Too Many Rats in the Cage.

Every once in a great while, a head hunter will call me with a job offer. Said offer will carry the promise of wonderful new things... adventure, excitement, fame, mental challenge, and a lot more money. So off I go. A for profit corporation paid to have little old me fly Business Class to the Big City for an interview. Business Class! In Business Class one gets five full inches of leg room instead of three! The flight was the first time since I was nine years old where the plane landed and I did not have an impression of my knees indented on my forehead. I know, sexy, eh?!

The For Profit Corporation puts me up in a swank hotel, with room service and everything. No coffee maker in my room. Uh uh. Nope. We've hit the big time, Baby. Make your own coffee? Puhleeze! Pablo wheels in a white cloth covered cart with a large silver pot full of piping hot, fantastic flavorful caffine and an orchid at For Profit Company's (FPC) expense. FPC doesn't seem to mind paying Swank Hotel $16.00 for said pot of coffee. They also don't mind the $4.00 room delivery charge. They wouldn't dream of denying Pablo his mandatory, already included $20% tip. Swank Hotel was kind enough to leave an extra space on the bill in case I wanted to tip Pablo more than 20%. Pablo was very nice, but fully dressed and did not display the abs or pects of the guy in the Solar Flex commercial, so Pablo was forced to make due with 20%.

The bed at Swank Hotel, can I tell you? Wow. Feather bed. Down comforter. 100,000 thread count sheets. I don't think crack could be as satisfying as that bed even if the guy from the Solar Flex commerical was in it with me. Oh, and the bathroom! More square footage than my house. Marble everywhere. And a phone. An Egyptian terry cloth robe that felt heavenly. I don't know what they do to terry cloth in Egypt, but I humbly bow to their superior knowledge and treatment of the textile.

My interview takes place over dinner at an equally swank restaurant. It dawns on me that I have not been to a restaurant where I have had to distinguish between a salad fork and a regular fork in quite sometime. Now I have a plethora of silverware at my disposal some of which I don't recognize including -I discovered later- a pair of "tapas tongs" which are used for olives, I'm told. Over dinner I am feeling like a first class ass, wondering why I've been toiling in the non-profit sector when I could have been toiling for For Profit Corp, which is willing to appropriately pay for my toils, and damn, FPC knows how to LIVE!

Dinner concludes and I'm ready to sign on the dotted line, move across the country, and begin the good life without guilt. Hell, I've done my time working for charity, now it's time for Polly! After all, the stressed induced heart attack I'm doomed to have will not be any less painful should it arrive by profit or non-for profit, so why not live a little before the inevitable coronary arrives? Valet Guy brings my rental car, also courtesy of FPC, to the front of the restaurant (sedan, NOT economy), opens my door and refuses my tip, which he tells me has "already been taken care of." I know, nice touch.

I drive back to Swank Hotel. Or at least I try to drive back to Swank Hotel. More like I make a slow crawl back to Swank Hotel. The freeway is far from free. I slowly inch along, and have the pleasure of paying tolls to do so. I exit from the freeway and inch along even more slowly where I not only stop at every single traffic light, but usually get stuck at the intersection twice before being allowed to move on to get stuck at the next traffic signal. Once I even had the pleasure of being the first car at a traffic light. In the nanosecond it took my foot to leave the brake and get to the gas, four hundred cars behind me honked demanding that I move my slow nanosecond -not jiffy second- sedan ass. It was 9:00 p.m. I thought rush hour would have been over at least three hours ago.

I stopped at the convenience store to buy a Diet Coke. Even though FPC would happily have paid, I just couldn't bring myself to call room service for a tiny bottle of Diet Coke, have them charge $4.50 for it, add a $4.00 delivery charge, and pay the mandatory 20% tip for fully dressed Pablo. At the convenience store I fill my 32 oz cup, and proceed to the checkout line where not one but three people race in front of me to make their dire purchases of Diet Coke and candy bars. Jeeze, if they were buying Tums to cure traffic related heartburn I would understand, but such hyper-combativeness over junk food seems a little extreme.

Once I ventured outside the realm of Swank Hotel and For Profit Corporation, I realized the only people I saw seemed to be stressed, cranky, and unhappy. I also came to realize that open spaces were nearly non-existent and feeling claustrophobic, I also felt stressed out and cranky. Day three in the Big City I had a dire revelation, which came as a result of me honking at someone else to move their slow nanosecond ass at a light. In my defense I had spent an hour in the car and had traveled a total of thirteen miles. Regardless, it took all of three days for me to become just another hostile rat in an overcrowded cage. My third night at Swank Hotel I had dreams of rolling around -completely clothed without Pablo or Solar Flex Guy- in a harvested corn field.

I have been aptly reminded. Peoria may not be perfect or perfectly polite, but I would wager big money -what would have been my new salary- and what would have been my new uppity title that Peoria is at least five, maybe ten years behind the decline in civility that has become standard in the Big City. I may earn myself a cornonary living in either, but it will come sooner in the Big City.

I couldn't get back to Peoria quickly enough. I'm a bit muddy at the moment so I'm going to go take a bubble bath now in my very humble bathroom -complete with peeling paint and pathetic water pressure, and I'm taking an entire six pack of Diet Coke with me. So, please, nobody flush.

Good to be home.