The saving grace, if there can be said to be such a situation, is that I called it exactly. For a month I’ve been telling collegues–only half-jokingly–that they were going to cancel the program right after this “tollgate”. I was also prescient on a few other pertinent issues; lamentedly, my seering abilities are not accounted for on my performance review; I was, however, particularly, ironically, singled out for the quality of my presentation slides and the effort I put into them. Er, okay. Thanks for, uh, noticing my “work”.
The entire bag was a damn-fool exercise to begin with, and I’m at least in part pleased to see it disappear into the void; however, it remains that the only successful product I’ve worked on in the last decade are some no-brainer paint brush handles. And we wonder why the chicks don’t gush over me the way they do such luminaries as the comb-over king Donald Trump or the cheese of sleeze Larry Flint.
Depending on how things cash out I may have more than I desire. Despite appearances, King George is not a great booster of the Military Industrial Complex of which I am a tiny little cog in the great clockworks, and once programs so overfunded that they were like a prime porker on slaughterday are now emaciated and skeletal, awaiting the circling buzzards to pick the rotting flesh from their bones. I shed not a tear, honestly, for the industry as a whole, but I will miss the steady cashflow to which I have, like a heroin addict, become unconscionably addicted.
Ah well; I’ve enough for a few months sojourn in the sun, and afterward toss myself to the winds of fate, which all sounds so fantastic and peregrine until I realize that it means possibly living out of my car again, or worse, habitating under a freeway underpass like one of our more unfortunate members of society.
Well, they always said I’d come to a bad end, and who am I to disappoint them.
Stranger
