Transition

As I sat at the railroad crossing, I examined each car of the slowly moving westbound freight train temporarily blocking my path. A few of the flatbed cars carried large spools of thick rusty colored wire. I wondered if these would be used to construct barb wired fences to keep people out (or in) or perhaps rebar in concrete to keep people up (or down).

The long train had nearly passed when another similar one chugged into view, moving eastbound. It too had several flat beds filled with the same twisted metal. An unnecessary transit, it appeared, and unnecessary transition from east to west, west to east.

I was sitting there in the rental car I had just picked up that morning. As Lindsey drove me to the rental facility to pick up my temporary wheels, I found her to be a pleasant, very thin (yet not painfully so, although almost) and professionally dressed young woman right down to her black leather dress ballet slippers (these joining Uggs and Crocs in an unholy trinity of comfortable yet supposedly fashionable adult female footwear).

Lindsey assured me that if there were any issues with the rental car, I could contact either her or her colleague in the office, whose name is Lindsey.

I drove off in my rented Jeep sport utility vehicle, a car that sports all the comfort and handling of a cargo van, but still manages to be only slightly less attractive. I need to use this rental until my next leased vehicle gets delivered to a local dealership.

The Chrysler 300 from my previous company needed to be dropped off at my old office. The new Chrysler 300 waiting for me from my old company remains in the parking lot at the dealership, as my lease had expired in February. Instead of that vehicle, I will be picking up a new Chrysler 300. My old and new companies use the same leasing service, but could not execute a transfer.

This is an example one of the “tools” I have been transitioning lately (and not too smoothly), getting a new computer up and running (accounting for a longer than usual gap in my blogging), selecting a new cell phone, new healthcare, passwords, accounts, systems, the list drags on and on.

Not to make excuses, but my blog went on an unexpected hiatus during this confluence of transitions. The emotional and physical toll of the past few weeks coupled with the fact that My Love has just made a huge transition of her own (legally speaking) really sapped the old creative juices as my brain shunted energy to emergency systems only.

Getting my home office in working order has been quite an ordeal, albeit a mostly pleasant one. I was on unpaid leave for a week ostensibly to take a vacation, but ended up working on these sorts of things mainly.

The home office is an attractive feature of my new employment, as I work from my apartment and travel the Midwest of the United States, managing the accounts and sales team in this territory. My last position was Global, and now I am Regional, so instead of traveling to Beijing / Singapore / London I now frequent Des Moines / Milwaukee / Detroit. Not as glamorous, perhaps, but I prefer the drive over the day long flights cramped in economy class seats.

My “Midwestern Region” consists of the Dakotas (both North and South), Kansas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. As my new boss stated during my travels with him and my “big boss” last week, I have “a lot of dirt to cover”. He made this statement at a college bar where we had landed to wait until dark to look at our lighting installations in the city. The next morning we were scheduled to meet with the company that uses our solid state lighting to create these fixtures. The local sales manager had driven us to a Panera Bread where we could comfortably sip coffee, nibble on bagels and use the free WiFi to do e-mail. My bosses where not happy with this program and the next thing I knew I was sitting around a table with a 5 gallon bucket of beer (literally, a big pail filled with Oberon Ale, my favorite seasonal brew that had just been launched a few days ago by the nearby Kalamazoo Brewing Company) where I stayed until sundown.

It was then I knew this new job was going to work out just fine.

Back to my vacation, I enjoyed the Easter holiday (the last of the holy trinity of gluttonous holidays with Thanksgiving and Christmas) simply because I was able to spend the extended three day weekend with my children.

I’m very happy that Easter has passed, it has always been my least favorite holiday. (My favorite holiday sighting this year was the billboard “Let Us Resurrect Your Fireplace” while I was driving though Milwaukee after an account call.)

I still recall with dread the Wednesday night Lenten services, for which we would have to get on our Sunday best and pile into our poorly heated and maintained automobile. My father would drive the half hour from our small town of a few thousand people to the big city of a few hundred thousand in South Dakota. These dreary weekly services would culminate in the somber week of Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday (I don’t know what that is either), Good Friday and finally sunrise service on Easter Sunday. We would get up painfully early to go to the first service, then hang around for the next one so my parents could sing in the choir for that one as well.

The whole church would pile into the grade school gymnasium for pancakes and hard boiled eggs. Service at the church being the primary social outlet for my parents, my father would busy himself flipping flapjacks while my mother joined the women serving the throng.

The cherry on top of this crap Sundae was the fact that my brothers and I would have to wait until everybody was finished to clean up the entire place. Folding up the tables, stacking the chairs, disposing of hundreds of sticky syrupy Styrofoam plates, all the while dreaming of getting home at some point to find the baskets hid by the Easter Bunny (this being a large rodent bearing chocolate bunnies so that children could eat his effigy along with yellow marshmallow juvenile chickens).

The only thing good about Easter to me is that it signals the start of spring. Ah the first day of spring, which reminds me of my last visit to the Post Office.

I decided to get a Post Office Box since my business cards would be printed using my home office address which in my case, of course, is my apartment. Equally to avoid the contact explanations I anticipated (yes, it is an apartment, yes, divorced actually) and to avoid angry customers showing up at my door late at night demanding a refund (this being merely an exaggeration on my part, but still a paranoia… you never know). Plus now I get to drive ten minutes to find out nobody has sent me anything useful.

This was my third attempt in as many visits (and weeks) to actually obtain a PO Box. The prevailing attitude seems to consist mostly of “What nefarious acts are you planning to commit that you are in need of the anonymity associated with this service, hmm?!”

It was a sunny day outside, which punctuated the gray dreary interior of the government office. My persistence was rewarded this time by getting a reasonable competent, if not compassionate (more importantly), clerk who not only seemed capable of the task but willing (more importantly) to do it.

As she “hunted-and-pecked” her way through the menus displayed on the archaic miniscule monochrome monitor (my father had a better display, for example, over twenty years ago on this first “portable” computer which was the size of a small suitcase and carried a full size keyboard along with an 8 inch floppy disk drive) a middle-aged, matronly mother grimly approached the counter to my immediate right.

She pulled out a neatly stuffed wedding invitation and asked how much, if at all, mailing this would require over the standard postage. Her dismay was evident as she recoiled at the $0.12 response curtly given after the off white heavy stock parcel was unceremoniously slapped onto the bare metal plate of the electronic scale.

“What are my options,” she inquired, “I need this to match the picture stamp I have already purchased”. (This picture stamp was a 41 cent custom job showing the engagement picture of the currently happy, most likely one day miserable, couple. Not that I’m bitter, it is just with a mother and in-law like this, the cards are not stacked in their favor).

The clerk, unsympathetically displayed the standard 12 cent stamps she would use to augment her pretty little picture.

“Ugh, is that all you have!”

It was.

“You expect me to but a big blue antelope on this envelope? This simply does not match at all, can’t you see that?”

The clerk could not.

At this point she sauntered over to assist my clerk who had run into problems with my application, leaving the comfortably dressed suburbanite to mutter over her misfortune to herself.

The woman finally decided she had quite enough of this insanity and declared to the assembled crowd, “These people are incompetent! I am going to the south town branch to conduct my business!”

She stormed off, and I noticed neither clerk in front of me even raised an eyebrow, they simply took no notice of her departure.

“Your customer left”, said one, finally.

“Yep. Too nice of a day to waste on somebody like that.”

I had to concur. Too nice of a life to waste on ugliness. Transition to sunshine.