Ok, Rob, I'm back to the white and blue colors which I know are so much easier to read....

It's after midnight. I've been trying to add connections to my new blog. It's relaxing, in a way, making me feel like I have connections. Otherwise, I'm sitting here freaking out about my job. Wondering how I got myself into such a mess. I mean, I knew it wasn't an ideal job when I took it. I knew The Sarge had the reputation of being hard to get along with. But I never imagined a work place where somebody was going to freak out if I got up from my desk for 5 unauthorized minutes or monitor my phone calls and write down the number of times I said, "you know" or "um".

We got to the heart of the matter today, and much more deeply than I wanted to go. The Sarge had a yelling customer, so she turned around and yelled at me, "What did you say to this customer? What date was it? Was it before 12:45? What do you mean you can't remember?!!"

I couldn't remember. There were notes in the text file, which she either didn't read or didn't believe. After handing me my head in front of everybody in the office she found out from the customer that she spoke to me on Monday, which, to make a long story short, made her shipping problem her mistake, not mine. But The Sarge still "doesn't think this is the job for me" because she asks me things and "I just give her a blank look."

"Like a deer in headlights" I said helpfully, I suppose cheerfully nailing shut my own coffin, but what the hell.

"Exactly! Like you have no idea what I'm talking about"

"I can't remember dates and times. I'm never going to remember without notes" I said, hopefully somewhat evenly.

"What the h--- is the matter with you? You DO remember things! You knew who this customer was! Why couldn't you just answer me what day you talked to them? How can you not remember?!"

"It's a number." I muttered. Suddenly, the whole horror of what is happening on my job became clear to me, like a chasm opening up at my feet. She was ready to have me walked out the door, and I was ready to go without a fight. Only because she was calming down and she suddenly remembered The Hub's employment status ( he's not employed) did she slow down. She watched me purse my lips against the thing I am loathe, loathe, loathe to admit. She watched tears roll down my face.

"Say something. Tea, say something to me. Anything. Personally, or professionally. Come on talk to me. Talk to me? Are ya gonna cuss?" she weedled.

"Dyscalcula" popped out of my mouth. I felt like the evil sister in one of those old Grimm's fairy tales. When she spoke an ugly toad jumped out of her mouth. An evil word had slipped out of my mouth and landed on the desk in the bare conference room like something slimey.

"Please tell me what you are saying." she said.

Too late now. She could look it up. "[URL=http://www.dyscalculia.org/calc.html]Dyscalcula.[/URL] Or Acalcula. It's a learning disability. I'm a sped."

"Sped?" Now she had the blank look.

"Yeah, short for the abbreviation on the door: SPecial EDucation. Sped. You think teachers always talk nicely about kids? Except, nobody knew it when I was in school. They just thought I wasn't paying attention or didn't care."

"That's what I thought!" she said, slapping the desk with her hand, "You have some kind of ....learning...problem? I've never heard of it."

"Almost nobody has. Not even a lot of educators. That's why I was in college before anybody figured out what was wrong with me. It's a math related learning disability. Numbers don't mean anything to me. In order to learn something the new information has to 'attach' to some other information in my mind. But numbers don't attach to anything. Dates, times, phone numbers, zip codes....it's all meaningless. I can recite poetry: Wanna hear On His Blindness by Milton? But I can't make change. I can remember a whole conversation, but not what time it took place, unless I wrote it down. Where things are in space is hard for me to learn too. This SAP system is like designed to be hell for somebody with my problems. "

"You always ask them to repeat the zip code when I'm monitoring you. I thought, 'they just said it!' I was starting to think maybe you couldn't hear! It's just numbers? Is there more to it?"

"Yeah, it's the thing that makes me wave my left hand while telling the driver, 'turn right! turn right!' But I don't think that's too much of an issue here."

"You can't tell your right from your left?"

"Quickly? No."

"Good Lord, you could have never made it in the milatary. You'd be dead!"

"Especially since I'm a passifist" I muttered under my breath.

"But, Tea, what are we gonna do here? You've got to know what time something shipped in this job. You've got to be able to tell me fast....you can't put numbers in the wrong order. What am I going to do?"

"You were getting ready to fire me." I reminded her. "It's not your fault, Sarge. The job has these requirements and I've learned all the compensatory techniques I'm gonna learn."

"Compensatory....that's why you always say back all the numbers. That's why you list all the account numbers on that notepad. But, there must be something I can do. You really are paying attention -"

"To somebody like you it must be like working with Dory. You know the fish with the great attitude but no short term memory from Finding Nemo?"

"That's exactly what I was thinking, but I wasn't going to say it." she admitted. Great. I'm a natural blue. "Lets just...lets think about this. Lets sleep on it. We'll talk tomorrow."

Now, I know this woman doesn't have a lot of knowlege about learning styles, but does she really think an L.D. I've been trying to overcome since I was six is going to go away over night?