Life is not a bowl of cherries

I am slowly discovering that one of the hardest things in life is to stand by and watch people you love suffer, or do things you don't agree with, or otherwise have life experiences that you wouldn't wish on an enemy. It goes without saying that doing this is a large part of parenting--although I've got to say that up to this point, Sparky hasn't been the biggest nightmare imaginable, just the occasional blip on the Serious Annoyance Scale--but it is true about adult family and friends too.

There is absolutely nothing I would like better right now than to be able to kneecap several people in St. Louis. One of Beast's sales accounts is with a family-owned company there, and they have got to be the most dysfunctional family and business ever. It makes my family-of-birth look like the most loving, calm, sane group of people. They seem to be basing their business style on the worst aspects of The Apprentice--the parts where Donald Trump instigates everyone to turn on each other, and the parts where he just yells at people.

The M.O. of these folks is to call Beast whenever they have a problem with what his company is selling them and holler at him. They yell about price, they yell about paying, they yell about quality, they yell about everything. NOTHING is ever their fault, it's never that they underpriced their own product, or they forgot to pay for the last shipment, or they didn't notice when things started to go bad in the manufacturing process. It's ALWAYS Beast's or Beast's company's fault. And there is never any "medium"--it's either SCREAMING or silence.

Beast spent all day today on this one account. He spent all day Friday on it too. Factor in that his sales territory stretches from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, and that he has spent 16+ hours of the last 40 he's worked on one customer...yeah.

I should, perhaps, mention that part of this current nightmare is because some of the product that Beast's company shipped should not have been sent--it was faulty, and caused the product St. Louis makes to fail their specs. So he's actually fighting St. Louis AND his own company at the same time.

To top things off, he had to close down a little earlier than usual this afternoon so he could go to the dentist to have the tooth he broke last week checked. The novacaine didn't work until he got like 4 shots, and having a temporary crown put on isn't exactly a party either (I've got 3? of them), so his mouth hurts. His back hurts from sitting in one place all day talking on the phone and dealing with emails and reports, and from the sheer tension of the day. And I think he's probably massively bummed that, while the cortisone injections he got last Tuesday really did bring him some pain relief last week, it hasn't stuck around very long at all.

Just before I shooed him upstairs after he dropped the heavy artillery meds (Percocet and Soma), he posted this to Facebook: "i am off to bed shortly - b/c this this [sic] sucks and i hate my job. loathe my job. and it is what it is." Obviously, this is not something that should be posted on Facebook, and I'm debating whether I should open his laptop and at least make that less public.

Psalm 6 has been running through the back of my mind a lot lately:

1 LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
2 Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am faint;
heal me, LORD, for my bones are in agony.
3 My soul is in deep anguish.
How long, LORD, how long?

4 Turn, LORD, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.
5 Among the dead no one proclaims your name.
Who praises you from the grave?

6 I am worn out from my groaning.
All night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears. 7 My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes.

8 Away from me, all you who do evil

It's very Lenten. And also very much an ear-worm: "How long, O Lord, how long?!"

Really hoping that 40-year wandering-in-the-desert metaphor is just a metaphor.