Cat up your Ass

Before you think I have something against furry felines, I don't. I have two of them and their canine "sister" that all get away with murder. What a life my "kids" have. Sleep all day in a lovely air-conditioned/heated townhouse with no space off-limits, bowls full of high-end cat/dog food and fresh refrigerated water every single day. Never mind that they're constantly being petted, kissed, pampered and that "mama" brings home new toys almost every weekend.

'Nuff said.

The moral of the joke Cat up your Ass was meant to cure me of something I often do: hype myself up unnecessarily. I've grown to DETEST drama, yet remnants of my past are sometimes hard to let go of (40 years with a mother who LOVED and welcomed drama into her life and, thereby, mine).

I find myself often reading so much into something that I'll create this entire false reality before I know the slightest bit of what's really going on. Here's an example (out of thousands I could call upon). A few months ago I logged into Google at work. It didn't come up, kept failing. I rebooted, same thing. Then my password wasn't working to get onto the internet. But everyone else's was working fine. Uh-oh, they're on to me, I thought. Even though I spend no more than the average person does at work surfing the web, I was getting worried that they'd locked me out and that I would be on disciplinary action due to it. Did I have any evidence to support this? No. Then I saw my old boss walk by and I said hi and he didn't respond. S is sort of scatterbrained and easily could have not heard me but I decided he didn't say hi because he couldn't be nice to me knowing he'd have to talk with me about my internet usage. Then I worried that this could be technically a Code of Conduct violation and that I could be dismissed WITH cause over it. That would mean I wouldn't get severance or unemployment benefits and I could even lose my company-given long-term-incentive shares (enough to buy me a very nice, high end car!). I wondered if I should execute the shares. If you execute your shares, they're yours, period. If you leave them in the account, gaining interest (based on company profits by quarter - and they've been doing beautifully for years!), you also risk that if you're fired with cause, the company can take them away. Now, I work for a huge company - over 75,000 employees. I've only known one person to be fired with cause and she was under investigation for months - she'd been stealing from the company, logging into people's email accounts without the authority to do so and that was only the tip of the iceberg. Her sister works for the company too and was doing similar things but was never caught as red handed. To this day I call them the Grifter Sisters - they scared me in their brilliant ability to lie without flinching. I'm convinced they could easily beat a polygraph. Meryl Streep has nothing on the Grifter Sisters. Well, when the one sister was fired, even she got to keep her shares and apply for unemployment (no severance though). Like most companies, my company went above and beyond to cut its ties from her, without hammering her so hard (which would have been justified) that she felt compelled to find some ambulance-chasing shyster to sue the company for unlawful dismissal while making a dozen false accusations. Publicity like that can be awful for a company, whether it's later found to be true or not.

Even with that, I was scared witless. So here's the joke. Incidentally, the joke was originally in Spanish so I must tell you that in Spanish, the word for cat (gato) is the same word used for a car jack (also "gato"). Hopefully you'll get the joke:

A guy's car breaks down far from home. He inspects the car and notices his back tire has a puncture and pops open the trunk to change the tire. Just then he notices the jack ("gato" - cat in Spanish) is missing. So he leans on the car and thinks....hmmm....a friend of his lives about a mile down the road, maybe his friend has a jack (gato/cat) he could lend him to change the tire. It's hot and he's walking to his friend's house and the whole way he's thinking, Man, this guy's the least helpful of my friends, he doesn't lend anything to anyone, he's distrusting and selfish - last summer I gave him free tickets to the World Series and I helped him build his deck. I know he's not going to lend me the jack (gato/cat) - he's going to make some bullshit excuse that he doesn't have it. I'm going to snap if he doesn't, after all I've done for him.

So he gets to the guy's house, rings the door bell and when his friend answers he says "listen, you can take that "cat" and shove it up your ass," turns around and returns to his car, leaving his friend flabbergasted and standing on the doorstep with his jaw still agape.

I think of that story when my mind goes racing and I conjure up an entire crazy dramatic tale of woe of something bad to come when I have no real evidence to believe that. Most times, that won't happen at all. My friend V used to say to me, "You must think a lot of yourself that you think in a company with tens of thousands of employees that the president is actually spending his day thinking about ways to fire you." Then we'd laugh ourselves silly and that would always snap me out of it.

No, I'm not the center of the universe and most people don't go out of their way to think of ways to rain on my parade.