Two good things that happened to me today. One was that The Hub got all the gunk off of my stock pot so I can use it. Of course, I used all the tomatos for other things....

It's been that kind of day. It started out with low oil in the car...

Then it was on to Bel Air, to rep tile, with no map. What's the big deal, I thought. I can find these places. It'll come back to me. Afer all, I lived and worked out there for 3 years.

Ugh. Everything came back to me all right - except for my sense of direction. Bel Air is a high growth area, and there are new roads, new shopping centers, new developments which all look like assisted living facilities EVERYWHERE. I have never been so lost anyplace in the state of Maryland. I drove around town 3 times trying to figure out how to get on to Churchville Rd...which is ridiculous since I used to work on Churchville Rd. But even when I was on it I didn't recognize it. There's a whole shopping center where the little 3 shop stip with the pizza place used to be. The bank in which I heard the O.J. Simpson verdict is gone. In fact the whole intersection is gone.

All I had to guide me were my horrible memories of working for Beneficial Finance. It was, bar none, even the famous Job-In-A-Box, the most horrible, stressful place I ever worked in my entire life. This was the company where, when I started as a summer, part time employee, the boss threw a chair at me. I sought to escape when I graduated from college, but a tight economy pulled me back in....and there I was, making loans to people that I had to read the contract to on account of that they were functionally illiterate. In most jobs you have to face a moral dilema every now and then: is it okay if I don't fill out all the paperwork? Is it okay if I round some figures? On this job, I faced a moral dilema apporoximately every 5 minutes. We got a new boss from a different office who came in and asked, with a perfectly straight face, "Do you forge here?"

I didn't think I could have possibly heard her correctly, so I asked her to repeat herself. To which she said, "Oh, I know you don't do it all the time. I mean, just on the parts of the contract...you know, if the customer doesn't see the X and leaves before you catch it?"

"Um. No. I've never done that. I've always mailed the copies to be signed or taken them to the customer on my lunch hour."

"Wow. Really? Well, we won't forge too much then, if you aren't used to it."

When I look back on this, I wonder what could have possibly been on my mind that I didn't just walk out the door right then and never look back. And I wasn't a kid when this happened. I was 27 years old. I decided that the new boss was trying to test my integrity, to see what I would say or do if I was told I could get away with something. After all, she was young, younger than me, and maybe didn't have much management skills. Maybe someone had told her this was a way to ferret out the kinds of people who might steal money out of the cash drawer ( not surprisingly, in this environment, there were a proportionatley HUGE number of embezzlers and cash drawer theives at all levels. Part of the reason they had recruited me so hard was because they knew how honest I was)

Anyway, it turned out she wasn't kidding or being manipulative. It also turned out that she was an EXPERT forger, and she once forged my signature on a cash count sheet so well that even I couldn't tell the difference. I had to turn her in. But I turned her in to the D.M., not the whistle blower hot line. The D.M. didn't want to do anything at all, but, of course he had to do something least I call the hotline on HIM. And I was so stupid. I agreed that it was just a case of the manager being young and too anxious to succeed ( HELLO! When I was 22 years old it never entered my mind to forge documents to get ahead!) and not understanding the seriousness of the situation. She agreed to stop, and I agreed to take a transfer, whereupon I got put into another office and had every one of the most difficult jobs in the place assigned to me, lost my bonus, and almost lost my mind before I went to work for GMAC. I'm telling you, after that enviroment, the three years I spent doing post 120 day bill collections were a relative walk in the park!!!

Anyway, back to today, when I finally found my customers they all had huge showrooms jam packed with stuff. There was no way they were going to take in an unproven flooring line from some shell shocked looking chic who came in off the street. The most I could do was try to establish relationships and hope for the best for the Spanish line that is coming in soon. And I'm sure I was not at my best, shakey and jittery from the astonishing traffic and practically having flashbacks of criminal activity.

After awhile, I went over to the mall to eat lunch. Even the mall had changed so that I didn't know where I was. I gobbled down a hot dog, which didn't do anything to improve the general feeling of nausea and unrest in my stomach. I thought of looking through some of the stores for half an hour to try to take my mind off how my day was going, but my conscience hounded me to get back to work.

It appears that I am too much of a pacifist to even kill time!

Still, the later part of the day was no more productive than the earlier. The other good thing that happened today was that I saw Rick and Rainey of-the-ten-cats...and, of course, I got to visit the 10 cats. I had picked some honey up for them at the honey harvest festival, since they both are bothered by allergies, so I dropped by their place. When you go to their house, you enter a soothing blue environment of lounging, relaxed cats and fish in aquariums. You sit on the sofa and cats come up to you, one by one, to be petted. They rotate sitting in your lap or purring in your ear from the back of the sofa. Some sit next to you and purr. Some sit on your feet and purr. I am fairly sure that cats are a cure for insomnia since they radiate relaxation, and always leave Rick and Rainey's convinced that we should get a couple more. Rick was even telling me about an animal rescue that places cats with feline luekemia (which is contageous) in homes like ours where the resident cat has already tested posative.

Then I got to face the traffic home. Since they had to land the shock trauma helicopter on my route ( two trucks vs. each other and a car) you can imagine it was no mean feat getting home. I arrived at about 8:00, and threw some salmon into the microwave for The Hub, while yakking on the cell phone and typing in my Avon orders.

Tomorrow? I get to go to Montgomery County! At least nothing horrible ever happened to me down there. Not yet.