Yesterday ended with a crash. Literally. Well, It wasn’t really yesterday. It was early this morning. I was awake and the terrible wife I am, I was keeping my husband awake with my chattering away about how to handle The Dissolution, which I’ll talk about later. Because all my good ideas happen after 2am, at 2:25 am we heard a loud bang as if one piece of giant metal had banged into another piece of giant metal.
I said, “Oh my god. That sounds like it came from the tunnel.” (We live around the corner from a tunnel.) My husband leapt out of bed, threw on some jeans and a jacket and sprinted around the corner. Sure enough, a car had landed on its roof after it exited the tunnel. It was upside down and the passenger was still inside. He must have been speeding because he hit a parked car on the street (which suffered some severe damage), which I assume is what caused the car to flip. I understand the basic premise of velocity after all.
When something is equivalent to a specification of an object’s speed and direction of motion, odd crashes can happen, like cars flipping and landing upside down.
When the police and paramedics arrived my husband overheard the driver say over and over again, “But I’m not drunk. I don’t know what happened. This is not a case of drunk driving.” He was coherent, albeit in shock but was able to maneuver himself out of his vehicle and hobble over to the paramedics who eventually took him to the local hospital emergency room.
What was odd about this crash? Well, the severity of it was odd. The fact that the car flipped upside down and landed on the roof is not something you see everyday. Plus, there were no sirens. Plus, the fact that the guy was coherent. Plus, the fact he was able to walk and didn’t seem to sustain any serious injuries. I have to wonder, did he lose consciousness when he was driving? And why? There were flashing lights, flickering off the sides of buildings but it was very, very quiet which seemed odd too.
That was the final blow to a cruel day.
It began with The Strike.
I have a side gig where I run a cultural creative commentary platform and sometimes use YouTube to do a little podcasting or showcase video artistry. YouTube gave us a strike for hosting someone they don’t approve of. The entire process of getting a strike on YouTube is the most corporate, uninteresting, unfair experience. Apparently it happens a lot and lots of people who’ve had The Strike or were Taken Down By YouTube have lots to say about it. The long and short of it goes something like this,
“Hi. We’re YouTube. We don’t like that person you hosted. Strike one. You can’t post anything on our platform for a week. Have a nice day, oh and don’t fuck up again.”
There’s no appealing The Strike. You can’t even bribe them to get them to change their mind. There’s no professionally-worded letter you can send them explaining how you simply didn’t know their arbitrary, invisible rules. You thought speech and discussion and joking around and sharing ideas is how, you know, the San Francisco Silicon Valley tag line claims it all works:
“We are all here just trying to make the world a better place.”
As I was uploading the conversation to a platform that doesn’t Strike and reaching out to people who suddenly lost access to the original content to let them know it would be available elsewhere, and contacting the person we were hosting to let them know our conversation was removed off YouTube, I received a flurry of weird calls on my Messenger app. I didn’t recognize the name of the person calling, and since it wasn’t a real name I assumed it was a bot or a troll or a CIA agent. My phone kept ringing and ringing and it was very disruptive, especially since I was trying to recover from the damage of The Strike.
I ended up researching the “person” (persona) calling me and I noticed they have a lot of mutuals (who are actually real people, and they’re nice) on social media, but all of The Incessant Caller’s content is hidden unless you are “friends” with them. But even after accepting their friend request and becoming “friends” I still could not see any content on their page.
I also found it particularly odd that The Incessant Caller came at a time when I had just published an audio blog about how Grimes got away with orchestrating a DDoS attack on Hipster Runoff.
With incessant ringing coming off my phone, I was attempting to load the video that YouTube Struck Down onto another site, and then suddenly I was getting the hit that that site was getting a 503 Service Unavailable message. Needless to say, I ended up blocking The Incessant Caller.
But, I suppose that little rabbit hole was just a distraction. The Strike was the warning for what was to come next.
The Dissolution came the same day, yesterday, a few hours after The Strike. My husband works in a design area of the tech industry and after taking some time away from the field, started consulting after about a three year hiatus. Everything was going fine. He was working with a team, helping them to carve out their roles, working on platforms, designing, examining skill sets, blah corporate blah corporate blah corporate blah.
He would meet occasionally with one of the VP’s and the two of them would go over ideas but mostly they would talk about cats and music. When he met with the VP yesterday, the VP started rambling a little bit and seemed “off” somehow as if he was unsure of what he was even saying. I listened in on this conversation which was on a Zoom-like call and could barely make sense of it. The long and short of it is the VP was sent to dissolve the consulting position, which means my husband is out of a role.
But seriously! It took a decoder ring to figure out what this guy was trying to say. He waved a piece of paper on screen and said something about a new role, and my husband didn’t know what to think. Then after the most uncomfortable, longest pause in history the VP says “What do you think?”
The quick backstory: The VP was put in his position after a swarm of people had been forced to exit the company. It was during this forced mass exodus, that my husband was brought in to consult. The VP and he sort of entered into the scene at the same time, but The VP wasn’t really meant for the role he was forced into, which would explain his frenetic and yammering, awkward delivery when having what is often considered The Most Uncomfortable Conversation In History.
When The Most Awkward and Uncomfortable Video Call In History that was the medium for The Most Uncomfortable Conversation in History ended, my husband and I looked at each other and he said, “What just happened?” And I said, “I think you were fired.”
After a series of expletives that would turn your ears red, we understood this to be “The New Normal” that people are talking about. Was he fired or did he quit? Because going back over the conversation it seemed as if he was setting my husband up to turn down a role which The VP had said his colleagues, Hipster Pronoun Executive VP and Condescending Pronoun Bitch VP, had met privately and decided previously that my husband wasn’t a good fit for.
So, let’s get this straight. He wasn’t a good fit for a role that he was never briefed on, he was never officially offered and a role he didn’t know anything about and doesn’t have anything to do with his consulting position.
Our take away was that the whole point of the video call yesterday was to simply humiliate and confuse my husband. But why? Because that’s the corporate culture from higher-ups. The second my husband met the Hipster Pronoun Executive VP he knew there was going to be tension. Despite his popular Twitter presence and inclusive language and “verified identity”, the dude did not like my husband. But, Hipster Pronoun Executive VP’s staff LOVED my husband. People recognize authenticity and in this New Normal Awkward Culture where roles are not defined and regular forced mass exodus of employees take place, morale goes way way down. My husband came in and morale started to boost. People started to relax. They started to unclench and work together. They started to act like a team. Something was happening and it was good. This was a direct threat to Hipster Pronoun Executive VP and the last straw happened when my husband made a 2 minute presentation using his awesome video design skills to tell a little story. The team LOVED it, gave it claps and hearts the way Millennials do. But, the two VP’s did not like that. They felt threatened by this and as punishment, they took away his income.
And so here we are, back at it.
As I am attempting to relay all of this to you, by the way, my computer has crashed about a dozen times. There has been a high wind all day and every time I get to a good point in this post, the electricity goes out, I’ve experienced more brownouts in trying to write this blog post than I have in the three years I’ve lived in this house. Every time there is a brown out, the electricity flickers off, my computer shuts off and I have to reboot and reload the content.
It’s really starting to feel like a conspiracy.
Anyway, this seemed like a good place to stop. Outside of the residents in my neighborhood complaining non-stop about the exorbitant car repairs as a result of streets that have not been paved in years, I wonder what sort of car repairs this Jeep will need:
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