a day in the life (a throwback)

so, normally SOMETHING will happen during the course of my day, and i’ll think to myself, “dude…this is SO going on the whore” or, as i tend to call it in my own mental slang (didn’t know i had some terms i keep only to myself, did you?) “this is getting ho-slapt” as in slapped onto this site. typically something will jump out at me during the day, and when it happens, i KNOW it’s getting ho-slapt. today, i kept getting false alarms…

so, i get to the office, and am figuring on a nice, slow, office bound day. then all of a sudden, i’m told i’m going to fiesta texas to deliver stock and fix a system…which i TRIED to trouble shoot yesterday via phone, but nobody would bother to return my calls, so i figured it wasn’t pressing, and that we’d just ship them the stock they asked for. now i was on the road again to sa…

the last time i had this feeling about the worthlessness of my tech-based presence in sa was when we switched carriers for our t1 line. i went down there, unplugged the line from the old carrier’s white box, plugged it into the new one (which was approximately four inches away and labeled with the new carriers logo), the light went green, and my boss buzzed my mobile to tell me all was well. it was as complicated as if you were to unplug your home phone from one jack and plug it into another one right next to it…so basically, it took five times as long to piss BEFORE i went into our sa comm center than it did to do the actual work. it’s what i refer to as microwave work shifts. i drove 162 miles round trip, took a total of almost four hours of my day, and worked for less than five seconds. same thing happened in corpus once, except it was over 300 miles (in a car they RENTED me, no less), about eight hours, and only SEVEN minutes of work. so the plan was to tell you about THOSE two instances, and talk about the injustices of having to go to sa today, and kill my afternoon for a couple of MINUTES worth of actual work…

but they had real problems. now, some of them were the fact that they had our system split between two BUILDINGS, in one case…but otherwise, it was real work. and it ended up being a good thing i went down. took a couple of hours on-site to make it all better. then i got to go to grady’s bbq for what i call the “countdown to naptime” platter (THREE meats, TWO sides, ONE pepsi)…only complaint? the macaroni and cheese was too runny…

damn near the whole day, and all i had to rant about was watery pasta. ain’t that a damn shame?

in the time i’ve been with my current job, we’ve done hippy jam fest shows for the likes of widepsread panic, string cheese incident, darkstar orchestra, and countless other grateful dead substitutes in the ever-growing, patchouli-reaking, ratty-looking, eight-hour-playing genre of nouveau hippy bullshit; and i’ve never had to work ANY of them.

until tonight. i had to work ratdog.

now, i knew going in that ratdog was different from the rest. it’s key draw? bob weir. guitarist and founding member of the grateful dead. it didn’t really hit me until i walked into the backstage area of la zona and saw all of bob’s anvil cases, which are still labeled with the “GRATEFUL DEAD” stencils from his main lifelong gig. and i saw the schedule, which is typical of this type of music…..

7:00 DOORS
8:00-9:30 RATDOG
9:30-10:00 INTERMISSION
10:00-11:30 RATDOG

“great”, i was thinking….”a bunch of smelly hippies, and more bullshit from the band and management than i’d EVER want to deal with” i had this whole, “FUCK THE GRATEFUL DEAD” rant planned. i thought to myself, “dude, this is gonna SUCK!!!”

but it didn’t.

the tour manager was cool as hell, the fans weren’t bad. hell, there were even quite a few attractive women there. don’t get me wrong, there was more than one person there who obviously hadn’t seen the business end of a bar of soap in QUITE some time. and a few who think “shampoo” is a musical. one guy even came up to the window when i went to grab pepsi and tried to “trade” for tickets. (i SO wish i had been there to see what he was gonna negotiate with…but he didn’t have some cute girl with him or anything, so how far do you think he’s have gotten? hemp jewelry, phish bootlegs, and b.o. that would make pepe le pew lose his libido will only get you so far) most of the speed stick fearing masses bought their tickets in advance, so i didn’t have to deal with them. i mainly dealt with their manager, chuck, who was pretty bad ass (and yes, chuck, i WILL be contacting you about how to get ahold of one of those shirts…remember i’m an XXL). even josh hung out, so i had someone i could make my running commentaries to; and when that happens, they leave my head and DON’T end up here.

so thank josh for that one.

i was telling him when we went to grab katz’s afterwards, “dude..that all went pretty well…NOW what am i going to write about?” i put in an eleven hour day between THREE cities (had stuff to take care of in san marcos, too) and all i have to show for it is the fact that i can’t find a decent second side at grady’s? i guess you DO have to suffer for art occasionally, huh? fucking macaroni…