• Yet more amazing revelations about Catholic Church hierarchy and their handling (pun!) of the ever-expanding molestation cases. Check out the linked article, it's yet another detailed account of how they knew for a fact that one of their priests was raping boys on numerous occasions, and promptly had him castrated and then thrown out of the church.  No wait, that's what decent people would do.  No, the church instead covered up for his crimes and moved him around from parish to parish, so he could always have fresh meat.  How considerate.

He was on record as being involved in NAMBLA, had admitted to his sins, and repeated them time and again, and the church covered for him, and bought off people who complained.

Imagine if some school had done that?  Or some orphanage?  They would be finished, deader than Enron. Multi-billion lawsuits, government inquiries and legislation, death threats, boycotts, etc.  And it's not like this is an isolated case, there are dozens of priests just like this that we know of, and I'm sure hundreds more that aren't known yet.  I wonder if Catholics are still coughing up the dough, knowing how much of it goes to pay off child abuse victims?

Like most non-organized religious people, I've got a lot of issues with churches being non-profit and therefore paying no taxes.  So many of them have very strong political agendas, and hide their profits from selling tapes and such, and pay even fewer taxes than big campaign-donating corporations.  Various right wing churches spent most of the Clinton years doing anything they could to slander and spread tabloid-quality rumors about the president, which is pretty clearly going well out of the scope of any real religious purpose.

They can of course promote or slander whoever they want to in their political opinions, they just shouldn't be able to do it under the cover of a church, and therefore pay no taxes on their fund raising, and not have to report financial disclosures as real companies do.

Anyway, I don't have the energy to dig up more examples and go into some big anti-church rant tonight.  My feet hurt.

• And the new poster child for tort reform is...

• Remember, police dogs run faster than you, and they have much sharper teeth.

How's this for irony? I posted yesterday about how I had to learn the lessons Dooce has to teach, and not post a bunch of funny-but-insulting stuff about my work, lest it eventually get back to the shaved chimps that run the stadium and company I work for, and I get sacked.  *oops*

So tonight I got screwed over by a stand manager and was forced to walk halfway around the stadium to get more of the poison I was peddling, and on the way there I was fuming and smashed my wire vending basket thing into the wall and swore in sailoresque fashion, mostly under my breath.  My smash broke the flimsy little plastic price thing on the wire basket, but those things have a life expectancy like a box of YumYums in a police break room; they break all the time, and cost about eight cents to replace.  It was somewhat satisfying at any rate.  Funny how cursing and hitting things is so effective at soothing foul humor.

I got to the other stand and talked to a level supervisor and she of course assured me the manager was an idiot and couldn't do what he'd done, and she'd take care of it.  So I sold another load of overpriced donuts, and then coming back for more (to my stand, not the other idiot-staffed one) I see another supervisor who says I must report to the main office immediately.  No explanation given.

Didn't occur to me that it could be anything of importance, maybe some quick conference on the manager restocking dispute.  So I get down there and they won't say shit about what I'm doing there, but I see the broken donut price sign on the desk, which is not expected, and is almost certainly a bad sign.

Anyway, 15 minutes later the other supervisor eventually arrives, as does the Union Rep, and I'm told that 2 fans saw me smack the wall, as did some usher, and they swore out a complaint, or something.  I can't quite imagine anyone so bored that they would bother to do that.  I mean if you were driving along and saw some worker who was clearly pissed about something give his bulldozer a smack, would you call his bosses to complain?  I should hope not.  And I'd hope that if you did they'd humor you and then once you hung up they'd laugh about what idiots people were.

Sadly that didn't happen at my job, and I'm now suspended while they "investigate" the situation.  What that means I don't know, I mean I admitted freely doing what they said I did, so what's to investigate? I was pissed, I hit the wall, I broke the little price tag in two (it can be taped and used again with about ten seconds of labor), and...

This is more or less a perfect example of why all workers so hate management.  They cave over any little thing.  You see some new TV show with something semi-offensive, and some housewife in Kansas starts writing letters and network executives break into a panic.  How can they not know how stupid people are, and how easily upset?  All employees in almost every job spend most of their free time joking with each other about how stupid management is, and how stupid the customers are.  It's like there is some sort of partial lobotomy workers undergo when they become management, and they forget all of their real life experience and common sense.

That's not entirely what it's like where I work; the management is largely clueless of how things need to be done, but most of the employees are even dumber, so I can see why management fears to leave them/us any real latitude in operations.  When you are trying to get 17 y/o idiots to do a job, you have to pretty well spell it out to them.

But I can't see why they would actually bother with idiot complaints.  I mean if an employee gets in a fight, or rips people off, or smokes pot on the job, that's something to worry about. If someone sees an angry employee smack a wall and keep on walking, that's the type where you nod and smile and act concerned, and then once they're gone you throw the paper you were writing on in the trash and joke with your co-workers about how stupid some people are.  Sure you tell the employee to be cool and not do that again, and you see why they were pissed in the first place, but why waste time doing any actual investigation?  It's not like the customer will ever know one way or the other.

Anyway, like the example of the bored Kansas housewife with her letter writing campaign making network execs tremble, this sort of thing shows a lack of common sense/proportion on the part of management. 

But given that it's me being fucked by things, I would see it that way...

So I make $40 instead of $120 since I had to leave early, after wasting 45 minutes in the office for something they could have told me in 2, and I'll miss tomorrow at least, though the Union rep thought it likely they'd quit dicking around and I'd be back working by the more-profitable weekend.

I get home after that and take off my new shoes, and the 3 or 4 layers of medical tape I had over band aids are literally dripping blood, and there are big wet spots on my black socks.  When you can see blood on black cotton, that's a bad sign.  Both heels, from the huge blisters I got yesterday.  Really worth the $20 a foot and 6 hours time spent having such fun, huh?

I'm not quite good enough at feeling persecuted to work myself into a fury about things.  It's not as if I don't hate the job and really want to not work there, so a day off that I probably wouldn't have worked anyway, what with my feet/legs/knee/ass/back aching so much isn't a big deal.  And I did do more or less exactly what I was said to do, and even though I was in the right about what I was so mad over, that's no excuse.  And I know that you have to keep it in control in front of the marks, and I didn't, and I know the company has to pretend they give a shit about what people whine about.  I find it mostly depressing just due to other things I'm already miserable about, and of course rather ironic, given the Dooce prophecy I've been seeing like an anvil descending towards my Wile E. Coyote persona.  So that's that.  Someone send me $20,000 so I can live on that the rest of the year and never return to the stadium.  Please?

The "despair" teased above is more about life in general, but I don't have the energy to type about that today, and it's too personal and depressing to go into here anyway.  I think.  It's not like I'm trying to impress girls with my sensitive nature or something.

On the bright side, the new shoes felt comfy, and I did get a semi-decent haircut before work.  Bleh.