Disaster Week sponsored by Pure Misery

The past week has been a real piece of shit. There is no other way to sugar coat it.

On Thursday of last week I eagerly rushed home to start opening my 2 boxes of 2010 Bowman Baseball. Well I ripped the first few packs of the first box and noticed that ALL of the Chrome Prospect cards in the box were miscut. How disappointing! I was really looking forward to this release this year. About halfway through the box, my girlfriend called to tell me that her job will no longer exist as of June 30th. Purely a victim of the crappy economy of Virginia and the armpit of society that Richmond is. We kind of had an idea that this would happen so she has been unsuccessfully searching for a new job since March.

Friday rolls around and I get home from work to open my second box of Bowman. Well, this box was also miscut so I'm getting pretty mad now. I called Topps customer support at 4:40pm and get a recorded message that they are closed. Their business hours are from 8:30 to 4:30 pm, Monday thru Friday. GEEZ, I can't catch a break. Now I get to sit and stew all weekend with messed up Chrome cards sitting on my desk.

Saturday I was going to attend a card show I had never been to. I was at a flea market type place and they were having a 10 year celebration that day. Surely I would be able to pick up some good cards at reasonable prices. HA! When we arrived we walked the entire flea market and found 2 dealers that had regular "card shops". One had singles in toploaders. When I got to a 1991 Score Pedro Guererro for $2 I decided not to waste my money. He seemed more interested in selling those stupid flags that everyone hangs on the top of their car windows. The other dealer I came across was selling 1990 Donruss and 1990 Fleer wax packs for $1 a pack. Yeah Right. What a total bust of a card show if you can call it that. The rest of the weekend was relatively quiet.

Monday morning I called Topps and they told me to send the damaged cards back at my expense and that they would "look into the problem" and "maybe replace the cards". I'll keep you posted...

Monday afternoon at work, an email came that had urgent in the subject line. It called for an all hands meeting on Tuesday Morning 8:30am. All 3 shifts, report directly to the specified meeting area. UH-OH. The rumor mill has been going full tilt for the last 8 or so months since a larger pharmaceutical company "merged" with ours.

So this morning at the meeting 550 employees of the Richmond manufacturing plant of the largest pharmaceutical company in the world learned that they going to be losing their jobs. That's right, EVERYBODY will be out of a job within 2 or 3 years. I do not understand how the #2 out of 78 worldwide manufacturing plants is not a "viable site" in the company's "worldwide strategy". I just don't get it.

So since we all got to go home early today, I decided to check on my Beckett marketplace orders that I placed just over a month ago. I have been wondering why I still haven't gotten them yet. Well, due to a stupid mistake about $100 worth of cards from my set wantlist are floating around in the mail, trash or somebody else's collection. I haven't ordered from the Beckett Marketplace in almost 4 years. 3 1/2 years ago I moved into my own house (which will probably be on the Real Estate Market soon). I had my orders shipped to my old apartment by mistake. I went by the old (ghetto) neighborhood and the person that lives in my old aparment "has not even seen any mail with my name on it". The post office can't help me either. The same old postmaster that was an ass to me 4 years ago was an even bigger asshole to me today. He wouldn't even go into the back and see if the packages were there. So now I am relying on the actual sellers of the cards to see if the packages will be returned to them. Chances are, I'll never see these cards.

Thanks for reading my rant. I'm sorry for the long post, I just needed some kind of release. I hope I didn't bore you too much. When it rains it pours. BTW anybody need an Instrumentation Technician or in the market for a house in the Richmond area? Hopefully I can calm down and get back to a regular post in the next few days.