Of Pink Slips & Green Cards

In the end, I just ran out of excuses. Everyone was blogging, and I had told myself more than once (and unfortunately, a few times out loud in front of witnesses) that I should flex a few horribly dormant writing muscles and do the same. If nothing else, it could serve as an escape from reading websites related to Apple, scripting, widget-design, and a bunch of other psuedo-technical areas I read up on, but rarely do any actual work with. The kind of websites that my very recent and oh-so-beautiful American wife finds about as exciting as a root canal with a phillips-head screwdriver.

That's the problem that arises when you combine the web and people with a short-attention span—it's too easy to lose your free time within its sticky strands without actually achieving anything.

And then the Gods of «insert whichever pantheon you deem relevant for your particular afterlife theory here» threw me a bone. A bone shaped and colored curiously like a pink-slip(1).

Redundancy certainly frees up your schedule. Well, after a few weeks it does. The first few weeks post-Decipher(2) have been chock full of immigration paperwork & medicals from delightful Indian doctors completely unconcerned with my prostate health. It seems the medicals and blood tests are valuable data for the government to help determine whether or not my marriage is justifiabe enough in their eyes to permit me a green card. The curious part here is that they only test for 2 diseases in your blood test—HIV and syphillis. Further proof in my casual pet-theory that America is much more worried about sex than violence. Mind you, there is no requirement in the immigration paperwork that I must own a gun, so I may be overstating it.

So this all leads to a lovely gift from the US immigration services. It seems I cannot be on someone's payroll, nor leave the country (and get back in) for 90-days from the time the government receives my green card application. I refer to this 3-month span colloquially as my Government Sponsored Suntan phase. The law itself I refer to as the Decreed Dormancy law.

And thus it was that all excuses to not blog were lost. The initial outcome of this suprising interaction of strange forces is stimulating liquid crystals on your monitor right now. Hardly worth the wait I know, but at least the train has left the station—for destinations unknown!

Due For Blogging Once I Return from Boston...
» Songs worth rewinding.
» Five TV commercials I hate. A lot.
» Franken-blister

Notes:
(1) I was disappointed to note, that departing from my job at my companies request came with no actual "pink slip", but instead with about 80 pages of agreements, notes, documents, contract copies and pages of gobbligook about Cobras (which even the most ardent Herpetologist would be bored to death by). Indeed I received this package twice (once via registered mail for the benefit of future legal wranglings I presume). It seems things were a lot simpler back in the days when expressions were short, catchy, and actual had meaning. Of course, this makes me wonder now if the green card is, in fact, green? (or even a card?).

(2) I was fully intending to include a link to my former employer's web site here, but the old-world innocent charm of the www.decipher.com card-gaming site has recently dissappeared (an error, I believe), and all links now port through to a soulless, online e-commerce site (which, co-incidentally, I once was the director of). Unfortunately, that is the department that has been ohemorrhaging money for the last 2 years. Indeed my current UB meter(3) registers that department with a 35% share of the blame.

(3) [Can you have superscripts within explanations of superscripts?] UB meter = UNEMPLOYMENT BLAME meter. This handy mental device measures where I place the accountability for my previous employers slide to extreme non-profitability. But it is important to note that this 'blame' is just for psychological-cleansing reasons, and without any intended vindictiveness. The full UB pie-chart will be revealed in time.