Okay, I realize there are a few small holes to be filled in as far as what's been happening with me since I last posted about my job change, so here's another year's worth of happenings crammed into an overstuffed nutshell. I left the relative comfort of my night shift job (I was working for the best supervisor EVER, I was surrounded by good buddies who kept it fun, and I'm a night owl at heart) for the relative hell of a day shift job at the Annex. It may have looked good on paper, but boy, WAS I WRONG. I joined a crew made up of crotchety old codgers with a loon or two thrown in for good measure, working under the most horrid conditions for a supervisor who used to mess around with one of my fellow workers back in the day. Sounds like a dream job, huh? If you enjoy NIGHTMARES. I tried to make the best of it, but it took all my efforts to drag myself to work everyday. Needless to say, I found the only way to slog through this daily grind was to listen to my I-Pod non-stop for 8 hours a day and tune everything else out. I had worked at this facility several years before, but that was a day at the spa compared to THIS. During that foray, I only worked six hours a day, surrounded by the best crew ever. We had a fun bunch back then, and we cut up and joked around and virtually ate our way through the holidays. (Most crews brought snacks around Christmas, but our bunch brought goodies the entire month of December, and for ALL holidays, including Keith Richards' birthday. Hey... it's a holiday to some...)

This time around was sheer hell, I tell ya. Understaffed, overworked, and the air vents I had written a formal complaint about two years prior STILL HADN'T BEEN CLEANED. Instead of just being black and grimy looking, they now had growths hanging out of them that reminded me of that old B-movie classic "The Blob." The headaches, sinus infections and nosebleeds began again almost immediately, so I launched into another losing battle to get them cleaned, all to no avail. What is it with these people? They'd rather fight tooth and nail to keep from doing the right thing instead of just sucking it up. LITTERALLY. I mean, how freaking difficult is it to change the 28 air filters once a month instead of bi-annually, and then get a fork-lift and shop-vac the vents? Do you know what official response I was given to my formal complaint? Someone had to be TRAINED to clean the vents... RIGHT... And once they got them trained how to use a shop-vac, then they were going to teach them how to wipe the boogers out of their noses, I'm sure. Has anyone EVER heard such a ridiculous excuse before? Oh that's right... I work for the blithering idiots of the USPS, an organization that wrote the book on stupid. Lest anyone think I'm overreacting, let's just say that my 22 years of service make me an expert. There's a REASON the term "going postal" is now part of the American lexicon. Hmmm.... I've just figured out the title to the expose I'm going to write about my 22 years of federal hell. Look for it at a bookstore near you in the near future, after I've sufficiently zippoed all my work-related bridges...

Enough for tonight... I'm getting indigestion just THINKING about the place...