knowing the price of everything

a few minutes ago i decided to support a friend of mine by buying a disc of his. the checkout surprised me.

airmail: 2 to 8 days, $3
express mail with tracking: 3 to 14 days, $26

ummm. really???

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i edited a couple of papers this afternoon - the first one was simple enough, but the second was tough. not only that, a lot of it seemed really similar to mine and i was greatly relieved when, about halfway through, the author took a completely different course :)

in other news - i'm making crazy headway into that script i mentioned... these works we're reading aren't really intended to be instructional, but they're a darn good source of inspiration!

around 7pm i needed a break, so i left and got caught in the rain (good thing i took the umbrella with just in case) on the way to meeting pg for a quick bite. we sat next to a couple nursing a miniature bruce willis - the resemblance was startling!

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i was going to dress up for the follow-up meeting, but at the last minute thought better of it and went to the meeting a compromise between rogue and slick. the meeting began really well, and remained upbeat right until the question of money came up.

i played nice, but i really didn't know whether to be amused or offended: "we checked how much someone with your experience earns in the market..." - before offering me even less than the army pays, which is at most a third of my market value? did you misread my cv?!

so things were a little awkward after that, and it didn't help that the waiter forgot my coffee and the big-boss-in-potentia hadn't forgotten.

...

now for the real joke: am i desperate enough to take the job anyway?

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so... i got to thinking on the way back home. yeah, it's still gnawing away. it's not being called a tyrant that set me off, nor egotistical. what really pushed my buttons at the very beginning was an aggressive insinuation concerning my lack of integrity, because the little genius doesn't want to understand that one cannot prevent idea contamination.

*hackles rise*

to make matters worse - i probably shouldn't be spending too much time alone right now - i'm still beating myself up over my co-worker's idiocy. i'm obviously an abysmal failure when it comes to teaching people to do things the right way. either that, or he's sabotaging the project to ensure that the work won't run out. the system's so badly designed that it's unlikely that that's going to happen, so i gotta run with the former.

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am i an alcoholic if rum helps me to focus better on freud? as it is, i'm hunting details on "formation" in what appear to be all the wrong places. it's the last thing i have left for this ugly assignment, and it's taking forever!

now back to work. i've been on a long enough break (thanks, nystire).