Second Verse, Same As the First
I’m blaming it on California. Not content to keep their freaking El Niño weather to themselves, they have to share their precipitation with the rest of the country. What do the Californians care if their rain is our two feet of snow?
Realizing that there was no chance I’d be able to make it to the tea room tomorrow in the middle of the forecasted blizzard, I betook myself to the tea room this afternoon. My mission was to prepare a presentation I’m giving to some vet students this coming Monday. Unfortunately, I’m working from a three-year-old version of my presentation which I happened to have given to the Professor whose course I am presenting this seminar in. (As you’ll recall, when I was supposed to give this presentation three years ago I found myself in the hospital fighting off a liver rejection episode rather than in the classroom talking to students.) The most current version of the PowerPoint was in my office the day I was laid off, and The Company decided it was their property. I’m not about to contest that, since it was mostly prepared on company time and when I presented it in past years I did so under the Company name.
Having acknowledged that though, the presentation itself was primarily generic information about the industry and food safety, with no company secrets embedded in it and nothing proprietary that the Company could be dismayed about. I’m therefore in the process of reconstructing the past two years of updates. Since all my supporting files were also kept by my former employer, putting my little Humpty Dumpty presentation together again is proving nearly impossible.
I do best working on frustrating problems (like reconstruction Power Point presentations and hunting for jobs on the web) in the tea room. At home I’m like to take “exasperation breaks” and end up playing Mahjongg Dimensions on MSGames. A break that was intended to be no more than ten minutes can expand to an hour, and work that I intended to get done remains unfinished. At the tea room, with my screen on semi-public display, I am less inclined to play games or catch up on message boards.
It was while I was working on patching my Power Point when the owner of the tea room came over and sat down at my table. We’ve become friends over these past months, sharing shoulders over our mutual frustrations (my job hunt, her business woes). She broke the news to me that the tea room would be closing down sometime in March, maybe early April. They just couldn’t get enough business to keep things in the black. The economy has treated everyone poorly.
If I can, I’ll try to find some way to blame California for this too.
Oh no! That’s such a shame. Cafes and tea rooms are particularly sensitive to falls in discretionary spending, unfortunately.
Aww, go ahead.
We deserve all the derision you can throw at us.
Just look what we have done with a perfectly good state….
Sigh.
Speaking as a Californian: Gee, thanks.
Those of us on the West Coast blame the recession on the East Coast, that is to say Wall Street, D.C., and the incredible corporate greed of all those East Coast executives. The unemployment rate in my county is over 20%, when one counts the official unemployment figures and those who no longer qualify because their unemployment has run out. And then there are those who have just plain given up.
As for El Nino, that’s a global phenomenon that begins with oceanic warming off the coast of South America, hence the Spanish name. We didn’t start it and we have no control over where it goes when it’s done flooding us. Floods that cause rock and mud slides that sometimes take whole neighborhoods sliding down the hillsides. As a bonus, we then get horrible fires in the summer that feed on the extra tall grasses that were well watered by all the winter and spring rains.
In other words, we pay for it, too! So there! 😛
/good-natured ribbing 😉
I suppose you’re familiar with the song "F*ck California"? 😀
Sorry about your tea room, but I’m glad you have a challenge to work on.