The Summer of Our Discontent

Lying down to sleep last night on the air mattress that I knew would be half-deflated by morning, I thought to myself “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The three times in the night when I rolled off the air mattress and onto the dog, and then clambered from my hands and knees to my feet, so that I could go pee, I thought to myself “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

As I waddled around my empty house, hatefully eyeballing the few remaining things that require packing and the many things that require cleaning, I thought to myself, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“This,” for the uninitiated, is my and The Husband’s relocation to Texas.

By late Spring, things were already heading downhill.  Sometime after week 20 of the pregnancy I came to the unfortunate conclusion that, despite being physically suited to pregnancy, it left me brutally handicapped by depression and face-clawing anxiety.  My sister’s husband, who was always an epic fuckwit of the first order, had gotten drunk and attempted to slap her around. No lasting physical harm was done because while he is a greasy-haired, semi-literate pygmy; my sister is 6 feet tall and, had she been inclined, could have stomped the piss out of him.  It did, however, require her oust him from the house and proceed to rebuild her life without him.

I was going Crazy, and my family was in upheaval, and then my work phone rang and all hell broke loose.

My husband was calling.  His company–an internet retailer–was being bought by another, much larger internet retailer.  Corporate unwillingness to collect sales taxes being what it is, the St. Louis office would be closing.  He was given a choice between relocating to Seattle; relocating to Texas; or losing his job.  Don’t let us speak about working from home–sales tax laws disallowed anything so sensible, and the owner of The Husband’s company has a thing for having asses in chairs.  It would be quaint, were it not so fucking irritating.

My husband?  He is a copywriter.  His prose is funny, clever, occasionally heartbreakingly sweet.  Because his employer is known for their quirky writing, it worked.  Unfortunately, the demand for copywriters in St. Louis is small, and the demand for his particular style here in the Lou is virtually non-existent.  Not moving, safe to say, would require a career change.

To say we considered our options would demonstrate a criminal use of understatement.  We agonized.  Neither of us thought, when we set about to have a kid, that we would be having said kid 10 hours away from our support system.  At the same time, neither of us thought that either of us would ever be offered the kinds of shiny prizes that were being dangled in front of him.  The choice was not simple, but it was plain–we needed to go.  It was the right choice at the shittiest imaginable time.

A cursory glance at a the job boards and a cost of living calculator quickly cleared up any questions of which city we would pick.  My particular industry is exceedingly well-represented in Dallas; it is virtually non-existent in Seattle.  That fact, though, was much less relevant to me than fact that moving to Seattle would require re-embracing a level of broke-assedness that I did not care to do. We’d have had to sell the baby, and we would have had to get a fucking wicked good price.

So.  Yeah.  Dallas.

At the time, I thought that making our decision would be the worst part of the whole process.  I had gone through corporate relocation with my first husband, and it went relatively smoothly.  ”What,” I asked myself, “could possibly happen?”

I obviously underestimated what could happen at the intersection of mind-boggling fuckwittery; gross incompetence; and absolutely not giving a shit.  If I knew then what I know now, I would have marched into my doctor and demanded he either commit me or place me in a medically induced coma because this process?  Has been fucked up from the floor up.

There was the back and forth about the sale itself.  At some point, the owner of The Husband’s company decided that he was, in fact, a goddamn genius.  He proceeded to engage in negotiations using an equal part of smoke and mirrors, assuming that his tremendous cleverness and charm would certainly trump the Acquiring Corporate Behemoth’s desire to see things like . . . numbers. Oddly enough, Acquiring Corporate Behemoth was not at all impressed by all the fucking shucking and jiving.  Instead, it waited until Wiley McDipshit had exhausted himself, and then had its phalanx of lawyers and designated number pimps sit down to negotiate based on things that had not been produced from the crack of Wiley’s sweaty ass.

Had it not been our lives that were being bandied about, it would have been a tremendously fascinating study in hubris.  It was our life, though, and this asshole was fucking it up.  You see, at the same time he’s got his tongue in Acquiring Corporate Behemoth’s ear and is wildly hoping  no one will catch onto his game of hide the salami, he was also the only point of contact for any questions; the only party with whom one could do any negotiating.   Wiley needed decisions as to who was relocating, and where, and when, so that he could expedite the sale.  When confronted with questions, though, he simply made shit up in an effort to make the asker go away. We’ll never even know what concerns might have been communicated to Acquiring Corporate Behemoth, but smart money is on none.

Eventually, the terms were hammered-out.  Predictably, all of Wiley McDipshit’s made up semi-assurances evaporated.  Finally, we had to seriously deal with moving.

Let’s just say mistakes were made.