I Give Up

Well, I dodged the bullet this time. Cousin Joshua has been talking for the last couple of days about taking someone he knows to small claims court for the return of some books. Given the pace of any court proceeding in New York, this, of course, would end him up in my house for another two or three years waiting for the damn thing to come to trial. I about died when I heard this piece of nonsense. However, the problem has been settled, and tomorrow he's off to the storage place to arrange for the nine million boxes in my living room to be picked up...HALLELUJAH!

By the way, I discovered tonight that he really is completely insane. He had a lot of loose change, so he wanted to put it into those paper money wrappers (I keep them around because I have found that dumping my change in a jar gives me an extra forty bucks or so here and there). Turns out that he doesn't know how to do this. I discovered this when he held up a wrapper of nickels and asked, "Does this look like enough?" I maintain that any normal, sane, human being (as none of which he qualifies, of course) would know that if a coin wrapper says $2 in nickels on the outside of it, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO COUNT THE DAMN NICKELS. How could you NOT be able to figure this out? The mind reels.

Tomorrow I go downtown for three or so hours to actually do some work in an office - one of my temp agencies has a transcription job that'll pay me $21 an hour, and I can do it at their offices, which means that I don't have to get dressed, thank heavens. I will, however, wear something other than my pajamas and bathrobe - but for the rest, it can be jeans and a sweater with no makeup and wet hair...and since it can be, I assure you it WILL be. Damned if I'm going to get all chic to sit around in a tiny room with a tape recorder. They'd damn well better have some usable equipment, however. The last time I did transcription, it was in a very high class type office in Rockefeller Center, but all they had for me to work with was a little tiny tape recorder - no headset, no foot pedal. If you have never done transcription work, let me tell you that this slows down the process to an incredible degree. You have to stop and start and backtrack and it's an unholy nuisance...whereas with a proper Dictaphone arrangement, you have your foot pedal and headset and your fingers never have to leave the keyboard. I assure this can save you a good two hours on a long transcription. However, given that they're paying me $21 an hour...maybe I'd better hope for truly lousy equipment.

To bed...with a hope for sweet dreams and a call from a casting agency while I'm transcribing!

Love, Wendy