the end is not yet

My voice

When I address groups it sounds (inside my head) like I'm shouting. Sometimes the volume inside my head almost hurts. So I'm always bewildered when someone invariably pipes up and says, "We can't hear you." How can there be such a discrepancy between the volume inside and outside my head?

Turn signals

They make a clicking noise! A damn loud one too. Why can't drivers hear them and clue in to the fact they've had a blinker on for five minutes? If their hearing is poor, why don't they know this and check to make sure the blinker goes off when it should?

I just watched Crash, with Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock and nearly every actor in Hollywood.

Most movies (even the ones I like) are like dragging your finger along sandpaper. This was pure silk, but silk with razor blades and fish hooks hidden in it. I can't remember the last time I felt like this watching a movie.

Note: What follows is more abbreviated than it was going to be, but it's out of date so a little glossing is called for.

I showed up for work the following Monday with more than a little attitude. Good money or no, I'd had it with being a line slave. Turns out I wasn't walking into the nightmare job I was expecting.

My new supervisor put me on what quickly became my favourite job. I drove brand new cars off the end of the line.

The first half shift was a little nerve wracking. Each car has to go to one of three areas. You figure out where they go from a code on the tracking sheet that goes with each car. Thing is, each code is different and there's no rhyme or reason to them. Then getting them off the line to each area is a lot like driving through a full parking lot to an extremely busy gas station. But once you get used to it, it's fun.

I did that job Tuesday and Wednesday too, but Thursday I got sent deep into Trim to install weather stripping on car doors. Friday I was driving again. Then Saturday - my for sure, definite last day - I got sent to do the most ridiculous job I had to do all summer.

Right after the robots install the front and rear windshields, the cars come to a station where two guys make sure the windshields are placed properly before banging on them with rubber mallets to set the epoxy or some such thing. The heat from outside had been screwing with the regular drying time of the epoxy. The rear windshield on one of the three kinds of cars we built was slipping out of place before the epoxy dried. So they sent me in with a roll of black duct tape to put a strip of tape on either side of the windshield at the top to hold it in place until it dried or set or whatever it was.

I didn't get to whack the cars with mallets. The disappointment was palpable.