Recently, I have been on the engagement from hell.  Okay, they are ALL engagements from hell, but this one is very special.  Not for the reasons specified below, but for many others.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is not why I bring you here today.  I want to alleviate all of your concerns about how safe your money is in our great, private institutions during these scary economic times.

You see, the majority of those with whom I work are in the banking and healthcare industry.  And we aren’t talking puny little people.  We are talking the biggies.  So when I tell you I am here to give you comfort, I can back it up.

In order for me to give you that comfort, as Jesus learned very quickly, parables are the best way to convey that information.  So below is a parable of my own.

“Oh ye, little lambs under the oppresive economic situation of the United States of America, come, sit under the tree of knowledge and share with me this story.  Listen, as I tell you the truth of what is going on around you; that the pharisees do NOT want you to know.

Though lowly commoner that I am, I find myself surrounded by bank executives, creating intelligence reports so that the economic decision makers that be can make better decisions for you and me.  And lo, I work hard for my currency that pays my landlord for my humble abode.

Upon delivering such ‘intelligent’ reports for said executives who are responsible for the safety of our money, I am returned armed with frustration from said executives.  These executives are frustrated, because these reports, which will save the economic lives of you and I, do not share the same report title sizing upon viewing.

Lo, diligently, I try to determine the cause of such a heinous complaint.  However, there is no issue to be found.  After communicating back and forth, after two weeks, the executives explain to me that it should be clear to me that we are discussing printing visibility, NOT viewing visibility.

After bleeding appropriately for my inability to read minds, I reviewed all pixel sizes for over an hour, and attempted to print out said reports to compare the psychotic noisings of bank executives.

Upon printing and within seconds of determining the problem, I found myself rolling on the floor, and could not stop.  I had immediately become possessed by a spirit, which could not be exhumed by myself; a spirit of laughter.  This spirit could only be removed from me by sharing the story with as many people as possible.

Therefore, I picked up the phone and called my other developers.

I explained to them that the executives were choosing to print the legal-sized report on letter paper, which is resizing the document when printing.  Doing so would of course, resize the title and all other information on the report.  Now, why would this be an issue?  Because the report is a legal-sized document.  And it is  quite visibly a legal-sized document when viewing it in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Now, you may ask me, oh commoner, how did you handle the expulsion of the laughter demon, and how did you handle the conveyance of such information back to the bank executives for such folly?  And how did the executives handle such an embarrassing oversight?

Well, the demon persists to this day.  I found that the demon is a part of my personality, and I rather like him.

I conveyed the information back to the client as nicely as I could, and tried not to sound like a complete asshole.

The client actually did not think they did anything wrong.  They blamed the tool, and didn’t understand that those were settings in Adobe Acrobat reader, and thought that we should somehow code into the report such that Acrobat reader prints it out a certain way. “

So I assure you, your money is completely safe in the hands of banking executives.  As long as you do not ask them to print out pdfs, or anything banal that requires an IQ of say, oh, 30.

And from that, I was dismissed from the project for being a poor developer (among other non-sensical mistakes on the client’s behalf that were, of course, my fault).  Of course, I was categorically mandated to work through every holiday we had, I was forced to cancel my vacation, and we worked 7×18 every day since Thanksgiving.  And from that, you can imagine that my resume is going to be updated this week while I am on vacation (think medical leave).

The last year and a half have been the hardest in my life.

Let me begin and bullet it for you. I’ll preface with the following. Some of you know I am bipolar. Many of you do not. Either way, I have been medicated for over 20 years now, and a year and a half ago, I exhausted all medication, as medication stops working for me about every 2 years.

So hear goes.

• Summer 2008: Attemped ECT: had no one to take me to sessions, so had to bail on that. No medications to assist me, so had to make it through.
• Started new job in August, but was still poorly medicated.
• Had to go on short-term disability in November.  Was hospitalized due to poorly-medicated status.  Started ECT in hospital.  Was released.  Friend took me to ECT, but required that I drive to her house and back.  I do not remember doing this, and it was not good.
• During ECT, my dog died 6 days before Christmas.
• After ECT, which was a disaster, I lost 10 months of memory, with the exception of disasterous events, like my dog dying.
• January; my step-father began the rapid descent into death by cancer.
• Stepped in, despite recovering from ECT and still no method of medication to assist.  My mother could not take care of herself, let alone take care of my stepfather.  I practically took over all duties to take care of him, with her assistance, barely.  24/7 care, which basically put me back in manic status.  I had to have my aunt fly in from Mexico to relieve me.
• After his death, it drove me back into the hospital.  We had to back to old-school medications, which cause MAJOR side effects with me, which are not bearable.  I was so sick that they could not care for me at the hospital and I had to be released.
• My mother went insane.  I had no recourse to care for myself.  I needed assistance (care) from my parents.  My mother kicked me out of her house, telling me that she and my father agreed that they both never wanted to see me or speak to me again.
• My mother continued to decline, pushing her friends farther and farther away from her.  She hit the bottle again, started to try to kill herself, and declined even further into her narcissistic personality disorder, which I have had to live with my whole life.
• I went back to work in April, but I had no concept of the products I had been working on.  I received no training, and was thrown into very complex consulting environments with no support and no skills.  I was working 14 hours a day, trying to handle my mother, and trying to handle the continued effort to find medication that worked.
• My medical bills were surmounting, and due to short term disability pay at 40%, I was broke.
• Due to trial and error with medication, my bills just for meds was costing me almost $1000 per month, with copays.
• At this point, I had to file bankruptcy due to the medical bills.
• The bankruptcy court, even with their budget, caused me to go in the hole over $800 per month because of my dog that I still had, since I traveled all the time.  I stopped eating because of the same.
• I finally had to give up my dog, the only thing I had left in the world that gave me any joy.
• My mother became so bad that my brother and I had to form a united front.  Her friends contacted me and told me that they could no longer assist her and would not communicate with her anymore.  None of us could handle the constant drunken calls all night long, the mean-spirited attacks, the begging and pleading, the clinginess, and the pill-popping, the lies and deceit, the lack of desire to get assistance despite constant advice, and the total self-centeredness which has been my mother my whole life.  The only thing that was lacking at this point was the beatings.  The emotional bashings started back up and my brother and I had started to distance ourselves at this point.
• At this point, my bankruptcy was supposed to be accepted and finalized, when the court dismissed it because they wanted to up the payment to $2000 per month, which would have put me in the hole by almost $1000 per month. 
• We waited 120 days to refile.
• I was in a horrible accident in North Carolina on the interstate where my car was hit three times and I was smashed around and slammed into the concrete barrier that divided the highway in the middle of nowhere while traveling between Charlotte and Raleigh between client sites.  I knew no one in the area.  I was okay, just bruised up and totally freaked out.
• I got totally fucked on a client engagement, and have had to work 80 hours a week or more, trying to fix something that an executive forced me into, with no recourse.
• I was put on a behavior improvement plan at work because I had to remove the statement “butt from a hole in the ground” from my vocabulary for internal discussions.  No one had even heard of a BIP before.  It’s the worst thing that can happen to you before termination.  It’s never-ending, and one mistake will cause immediate termination.  Interestingly, my performance review was very good.
• The day it was time to refile my bankruptcy, the IRS seized all of my assets, and I had no penny to access in my accounts.
• We refiled bankruptcy, and the IRS lifted the levy on my account.  They forgot to “check boxes”, however, and the levy wasn’t lifted.  To this day, I have no debit card that works, no lifted levy, and I am required to travel with no available bank account and a maxed out corporate amex card.
• My mother has gone over the deep end.  In a drunken stupor, she decided to tell my brother and I about her redo of her will, leaving every single asset she has to her sister.  We never expected anything anyway, regardless of her assets.  But we had to sit there and listen, over and over and over for hours to her in a drunken stupor go over it a hundred times.
• Oh, and did I forget that my dog, the one she stole years ago died in July, and it was so bad that my mother waited for rigormortis to set in, took pictures of the dog after she died, created a shrine, cut hair off the dog, and has changed her mind six different times about how she wants the ashes parted out for the dog and her ashes?  Last I heard, I am to part out my late dog (her dog’s) ashes in three parts, and my mother’s ashes in three parts, and mix the two into three equal parts.  One part goes to my brother, one part to me, and one to my aunt to take to fucking upstate New York to spread out god knows where.  Like I am so fucking going to do that.
• And this weekend, since my brother has finally woken up and smelled the coffee, which I did 20 years ago and told the family to go fuck themselves, I am going to go back him up and let him finally tell my mother to go fuck herself.  So that will be fun.  Did I tell you my aunt is in town?  The woman who doesn’t believe my mother abused the fuck out of us growing up?  The one that attempted to kill us with the shotgun while we hightailed it out the window and my brother drove us the fuck out of there?  That was just one night.

So, that’s the last year and a half of my life.  Of course, most of my life has been like that.  The last year and a half has just been the most eventful.  Most events in my life are that horrific, they just don’t come in so short a time period.  I usually get maybe two of those a year, with shitty spells in between, but not so shitty.

So there you go.  My mom is completely batshit crazy with shitloads of money, a dead husband, a shrine to a dog that she introduces to me every time I go over there as if I have never seen it before, and a daily update as to how the ashes are to be parted when she dies.

To give you a funny though, she tried to drown herself in her pool.  It’s five feet deep.  She told us, next time, she’s going to tie cement blocks to her feet.  It’s five fucking feet deep.  I did mention that, right?

Yeah, that’s right. I said it.

I am the proud nesting ground of one retarted, autistic and dumb mother-fucker female redbird.

Some stupid, over-testosteroned egotistical male redbird has decided that MY property is the best place to keep his harem of the “dumb blonde” female redbirds. I have three of them. I assume he is working on more, due to the typical boredom factor of about three months of most males.

This one particular dumbass, I mean, female redbird, has decided that she can get into my house. For six months, I have listened to this dumb mother-fucking stupid-ass bird peck at my window. Full head-on. At first, I worried that she would kill herself, so I would go in there and scare her away. As it continued, I just got pissed.

I put up blocks, cardboard boxes, scary shit; nothing deters this stupid fucking bird. My house looks like it has been boarded up with cardboard in the back. All she does is find another fucking window to peck at.

It starts at 5 a.m. and goes till about 9 p.m. I am now hoping that one last peck will take out her brain stem and that will be the end of it. It’s either that, or I go out and commit mass murder against three harem birds. God knows what the male would do to me should I do that.

I don’t own a gun; I guess I would have to resort to hand to hand combat. Because I can’t fly, and I am slow as molasses, she has the upper wing on me. But it’s MY fucking house, bitch. Maybe some poison on the glass? The bird CAN’T be smarter than me. Or can she?

Ideas on killing the mother-fucking retarted and autistic harem bird? All ideas welcomed.

In light of the fact that I have spent years and years and years celebrating Valentine’s day alone, consuming vast quantities of chocolate to compensate for the lack of sex in my life, I have decided to put together a proposition.

My proposition consists of exactly what I am looking for in a man. Okay, the MINIMAL qualities. Over the years, my list has grown quite short, much like my expectations out of life.

So, without further ado, here is my proposition to those men who fit the bill.

Single, well-employed, traveling female in search of anatomically-correct male counterpart who has the following qualities:

1. Can speak and write at a 9th grade level.
2. Can lift Sparklettes water from porch to kitchen.
3. Can say “uh huh” and “oh” and “wow” at appropriate times in conversation when not listening.
4. Is mildly employable.
5. Breathes air. Doesn’t have to breathe air well.
6. Can get out of bed by himself without a forklift. Crowbar is acceptable.
7. Does not wear women’s lingerie.
8. Does not fuck with my purple pens. These are sacred items.
9. Does not get manicures.
10. Does not fart ON me.

Is this too much to ask? Really?

Okay, I couldn’t compress it without losing half the screen, so upon Wayne’s recommendation, I uploaded it to youtube.

Again, I am the one with the christmas dress in many colors in striped pattern both horizontal and vertical and talking about tearing my dress.  Ah, skinny once upon a time.