Never a Dull Day...

I hadn't been in the office this morning more than 5 minutes before I got a very strange phone call. A guy tells me "we" have a problem with one of my employees. He tells me who he's talking about and then goes on to tell me that this employee uses and sells marijuana, is on lortabs (prescription pain killers) around the clock and is stealing diesel fuel from the plant. He tells me to drug test him today and he would fail. I asked him who he was, told him I wasn't at liberty to discuss employees and transferred him to my boss who pretty much told him the same thing. The concerned citizen told my boss he was calling the Better Business Bureau and hung up on him. This guy definitely has a personal issue with this employee and he was trying to get him fired. I'm pretty sure that if I drug tested everyone here, everyone would pass because the drug test doesn't work. However, if I sent them all to the clinic to be tested, then at least 75% would fail. Unfortunately, that's just how it is. We pay these guys $7.50 an hour to work in the insane heat and frigid cold doing manual, back-breaking labor. I wouldn't do what they do for $100 an hour. Not a chance in hell. I don't condone what they do outside of work but it's their business and their life. All I can ask is that they show up to work and do their jobs. As for the diesel issue, we solved that relatively quickly by installing a lock on the tank.

There was a guy who came in last summer to apply for a job. We weren't hiring at the time but my boss told him he would pay him to cut our grass out front. His house was across the street so he raced home to get the lawn mower and was back out front working 10 minutes later. It began to rain when he was about halfway done and he came in the office to get the money. I told him I wouldn't pay him until the job was done but he somehow convinced my boss to pay him in full. My boss told him he knew where to find him obviously since we can see his house from my office window. He never came back. I saw him a couple weeks later when I was walking to the post office next to his house but he either didn't or pretended not to hear me when I yelled his name. One week later, he was dead from a heroin overdose. He was 19 years old. His mother has lost 2 of her 4 children to drugs. One year earlier her oldest son, who was 20 at the time, crashed his car into a telephone pole one mile down the road and was killed instantly. He was high on drugs. An absolute shame.

I did bring the guys cookies to work today so I've crossed that off my list :) They were all very appreciative and most of them made a special effort to thank me. Some even lied and told me they were good. I attempted to make brownies last night as well but they didn't turn out so great. Actually I don't know how they tasted because I couldn't get them out of the pan. Oh well. I won an indoor herb garden kit on Ebay on Tuesday so once that arrives, I can get to planting and knock that off my list too! When I told Howard about the herb garden, he laughed and asked me why I needed herbs when I never cook. I think he's secretly excited though.

I think the list item I'm most looking forward to is building the lego set. My brother and I were crazy about legos when we were younger. The guest room in our house in PA was dedicated to our lego town. We had two long tables set up with our town stretched across them. There was a fire station, police station, hospital, gas station and airport. Every kid in our neighborhood had their own lego house in our town though mine was always the prettiest because I stole all the lego flowers and placed them all over my pretty green lawn. A few years back when both Anthony and I were still living in Northern VA, we went to Tysons to Christmas shop for our parents. We walked by the lego store and both stopped dead in our tracks. We decided we would just go take a peek at the newer sets. A couple hours later we finally left the store to continue our shopping. We just had to sit down in the tiny kids' chairs with our knees up to our chins and build a house together. It's one of my most favorite recent memories. When I told him I was bidding on the 1991 Lego Fire Station, he was just as excited as I was. When I'm done with it, I'm going to send it to him to build with Brooke and Paige. This is what Heather thinks about me:

me: 2 hours until the lego set is mineeeeee
Heather: haha, you might be the biggest dork i know

Yup.