Take another one on the chin, buddy.
I could start with January. I think I will. December had been about as good as I can remember in a long time. Cheery company. A full house. A good paying contract job. Friends and lover here to have a good time.
But that all changed with the new year. January came: everyone went back to their home town. My fabulous lady, who was becoming tired of her professional life on jet planes traveling from place to place, decided that she needed to get her own house in order and finally moved into that house she had been left when her mom passed. She had been toying with the idea of renting it out, or moving in. She chose moving in.
And fell in love with her house. Now living in my town is pretty expensive: it is one of the top travel destinations in the world. There was no way to buy a place here. So, I could understand her decision to stay in the pacific northwest, even with the abundance of cloudy, rainy weather and small town attitudes. When she was not flying, she could dig in and have her own home, yard, and that occasional deer snoozing in the back yard.
Mostly, though, she stopped calling. Stopped answering the phone. Not fun. Now here me good: I do not own this woman, nor feel she owes me a thing. We had great times, and a fabulous connection. I have no regrets on that number, and I do not think she does either. I have the best regard for her and wish her to enjoy life with total abandon. Abandoning me, just was not the kind of abandon I had in mind…
And, Oh yes, that great contracting job? Well it was a problem for the manager when I pointed out that the very expensive database she thought her team was using had no data in it: she had the name of it wrong, and it seems some other pretty fundamental information. It took a flurry of conference calls for her to get back on the right track. And only then did she find out that a major part of the data was going down the bit-bucket. Her boss was wondering why her project was over budget and way past her deadlines. That whole effort got cancelled just after Christmas – maybe it is why red is so, well ‘Christmassy’. It took three months for them to pay. They may think that I had something to do with the bugs from the New York vender. Even now, months later, the company is still trying to mop up after that disaster. But, had I kept quiet? Maybe I could have milked that cash cow for a month or two more…. Who knows? Still, no gig, no cash. no how!
The failure quote: “January: The Mother of All Failure”
The failure quote: “Failure goes with a well lived life. It’s just harder to enjoy than success.”
That was January. It got worse. Lots worse.
