Ravings of a Textual Deviant

I’m going to take advantage of the fact that my dad does not, to the best of my knowledge, read my blog.

First, a little background. My dad’s a clinical chemist. His specialty is dry-reagent chemistry. If you’ve every used one of those little plastic dipsticks to check the chlorine in a pool, you may well have used something he worked on. He’s always had these ideas for new products kicking around, and starting when I was eleven and first learning to do computer graphics, I’ve been helping him out.

A couple of years ago, I got dragged into helping him with his main project. I was technically working at an hourly rate, but because it was a start-up, there wasn’t any actual cash being paid out. Pretty soon, I ended up working for shares, because it was easier (for him) for me to accumulate stock options than not paid in cash. Originally, I was strictly doing the occasional bit of graphics or tech writing. But as time went by, I saw a lot of other things not getting done. And as I’m the sort of person who does things that need doing, I ended up trying to do a lot of things that needed doing…never mind that I wasn’t trained, experienced, qualified, or even interested.

Now, the product is finally on the market. (Getting it there is a whole other story, and I’m not going there because I simply cannot start drinking at 8:00 AM.) Back in November, I told my dad that as soon as we got to this point, and all the loose ends were wrapped up, I was done. And I was absolutely, positively not taking on anything new. Well, we’ve almost got the loose ends wrapped up. And I am burned out. I am beyond burned out. I expressed this to my dad, and he simply said “Me, too.” Lately, the only way to get him to listen to me is to tell him something he doesn’t want to hear, so I retorted “Yeah, but it’s your business. I’m just here because I have trouble saying no to you.”

Would you believe that he still doesn’t get it?

The worst part of it is that along the way, I seem to have lost my dad and ended up with a boss who’s known me for way too long and happens to share some DNA. I can’t remember the last time I got a phone call or email from him that didn’t start with “I need you to…” He needs a graphic emailed to someone. He needs me to find a file. He needs me to write a procedure. He needs me to troubleshoot a corrupted database that turns out to be just fine if he’d open the damned thing in Access, not Word. He needs me to go to a plant sale for him (I am not making this up) on the first Saturday morning in months that I don’t have to go into the lab and work. He even invited an out-of-town investor to stay at my house–and forget not asking me about it, he damned near didn’t tell me about it. (”I thought I told you,” he said. “No, because if you had, I would have told you that I had another houseguest staying those days.”) And then, my mother had to explain to him why I was so upset.

Now, I don’t mean to portray my dad as a complete asshole, because he’s not. He’s not intentionally malicious; he just doesn’t think about what he’s doing. I really, truly try to remember this when I can’t sleep and I’m frantically calling my brother in Oregon at 2:00 AM so that he can convince me that it really is a bad idea for our dad to end up in a garbage bag in the woods. (Or that if he does, he had it coming.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004 at 9:29 am and is filed under Daze in the Life of..., Life with Father. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.