Cube Land Nightmare - Back in Secret Agent Land

I didn't think I had to take out my Secret Agent hat again, but I did. I dusted it off, punched it into shape, came out of retirement, and stepped into Cube Land, working as an undercover student in need of an hourly wage. The undercover student thing was for the job (nobody would employ me if I told them I had a doctorate degree. Yes, not even Trader Joe's) and the hourly wage was so I can support my two senile dogs, my one-eyed cat, and the generic cat whose generic, swaying belly sweeps the floor and is sucking me dry. I also have two NYC parking tickets I had chosen to ignore, acquired, by deception, back in December, of 2006. Makes me hate the city even more.

My task was to spy on employees. They gave me a cubicle at headquarters and a computer and I watched videos all day, hoping to catch someone doing the naughty or stealing company goods. To date, I had apprehended a hot dog thief, a peanut thief and a slim jim thief and a juvenile non employee in over-sized jeans stealing a can of beer in one of the many convenient stores owned by the company.

I settle into the all familiar Cube Land. This company's sound proof barrier was also malfunctioning. Cube Land is evil. With its inception, you now can pick your nose in private. But you get to listen in on and smell your co-workers' every move.

Oh, too loud Lucy across from you is eating onions today.
Sally I'm-about-to-breakup-with-my-man is peeling oranges.
Tom dying-to-get-a-promotion is having curry for lunch.

Thank god for ipods. Wish now they'd invent a smell diffuser. You can't fart into your seat anymore because the walls of Cube Land is designed to concentrate all aromas and odors upwards such that if you gather enough momentum, everyone would know that someone needs to go check his pants. Besides, conspiring against the cubicle owner, they now make cushion-less, ergonomic office chairs made of a plastic material that has a million unseen holes in it, allowing for easier diffusion of body smells.

So day in and day out, I silently trudge to my stall, turn on the computer and begin my spying, blasting my ipod until my eardrums visibly vibrate. In essence, I mind my own business and try to get my job done as quickly as possible.

Then it came time to train newbies, all essentially ten years younger and not pretending to be a college student. I am delighted to be talking to someone other than myself. I hadn't been in Cube Land that long to necessitate the invention of an imaginary friend. But given a couple of more weeks, I'd have made his acquaintance.

The first newby was a little on the shy side and probably petrified on the first day and didn't want to screw up the chance of earning $12/hr. The second newby I would call cocky. He already knew everything I was going to teach him before I even opened my mouth but probably only retained like 0.01% of what I said. However, he made for an interesting conversation and seriously, spying on other people is not rocket science. Apparently, the newbies were going to school for a degree in network security and probably google searched security jobs in the area and landed in Cube Land with me.

We got to talking about network security and how actually secure is a wireless network like the one millions of people have at home. Not actually, was his answer. And then we got to talking about how easy it is for some hacker to sit in front of your house for a couple of days and just "throw" your network these "packets" until it coughs up your password. From there, they can intercept every transaction, every password in your system. Holy cow! Then he got to talking about how he wanted to hack into his school's system just for the hell of it. I was told that this was ok for the school. As long as he disclosed his method, he wouldn't go to jail. That's not teaching responsibility, I said. Hacking into something for unlawful gain is unlawful. He said that it actually is responsible because the student learns that he mustn't hack stealthily, whatever the heck that means. He also said that it helps to improve the school's network security. I guess that is a novel way to think about it. He may even get extra credit.

Our interesting conversation is abruptly interrupted by the boss who storms by the cubicle looking nonplussed and reminds us that Cube Land exists. Like a nazi camp SS, he unshields his pistol and says that we are to only have conversations to do with slim jim and hot dog thieves or else we would loose our heads. Some one who does not have working ipods marched up to boss man and demanded that he discipline his troupes because we were merely watching videos and our lives were too unimportant to warrant some conversation other than slim jims and hot dogs.

Meanwhile, I hear conversations about "my daughter isn't talking to me anymore" and "that was the greatest movie" and "we should try this place for lunch". I guess the polite thing was to come over and say "hey, maybe you could pipe it down because none of us are interested in knowing about how you want to hack into your school's system" like normal adults. Instead, it had to be the sneaky, under handed way of telling the teacher by leaving an anonymous note. Like Osama sending out suicide bombers to die on his behalf. Pretty cowardly.

It had to be too loud Lucy in the corner who had commented on my onions the other day.
"Someone's eating onions," she said as she walked past my cubicle.
I apologized and chomped on.
"You might want to check the cubicle next to mine. They had two chairs there yesterday," she said to someone missing an office chair. She looks into my cubicle and is surprised to find the only chair there was was the one I was sitting on.
"Oh, it's not there anymore."

Again, instead of having a nice, human conversation, she assumes I am part of the furniture and moves on.

She probably is frustrated and hadn't had good sex in a while and wants to blame it on everyone but herself. And she probably is the type that just cannot mind her own business, which makes Cube Land perfectly suited for her.

So we talk about slim jim and hot dog thieves, except in a decibel louder than normal human conversation.

How I envy people who can go to work in their pajamas and play with poodles all day, can fart, eat onions and talk about whatever the hell it is they want without some pathetic people who have probably been in a cubicle in Cube Land for the majority of their working careers listening to and smelling the every move of their co workers.

To Osama & his sissy Al Qeida

In pursuit of a job so I can pay off my student loans and not live like a pauper, I had to go on a job hunt for a job that would start this July if all things go smoothly. This entails traveling on over crowded, budget airplanes to distant parts of the US that is far away from Arizona, eating budget airline food that consists of cheese sticks, slim jims and 100-calorie oreos stuffed in cute, 3 by 4 boxes, dining on the fine fair of Terminal Airport junk in its small variety of MacDonald's, Seattle Coffee and the countless, nameless bars that all look the same, enduring body smells and bratty children and paying $5 for week-old oranges. I proudly say that I can now pass through security with my eyes closed and despise every person who lay claim to the title "TSA agent", who have, on more than one occasion, "confiscated" my various cosmetics supplies and lotions for the sake of National Security and the War on Terror.

Inevitably, Osama and his sissy Al Qeida have stock piled on Aveeno face washes, 24 hour smooth-on body lotion, bottles of face tonic, bottles upon bottles of good drinking water and bottles upon more bottles of coca cola, swam knee deep in perfectly flourided Colgate toothpastes and frolicked in many tubes of mud masks. So now, they better look like a sissy version of their former selves and can stand next to Claudia Schiffer without smelling like a mountain goat and looking like a gorilla.

Since I refuse to support the small industry that has sprouted after a couple of numchucks in London saw it their duty to participate in a "Holy War" that calls for the maiming of innocents, an industry that profits on the helpless millions of travelers unprepared to part with their body lotions, foundation compacts and lipsticks and has now supplied Walmart and Target with millions of 4 oz pump bottles, miniature soaps and shampoos calling them "travel-sized", I thought it wise to disguise my Aveeno face wash with salicylic acid (or commonly known as aspirin) as "medicine" and squeezed it into the 4 oz ziploc bag that contained my over-the-counter steroid ointment and my over-the-counter nondescript, store brand saline contact lens solution. According to reputed sources, contact lens solution is considered "medicinal" along with heart medications, hemorrhoid cream, and antacids and can therefore be taken into the cabin. After all, I rationalized, aspirin is kind of a heart medication that gets prescribed to people with heart attacks, so what's the difference between that and hemorrhoid cream? On my last trip out to Cleveland, I had pretended that it was something I could not live without and that the trans-America flight would be certain death and a full face melt down if I was not allowed to carry my aspirin infused face wash with me.

The TSA agent (government stooge) didn't share the same view.

"The bottle is too big," she said.
I gave her the aspirin schpeal and dutifully pointed out the word "salicylic acid" on the bottle.
"This is something you can buy over-the-counter and is not medicine," she counters.
But my steroid cream and contact lens solution were bought over-the-counter! Even hemorrhoid cream can be purchased at the neighborhood convenience store, so what makes some over-the-counter things medicine and others not? Was it some arbitrary designation that some how now excluded my aspirin face wash, the almighty aspirin whose properties are all encompassing?

"If I or some other passenger were to be unfortunate enough to suffer a heart attack, we could drink the face wash," I said in a last ditch attempt to salvage the 3/4 full bottle that was slowly moving out of my reach and into the coffers of Osama and his gang.

The TSA agent looks at me.

"The only way you can take this with you is if you checked in your luggage, which would mean you have to leave security, go back down to the check in counter, and check in your luggage."

I gave her an evil eye as she takes the Aveeno and tosses it into a pile of other War on Terror objects. I hear Osama and his sissy gang gleefully laughing in their subterranean hideout. It is one up for them if they can usurp my way of life and deprive me, not only of the pleasure of seeing the World Trade Center live, but now, depriving me of my face wash with aspirin.

May they rot in hell.

Old Lang Sine

I've not been known to keep dates or deadlines in my head so I guess this farewell to the year past is a little past its due date. Like good wine or aged brandy, it only gets better when it is later, especially some 60 days after the fact. However, I celebrate Chinese New Year, which was just some weeks ago. So, I am not too far off.

My my how time flies. As I reflect on the year and all its accomplishments or non-accomplishments, I think of hot chocolate fudge cake and Roger Rabbit. There were bits that were so delectably enjoyable, like hot chocolate fudge cake, and some other bits that were too cartoon to be real life but happened like it was real life.

I guess the year started with my trip to London that I almost did not get to enter because of 1) crap battery life of Apple's lithium batteries, 2) my big gigantic mouth that can't help but spew forth before my brain can stop it, and 3) no compassion for fat people. I was punished duly because this has indirectly or directly (I have yet to tell and may never tell) cost me the friendship of, one of the few, true friends. I am now down to one true friend. And if I manage to jack this one up, I will probably be the saddest human being alive. No hot chocolate fudge cake.

I did get to visit Florence and took day trips to Rome and Venice, practice some of my Italian, which is limited to ordering food, and asking where is the bathroom. And of course, I am supposed to say I learned a little about UK style cardio thoracic surgery. Woo wee. (There is a thick layer of sarcasm here).

I came back to New York homeless because another "friend" who promised me a place to stay gave me the "I'm real sorry but" speech with short notice, ended up stranded at La Guardia on Valentine's Day because I was going to crawl back home to the warmth and love of the Arizona desert and also for some unmentionables I cannot write online. That gratification was delayed.

I shouldn't have called the woman 'fat' on the British Airways flight.

Miserable and feeling all sorry for myself, I entered my last several months of medical school with dolor, a little bit of rubor felt on my ego, and a tumor growing inside that grew up to be an utter dislike and abhorrence for little humans and their parents and New York City.

This was my introduction into Pediatrics at a Community Hospital in inner Brooklyn where parents bring in their kids to the ER for the common cold and a slight fever and where the kids, who have been to the ER 50 times in the past 3 months, are so terrified of the doctors and nurses that they piss in their pants because their mothers insist that their child is too ill to be sent home and demands an x-ray, IV fluids, IV antibiotics and a night's stay at Hotel De Wycoff at taxpayer's expense and no out of pocket costs. I had to strap the 5 year old down to the examining table while the PA set an IV catheter, meanwhile enduring the child screaming, "I'm better now! I'm not sick!" who has now soiled himself. For the child's sake, I say to the mother that we don't have to put the child through so much trauma and the woman gets mad at me and tells me to fuck off in her Hispanic, melodramatic, down in the Brooklyn hood attitude that blows me away. It is her opinion that her five years of motherhood gives her more medical knowledge then my 10 years of education. And we bend backwards for this woman because this is the way we do medicine.

So my punishment endures through half of the year and I am immensely glad to return to civility where no one lives on top of each other like a tin of sardines and children don't piss in their pants when they see their pediatricians because their pediatricians are treating the psychosis of their mothers.

Warm chocolate fudge cake.

I end the year in Georgia, playing Secret Agent at the CDC, learning how government agencies function, how we are actually paying people to study mold, air pollution and accidental death, how some of them end up with God complexes and think they are the world's solution to poverty, hunger and disease when they are convinced that reservation casinos do not make any money and that the solution to prevent narcotic deaths due to overdoses is to put out an all points bulletin in every ER for snoring, somnolent individuals . So much for smarts.

Roger Rabbit is in the sidelines cheering on the MDieties and PhDieties of the Government who want to institute guidelines and laws on how we should live our lives. (This means: no hunting because you can get accidentally shot and killed, no ATV riding because it can over turn on the sand dunes and kill you, no narcotics prescriptions because they would rather you suffer in pain than to die of an overdose, no coughing, no breathing, no cars, no factories...). No hot chocolate fudge cake.

In between, I took my last few doctor tests as a medical student. My second board exam, I thought, was a disaster. I planned and studied and when it came time to take it, I decided on a hare brained idea to rent a hotel room next to the test center so I can guarantee myself a good night's rest. Instead, I was up until midnight, tossing and turning, decided to go home to the comfort of my bed but didn't sleep until 3 am. By early afternoon the next day, when the adrenalin wore off, I was answering questions with the first thing that came into my head, which luckily for me, was not food. I surprised myself by doing better than the first test. I made Mitch open the results envelope and he was putting on a show and telling me that I had to retake the damn thing, which almost got him killed.

My last doctor test was a practicum. I actually had to pretend I was a doctor and see patients who were paid actors. Yes, it's like that episode of Seinfeld when Kramer had alcoholic cirrhosis or some STD. I remember a nice little old lady who was supposed to have uncontrolled diabetes and has developed neuropathy. In other words, her nerves were whacked up. I had to explain a test I wanted to run, which was an EMG. Being the sophisticated person that I am and always speaking before my brain has had a chance to process the garbage, I tried to spell out the acronym, except that I couldn't remember what it was. It started out with "electro" which was right and then I said "magnetic" for the 'M' and then couldn't figure out what goes with the 'G'. In fact, it wasn't electromagnetic anything! It was a nerve conduction study and I spent so much time trying to figure out what 'EMG' meant that the bell for time's up rang. I had to say to the little old lady that I can't remember what it means but the test was done to test her nerves, at which time, she smiled and almost laughed at me. Roger Rabbit in my brain.

I ended the year by doing another world wind tour of the US, going to different places for interviews (been to Cleveland THREE times) so that I can get a real job this summer. This is the in between time of after school and before you make the big bucks where my further education is being paid for by the American public.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I managed to graduate.

Now, in just three short days, I will have to offer up my list of most desired programs to be at where I will spend the next 3 years of my life. I'm insane, but it is looking like Cleveland may be it.

Don't forget to pause and click on the advertisements so I can support my Starbucks habit while I am in this "in between" space in my life, surrounded by dog pooping in the kennel and cleaning the pooped kennel and a tight feeding and excrement schedule, a minute deviation from which results in soilage I have to clean up. Every penny counts as I welcome in the new and exciting year.