...Can dryer lint be composted? One could ask what this has to do with telecommuting...damned if I know, but it's a question that has plagued me for months. It just never gets boosted far enough up my priority chain to get answered. So what exactly does rank up there with the lofty questions that do get answered. A successful business person and telecommuter knows that all problems relating to any mental infrastructure must be solved, albeit in some order, for success to be achieved and maintained if a true relative sense of accomplishment is to be justified within the self emanating processes that erupt freely in the cortext of the unsuspecting suceedee. To put it another way, I will cross that bridge, when, and if, I come to it.

...Here's a great recipe for a Fast Telecommuter's Stay-at-Home Tomato Sauce. This is supposed to be made with, literally, garden fresh tomatoes, but I don't know why it wouldn't work with tomatoes you buy at the market. For two adults, you throw about a dozen tomatoes into boiling water and leave them there just far a short minute or so, more or less, so to speak, then throw them into cold water so that they can be handled and peeled easily...peel them. Cut them up a little and take out the seeds and the gooey stuff the seeds reside in. Cut those pieces into even smaller pieces...set aside. In a deep skillet heat on high two tablespoons of olive oil, chuck in about 4 moderately sized cloves of finely diced garlic, a heap of basil (fresh or dried) and just when the garlic turns the slightest slightest bit brown throw in the tomatoes. They should sizzle for a sec (nice sound) ...Cook on high heat and saute and kinda mash everything around in the pan for three minutes and pour it onto the spaghetti that had just finished being cooked and been rinsed. You were cooking the spaghetti all this time...weren't you? If you are not lactose intolerant, you're going to want to sprinkle some kind of nice Italian cheese on top of this melange.

I don't cut the corporation short, despite the fact they are trying to eliminate my position. It is my sole source of support and they trust me to do an honest days work. This is the hardest part about telecommuting, especially on those days when the workload is diminutive or even less. I've spent some philosophical moments in the past month chatting with people who do not, and say the could not, do this type of work. They know themselves well enough to know that they'd be goofing off. Hell, I know people in my company that go in every day and for all the good they will do that day, might well have not come in at all. They have been goofing off forever! In my 22 years with my place of employ, I've known malingerers who have run their own private business' from their office when they should have been doing engineering things or marketing or some other such vocational projects to improve the corporations bottom line...Alas, in these days of fine tuned bean-counting many of these charlatans have been exposed and weeded out. Good riddance. I, myself, am oft times tempted to grab a good book and knock off a chapter or two...watch the tube, (although, I am not a big soap-opera fan)...or take a snooze...but it's not in my make-up. And admittedly, there are some days when I don't get out of my warm slippers until mid-afternoon. But on sick days (of which there are very few) rather than lay abed being bored out of my head, I'll will come into the office here and either lounge sickly-like on the chair or lay on the floor. I give them 10 hours a day when they only expect 8, respond to answering machine messages well into the evening. That is real devotion, at least, so says I.

If work is slow I will beat the bushes for things to do. Call an old workplace acquaintance. Remind them how it used to be when I did nice work for them and bemoan the fact that everything is going overseas. Hang up. Call someone else. This is just too cheery for this time of year. New subject.

I have a new boss, or so a co-worker has told me. Pity. I have seen my last boss only twice in the almost two years I have worked for him. We were getting close. I was beginning to think I knew him and he knew me, knew what I did, understood, cared, bonded. But, he. much like us all, had to claw his way up to the next rung of the corporate ladder, I guess. Be right back, have to go downstairs and grab a a fudge brownie...my standard breakfast. There is some anxiety over the possibility that the new boss may say, out of the blue, "Pal, why don't you plan on coming in every day!" There is currently no retort in my head for this remark, even in the rehearsal stage...it would have to be winged. Local job listings would have to be double checked. New situations thought of. Goodbye to telecommutership. But then again, he may just ignore my existence up here like the outgoing dude has. I did get a goodbye email from the outgoing boss this weekend in which he suggested "Think through what you want in the future." I don't want to read anything into this but I think there is something to be read into this. Let's see, for interviews I would need to get a fresh haircut and have my suit pressed.

All is not lost... there is a bright side. Last month, I got a chance to write about the fact that I have lost touch communication-wise with the corporation... As of this writing I still do not have that sweet convenient digital contact. However, this inconvenience has given me a great opportunity to discover all sorts of workarounds that I might never have thought of before. This communication gap has increased my knowledge and marketability. It has strengthened my patience. It has allowed me to observe, first hand, the limitations of the geeks who oversee this kind of event. It has been a refresher course in UPS procedure. My fax has been given that long needed runout from sitting idle for so long. Excuses have taken on realistic plausibility. I did call last week to see how this "emergency" was being handled. The experts told me they were setting up my exact situation in-house so they could evaluate and correct it... I said "Thank you" and have not heard from them since. I have had not had network communication with the corporation since sometime in September and this was supposed to be a 24 hour (maximum) fix! Chortle.