NeroW, what jerks! You need to get out of there, that shit is never going to get better. Loyalty is wasted on these people. You are just being used.

My current annoyance is I don't remember what it feels like to be really nice and warm. Also, the air mattress & crappy chairs are making my back hurt. Feh.

Come to NY.

Thanks for the outpouring of support. I just remembered, I don't have the next two days off. I work Saturday night. Another annoyance.

Also: finals.

just leave. always be present only where you are valued. kitchens NEED and are desperate for good people on the line.

remember, they need you more than you need them.

Cold, wet feet.

Time to tip the building staff. Mama mia.

I know it's deserved. We are also verrrry lucky in our building. The guy on the list who has been here the SHORTEST has been here 11 years. But it's just a lot at one time.

I have to buy exactly zero Christmas gifts. Ah, the joys of being a Jew at Christmas.

mail carriers have to be tipped?

It's tricky. I live in an enormous building with dozens of doormen and maintenance people. I tip the guys in the package room, the one concierge of the phalanx of them that has been helpful to me, and the doormen I actually interact with. That's about six people and they each get $50. We have 'rovers' who bring up your cleaning, packages, etc. I tip them when they deliver stuff but not at the end of the year. The letter carrier (I have always tipped them because my mother did ) gets $20 and I always get a thank you note which leads me to believe not everyone does this. Cleaning lady, when I had one, got two weeks pay. When I lived in a non doorman building I gave my terrific, wonderful super $200. He kept the building spotless, took packages, fed my cats when I was away and could fix anything. In my current place I don't tip the maintenance people--there are a ton of them--but I may have to tip the head of maintenance this year because he's been very helpful with a leak that I had.


Aaron, you could try asking a neighbor, if you know any of them well enough, what is standard in your building.

We're giving our super, our main handyman, and the 4 doormen that we deal with the most, each $100. Everybody else (porters, junior handyman, other doormen) - get $50 or $70.

We also tip during the year, and of course when somebody helps us with something.

I also buy my favorite guys (the main handyman and 2 of the doormen) bottles of scotch for Christmas.

Postmen are not techinically supposed to get tipped. It's a violation of some Postal code. But that doesn't stop us from giving something to our guy anyway -- we LOVE Lou!

As for the doormen, super, handymen, porters, etc - the amounts vary from about $50 - $200. Our building has a staff of about 12. The super gets tipped very generously.

Aaron -- give each person their tip individually.

We would tip our super more than the rest - except that he's an asshole.

Our building has about 12 people on staff too.

The people on my street come out with their shovels, but they don't shovel the sidewalks in front of their houses, they shovel their parking spaces. Ah, Chicago.

I'm giving my super $50 and my porter $40. I'm in a middle-class building in Queens, so I don't have to give them nearly as much as you Manhattan folk. Oh, also have to tip the hairdresser. Plus, I have to come up with $$ for my cousin's wedding.

I'm the super, maintenance person, doorman, and snow shoveler. No one tips me.

I'm in the midst of an existential crisis. I can't find my damned birth certificate.

I'll vouch for you.

my birth certificate merely says "baby boy" on it. not uncommon for indian birth certificates of a certain era and earlier. according to my lawyer, a major source of pain during green card applications. i had to get my parents to send me notarized statements that they were my parents and that i was the baby boy referred to.

dammit! that reminds me--i only have a short period of time left to file to remove the conditions from my first green card. or else.

How many different ways can they spell Behemoth?

I have to choose between seeing Narnia, Brokeback, and Syriana tomorrow. Aaarrrggghhhh.

Maurice:

It gets better. I was born in Albany, NY. My Lebanese passport says I was born in "El-Bani".

Omni: I saw Syriana last night. I thought it was really really good. If you liked Traffic this was similar in style but a lot more scary.

Yeah, Syriana is my first choice. But I think I'm going to get outvoted - Narnia is Eyebrows' first choice and it's his turn to pick, I have been reminded.

Hey, at least he didn't say Aeon Flux.

73 mile an hour winds swept over Cape Cod on Friday night, downing almost all power lines in Orleans. My house lost gutters and some flashing and the eaves are damaged. Also lost seven trees--3 uprooted, two landed on the house. The others were shorn off to stumps. Awaiting a call from the tenant, who fortuitously owns a small construction company with his brother, and who is removing the trees from the roof and assessing the damage.

Surrealistic note: because of the power loss, one of the few businesses with a working generator became a default shelter. This would be our local pub the Land Ho, always referred to by my family as "the Ho".

Revisiting the discussion of holiday tipping of apartment house staff: this morning I picked up the list of building employees. There are 65 of them.

Easy. Dollar each.

The "Reasons to be Cheerful" thread.

My best friends boyfriend, the reiki practitioner, asked me to see a movie with him called "What the bleep do we know?", supposedly a an honest, constructive discussion of science vs. spirituality I knew I wasn't going to like it as soon as he mentioned it, but agreed that we could see it at some point. He just brought it up again so I looked it up online and found out the following:

Okay, the obvious question: how does your best friend tolerate all of this?

he's half and half. I'm very far on the sceptical side, the boyfriend is very far on the new age side, and BF falls somewhere in the middle. When his boyfriend gave him a crystal, for example, he told me he didn't believe it had healing properties, but he appreciated it as a present.

I'm OK with the boyfriend being new agey, I just don't want to be preached at.

I have a group of women friends who are obsessed with that *BLEEP* movie. A few of them are fatuous enough that I'm not particularly surprised, but one is a chiropractor who always seemed rather bright to me; she went so far as to buy the DVD.

One of the group is now trying to enlist me in Landmark (née EST) training. No surprise that I've distanced myself from these people (socially). I need to see them professionally for massage and chiropractic services.

FWIW, several years ago, someone invited me to a viewing of a video of a seminar/performance/whatever by that woman who claims to be channeling the 3,000-year-old Ramtha (her name is Jayzee Knight or something like that). It was so bogus, I couldn't believe ethat anyone with even a facsimile of a brain could take it seriously. The whole thing read like an extended SNL skit.


Edit: It's JZ Knight, and Ramtha is 35,000 years old. A brave warrior of Atlantis, apparently.

How many times a day do Sherry-Lehman and Union Square Wines need to email me?