Merry Christmas To Me

As the holiday season has arrived I have been very excited about the festivities and the invitaion I would have to enjoy the company of my family and friends. . . well I WAS excited anyway. I currently work for company A (I do not wish to expose the name in case of offending anyone) and was excited to receive an invitation via email inviting me to the "family Christmas party." Upon calling to RSVP I was rudely rejected by a superior informing me that "student" secretaries were not invited. I have since tried to rid my brain of the embarrassment and disappointment I felt during that conversation, but I have been reminded everyday for the past three weeks of the joyous celebration that I was not able to take a part. Daily I was commanded to cut wrapping paper, assemble ornaments, fluff mini trees, water centerpieces and count numbers attending. My holiday spirits were deflated in a hurry and Christmas didn't seem like it would be the jubilant celebration I had been counting on. Finally the Christmas party came and went and I felt better that I would no longer have to endure such hardships at my workplace. The day after the party however I was given the golden opportunity to clean the banquet room in which the party took place. I loaded 4 large vehicles with left over Christmas gifts (there had to have been at least 300) and then was able to carry them up three flights of stairs only to be sent home giftless. My only word for this. . . OUTRAGE!!!

The Place In Which We Live

So we have been placed as the managers of our 5-plex. A prestigious position no? When we moved in we were dazzled by all of the incentives that we were offered just for being the "managers" of our small kingdom. We moved in from our last debacle of a dwelling into as Jen so eloquently put "greener pastures" only to have those incentives ripped out from under us. In a phone call to our landlord voicing our displeasure at these wrongdoings we were reminded that we were given exclusive access to the only washer and dryer in the house. That was nice of them as we had bought the washer and dryer from the previous tenants. So to take a moment to describe these lush pastures; the walls are paper thin which allows us to hear not only that the neighbors are conversing but what they are conversing about. Which brings us to our upstairs neighbors. They are the Bucks. Having just been recently married you can only imagine the sounds we hear from their neck of the woods. Lets just say they really like each other. When hearing people in a romantic situation like this (and having no choice but to fight the mental images) one would like to imagine a body builder and his supermodel wife. One day we met them. Ever seen revenge of the nerds? Enough said. We call them the Buck Nakeds. We aren't sure that the people living below us are in this country legally. There are 6 of them fresh off the boat, or raft, or tube, or however they got here. 2 parents and 4 children. The mom just had the furriest baby we've ever seen. Cute in an ewok kind of way. The children used to run around the house and play right outside our bedroom window until 3 in the morning. That stopped abruptly when we got frustrated and went outside to threaten them with deportation. They have since left us for a bigger apartment leaving the one they so recently inhabited looking like a 7-11 restroom. This brings us to the people just through the wall. To summarize them... they're crazy. Jim is almost 50 with tattoos up and down his body with the mouth of a sailor who claims that he is an ex-authority 70. We believe him. His wife Helen smokes like a chimney but not on the premises anymore thanks to Jen and her No Tobacco Tolerance policy. They asked one day if they could use our washer and dryer and after a mental flash of their "Caucasian refuse" clothes all over our tiny laundry room and not ever being able to use our own facilities (not to mention the fact that we don't trust them at all) Jen politely said "heck" no and sent them on their way. They aren't very fond of Jen. Our landlord recently gave our phone numbers out to people who might be interested in the Mexicans vacant apartment. We love having nobody living below us (and the fact that our crooked landlord is getting no money from it) so we tell them in the nicest way possible about the neighbors. That apartment is still vacant. Maybe we'll end up liking this manager position after all.