicate which can't be done in writing, although admittedly the vast majority of e-mails are deleted unread.

I recommend a handout. If someone has gone to the trouble of collating, I'm going to at least give it a peek.

Anyway, this was to be a quick meeting about overtime and phone time, that is, the time we spend waiting for people to call from around the nation so that we can either tell them lies in a vain effort to appease them OR marvel at the mind-blowing stupidity of Americans. Since I'm actively cultivating indifference towards every aspect of my job that doesn't actually involve the part where I'm getting paid, I care little about the substance of the meeting--less because I had a pretty good idea what it was about.

So, we're all sitting around, and our supervisor comes in. Without excessive ado, she announces that because we work for a family-oriented company, and because her and the other middle-management goobers are worried about our "quality of life," they want us to cut back on overtime and don't want us to work any extra hours without their approval.

*blink*

I feel like I made real progress in my quest to behave appropriately in the corporate hive because I didn't actually snicker out loud. Puh-fucking-leez. These people would pimp my mother and sell my children into a sweatshop if they could make a buck doing so. It was a statement so utterly farcical on the face of it that I am astounded that she was able to suppress her laughter while she made it. Further undermining my already threadbare credulity is the not-uncommonly known fact that we've already blown through the overtime budget for the year.

Poor fucking planning, yo.

You know the weirdest part, though? Someone in the meeting actually kind of bought it.

*sigh*

On The Mortgage Crisis

So, I know I promised a full accounting of Floorpocalypse 2008*, but I'm still too close to the crisis to talk about it. If you don't like the way we run things around you, I encourage you to bitch about me on your own blogs. Or message me to complain...I look forward to ignoring you

Instead, I think I'm going to talk about something else that continues to annoy the holy living fuck out of me, the "mortgage crisis." I do reserve the right to veer at any time into more generalized bitching about people being fucktards, but let's just see where we wind up, 'kay? 'Kay.

Because you're reading this, I'm assuming you haven't recently woken from a coma. That being the case, I'm sure you're aware that the housing market in this country is well and truly fucked. Every day brings more and more bad news. Real estate was long considered one of the surest, safest places to invest one's money. I suppose this can be adequately explained by the intrinsic scarcity of land combined with the fact the folks need places to live and store their accretions of crap. Whether it's a rental or a ranch house, a home of some kind is a pretty fucking basic necessity. So what happened?

Stupid happened. In a big and important way.

Lots of people like to blame low interest rates; I can't imagine a parallel universe in which I cared any less, really, about the policies of former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. I wouldn't want a job where I was somehow supposed to "steer" the US economy, as though such an absurd notion were even a remote possibility--might as well try to fucking test drive Greenland around the North Atlantic. I will weigh in on whether his fiscal policies were good or bad in my next life when I'm pursuing my PhD in economics. Or never. I like never, but I digress...

Bargain basement interest rates did, undoubtedly, contribute to the "housing bubble." When money is really cheap, it becomes possible to borrow more of it. Duh. The thing is, though, that's not what really caused the mortgage crisis, or even the housing bubble.

These things, you see, were actually caused by dummies who really, REALLY suck at math and really, REALLY excel at self-delusion.

Anyone who isn't storing his brains in a pouch duct-taped behind his scrotum (or in her vag...whatevs), should have looked at the housing market of the past few years and realized that was completely beyond the realm of possibility that houses were going to appreciate at, in some areas, double digit rates. Come. The fuck. On. The ONLY way your house should double in value in two years is if all the land to the West of you tumbles into the Pacific and you suddenly have beach frontage.

I'm not talking about a spectacular level of financial savvy, here. You don't need to read the financial trade rags to know that housing prices simply could not continue to gain the way they did in from, say, 2001 to 2005. You know why ANYONE can figure that out?

Because a shit-ton of borrowed money, even at a low interest rate, still winds up requiring a big damn monthly payment. Take the average salary in an area, divide by big damn monthly payment, and you have no one who can afford to live in a damn house. If people can't afford a home, they'll rent. Or move away. Housing prices get high enough, and no one will buy houses.

Which actually might have happened, if not for various "exotic" loan products and the dumb fucks who signed on the dotted lines.

Okay, quick PSA here. If someone asks you to sign something promising to repay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you don't understand what it says, DON'T for the love of god and all that is holy sign the damn thing. I'm not talking about all the legalese and whatnots, most mortgage paperwork is made entirely of equal amounts of nonsense and absolute shit. However, there are important bits. They have numbers on them. If the numbers don't make sense, or aren't what you thought you agreed to, or seem to have an unexpectedly large collection of zeros to the left of decimal, then walk away. Maybe shank a fucker with the pen on the way out.

Of course, people didn't do that. They were going to buy houses! Or refinance and put on a deck! A bigger kitchen! Designer Laser Vaginoplasty! As though the general idiocy of people running around off-leash isn't bad enough, banks jumped in to help them acquire absurdly overpriced houses that they could never hoped to afford using any sort of halfway normal loan product.

When finally even interest-only mortgages were not enough to help borrowers overreach to get into houses, banks came up with the so-called "pay-option" ARM products. The premise behind this loan is so stupid that I can hardly imagine the individual for whom it would be appropriate. Still thinking. Still nothing. Maybe people who are in their last year of residency to be a brain surgeon or a crotch redecorator and, as such, expect to realize a 500% jump in income in the next 6-12 months. Maybe.

Now, there are undoubtedly people out there who wound up with these loans who didn't ask for them, who didn't understand the, who didn't really want them. HOWEVER, these are also people who either willfully ignored the fact that the loan in question was substantially below market rates (as though they lived in a rarefied vacuum exempt from the machinations of market competition), or who didn't even bother finding out what a normal loan should have cost them. Whatever. Either way. Please report to the gonad irradiator so that my children never have to put up with your children.

Add to that people who knowingly lied on their loan applications, or allowed others to lie for them. Everybody goes on and on about stated and no-documentation loans and how awful they've turned out to be. Again, duh. If you have to LIE to get into a house, it probably doesn't bode well for you overall. These loans actually have legitimate uses, and if not used in the service of acquisitive morons they aren't necessarily bad. They are now, though, exceedingly difficult to get at all.

Yes, there were stupid loans and bad loan officers. There is plenty of blame to dole out to the loan companies and the banks and the dipshits who weren't paying attention as the lunatics took over the asylum.

Who, however, do I really blame?

I blame the people who didn't read their loan docs. The people who didn't ask a fucking question. The people who decided that somehow, someway, arithmetic just didn't count in their own special case. I blame the idiots who thought that $30,000 income = $300,000 house. Locally, I blame the morons who weren't going to be happy unless they had 4 bedrooms and 3 baths and brand new through and through. I blame the people who, pissing logic and reason the wind, made a series of incredibly stupid choices and who now, on the far side of it, don't even recognize their own culpability.

I have given this a lot of thought, more even then the average bear. I've concluded that a large proportion, possibly a majority, of people who are at risk of losing their homes actually DESERVE to lose them. Yep. You heard me right. Most people who are in this mess put themselves there, and did so either purposely or with so little actual thought as to border on the absurd.

As for whether or not to circumvent the actions of fate and try to save these morons from themselves, I'm somewhat torn. A small part of me does feel bad for the offspring of these unholy unions of greed and stupidity--these kids didn't ask to wind up losing their bedroom because Mom and Dad blow at math. A much larger part of me would like to see something keep things based only on self-interest--I would like my home to at least RETAIN its value (although in my area price gains were much more modest so the crash is not so keenly felt). I like my little 30-year fixed rate cottage, but I do hope to sell and move in the next few years.

That all said, though, I refer back to my earlier points regarding attempting to affect this economy, and to this article, which explains why some people would be foolish to pay their loans no matter what.

Now THAT, my friends, is what we call an unforeseen consequence.

*Credit The Boy for this well-turned phrase.

CarpetGeddon 2008

A full and detailed accounting of this entire catastrophe is to follow, complete with photos, but until then...two words.

Distressed urban.

Work with me, people

Note To Self

You know you're ready for spring when. . .

you walk by the shop window in the mall and see a pair of lovely pink wedges and your first instinct is to lick the glass.