The Wrong Dog Blog

Today was a near perfect autumnal equinox, with truly splendiferous WALKIES!!! weather, and the woofus enjoyed himself accordingly. Howsomever, today is the occasion for which I have long awaited: an opportunity to write an entry in praise of my boss.

The timing is actually quite crucial. You see, if I do it at a time when she is doing something nice for me, she might think that I am writing it only because I am grateful for that particular niceness and not out of general appreciation. So I kept waiting for a time when something particularly nice for me wasn’t in the works. This has proved to be impossible: no sooner is the refinance settled and done, but she’s offering to fly me to Hawaii for her wedding. But one can hardly say, “Stop being nice to me, Bianca, so I can post a blog in praise of you!” It sort of detracts from the purpose of the thing.

Fortunately for me and unfortunately for the business, there is a temporary staff shortage at the warehouse and it is necessary for me to pick up some duties that can be done remotely by computer. The possibility of a respite from kindness obviously being a spectre of my fevered imagination, I decided that being given extra work would have to do. After all, most people do not respond to being given extra duties with anthems of joy, so Bianca would be forced to conclude that I do appreciate her generally speaking. This is, of course, assuming that Bianca opts for logic in this case, which of course it’s possible she won’t, but I’m hoping that she’ll keep in mind that the being whose motivations are under speculation is me and therefore logic is the way to go.

I met Bianca back in the dawn of prehistory, back when I was working at the Awful Place and didn’t even know I was an Aspie—even before I had a woofus! We met on an electronic mailing list about collecting an item of mutual interest. Bianca was in the process of starting her first business, in which she would sell (among other things) this item of mutual interest. We chatted back and forth for some time about our collections and related topics. At one point my failing business loaned her starting business a little capital and we saw the best profit we saw the whole time we were afloat. Bianca and I did occasional business, we chatted electronically a great deal, we actually met a couple of times when she was in NYC and I went there to meet her, she moved to Japan, she offered immense emotional support during the crash and burn of my business. Then she started her next business and that started really taking off.

We didn’t chat as much during that period, but then Bianca was busy. Starting a business is busy and starting a successful business is busy, squared. We kept in touch, though. I adopted a woofus and attempted to be Super-Mom. My situation at the Awful Place continued to descend until I lost my job there, as Helen once put it, in circumstances that were possibly illegal and definitely brutal. Despite the demands of her growing business, Bianca was there for me.

The next seven months, during which I was unemployed, were rough. I did have a copyediting project that kept me going, but it was going to end, as were my unemployment benefits. I finally begged Bianca to give me a job.

It wasn’t really fair of me. She didn’t need a proofreader or a copyeditor in her business, and she had no way of knowing that I was competent to do anything else. It’s a notoriously bad idea to hire friends as employees. Her business was still in its development stages and she needed to hire staff to do positions she actually needed, not waste the funds on a friend who might prove to be only a liability. She gave me a job, though.

I won’t say I don’t do anything for the company; it’s just that I don’t think I do anything special. Any college kid with an eye for detail and a year of college Japanese could do better. I often think of a Roseanne episode in which Dan asks a neighbor moving back to Chicago what sort of job it is that the neighbor will be doing there and the neighbor answers, “It’s a son-in-law job.” I often think that I do a “friend job,” but I at least try to do it well. Unquestionably from my end it beats any job I’ve ever had: I can work at home, I don’t have to deal with the public, to a great degree I can make my own hours. Periodically Bianca makes raise noises, and I get a raise. We’re long past the point where I feel overpaid, especially now with the refinance that I talked about in my last post.

The job is really the tip of the iceberg, in a nearly literal sense. Like an iceberg, the majority of Bianca’s positive impact on my life is under the surface and goes deep. Of course, it’s a lot warmer than an iceberg, so there the metaphor has to end, but I can’t really cover all the ways that Bianca has been a great friend and a great boss. This is only a blog, after all. I’m not saying that we don’t ever get on each other’s nerves—Bianca’s a human and I’m an Aspie, and sometimes the internet isn’t big enough for the clash of neurologies. I know, though, that Bianca is not going to suddenly disappear on me. In fact, one of the things that keeps me from suddenly disappearing on the whole overstimulating, complicated world is the knowledge that Bianca needs me to not suddenly disappear.

Besides, I think I’m actually starting to enjoy myself. If so, though, that has a great deal to do with Bianca and her unending support.

My apologies it has been so long since my last blog entry. I am an Aspie on a mission: a mission to find a home for me and my woofus that does not have so very many stairs associated with it and that is better than slum conditions. (No, really, I do live in slum housing.) Having discovered that only 17% of the rentals in this area are open to woofi, I concluded that it was time to buy a home.

Not that I hadn’t wanted one before, but things are getting more urgent. Sunny is now seven years old. I’m now forty-two. We need a place that doesn’t exhaust us just walking up to it from the sidewalk. We need a place that is accessible to all the places that I can’t take us by car because I can’t ever drive one, my visual reaction time being what it is. A home has always been out of our reach because of my financial stupidity and my persistent Dreaming of Big Expensive Dreams (like 3D graphics).

Fortunately for Sunny and me, I work for Bianca. I told her that I couldn’t buy a house because I am in too much debt, and she offered to pay off my debts. Is that sweet or what? Unfortunately the government would tax me on whatever she paid off, even if I never touched the money, so instead we put together a loan on a long term and at low interest that a mortgage officer called “a sweet deal” when I told him about it. Magically, my monthly debt payments are reduced to less than 5 percent of my monthly income. Interesting fact: the mortgage lenders don’t care how deep you are in debt so long as your payments don’t come to more than 5 percent of your monthly income. Unsolicited advice: even if you’re not interested in home-buying, go to one of the classes just to learn what they have to tell you about credit. Your credit rating in American society is essentially your value as a being, so you need to know about it, and it’s not simple!

I am interested in buying a home, so I have enrolled in a home-buying course for its actual purpose. Sunny is permitted to come along to class, and he’s loving it. I was afraid he was going to lick the toes of one of my classmates who was wearing sandals—I know he thought about it because he gave her toes a good sniff and a long stare before passing on. He loves wandering around and saying hi to the other students. It’s now the big day in his week.

My dream house just happens to be on the market: it’s right next to the grocery stores and the pharmacy and the credit union, and has a lovely tree out front, so I have been ogling it for years as I passed on my way to the grocery stores and the pharmacy and the credit union. I learned at an open house how expensive it was. I didn’t think I could afford it, but then I’m not a mortgage officer, so I thought I should at least look into it. I went to the mortgage officer at my credit union, and as I expected, the Dream House was out of reach. But then he indicated the form in front of me. “Is that the form for the first-time home buyers IDA?”

This IDA is a marvelous thing. If you meet the income restrictions, you can save up to $1666 in between one and three years and get back $5K for your house down-payment. Naturally I am going to apply. So I said yes, that is what the form is.

“I don’t make the decision on who gets in that program, but they like to limit it to people who actually will be in a position to buy a home within three years.”

Ouch. I could live with the Dream Home being out of my league, but no house at all? After all Bianca’s generosity and even attending classes and open houses with humans and going to have to do more of that and still no house? And to be told about it in that backhanded, snooty way, instead of just saying “I don’t think you’ll make it within the time alotted by the program”? That really hurt.

I complained about the Mortgage Officer to Joh, who had the practical suggestion that I ask the instructor of my home-buying class instructor what she thought. My instructor looked at the numbers. She suggested I get a condo as a starter home, although I’d have to go through another program because hers is limited to buyers within the city and all the condos are outside of it. I was devastated. I’d rented one of those condos one year about a decade and a half ago, and hated it. It was too far from everything. Grocery shopping, laundry, everything was a pain. Plus there wasn’t much in the way of WALKIES!!! locations. It would, however, get me out of the Osgood Estates and into real housing fairly quickly. It also bid fair to have me stuck there permanently. Between a condo mortgage, condo fees, and the higher transportation fees of having to rely on buses and cabs when I generally rely on my feet, I’d be lucky to save anything.

So the day after our talk, I wrote my instructor an e-mail. I pointed out the downsides of the condo plan. I pointed out how much I could save by staying in my slum housing for the time being. With the IDA, I could put together a 5% deposit in less than two years on the least expensive houses avialable in the city that aren’t fixer uppers. (I have no interest in making my home my hobby. My home is supposed to be the locus for my hobbies, not the hobbies themselves.) Of course, with the mortgage officer’s attitude the IDA looked iffy, but I had written the director of the IDA program a letter explaining why I had to live in the city and really needed the IDA to make the whole package work.

To my amazement, my instructor was so impressed by my logic and my thinking things out that she wrote a letter to the IDA director and the mortgage officer, supporting my IDA application! She told them she couldn’t promise that an appropriate house would be available for me to buy within the time of the program, but she thought I had a good plan and was very determined. So I might get into the IDA program after all!

That still puts a lot of months ahead of me and the woofus. Months of stairs. Months of fighting with the landlord about the heat being broken. (We do that about every three weeks through the heating season because that’s about how often it breaks. It breaks, I complain for at least four days while he insists it’s because I have let the radiators get dusty while I insist that the pipe coming into the apartment is cold, so it doesn’t matter if the radiators are dusty or not. Finally the plumber comes, patch-fixes it, it works for about two weeks, and the cycle repeats.) Months of paring down expenses as far as we can so that we can save the money for the down-payment. For instance, instead of taking Sunny to the groomer for his three-month trim, I’m going to trim him myself. It takes days because he eventually starts licking to keep me from trimming, which puts him in danger of having his tongue trimmed and I have to stop for that day and try again the next. He looks silly because I’m a lousy trimmer and he goes around with a ridiculously uneven job until I’m done: his tail and one foot will be fine, but his other feet will be bushy and his tush will look like he’s wearing panties with ruffles on the seat. Of course, he’s a woofus, and he doesn’t care how he looks. Thank goodness he’s not a bunny because bunnies know when they look ridiculous and take it badly. Still, I don’t like it when people stare at Sunny not in a good way.

But maybe there will at least be a purpose to all those months in the end.