employablog

Even prenatally we hear it. Though the shushing lub-dub of our mother’s pulse, dampened by fluid,

time is money.

Then we get our first job, at the ripe age of 14, we learn it first-hand. Literally watching a clock and equating it with minimum wage nickels and dimes. As a cashier at a suburban movie theater, time really was money. Through the window I had a perfect view of a digital clock tower atop a bank. Each minute was worth just over eight-and-a-half cents.

Once that mindset gels, it’s easy to plug anything in this time-money equation. This led me to drop-off service. In Brooklyn, it was cheap, and if you valued your time at anything more than $1, you were actually making imaginary money by doing laundry drop-off service. And that equation also lends itself well to checking up on credit card bills, aberrant phone charges and so on. If it’s worth a decent hourly wage, then the molasses minutes of hold music are worth it.

This is how I met TLG - Just For Me representative Judy Akansas, Judy Deepthroat, or Judy DeepSouth. Monikers aside, her first name was Judy, and the hamster running in her brain was plumb tuckered out.

Many moons ago, my credit card company, JP Chase sent me a check.  A tiny $9.someunevenamountofchange check. It came with no explanation, and looked … suspiciously, like a refund check.

Fasting forward (and breaking the fast, atoning and so forth) to today, TLG-Just For Me billed my for $59.95. Lord knows  who or what they are, how they found me, and why I owe them cashmoney. Anyhoo, the statement also had an 800 number. I nancy drewed that shit, and that brings us back to Judy McInbred. Eventually my words reached her (moneyback moneyback moneyback, how did you find me) reached her, ad I left happy, with all my faculties intact.

But just for kicks I did a search on TLG Just For Me to see what it is. I still have no idea, but I did find a ton of sites regarding the current lawsuits against them and JP Chase for credit card scams.

Que interessante, or French Toastes.

The moral is, I made $9.someunevenamountofchange in about 20 minutes. I still feel a little underpaid, but it won’t go in the regrets column in my permanent record, buried in a capsule ‘neeth the Geenpoint oil spill

I used to work in an office doing curriculum editing and development for a certain test preparation company, specifically for the MCAT.  The MCAT is the big daddy of all standardized admissions tests. It makes the SAT look like a summer breeze and the GRE look like your differently-abled neighbor.

It is the longest, it is the hardest, and golly, it’s the only one that actually tests science.

Anyhoo, I used to do all this stuff for it, and I used to have to do it in an office, an office located in Times Square, which, although it is in the best city in the world (New York) is just about the worst place in the world.

Unless you are an obese couple from Iowa, or a Japanese tourist. Then it’s a dream-cum-laude.

Anyways.

Now I set students straight. They contact me, and I tell them how it is via email, and I get paid for this. It is great, it is incredible, and it keeps my head full of all this stuff, some of which is pretty interesting. Don’t ever tell me the Krebs Cycle is lame. It is not. It’s awesome, and you love it. If you don’t, send me an email, and I’ll get paid to tell you why the Krebs Cycle rules.

So, as a teacher, I used to have to teach in person. It was no fun, I get anxiety, I turn red, I sweat, and so on. Though all this is on the inside. On the outside I look fine, a little awkward, but otherwise together. But I don’t want an ulcer. So, e-teaching is the way to go. Either way, all the teaching materials are online, and we have a monthly password to access them. My buddy T makes the password. I used to be able to walk down the hall and see him. Now he doesn’t even have a facebook picture, just a question mark, and so my only contact is a monthly email telling me the new password. And lately they’ve all been internal marketing codes. T’s creative flair gets overridden and I can feel him hurting a tiny, but unimportant bit.

I mean, he’s made such passwords as zamb0n1, during the winter! It seems like a lame way to get kicks. But after dozens of log-ons, every day of every week, something like zamb0n1 can make me smile more than a cryptic marketing code. We already work there, so marketing to the worker bees is well … subliminally … mean. Besides, there’s nothing funny about marketing codes — yet. But zamb0n1, that one’s still my favorite. Like a little Christmas present from T.

And now, I just got another little gift. No more marketing codes, just raw T.

But this password is current, so I can’t tell.

Best believe it’s a T classic.

Over the last few days in anatomy lab I’ve ventured into the bowels of … the bowel. Before starting dissection, I had happy notions that maybe they empty the cadavers our before we see them, maybe they stuff them with potpourri.

So not the case. My professor ambled over, reached his hands into our bodies abdomen and started poking around.

“Mhmm, mhmm,” he said, squinting his eyes, “Oh yes! This feels just like a live specimen! Seems you have a very light preservation.”

‘Light,’ here is a euphemism for “not.” We have something that should be preserved, but is not, so it is decaying.

He then went on, destroying my ideas of cleanliness.

“So, for you guys, under no means are you to open the colon. If you do, yknow, just yell ‘CODE BROWN,’ and I’ll run out the room.” He smiled and laughed, and walked away.

Since then, there have been a few silent code browns, and today, as I was doing my …

my business. It’s what I do after I finish my coffee, I noticed a familiar smell.

Dead poo smells just like real live poo.