three silver linings

1) My older brother is coming to visit, unexpectedly.

I already knew my little brother was coming, with his girlfriend, for a pre-Christmas visit as it's so expensive to fly around Christmas itself. He'll be staying with my parents for a few days, taking his girlfriend down to New Orleans, introducing her to Southern food and his wild friends, then he'll head up my way and stay with me a couple nights before moving on to her family's home for the remainder of their vacation. I was looking forward to a couple days with him-- I haven't seen him since last Christmas, and I'd like to get to know this girl who seems to have stolen my loner little brother's heart.

Now, the older is thrown into the mix. Broken up with his finance who just took her stuff and moved out yesterday, he's more despondent and pathetic than usual. I have a hard enough time staying sane on a twenty minute phone conversation with him, much less actual person-to-person interaction. He won't be staying in my house though, thankfully, but because he has no job and because she took the majority of the furniture and accessories in his apartment, he has no reason to return any time soon. My mom thinks he'll go back when little brother goes back, but who knows. A condition of his returning home was that he sees a local doctor and gets an antidepressant prescription  for the depression he's tried to "handle" on his own his whole life (until now he had been adamant that he would not medicate himself) so hopefully that's the silver lining I'm trying so hard to see here.

2) I had to fire someone yesterday.

I hired him about six weeks ago to be our flash animator and work from home, and in that time he's promised a ton of work and delivered very little. At first we chalked it up to his creative, artistic personality, that he just needed to be coddled and stroked a bit and then his genius would prove itself. After a while we started to realize that not much of his work was being done, and what was done wasn't on time, so we assigned a manager to watch him and his work as closely as he could. It didn't help, and it drove the manager crazy trying to find him all the time. Both Monday and Tuesday this week we called and called, trying to get him on the phone, but finally last night I had to send an email. I suppose I had it easy that way, since there was no face to face meeting, but it was still terrible. He emailed me right back saying he understood. It's like he wanted us to fire him.

That was my first firing and hopefully will be my only one for a long, long time. I guess he made it easy on me, so there's my slightly tarnished silver lining.

3) A coworker nearly got scammed by a fake homeowner.

She's been looking for a home to rent for herself and her three little girls. She's going through a divorce, so she needs to move quickly and stay in the county school district. It hasn't been an easy search. There was the cute little cabin next to a field of run down trailers, a nice house but right on the highway with no yard and no place for the 4 year old to play, and now this.

It's a beautiful house in a friendly neighborhood-- they even have a community pool. The advertiser told my coworker that he was a pastor on a mission trip to West Africa, and he needed someone to watch his house and yard while he was gone. He wanted someone he could trust, so he sent her a homemade application with strange questions like "Do you promise to take care of the yard," and "Have you ever been in trouble with the police," all written with poor grammar and spelling. Her second clue was that he kept putting off her specific questions, especially when she asked about getting access to the house (she had already peeked through the dark windows) and about a lease to sign.

Finally, last night when he asked her to wire money through Western Union to Africa before she had even seen a lease or the inside of the house, she knew something was up. To trip him up, she asked him through email if the red electrical box on the front of the house controlled an invisible fence, knowing from experience that invisible fence boxes are always placed inside the house and are usually black, not to mention there was no red box on the front of the house. When he said, "yes," she had him. Today she called the police and the neighborhood homeowners association who told her that someone lives in that house, and they already knew about the scam. They thanked her for forwarding her emails from him and the original ad.

We live in a very small and trusting town. Everyone knows just about everyone, or at least they know each others' faces. Things like this just don't happen in places like this, or at least they didn't used to.

She's out right now looking at two more houses, one pretty far away but owned by a nice old lady, and the other in a picturesque neighborhood of large condos practically within walking distance of the office. Hopefully one of those options will work, and she'll find her little silver lining as well, shining bright in all the darkness she's had to combat in the past few weeks.