During a day of unseasonable warmth, I rode the bike to work again. I got stuck in a polar vortex of doing things for the office at the junior high, which meant I started stacking up work orders from other people. I took a quick Taco Tuesday break with Dale, Zach, Gary, and Heather, and then ran home to get a helmet for Eaddie.
Near the end of the day, Ben sent us a pretty long email basically telling us that Brice was hired on a full four steps higher than any of us were allowed to hire on, which makes him one of the highest paid techs right out of the gate. I was bothered still by his start date a full week before he actually showed up. It didn’t make me much happier to see him sitting in the shop on his phone, but I couldn’t really blame him if he was just there to follow someone else around. I would have liked to see him trying to talk to someone instead though, since he’s got a lot of ground to cover regardless of how much he knows outside of our own policies and procedures. I certainly don’t remember being on my phone a lot during my third day on the job.
Demoralized, I left whatever I had going on to take Eaddie to karate. Summer and Autumn were at a quiz bowl event in Clarksville, so she and I got to ride the bike across town. I stopped by the shop to talk to Ben for a couple minutes, running into Ryan as I pulled in. Then I went to my parents’ house for dinner and to pick up some bánh bao. Zach called a couple times and we chatted about what we should do, and how we could possibly have a productive conversation without the lesser-intelligent bringing up irrelevant nonsense or flying off the handle. We didn’t have any great ideas.
Back home, I had lost power for most of the evening, so I took the opportunity to shuffle around some battery backups. It took me most of the night to fight through everything, and I guess I’m really no better for it.
Tell me again why I can’t be a part of that positive change.