Wrong, wrong, wrong

Instead of an essay on a single topic, I have several items to report today. However, these items do have a unifying theme, which is this: I was wrong.
First, an update on my experiment in moonlighting: it was a failure. “How hard can it be?” I asked here when I announced the idea. Pretty damn hard, as it turns out. I lasted a week. It wasn’t just the chronic sleep deficit, or not seeing my family, or the lack of time for anything other than work or sleep. What finally convinced me to give up was the realization that I had decided to try moonlighting for two reasons, and neither of them was valid. Reason one, you may remember, was that I didn’t want to leave Perigee shorthanded just when their workload was heaviest. But the workload actually peaked a week or two before I started my IBM contract, and Perigee was already starting to lay off temporary workers. By the beginning of this week, the night shift was down to just a few people, and the stuff I was being given to do was pretty trivial. They didn’t actually need me very much.
Reason two was that my family could use the extra money. But I found that because I was short of sleep, I was hitting the snooze button for longer in the morning, and arriving at work later. No one at IBM seemed to mind, because we have flex time — but I was still leaving on time at 5:00 in order to get to my evening job. I wasn’t putting in a full day at IBM. Since my hourly rate at IBM was much better than at Perigee, missing an hour at my day job in order to work an hour at my evening job was, to put it in mathematical terms, stupid. If I wanted to earn more, I would be better off working more hours at IBM. So this past Tuesday, I resigned from Perigee and went home to spend an evening with my family. My stress level has been declining steadily ever since.
What else was I wrong about? Pedestrian signal lights. On Wednesday, my IBM team went to lunch together at the shopping center across the intersection. And I discovered that I was mistaken about the signal light for crossing Six Forks Road — it does sometimes say WALK. But it had never done so for me — not once! Why? There is a very simple explanation. The push-to-walk buttons work just fine, but I was pressing the wrong one. Despite the signs indicating which button was for crossing which street, I had gotten them backwards. I was pressing the button for Millbrook when I wanted to cross Six Forks. How I escaped becoming roadkill, I’ll never know.
If you’re wondering, the restaurant we crossed the street to dine at was the Bull and Bear. Yes, the place that was rated dismal in the one review I had managed to find. Not only had my teammates not read that review, the restaurant is a favorite of theirs; they eat there all the time. Well, I couldn’t very well turn down their invitation, could I? I steeled myself for possible food poisoning and followed them across the intersection. Guess what? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the place. The service was excellent, and my bean-and-ham soup and chicken cordon bleu sandwich were entirely satisfactory. In this case it was the reviewers who were wrong (or perhaps they just visited the B&B on a bad day). But I accepted their assessment instead of checking the place out myself, so I was wrong, too.
As you can see, I was wrong about pretty much everything. But weblogs can be edited. If I were Michael Moore, I would delete the blog entries showing just how wrong I was and pretend it never happened. Well, I would much rather be like Rachel Lucas. I’ll follow her example and leave the record intact, proving to the world that I’m a moron and I don’t know anything.

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