Prologue

Like so many people, I have several long-distance friends whom I know only through the magic of the Internets. Lonnie is not one of them.

You see, more than ten years ago our friend Lonnie ended up in a job that he never wanted or expected to have. So did dozens of other people who figured that while being a software support tech for an insurance office automation product was not the culmination of their childhood dreams, it probably was an avenue to a paycheck that wouldn't bounce. I know that was my theory, anyway.

I don't think I really knew Lonnie during the first part of that summer, while we trained, honest to goodness, in a school cafeteria as the office building was being completed. For one thing, I had been befriended by a possessive and possibly psychotic pregnant mother of four who eventually had to leave that job and start appearing at her OB appointments in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit because, darn the luck, she was sentenced to ten years for embezzling $169,000 and five cars from her previous employer, a car dealership. True story.

Later, with adjacent cubes and a regular need to vent and get help with a "resolve", we got to know each other over the year--or months, really--that Karissa was born, I was pregnant, Clinton was re-elected, the Packers won the Super Bowl, management grew increasingly perverse, and our coworkers variously had affairs, got married, got divorced, got arrested, discovered their true sexual orientation, became alcoholics, or some combination thereof.

Call it a bonding experience.

Soon enough, Lonnie went on to better things in a blaze of company-wide kiss-off-email glory, and not long after that I left the company and Iowa with my husband and our new baby. It was a blip on the career radar; the kind of experience that slides off the resumé and fades, mercifully, from memory.

Except that here we still are, trading the kind of stories and snark that kept us sane in the cubicles of purgatory. And for that reason alone, it was the best crappy job I ever had.