Zel-kun’s Words

It amazes me that the more populated the area, the less people seem to notice each other.  In the country, people will stop and wave to you, even engage in conversation.  It doesn’t matter that you’re a stranger, you’re another human being.

In the suburban areas, that’s less true.  Sometimes your neighbors might wave or engage in polite conversation, but nothing so much as waving or conversing with strangers.  If they see your vehicle disabled or you’re in some type of trouble, they will help, however.  People have offered me rides to the gas station when my car broke down, and have helped me push my car when I’ve foolishly ran out of gas.

In the city, there is little contact with your neighbors (if I’m lucky, I can get a good morning), and absolutely no contact with strangers.  People isolate and distance themselves in public.  There’s no eye contact, and speech is avoided if possible.  I originally attributed this to my living in a Mexican neighborhood, but the same is true in the other neighborhoods I’ve noticed.

It’s sad, but maybe it’s a necessary defense mechanism against beggars and con-men.  Admittedly, I had to develop this same defense.  When I first went to the city, I gave change to a beggar and told him I didn’t have any money if I didn’t.  That just invites further conversation and confrontation.

“No money at all?  Just some change?  Maybe a dollar?  I have to feed my kids.”  They’ll go on and on.  I feel sorry for the homeless, but you can find something besides begging to do.  There’s a morning show in Chicago which has repeatedly tried to find homeless people jobs.  Each time, the homeless people would be excited, and listeners of the show would call in offering them jobs and temporary shelter.

So far, no one has actually stepped up and TAKEN the job.

So make of that what you will.

So when this morning, I stopped to gas up my car, I saw a man pushing his car into the station.  He had apparently ran out of gas, and was pushing it with one arm and steering with the other.  From experience, this is the world’s most difficult task.  It is made more difficult by the fact that the station is up a small incline.

My first instinct was to avoid the situation altogether.  But then I saw a few men on the corner looking at this poor guy trying to push his car in.  I saw him push the car a few inches, and the car would roll back.  He needed help, so I overcame that little ‘defense mechanism’ and ran over to him.  It only took a minute of my time to get behind the car and push it up the incline to the pump.

So a moment out of my busy day was enough to make someone else’s just a little better.

I remember when I broke down on the tollway (my fuel pump was dying), I was far from home, at least an hour to any friends or family, and it was 9:00 at night.  I didn’t have a cell phone, and spent about half an hour or so backtracking and climbing a steep hill to the tollbooth office.  No one there was the least bit willing to help me, they wouldn’t even tell me where the nearest payphone was.  After another twenty minutes of stumbling around in the dark, I found a payphone on the road.  I called my brother, and went back to my car.

I stood by my vehicle for over an hour with the emergency lights on, and even though hundreds of cars passed, not a single one stopped.

We tend to avoid people in need because we feel that someone else is bound to help.  It’s called social diffusion.  Everyone thinks someone else will help to the point where no one does.  I write this with the hope that next time you see someone in need of help, drive by a broken-down auto on the road, maybe you’ll take a few moments to help.

Because if you don’t, there’s a good chance no one will.

Zel-kun out.

The snow finally had a chance to melt today.  For two weeks, we’ve had single-digit temps with snow and more snow.  It’s still overcast, though, Chicago doesn’t really see the sun this time of year.  As a co-worker who recently moved to here said, “This place is so depressing, don’t you EVER see the sun?”

Sure we do.  In Summer.

When the snow melted, I was able to see a white cross planted into the hill of an offramp, symbolizing that someone had lost their life on that spot.  Whether through their fault, or someone elses, that wooden cross stands there to remind all who pass that someone has died.

I cleared my thoughts and bowed my head a moment.  I may not have known who died, but I felt it was something I should do all the same.  Life and death, heaven and hell, I don’t presume to know what happens outside this mortal world.  But here on Earth, the only thing we have for certain in death is memory.  The least I could do was spare a moment to honor whomever that cross belongs to.

On that note, a few years ago, there was a cross on the side of the tollway I would pass everytime I travelled to Illinois, back when I lived in Indiana.  I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought, I do a lot more thinking now than I used to.  That says a lot being I was never a slouch in the ’sit and think about random things’ department.  Then one time, as I travelled by, I saw skidmarks leading up to the grass, and mud tracks that went right over the now shattered cross.  The tracks showed the vehicle swerved in time to miss the overpass and land back on the road.  Whether the driver was drunk or road conditions were bad that night, I guess I’ll never know.

Seeing that shattered cross was one of the more morose moments in memory.

Zel-kun out.

I’m not sure why, but as I was stuck in traffic today, I started humming the theme to ‘Inspector Gadget.’  Admittedly, it’s pretty catchy.

Do do do do do, Inspector Gadget, do do do do do, whoo hoo.

Not exactly complicated lyrics, but I heard it enough as a kid, being one of my favorite cartoons.  I used to get a kick out of all the different devices he had grafted onto him.  Every time I watched, I kept hoping he’d actually do something right for a change.  But sadly, that day never happened.

After realizing I was humming the theme song, I drifted off into analyzing the series.  The world of Inspector Gadget is frightening and confusing if you think about it.

You have this famous inspector.  He’s obviously well-respected and has gone far in the police force.  As we see in the show, however, he’s completely helpless.  It’s amazing he gets out of bed in the morning, really.  Sure, his niece actually solves the crimes for him, but consider this…

How did he even GET into the police force in the first place.  He would have flunked out of the academy… if he managed to pass the entrance exam at all.

Logically, since his niece is too young to have helped him through the academy, and since it’s highly unlikely he had someone else helping him, we can theorize that at one time, Inspector Gadget must have been a competent person.

So sometime before the start of the show, Gadget must have lost his competency.  Either he had some sort of stroke, aneurysm, or other type of brain-effecting event.  Since all of the aforementioned events would have led to his dismissal from the force, I conclude that it was the operation that gave Gadget his gadgets.  Whether Gadget volunteered, or an event similar to the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ happened, there’s no way of knowing.  But one thing is for sure, afterwards, he was not the same Gadget he was.

So now, we have an incompetent, air-headed, clumsy, and generally idiotic enforcer of the law, complete with a built-in arsenal, which he has little control over.  Throughout the show, he accidentally cuts, zaps, burns, electrocutes, and crushes people randomly through the misuse of his gadgets (I remember when he tried to use his ‘Gadget Pen’ and ended up shooting a laser).  In any normal world, he would have been decommissioned, and likely been forced to undergo an operation to remove the gadgets from him.

Instead, you have Penny, his precocious niece who used her computer book (more fantastical then than it is now) to ‘help’ her uncle solve crimes and take all the credit.  This allows Gadget to keep his important position, and continue to put many innocent people at risk.

He is truly a dangerous individual.

I’m suddenly reminded of an episode of ‘Robot Chicken’ which demonstrated what would happen if Gadget went completely insane.  It was pretty funny to see him trying to massacre Penny.  But it is bound to happen, he will snap.

Zel-kun out.

As is my routine when I’m getting ready to leave work, I checked the traffic report.  Within seconds, I have a traffic map of the region in front of me.  The entire length of the trip is shown in bright red, indicating severely congested traffic.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the traffic that bad.  So, instead of spending an eternity in a vehicle, I have decided to wait it out a bit, hopefully it’ll thin out soon.

The traffic has been spastic as of late, with a two-hour commute in the other day, with only a 40-minute trip out.  It’s not snowing or raining, nor are there any accidents reported on the road.  It’s as though everyone collectively decided they were going to clog up the freeway.  It doesn’t make sense.

Spent the day fixing old out-of-warantee laptops.  No one wants to touch them, but we’re running out of the old models, and the budget won’t allow for upgrading them, so we need to stretch the stock of this model as long as we can.  Fortunately, I’m not afraid to tear a laptop apart in hopes of fixing it.

There’s a large stack of them next to me I’ve been working on all day.  Most of them are user damage.  People spill coffee on them, pop keys off the keyboards, smash the screens, and even run them over with their cars.  So I’ve been taking the still usable parts of these laptops, and consolodating them into working models.

It’s like Frankenstein, in a way.  Which, in case you didn’t know, is pronounced ‘frahnk en steen.’

Zel-kun out.

It took me over two hours to get to work today.  Not entirely sure why traffic was so bad.  There was only a little snow, and no accidents.  My co-workers had the same trouble, milling into the office about an hour late.

The south side of Chicago is surprisingly barren during winter mornings.  There’s no one on the streets, no kids in the schoolyard, just the sound of wind and the whirl of snow.  It’s not so bad by my apartment, it’s a relatively active area.

But when I start heading down the road, it gets worse.  I stop at a light about five or six blocks from home, and see a boarded up chinese restaraunt to my left.  The sign above the door was broken, about half of it missing.  The sign hanging from the wall is in better shape, its lights and plastic practically untouched by the elements.  I think that made it even more desolate, the pristine sign.

I imagine a Chinese family, full of hope, and wanting to open a successful restaraunt in Chicago, along a main road.  The location is good and the building was nice back in its prime.  They open up and wait for the customers to roll in.  They wait, and wait, and wait.  They cut their prices, hold promotions, and nothing.  Eventually, their hopes dashed and their spirits broken, they close.  I picture them standing in front of their former place of business, giving that pristine sign a last look before leaving.

To my right is a building that may have been a factory at one time, all the windows covered in plywood.  There was a time when America made a lot of their own goods, a time when you looked at the bottom of an item and maybe, just maybe, you’d see ‘made in U.S.A’ imprinted on it.

One by one, factories close, their jobs shipped overseas.  Suddenly thousands of people are left without jobs.  I remember when I would talk to new Wal-Mart employees, and most of them were from mills and factories that have closed.  The world has moved on without them.  America has moved from factories to corporations, for better or for worse.

Maybe in a hundred years all the old darelict factories will be refurbished into offices, and those old dead areas will be allowed to thrive again.  Each one of those closed and dead buildings represents broken lives, each one with its own story.

Zel-kun out.

The outskirts of Oklahoma City were very similar to the outskirts of Chicago.  The roads were set in the same way, the buildings had the same architecture, it had the same feeling.  At the same time, however, it was so… clean.  The walls were free of graffiti, the roads were smooth, even the paint seemed brighter.  You could tell you weren’t in the best part of town, but it sure didn’t look like it.

My first visit on this trip was supposed to be a site in Tulsa, a hundred miles northeast of Oklahoma City, which was where I landed.  In the morning, I was informed I would need to drive to Oklahoma City, but I didn’t have my laptop, as it was supposed to be shipped to my hotel room that afternoon.  This meant I had to first pick it up from the UPS facility in Owasso, about ten miles northeast of Tulsa.  The trip was looking up.

That afternoon, I arrived in Oklahoma City, it was a little cold, but nothing compared to the temperature in Chicago.  It was about forty degrees, which was nothing for Wintertime up north.  I passed the jobsite half a dozen times before I finally found it, pulling up to the tiny black speaker, which was the only sign that this place might just be where I’m trying to go.  The building was short and unmarked, surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence, it looked like a military compound.

After checking my credentials, I was led into the compound, where I began to work.  My job was pretty straightforward for the most part, to take asset inventory in the location and import the data into a new inventory system.  There were different nuances, but that was the basic routine.  The room I worked in was large, spacious, and cooled to the point where I could occasionally see my breath.  The room was divided into aisles with towering cabinets housing the equipment, each one seven feet tall.  It was easy to lose yourself in the aisles, with nothing marking your location other than a letter or two at the top of each cabinet.

At the very front of the room was a door and two windows.  The door led into the control room, where the operators sat and monitored the performance of the site.  The windows were so the operators could see into the room.  I spent three days in that room, entering one piece of equipment after the other into the database, occasionally taking breaks to show one of the operators how to use the new system.  The job had its tedious moments, but being in a different location somehow made it seem more exciting.

On the third day, as I was nearing the end of the last aisle, I opened a cabinet to see it full of unfamiliar equipment with no serial numbers visible.  I check through my entire book that shows the numbers for models with no visible model numbers, and there’s nothing there.  I call my project manager and begin describing the equipment.  He tells me to wait.

So I wait.

Half an hour later he calls back to tell me how I’m to input these new devices into the database.  It is slow and tedious, with it being nearly ten in the evening by the time I’m done.  As I’m finishing, the lights go out.  I’m standing there in the dark, surrounded by millions upon millions of dollars of equipment.  I carefully pack up in the dim glow of the machines, and make my way to the control room.

The control room is dark and empty, everyone had gone home.  I flip the lights on and call out, “Anyone here?”  After a few moments, I realize that I have, in fact, been left here alone.

Great.

I call my project manager, who is probably upset that he’s still working, and I tell him that I’m alone.

“Alone… what do you mean?”

“Well, they all left.  There’s no one here, the lights are off.”

There’s silence on the other end.  In hindsight, this scenario happened pretty often on my trip, me being able to render my poor project manager speechless.  “Don’t move, those places have some tight security systems.”

“I’m in the control room now,” I respond.

“Good, don’t move, I’m going to try to get in touch with some people.”

Sure enough, he can’t get in touch with anyone, being ten in the evening, and calls me back, “I’m not sure what to do, you can’t leave, if you set off that security system, we’ll all be in a lot of trouble.”

Just then, the door to the outer hallway opens and in walks a young kid, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and grabs the trash.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have never in my entire life been so happy to see a janitor.  I catch him and ask him to let me out of the building.  He complies, and relate the news to my very relieved project manager.  A few minutes later, I’m standing in the cool night air of Oklahoma City.

I take a deep breath, grab my things, and walk to my car… on the other side of a giant, electronically locked, barbed wire fence.  I lean against the wall, shaking my head.  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.  I kept thinking that any minute, a cop was going to drive by and see me meandering around this secure area.  He’ll see my out-of-state license, and complete lack of credentials for the place in which I stand, and he’ll throw me in the back of his car.

Luckily, that never happened.  But I did have to stand out in the cold for another hour or so until the janitor finished his shift.  He let me out, and I was finally able to leave Oklahoma City.  But I chose to go back to my hotel room and sleep first.

Zel-kun out.

Junior Year…  I guess I could say this was a year of transition for me.  During the summer, I had spent my time renting anime from the local Blockbuster, and watching it on the VCR.  It was grainy and there was the occasional line of static, but VHS was still predominent, and that’s what I had in my bedroom.  My stepdad had a DVD player, probably cost him a few hundred dollars, but he always liked having the latest technology.

There was nothing really special on the academic front, I basically floated through my classes without any real effort.  I could usually get away with listening while I read a book, and then pass the test.  Some classes I actually had to write notes, and some had teachers that weren’t boring, but for the most part, it was a haze.

I had biology, which was fun.  I had a teacher that knew everything you ever needed to know about biology.  The class started with cellular structure, and worked its way up from there.  Eventually, we were dissecting things big and small.  It wasn’t my favorite thing to do, but at least it made time fly when we were cutting up little creatures.  I ended up always making a little extra money selling extra pairs of latex gloves for a dollar a piece.  The teacher didn’t need gloves, he’d always reach right down into whatever dead animal was before him without any hesitation.  I’ve seen him rip the exoskeleton right off of a crawfish with his bare hands.

Finally, it was time to dissect a rat.  It was disgusting even before we cut it open.  Coarse yellow hair, giant teeth, and a long tail.  Then cutting it open released an unearthly stench that probably shaved a few years off my life.  One of the things we had to do was measure the small intestine.  I’m not sure if you ever seen a rat’s small intestine, but it’s not pretty.  Slowly I severed the tissue binding it together, handing the other end to my lab partner.  We finally have it inravelled, when her grip on the tweezers slip.

Interesting thing about a stretched out small intestine… it’s like a long disgusting rubber band.  And when one person lets go of their end, the other person has less than a second to see an intestinal whip zooming towards their face.  So, yes, I was smacked in the face with a rat’s small intestine, leaving a spray of the fetid digestive leavings within.  It was by some miracle that I didn’t throw up all over the place.

I signed up to be an Ambassador, which is a fancy word for ‘guy who sits near the front door and tells visitors where to go.’  It took place of my study hall last hour of the day, and usually meant I could sneak out a few minutes early.  On top of that,I was completely unsupervised so if I nodded off while reading, no one noticed.  Not many people visited during the last hour of school, so it wasn’t very busy.

Not long after I started, another student signed up to be an Ambassador.  I had a partner.

Enter Craig.

From the start, Craig was not shy in the least.  He sat down and began talking right off.  I found out quickly that we both played the same games and were both fans of anime, which, even though the Pokemon craze was beginning to kick into full gear, wasn’t all that common.

Craig was the first ‘cool’ friend I ever had.  He dressed in the coolest clothes, he had that ‘I don’t care’ attitude, and he was unfailingly friendly.  Needless to say, last hour became a lot of fun.  Craig was also the friend present during the bowling alley incident mentioned in the earlier chapter ‘Psycho.’ 

He never did let me live that down.

Well, I happen to know that they need to make their job offers on Friday, so now it’s a period of waiting.  They said they’d like to make me an offer, so I’m hoping that goes over well.  But until I have it on paper before me, I just sit here wondering what’s going to happen.

I watched that new show on the Discovery Channel, Smash Lab, which seems to be a show trying to be another Mythbusters.  The basis of the show is that they take an existing piece of technology, and try to utilize it in a new way.  Last night, they wanted to see if the special type of soft concrete at the end of airport runways, used to stop planes, could be used to prevent auto crashes on the highway.

Not a bad idea.  In fact, the layout of the show (question, idea for build, build, test) is nearly identical to that of Mythbusters.  And in the end, some nice crashes.  The show failed with the stars, however.  The four people didn’t seem to have a whole lot of chemistry or charisma.  Watching these people on camera was like watching people at work, not real exciting.  It is their first show, so maybe they’ll improve.  Maybe by the end of the season it’ll end up being a nice show to follow Mythbusters.

Zel-kun out.

I have a job interview today.  It’s for a position here at the company, which would have me transition from outside contractor to official employee.  It would mean a bit more responsibility, a lot more money, and days off and vacation time.  It would be a large step in my career, and it would mean different members of my family will finally stop asking the question, “Have you heard anything about a permanent position?”

I’m pretty confident in my abilities, and I’m on friendly terms with the people about to interview me, but I can’t help but feel nervous.  I was actually less nervous the first time I interviewed for the contract, back when I was still recoiling from the fiasco with my last job.  I really didn’t expect to get the position, so I wasn’t nervous.  Not being nervous, I nailed the interview and here I am.

Ironic, really.

Only 5 hours left until the judgement.

Zel-kun out.

As I mentioned yesterday, Zai was sick.  As such, I relieved her of cooking duties and picked up dinner on the way home.  It was snowing outside, turning my usual commute into nearly two-hours.  But my bosses understand my commute and generally let me leave early when weather turns sour.  So I’m still able to arrive at home around the normal time.

I stopped at Subway, where this Indian guy and hispanic girl always worked, I was becoming something of a regular to them.  I only go there once every couple of weeks or so, but it’s remarkably easy to become a regular when you’re friendly and actually talk to the people who serve you food.  And I will say that they make the best sandwiches out of all the Subways I’ve visited.

I asked for a sandwich I’ve never had before, and asked it to be prepared just like the picture, which ended in us both looking at the picture and guessing what toppings and condiments were on it.

As watched her prepare my sandwich, as was the norm, a group of police officers filed in and began ordering their sandwiches.  They too were polite and courteous to the people behind the counter.  In fact, the hispanic girl knew their orders before they said them.

I’ve always had a great amount of respect for police officers, when they’re not behind my car with their lights on.  I know there’s a lot of corruption and crooked cops out there, but I don’t think that changes the fact that there are a lot of those who put their lives on the line to ensure that people are safe.

After I left the subway, I walked to my car and set my sandwich down on the passenger seat.  I looked up to see the officer who was behind me in line sitting down with his sandwich in the window (it was a vegatarian sub, if anyone was curious), and he clasped his hands to his forehead.  He stayed in this position for several moments until raising his head and beginning his meal.  He was saying grace.

I’ve never said grace, and the few times I heard it at the dinner table (my stepmother and stepsister are Catholic), it was routine and nothing more, said with lifeless intonations.  But when I saw the officer do it, there was reverence there.  I guess in a dangerous line of work, having a little faith can help.

It just made me think at the end of a long day.

Zel-kun out.