MAGGI PICAYUNE

Coming down with strep (throat) and being put on disability for two weeks was a fitting end to a really awful, stressful, emotional and disappointing year. Getting ill hit me suddenly too. I was having a decent weekend right up to the cusp of the Holiday/Shutdown week at Apple, then Bam! Biff! Pow! I hard an itchy, sore throat during the Kenny’s (Coffee Company) Christmas party that Sunday evening. By Monday, my day off, I had the chills, fever and every joint in my body ached.

Meanwhile, Somara was in the thick of culinary school. Let me rewind a bit. When I wrote about Christmas Break 2003, the new year (2004) was off to an alright start, namely attending Sonia’s wedding in Houston. By mid-January, things hit the fan. Somara’s father laid her off because his business was starting its inevitable decline. Matters for me at Apple were mediocre but we couldn’t afford to have one person completely unemployed. We weighed our options hastily. Somara decided that she wanted to go back to school, namely culinary. It seemed a logical idea with all the hours of Food TV she had watched. She was already a good cook, a formal education would cinch it. I went along since I knew not completing her college degree bugged her. I know it would bother me and the older one gets, the harder it is to regain the momentum to graduate. Today’s universities practically make it a moving target.

So Somara shopped around Austin. The two main choices were Texas Culinary Academy (TCA) and Austin Community College (ACC). The latter I’m a fan of. I took French I and II there plus Unix I and C++. How I want to go back for an entry-level English/Composition class to polish my skills and the Northridge Campus had a slew of Mac classes on Photoshop I’m itching to take.

When it comes to culinary classes, ACC is a nuisance. I was sold on the lower price tag but I didn’t want Somara to be in the usual mess college students experience through ACC and in spades at UT: her schedule would shift every semester, it could drag on if certain key classes aren’t available, etc. Culinary is just another trade ACC teaches anyway, right along with AC repair and welding, the AA/AS she earned wouldn’t carry much weight.

Then came TCA’s price tag, $45,000! I thought, we don’t need to buy the school, just attend. Hell, my undergraduate degree from Marquette ran that high but I got to be a student for over four years. This was only 15 months! Somara felt deflated by my reaction. We’d only been married for a few months so I pressed to ask why TCA was worth the hefty price tag. She explained how the the tuition covered everything in one swoop, none of the nickel-and-dime crap I endured at Marquette on textbooks or lab fees. Classes changed every six weeks but her schedule would never alter, school would be every weekday afternoon. Best of all, TCA was accredited as legitimate and was part of the Cordon Bleu program (where Julia Childs went yet never graduated). There were other possibilities of financial aid (which turned out to be only loans, we’re 41 % done with now). I gave the go-ahead knowing how much it really meant. Had I known how nasty the final bill would be, I’d still give Somara the green light. I just would’ve paid off some of the debt in advance.

Now why this digression? Well, Somara was only working part-time now (she and her father worked out a new arrangement) and my stress levels rose from it. I felt as if I had been put into a corner, an “I can’t fail” corner which was amplified by the 2004 election (we know how that went) and a series of bosses at Apple who were (I won’t mince words) terrible. In defense of the team manager I had though (Mark), once we really had a blunt, open discussion of my emotional state (I had lost my confidence to help customers with the server OS) and my pursuit to get assistance through Apple’s programs, the future looked better. The immediate future continued to be rocky. However, I told myself and the boss, I would not leave Apple under a cloud.

Then getting sick, being diagnosed by doctor (really a PA in America’s “superior” system) and told I wouldn’t be allowed to return to work for a week was a devastating blow. It made me look disingenuous on the deal I made with Mark. Strep is contagious for a couple days yet the following ones aren’t so I was then goldbricking (in my mind). To make it worse, the strep evolved into laryngitis which had the PA order me away from work another week! Going back to Apple only to be fired frequently crossed my mind.

Obviously, this is a Holiday Break I’d like to forget. All this overshadowed Christmas and New Year’s. Hell, I think I was stuck at home vegging out while Somara went to celebrate the gift giving in Georgetown.

Then a crazy idea flooded our heads. Some instructor Somara frequently spoke of had leads in Phoenix. I thought, why not move there, get a fresh start. My friend Rad lived there. We had visited a couple times. Somara lived there in the Nineties while working for Motorola and I really liked the scenery. Phoenix was similar to Austin in the “lack” of Winter, blistering hot Summers and the big selling point was their hockey team. Sure it was the Coyotes but it was an NHL franchise!

I drove over to the Stor place across 1825 and started a rental contract to put away our non-essential belongings as they were packed away. The therapist I was seeing (Judith) recommended I take control of the clutter issues bugging me in my office (at home). This dovetailed into the digitization of my entire CD collection then (completed in about six weeks). One thing which kept me going was imagining the drive across I-10 in a U-Haul/Ryder truck to a new home. Sometimes, the journey is more exciting the actual living in another city.

Needless to say, we didn’t move to Phoenix, I’ll save the explanation for later in 2010; I also wasn’t fired or in trouble at Apple. Somara and I did everything we were supposed to regarding the disability business. There was a debacle via payroll which I had to bear for three paychecks but it was better than giving back all the money in one fell swoop. Nah, my job was secured a tad since one of the problematic people transferred out and the group was on the verge of hiring a couple new managers, one of which I got assigned to, something I had been begging HR to do for weeks. Thankfully, being moved into Juan’s team vindicated me by the time I had my review near the end of 2005.

What about Christmas 2004 though? I’d like to have it removed from my memory. Then again, there was one incident between the holidays at Trudy’s North that raised my spirits.

Our friends Tom and Alaire invited us out to dinner. I was reluctant. Here I was on disability and what would I do if someone from Apple saw me? The only rebuttal I could think of in my defense was prove I wasn’t making money on the side during the time period. Somara probably cajole me into going. Again, I’m glad I did because during our meal, I spotted a little hand tugging on Tom’s sleeve. We turned to see who it was and it was this darling little girl thanking Santa for all the stuff he gave her. This made me realize Tom’s attire, a red shirt with black suspenders; he’s always had a white beard in the years I’ve known him. The little girl’s mother was seen scrambling to our table to apologize for her daughter’s behavior. Tom took it in good stride, told the mother not to worry about it, he said it happens often to him this time of year. Later on, Tom and Alaire shared their Santa on his skiing vacation anecdote! I love that incident. Thanks to them, I have an in with Santa when I talk to small children and I can loan their parents some (behavioral) assistance. Ask my friend Helen.

This concludes this year’s Six Days of Christmas series. I appreciate your patience, participation and I do hope everyone of you had a great Holiday Break season. Most of us return to the grind on Monday. I’m cool with it, there’s so much to work to do and I think 2010 will be filled with anticipation at Apple. MacWorld has been pushed back to February to compete with the CES show in Vegas. Outside of Apple, I’m excited over the new music releases due by SXSW or later, namely Goldfrapp and Scissor Sisters. The other variable the Maggi Republic is treating as a blessing and a curse, the purchase of our first new car in 14 years. Honda’s Fit is the current frontrunner.

Happy New Year. May 2010 be much better than 2009 but leave the politics at the virtual door please.

A year certainly made a major difference by this Christmas Break! The previous one was lonely but filled with a quiet optimism. My patience did pay off throughout 1999 and it was more of a Thanksgiving or point of Remembrance like New Year’s is for me:

• Hired by Apple in April.
• My dating of Somara became a more permanent arrangement, not married but we had exclusivity for lack of a better term. I don’t recall if she started throwing the marriage hint around by then. That’s a funnier story in its own right.
• No more moving! I had a one-year lease on an apartment with Garrett until next Spring.
• Broadband (cable modem) in the apartment for the first time.
• Got the last of my belongings out of North Carolina in November.
• My personal financial picture was improving yet I wasn’t close to paying anything major in full for another couple years.

For 1998 I did say The Phantom Menace was something I was excited about. I am relieved that I didn’t invest too much mental capital into it. P-U! To counter it, 1999 did have two movies I like and these continue to hold up after a decade: The Mummy and The Matrix, both of which should’ve stopped there and avoided sequels. The former was the best re-imagining (I prefer the term modernizations) attempts done. During the Nineties, Hollywood redid Dracula (yawn) with Gary Oldman, Frankenstein (ugh) with DeNiro and the Wolfman with Nicholson (double ugh). They only got it right with The Mummy by combining Action-movie elements a la Indiana Jones and enough Horror to prove the monster was dangerous, malevolent and ruthless.

I had to digress a bit with a movie because as 1999 wound down, I was leaving my part-time gig at Gateway 16 to a new part-time setup at Kenny’s Coffee Company. Being a barista would pay less but I spent a significant chunk of my spare time at the shop, why not get paid for drinking coffee! My last day was on Christmas, working the box office, selling tickets to some rather uninteresting fare, namely Man on the Moon since Toy Story 2 was long in the tooth (it was a Thanksgiving release). The managers at Gateway 16 expressed their gratitude several days earlier by giving me a goodbye present of a D&B gift card and movie passes. Gratitude? I was one of the few employees who did his job during his shift. Quite the contrast from the inept, clueless service worker I was 15 years ago at Farrell’s. Then again, I was 31. If I behaved like the teenagers who were the majority at Gateway 16, I should’ve had my head examined.

As for Christmas Break, I was stoked. Apple had moved to a new building the week before so there was the “new car” smell but the different phone system sucked and our new cubicles lacked privacy. Little did we anticipate how it would get worse in 2000, namely Apple selling the most Macs it had ever done since 1996. Worse? It is when you don’t enough people to answer the phones. This came later anyway. Before the phone-call deluge, Apple remained sweet. We only had to work half a day on Christmas Eve! Ethan, Garrett and I scored the 10 AM – 2 PM shift. We tried to have breakfast at Trudy’s North but they weren’t open so we had to settle on Taco Cabana. The day was slow and as expected, some Tier 1 tech tried to dump a call on me at 1:59 PM. I can’t remember how I managed to get out on time. I probably don’t want to, I have a feeling I did it by unfriendly means.

Jumping ahead to Christmas, I did an opening, final shift with Gateway and afterwards, I think Somara met me at my apartment where we then went to visit her parents’ house in Georgetown. I know I had been there before for birthday parties. It may have been my first encounter with her siblings, in-laws, nephews and niece. The meal was nice but Somara’s gift to me was the best! A new Jansport backpack. My current one was falling apart or looking ratty. What made Somara’s extra special was the modifications she made to it, Bugs Bunny was glued on to the outer pocket! Somara knew how much I like the character (he’s my totem) so she found a pair of socks, cut his head off of them and glued them permanently on. I was clinging to “dying” backpack due to the Bugs Bunny design, now I could give it up. Besides, the modification on the back, it had an inner pocket to store my PowerBook 5300c. I still have this backpack too, it’s very well made and it’s one of my trademarks at Apple; everybody knows it’s my backpack (or sac a dos).

Now to the elephant in the story…Y2K. What a joke! Actually, I was never worried about it. Not because of my profession using computers (Macs were compliant from day one and many older models will be until Unix Time runs out in 2038) but all the hysteria wasn’t founded in any solid facts. Think about it. What does the year have to do with the electricity running, the car starting or a nuclear weapon? Absolutely zilch. Maybe there could’ve been a glitch in billing yet nothing was going to turn off or spontaneously start. Apple didn’t take any chances, one little, trivial glitch caused by third-party software would be enough to give the SCLM a field day. Everybody at my level of skill (Tier 2) had to be on call for certain shifts in case it hit the fan. Having little interest, I was a third stringer.

Quick aside. Last night I had dinner with my friends Ethan and Kelly (the Lowrys of California, not the couple I catsit for) and we talked about the Y2K silliness. Ethan volunteered to work that fateful evening, there was extra pay or comp time for his effort. I asked him if it was as easy as it sounded. His response? There was one call and it was a guy trying to get support after hours for a piece of software. Otherwise, he and his co-workers drank beer. They probably watched DVDs on the souped up G4 towers and played numerous Quake/Unreal battles.

My only hope is that all those Chicken Littles continue to feel stupid.

Back to my New Year memory.

I recall having to work the whole day but when I was finished, I was off to Somara’s to ring in the year and decade (and century and millennium if you care for such a definition) watching TV, petting Wicca and taking it easy. Neither of us found a decent party or anything. Downtown Austin was going to be nuts for A2K. I would’ve enjoying seeing Lyle Lovett though. I do clearly remember calling Somara before leaving work to tell her I was on my way. She asked me to stop by the store for some club soda. Foolishly, I agreed. The one day of the year NOT to hit the grocery store, then would be it. The experience wasn’t too bad. I did get a huge laugh scouring the nearby Albertson’s (on Oltorf, South Austin). All the toilet paper and bottle water was gone. Water I could see in an emergency having experienced Hurricane Alicia (or was it Alisha?) yet toilet paper? If civilization is collapsing left and right around us, I think a change of underwear would be more prudent.

Needless to say, we both collapsed well before the magic moment at midnight. I woke up briefly at 12:45 AM, didn’t see any mushroom clouds and went back sleep.

Austin II was definitely panning out on numerous fronts!

Despite being in a new city, the same general malaise I felt during previous Christmases (1992 and 1993) continued. The part which really sucked was the lack of getting to attend the Sidler’s New Year’s bash in Chicago (this became the last one too). No matter how rotten Christmas was, their party was always a high point.

Now I was a thousand miles away and on the bubble with my position at University Towers. Some of it my own doing and the rest the usual politics at the place; the GM wanted me fired yet did nothing about the other people stealing or my favorite, the head of maintenance having an affair with another employee. Then again, the GM had an alcoholic son who was a lawsuit waiting to happen so he needed others’ faults to deflect such a liability.

Right around Christmas Eve Doc told me about my hours being cut (probably the compromise) which just amplified the virtual kick in the nads I received from Apple over not getting the internship gig. Patricia returning to France didn’t help.

Austin was quickly feeling like a bad decision. I left Central Illinois to make a fresh start and now I feared I was digging myself into the same hole I climbed out of 11 months ago. Much of it was caused by unrealistic expectations. Success in a new city wasn’t going to be sudden. It would take months, not weeks or days. Now I wasn’t sure if I had the luxury of time. With my hours being cut, paying the bills was going to be more difficult. Remaining friends with Doc was proving harder too. Sonia became an invaluable counterweight to the ugly situation. She did invite me to join her Houston for the holiday but I had to decline, I was offered the holiday shifts at the dorm and I had better take them while I had the opportunity.

On Christmas Day though, I wasn’t going to let the past or recent events bring me down. I decided to keep my movie tradition while amending it with an additional couple things. After hearing all the commercials for Katz’s on KNNC, I hopped on my bike to have Christmas dinner there. The weather was gorgeous, for late December. I clearly remember it being a sunny day and the temperatures got as high as the upper 50s (F) or low 60s (F). If nothing nothing else, I could be happier over the lack of snow and chill while biking 32 blocks to downtown Austin. To kill time while waiting to be seated, I packed my backpack (or its French name I liked to use, mon sac a dos) with pens, stamps and paper to write letters to friends. The correspondence habit evolved into a trend I carried on for a few years. I consider it a precursor to this site. As I ate my meal, I kept thinking about Patricia would’ve enjoyed Katz’s.

After eating, I got back on my bike and rode like hell to the Lincoln 6 (long closed) to see a movie. This was a more grueling 60-plus blocks North from Katz’s, much of it on a slight incline uphill. The lack of traffic on Christmas Day worked in my favor going along Lamar and Airport Boulevard. Hollywood didn’t roll out much to choose from that day either. I should’ve stayed at my apartment to watch the free cable it came with. Then again, had I known how close the Highland 10 was from the Lincoln 6, I may have had a better choice. Anyway, I was feeling optimistic so I went to IQ, a rather formulaic romantic comedy starring Tim Robbins, Walter Matthau (as Albert Einstein) and the queen of the genre, Meg Ryan. I still arrived early for the first show and spent over 90 minutes in the lobby writing a letter to Cindy. The other strong memory was hearing Sarah McLachlan’s cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Song for a Winter’s Night.”

The ride back was easy, having the incline in my favor. I made it back to my apartment well before sundown. Patricia left me a message on my machine wishing me a Merry Christmas. That brought a huge smile to my face. Mom called too. She wanted to make sure I was alright. I think she was aware of all the blows to my morale I had been through. I’m glad she didn’t make another pitch for me to move to Raleigh-Durham.

Sonia came back a couple days later. She had been invited to her boss’s New Year’s Eve party so I got to tag along. Helen frequently reminds me about the streaking incident I missed on a cold Chicago morning in 1995. I think the hostess’s husband sent the Chicago perpetrators a telepathic suggestion since we had a similar incident by midnight, except it was over 70 degrees (F) that evening. Our party also included someone firing a handgun in the air for an unexplainable reason.

It seemed like a bittersweet ending to the Break. I just hit the snooze button on my problems for a while which is what the holidays are really all about. Austin’s superior weather let me take stock on how much better life was too. Maybe this is why my life in Austin gradually came around in 1995. By late April, I was grateful I toughed it out instead of getting offers from Chicago.