Black Friday, Part I

Spring semester: day nineteen

Okay. Well. It hasn't been the best week.


Before I go any further, I want to mention that yes, even though over the course of the past ten years I have only been single on Valentine's Day for one of them, I am still not a huge fan of the "holiday" overall due to its commercialism and somewhat halfhearted (pun intended) way of saying "this is the day you show your love to that special someone!" No, if you have a "special someone," you'd better be showing that love to them every day or it won't be long before you no longer have a "special someone." It took me a long time and lots of growing up over the years before I fully realized this. But, as I still loathe the commercialism/consumerism involved, I will always refer to Valentine's Day as "Black [day of the week]" in honor of not only that, but in honor of those friends and family members who have, over the years, been betrayed and/or wounded by the act of love, or who have lost loved ones.

My own Valentine's Day, obviously, is a bit more significant than just being a commercial "holiday" draped in pink and red hearts -- one year ago today, I proposed to Daisy. I'm sure most of you are aware of this, of course, as it's not like we really made it a secret or anything. I proposed in my kitchen, in front of the stove, after giving her a blue plastic vase full of daisies (what else?) with the ring holding them together. It was sweet. Not a whole lot has changed in our relationship since then. I already view Daisy as my wife; I have for some time now. She is always the first thing on my mind when I wake up in the morning, and is usually the last person I talk to or think about when I go to bed at night. This is, obviously, to be expected.

Right now, Daisy is still asleep downstairs in bed, with at least two (if not all three) of the cats. We had a stressful, eventful day yesterday plagued with problems and worries big and small. Because of this, I'm going to let her sleep as long as she needs to sleep, and we'll take care of whatever we want to do for the day once she gets up. I've already been awake for about two hours. Why? Well, we'll get to that.

Let's start from the beginning.

Yesterday morning, I got up, came upstairs, and wrote my last post here. Daisy woke up for a few minutes, long enough to go to the bathroom and give me a kiss, before she went back downstairs to bed. When I left the house at about 8AM, she was passed out on the bed like a starfish, in deep sleep. Pete was sleeping between her knees, and Maggie was sleeping next to her head and shoulders. Even though Daisy is normally a pretty deep sleeper, I try to be as quiet as possible if I have to leave the house to teach when she's asleep, since most times she'll just sleep through the entire time I'm gone until I get back home.

I got to West campus and taught my morning 102 class normally and without incident; it was a pretty straightforward lesson on finding and evaluating research sources for accuracy, lack of bias, and reliability. Boring? Yes, probably, but it's stuff my students both old and new need to know for the parameters of their 102 assignments, to know what I (as well as the University) expects from them in their research. Most, if not all, of them are pretty on-the-ball with this stuff, so I doubt I'll have any real problems when their first papers roll in two weeks from now. However, only one of them (of twelve) had read the companion reading for the class, so I had to postpone covering that until Tuesday. I'm not covering something in class they haven't read, obviously, as it would be a waste of breath and we'd have no classroom discussion about it -- they'd just stare at me like idiots.

I came home, very quietly unlocked the door and entered the house, and found the bed empty and Pete sitting on the floor staring at me. Daisy had gotten up at some point, which was rather unusual for her (she's only not slept through my morning gone to school once before). I went upstairs to find that she was not only awake, but she was fully dressed, had straightened her hair -- something that takes a long time for her to do, as her hair is naturally very curly -- and put on makeup, had eaten already, and had been waiting for me. Apparently she woke up when I left the house to go teach, and realized when she heard me start my car that I was leaving, not coming home. While I was teaching, she posted this on Facebook:

I'm looking out the window wondering when the center of my universe is going to get home.

Yes folks, I've become one of Brandon's cats.

I felt bad, of course, that my leaving had awakened her instead of her waking naturally, and that she just basically had to wait on me for well over two hours before I got back home. Even though the Monte Carlo is loud in her comings and goings, Daisy usually sleeps right through everything.

We had a big day planned, obviously. Well, big for us, anyhow. I needed to go get my paycheck cashed and figure out how I was going to get the money into my bank account, via Western Union or other means, then we needed to get the rest of the groceries and foodstuffs for our home-cooked meals for the next two days, and finally, we were planning to go see a movie in the afternoon -- it was narrowed down to either the Robocop remake or The Lego Movie. So, yeah, we had a list of stuff to do.

After settling down at home for a bit and decompressing with her, we got ready to go and left the house again with my paycheck in tow to get it cashed, going to Walmart. I chose Walmart first, obviously, because I've had all sorts of other checks cashed there over the years (most notably, my tax refund checks) and because I wanted to check to see if MoneyGram could wire funds directly to a bank account. After reading the form, apparently they can, but it doesn't say on the form how to do it or leave any space for account numbers and the like. So, we decided that I'd just cash the check at Walmart and take the money to Dillon's, where they do Western Unions and I know money can be sent to my account that way.

So I went through the drill of cashing the check there; they take your ID and SSN, match everything to the name on the check, etc, and run it through. And then the lady looked at me blank-faced and dead-eyed and said "We can't cash this check."

"Why not?" I asked.

"I don't know. Here's the receipt it printed out; you'll have to call the Certegy people to figure out why."

Certegy is a check-verification company that places like Walmart use as a go-between when checks are cashed there to verify the amount is correct, the check's not a forgery or has fake numbers on it, and to verify that it's being cashed by the right person, amongst other things. If anything comes up strange in the system, Certegy flags it and won't let you (or Walmart, or anywhere else that uses it) cash the check.

"That's really weird," I told Daisy. "It's not like it's a fake check or anything like that, it's a check from the university. It has all the numbers and info on it, it's got all the security features, my address and name match...everything's there. And it's not like I'm not in Walmart's check-cashing system anyway, 'cause I cash my tax refund checks here."

"Well, we have to go to Dillon's anyway, right?" Daisy asked. "That's where the Western Union is, and we have to get the stuff for the dip."

Daisy is making her famous spinach artichoke dip for us tonight for part of our Valentine's Day dinner, and Dillon's is the only place in town that sells the vegan sour cream and vegan cream cheese she uses to make it. She can get it anywhere in Omaha, but here it's just at Dillon's.

"Right," I said. So we went to Dillon's...who also uses the same system as Walmart, and who also couldn't cash my check.

"I can't tell you why it won't go through," the helpful lady at the counter there said, "but I can tell you that there's no problem with the account numbers or your SSN -- those are fine. I hope you can get it cashed somewhere."

"Me too," I told her, forcing a smile and thanking her. I mean, it wasn't her fault.

By this point I was very pissed off. Yes, I'd finally gotten paid, but couldn't actually get the money out of the check -- it was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone, the stone being the university in this instance.

"I'm sorry, baby," Daisy said, as she is able to tell when I am really angry and am holding it in for the sake of us being in public. "I know how frustrating this must be."

"This is fucking bullshit," I mumbled to her, quietly. "It's not a fake check, the numbers are there and correct and everything's verified; that woman told me as much -- it's a payroll check just like any other payroll check or any other check I would cash someplace. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to cash it."

This was very frustrating for me, as you could probably imagine. I've been battling with the university for over three weeks now just to get paid, just to get my money, just to even get access to my money. I've been given runaround after runaround, setback after setback. Now that I finally have a paycheck in my hands, I can't even get the money out of it, and it's basically become as useless as any other piece of paper.

We had to go to both Dillon's stores for the stuff we needed for the dip, because the first one didn't have the sour cream and cream cheese (which was my fault, really, as I forgot that the south store didn't). I was sort of zoned out the entire time, just awash with anger and frustration, because always, always, if it's not one thing, it's another. All I wanted was for this one thing to go right so that I could just have the money that was rightfully mine, that I've waited almost a month now to get, that I desperately need to pay my bills.

We got the stuff we needed and came home, and I was still angry. I didn't take it out on Daisy -- she was trying to be as helpful and as sweet as possible, as she always is -- but I was ready to punch something or someone. I wanted to call the payroll office and scream at them because they'd given me a check that was basically useless to me, and had provided no way for me to get the money out of it because they have no sort of direct deposit set up for these kinds of checks and no way, no how I could do that.

"Just call the number they gave you and see what they tell you," Daisy told me. "Maybe it's something simple in their system they can fix over the phone and clear it."