We moved into our house in July of 1999, and between then and January of 2000 the strange shivering fits would come and go with no seeming pattern or regularity.
The daily commuting to the city was destroying my energy levels and as soon as we got home I was asleep on the couch usually without eating dinner.
By January of 2000 I couldn’t take the commuting anymore and couldn’t take being away from a bathroom for so long at any given time and ended up quitting my job in the city to start working at a dot.com in White Plains, which reduced my commuting to only a 45 minute drive.
On one hand the dot.com was fun to work at because it had all of the stereotypical perks that they came with during the boom – free lunches and soda, a pool and ping-pong tables, and a whole vintage arcade with games like Tron, Sinistar, and pinball – but the people who ran it were absolute fuckheads.
Although the commute was now manageable, the stress level because of management incompetence was through the roof and instead of the new job helping with my problem everything became twice as worse. However, at that point I couldn’t even begin to imagine how bad things could get when your employer has no sense of decency.
After working at the place for about four months with nothing but praise for my management of their IT infrastructure I was unexpectedly called into meet with the head of Human Resources.
She said she needed to tell me something and from the look on her face (and the fact that I’ve seen many, many people fired during my career) I prepared myself to be fired.
Instead, she looked me and said “There have been complaints that you stink. By that, I mean you smell badly.”
My jaw hit the floor.
“Do you bathe regularly?” she asked with something of a smile now that the difficult bridge had been crossed.
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