Sorry I missed your call. I'll ring you up early this week to report on this f*cking adventure. I'm in North Dallas, so I'm not too far from the lakes and ranchlands, which is cool. AirTran has 200.00 flights to Detroit, so that'll get me back to see ACJ. I've started talking with the local girls, who are pleasant and blush easily. Hadn't had any barbecue or medication yet, but I'll let you know. Wonder how to localize my myspace profile to Dallas? I'm looking for a wealthy woman in her late thirties with a ranch. Please send pictures of the ranch. Yeah, right.
There's this blonde across the hall and six doors down who checked in this morning, and I had a nice talk with her this morning in the elevator. She's pretty in a Texas kind of way, with crooked but complete teeth, messy blonde hair and dorky tennis-shoes. What kind of work is she here to do in Dallas? I guess I'll need to hang in the lobby and notice any unusual traffic.
It's like this in hotels of this price level, around 40 a night, 200 a week. I think I noticed the night clerk reviewing a mug shot file on the computer when I stopped at his counter to request laundry change, four panels of male mugs with bad lighting and even poorer focus, similar to driver's license photographs. The manager and owner of the hotel, a man by name of MK if not WJ, made me come to the counter and speak with him before he extended to me a weekly rate. This joint is six miles from the headquarters of a large information technology corporation, a campus girded for security and secrecy, even more forbidding than the nuclear plant on Lake Michigan's shores. That's the only reason I'm here, and this week I'll be looking north of the city to find more permanent temporary digs. Ten miles north of headquarters, there's a few vineyards and wineries and even a town called Grapevine, Texas, with a reservoir lake called Grapevine Lake, and I think I'll be looking into that.
Some interesting opportunities starting coming in the day I was pulling out. A gig at the world's largest automaker, but the interview process was going to take all month. A man with a Hindi accent called me up at 8:00 PM, wanted me to go to an interview Thursday, and welcomed me to show up to work on Monday in Southfield at the offices of the nation's largest telecom provider. Good and well, but he wanted to pay me monthly as a 1099, which means I'm not a payroll item that must be made no matter what. It was a price-fixed contract, meaning that I'm working overtime on my own dime in the project goes sour. He started offering 75,000, but I declined it. Maybe I should have asked him to give me a month up front, earnest money. Duh ! If he had said yes, I could have been his boy.
So I'm here in Dallas living in a Microtel motel room, third floor. listening to traffic whistle and humming on the George Bush Tollway. It is just me, or does it seem appropriate that on the GBT, named after a Republican, the motorist is nickle and dimed for every mile? It's forty cents just to head down the ramp and drive onward, and seventy-five cents at the frequent toll booths. There's no speeding on the tollways. One doesn't get to accelerate for too long.
On the Lyndon Baines Johnson, named after a Democrat, name after a beltway that circles the city, it cost nothing to drive the miles and no toll is collected when one starts. Funny, the Lyndon Baines Johnson freeway is called the LBJ. The George Bush Tollway is called just that, the George Bush Tollway. Is this a subtle way to forget a Democratic president? I'm going to start calling the tollway the GHB.
I will keep you posted, and let you know when I'm back in the city. Tomorrow morning I'll know more about my work schedule. It's a 7 day a week operation, with programmers watching databases and servers between 8 AM and 8 PM. After eight in the evening, control passes over to a control center in India, where programmers return it in the morning. I'm hoping to fly back at least every three weeks for a long weekend. Last job, I was treated like a real consultant, with neat perks, including time flexibility and no weekends. No one can keep me down for too long.
Pull out your union card and kiss it for me. See what shit its possible to pull on non-unionized intellectual, white color office pukes like me? I'm a thousand miles from home, miles driven on my own dime, staying on my own dime. Sometimes I wonder if the programs to send kids to college on Government grants, loans and scholarships had been thought up by think tanks who wanted to reduce union membership? You can tell me to stop whining at any time.
Your friend,
Wilbo
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