Security deferred

This is about as good-news-bad-news as you can get. On the Good News side, Verizon has decided to close out its surplus claim for New York operator services. Long and short of it is: no layoffs. More specifically: no layoffs for me. The Bad News, unfortunately, is that the company will be announcing a brand spankin' new surplus within the next week or two. Great. Thanks, guys.

This actually isn't quite as pointless as it sounds. Under our current contract, when the company declares a surplus, they have to go through several roster-thinning steps (e.g. retirement packages, job sharing, etc.) before they can get to the layoff part of the show. They were at the very tail end of that process when they closed out this current surplus declaration, so even if they announce the new surplus today, they have to start all over again, and we're looking at a good two months before anything drastic happens. With any luck, we'll protract this thing out until August, when our contract is up and we get to go on strike. Again.

If anyone knows of someone wealthy who's looking to put a total stranger in his/her will, could I have their phone number? Thanks.

"The notion that I am me is like a pebble in my shoe"

Someday, when I (fail to) grow up, I'm going to have a home page that's this expletive-deleted cool.