Remember a little bit back I said that posting the way I do is good and bad. Well, therefore. As I am writing this, she has over two months to go but I just wrote 17 days, and my brain goes there, and it is not a good thought.

This title has nothing to do with Carrie leaving and everything to do with ‘Only a month and a half’ left in the year and if I continue with the way things have been going, I will have posted every Monday for an entire year! That has always been a goal and never been achieved.

We are currently on vacation in Pigeon Forge and Dollywood. We left last Friday and arrived here Saturday afternoon. What a great trip so far!!

I look at when the post is to be up and then I get anxious, unbelievably bad, thinking that she will be leaving in just a few weeks and must bring myself back to reality that the post is not posted quite yet.

I had my second review with Hans last week. Given the power outage fiasco and my one on one with him regarding attendance as being not as he wanted and accused me of not contacting him when I would be out (not true) I figured it would not go well. I was completely wrong. The review went very well and I’m even getting a 3% raise. I was quite shocked.

Other things we discussed led me to believe that I will be here for my second-year anniversary eliminating the need for me to repay the moving expenses when I decide to get out of here. Here being work, not necessarily Thomasville.

We are heading to Dollywood on Friday with a stopover halfway, so we aren’t driving for 8 hours. I’ll post pictures when we get back. We are looking forward to this trip very much.

We had a great Halloween weekend, and the following week was looking to be great.

Was it? It started great then Wednesday rolled around. This started out great as well, then we had our Engineering meeting. We always have this meeting in the main conference room when five minutes before the meeting started all the power went out in the building. It seemed to be a violent situation as well. We moved the meeting to the outside patio and watched as the fire chief’s car and a fire engine rolled into the drive of the plant. This looked like a bit more of a temporary outage. We completed our meeting by 8:50 and as we were starting to leave an individual came in and told us they were sending everyone home. *We’ll come back to this point. At this time, we all headed back to our desks as best we could (there is no emergency lighting). I sat at my desk and started putting things away in my bag while others sat around talking about going golfing etc… We all did this for around 45 minutes or so until Carrie came and picked me up (I called her at 9:00am).

At this point I thought Justin was going home (he was going to work from home), Bret and Evan were going to go golfing, Landen asked if they were sending people home and we then heard from HR it was for safety reasons they were sending people home. When Carrie arrived, we headed to Walmart and picked up some oil and funnel for the car, paint and I also picked up a dashcam. There were other people from work there as well. As we were going home Carrie asked me if I wanted to go to Valdosta with her, I though why not? After we got home, we relaxed for a bit, changed clothes and Carrie got all dressed up with her new dress etc… After a couple hours I figured, they weren’t going to call from work so let’s leave for a road trip, this is about 12:00 noon.

I was not thinking about work from this point on. We found the Valdosta Mall very easily, shopped around and then went to a store called ‘An Even Greater Divide Smoke Shop’ to pick up a toy 🙂 for Carrie. The store was very clean. They, among other things sold incense, cigars and blacklight posters and tee shirts. It was a great store even though the area was pretty sketchy.

After a great road trip, we headed home, arrived there around 4:00pm made dinner, watched a little TV and went to bed.

Fast forward to Thursday morning, arriving to work not knowing if the power was on or not saw all the lights on and went in. When I checked my email, I found that it had been blown up by about seven emails and I usually get one or two. It turns out that the power came back on 30 minutes after they told us to go home and the emails from Hans were not happy and said and I quote…

“All – Let this serve as future notice that as long as you work for engineering the only 2 people that can authorize you to leave early are the Engineering Manager and the General Manager. My expectation (which I believe to be common sense) is that once you hear that people may get sent home you confirm this with your supervisor before leaving. We will review at tomorrows 8:30.”

*This is the point I was coming back to. When we were told they were sending everyone home, Hans was right there with us all. If he wanted us to stay, it was incumbent upon him to tell us to stay put until hears something official. He sent a text to Bret who was on the golf course drunk and would not come back along with Evan and Schwimer. I’m not sure who else might have been with him but he did not make an effort to text me and I was waiting at home for just that reason.

This will be the reason I will be making a quick exit from this hell hole of a work environment as soon as August 17th, 2023, gets here.

One more thing. I think I heard today (Thursday) that Marvin is no longer with us, and Noah is taking over all of his work. I’m not sure if that is true and it could only be hearsay. I’m sure Marvin is taking this time off because he is in the Military reserves so if he in fact no longer with us and we (the company) let him go there could be some lawsuits involved here. I don’t think this is in fact true, his very large flag is still on the wall and other personal items on his desk. I think Justin mis-spoke.

This has been a long post and I’ll stop it here. Whew…. This place is something else and it’s the people, not the work.