Read chapter 98 here
Photo by Retiring Guy
Thursday, December 31, 2020
We experienced a bit of a scare earlier this week, one that remains verbally unacknowledged.
Nobody wants to be a jinx, I suppose.
As he usually does each weekend morning, Andy sauntered into the family room about 8 o’clock yesterday.
“Good morning!” I greeted him as he approached my desk.
He returned the greeting, sounding a bit distracted.
“I suppose it’ll be a slow week for you,” I said.
“I can’t get into the system at work right now. My password doesn’t work,” he explained.
“Have you contacted anyone?”
“Yeah, I called the IT department and left a voicemail.”
“I’m sure someone will get back to you soon. Maybe this did some kind of maintenance over the long weekend,” I offered.
I was determined to keep the conversation positive, even as my mind raced back to early in the year when
being locked out of BSG’s system proved to be the first step in a widespread layoff procedure. But that involved a buyout by a larger company (BSN Sports, Andy’s current employer) subsuming — or gobbling up, to put it more bluntly — a smaller company (Kollege Town Sports) and unloading the employees they no longer needed.
Why would they do something like that now? I wondered.
Sports at all levels — pro, college, school, club — have in many cases continued to play, although there have been numerous stumbles along the way. (After trouncing Illinois in its 2020 season opener, the Wisconsin Badgers football had to cancel their next 2 games as a result of a Covid outbreak on the team.) At the pro level, basketball, baseball, and hockey made it through their respective championship series. The college bowl season is underway, and at this point it looks as though we’ll have March Madness in 2021. Without any fans present, to be sure. In other words, the market for jerseys and related sportswear and equipment hasn’t dried up.
I suspect the same thoughts raced through Andy’s mind while waiting for a callback. He was full of chatter, as if burning off nervous energy. Before leaving the house to run some errands, I was set to ask him if he had called his supervisor – to get some reassurance that he still had a job, for one -- but he beat me to the punch when he mentioned he had just talked to her and she was going to follow up with IT. This news provided a sense of relief. Nothing along the line of, “Oh, Andy, I meant to tell you before….”
It’s just some computer glitch, I assured myself.
And indeed that was exactly the case, as Andy was ‘back at work’, reviewing an order on his work computer screen (on the table to his right), when I returned home.
(During slow periods of the workday,
and there have been quite a few during the holidays, Andy has his big-screen TV to keep him occupied.)
2020 has been a lousy enough year without the addition of a loss of job exclamation point during the final week of the year.
BSN Sports is planning to bring its employee back to work in an office environment sometime in March, according to Andy. That will involve a short commute to Waunakee, about 5 miles north of Middleton. Whenever this step occurs, Andy will start focusing on moving out and being on his own again.
And to close, here are two photos of Eddie and Madi. The color photo shows the Christmas Day raclette dinner table at the Vol house. Madi’s parents live in Oberdischingen, a community (population 2,200) located 10 miles southwest of Ulm.
The photo below is from a late-afternoon walk in Oberdischingen on December 26, 2019. This area of Germany is on the 48th latitude, which puts it north of Montreal and Quebec City. It gets dark very early at this time of year,.
Photo by Retiring Guy
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