As I settle into my cramped and dog hair covered home office this morning, sipping on my freshly brewed Starbucks coffee (Tall coffee in a Grande cup topped with soy please) my Einstein’s Bagel lightly toasted and covered with plain lite cream cheese already eaten and my anti-depression medicine swallowed down, I’m ready to start my morning, making cold-calls, the part of my job that I despise. I often wonder what I was thinking 15 years ago when I agreed to take a job in the cargo operations side of Japan Airlines. Why didn’t I request, no demand, the much more glamorous task of Passenger Service Agent?

Oh yes, that’s right I remember why… It got me out of my parent’s house and to the farthest point away from them on the continent. The glorious San Francisco Bay Area where I would begin my adult life and experience so many mistakes that would ultimately lead me down the path of life that dropped me in Chicago like an engine falling off of a DC-10 aircraft in the 1970’s. I crashed into Chicago in an enviable position that would quickly change for the worse; leaving me reeling and wondering what I’d done wrong to have karma treat me so badly. I was offered the world (on an air cargo budget) and I took it. A huge pay raise, an even larger territory and a goal of developing a crack sales force to cover it, all of them reporting to me. Ha Ha I was now to be the boss.

Of a single sales representative it would turn out, who apparently never quit his last position with one of my competitors thereby collecting at least 2 paychecks and doing little work for either. That would be the beginning of the end for my successful management career. Shortly after this bomb hit, the entire national sales force was restructured, fired (laid off is much more politically correct but less honest) and replaced with people at the corporate office in Santa Clara, California.

I’ve bounced around the Chicago Air cargo job market a tad bit in the 3 years since not really feeling like I fit in here in the Midwest. My personal life is less than enviable as I’ve developed no truly close friends in my more than five years here. I have friends, but none that would remove my collection of porn, fetish wear and toys (FYI, It is all in my closet and night stand, be sure to check the cabinets as well.) before my parents come to claim my belongings (oh and don’t forget the computer porn and the CD’s in the cabinet above my desk), should my body be discovered in some alleyway (I’m sure it would be in a compromising position. I just have a feeling is all…). I picture my body being found wrapped in saran wrap and duct tape, hooded and gagged when they find it. But that is a story for a different time.

All of this negative movement in the past 5 years has truly affected my ego, leaving me feeling like Farah Fawcett just before she set her husband’s character on fire in that now infamous made for television movie, “The Burning Bed”. Beaten, bruised, and begging for it to all just stop. So I’m now shopping for kerosene. I’m ready to burn the bed that is my life here in Chicago.

Think warm thoughts for me. The warmer the better to start a fire.