speaking of "holy", my pitch letter for the holey wars

I found this doing research for my book. It's the first pitch letter I ever wrote, pitching an article Mayo and I wrote for Falling magazine. I did hear back from the gentleman I sent this to, but they never did publish our story. The story can be found here: http://blonstar40.blogspot.com/2007/02/holey-wars.html

Almost too embarrassing to read this now:

I tried to submit this via the email listed on the Falling web page but the server seems to have disappeared. No comments on the skills of the web master.

Anyway, Mayo suggested I email this to you. He would have sent it himself but he's busy right now getting Banff blow jobs and soloing something called "the pencil" (not a name to impress the ladies – even "the eraser" would imply more, um, girth). Now, take a couple of shots of your favorite scotch/bourbon/whatever before you proceed further into the ACTUAL MESSAGE:

To the esteemed editor of Falling Magazine:

I have always been a fan of your country, including the hard working Mounties with those oh so shiny buckles. And I'm an even bigger fan of Falling, as many of your articles have helped me improve my climbing and inspired me to make even more fun of sport climbers. 

Will Mayo and I have written an article for your review, titled The Holey Wars. It concerns the dangerous and unprecedented jihad going on in the climbing community against people who bolt climbs. We feel that this information will be useful to your readers.

The article includes:

- an interview with the Jewish Jihadist who chopped all the bolts on the Royal Caribbean cruise ships

- an update on the Pentagon's latest bolt technology

- a short plug for the new drink Red Bolt

- more information on the blow up doll debacle on Everest

We hope you enjoy it.

Sincerely yours on belay,

Franki & Will

p.s. if you didn't find it amusing, please have more shots and then start again, from the top, up we go...

baptist bastards

I was just reading an article on NPR about the Westborough Baptist church in Topeka Kansas. They've been protesting at military funerals against gay people and were sued by the father of a soldier who died in Iraq (his son wasn't gay):

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/02/134194491/high-court-rules-for-military-funeral-protesters

What the fuck is wrong with these people? Though the supreme court voted they can continue protesting at funerals because it's their first amendment right, if those stupid fucks really had an issue that they wanted to resolve, they should fucking go to Washington and protest there. Disturbing the families who have lost someone in the war is unconscionable, sick, and not christian. Obviously they are trying to get media coverage, and they carry signs like "god hates fags" and "pray for more dead soldiers".


If hatred and prejudice was the answer, all of the world's problems would have been solved a long time ago. These protesters will accomplish nothing, at an emotional toll to families that shouldn't have to suffer more. Idiots. I hope all the toilets of the people participating in this protest back up and cost thousands of dollars to fix.

proposal is done!

I am so damn productive today...I also just sent off the final version of my newly revised book proposal. The last three days have been hell, trying to write a proposal that was funny, to the point, and informative about my book. It was a great exercise though. And even no agent picks up my book, I think they will laugh at at least one of the jokes.

When I get feedback from David I'll post my new proposal, for any of you aspiring writers.

And now back to writing. Finishing up the last edits on my book. Then on to the next project...a children's book about a giant, an alligator, and a kangaroo who's arms are too short. If anyone can think of a catchy title please post it in comments...

bread in a blanky

 I'm making bread again. I know you dudes are thinking, like, what kind of disaster is it going to be this time.

Well, for your information, I did things differently. When I added water to the dry ingredients I used warm water (though my brother told me that the yeast is supposed to be refrigerated or it goes bad or some shit like that, I'm going to have to research that in more detail because I looked at the yeast packet and there was NOTHING saying to put it in the refrigerator). And this time, instead of just covering it with plastic wrap I also gave it a little bread blanky to keep it warm.

So far the results are good. The dough rose this time. I just made it into a ball and put it in a towel, as the directions stated. We'll see if the ball really doubles in size or not. Hm. Wonder if I should use a lighter towel. What if the bread can't rise because the towel is weighing it down?

I also realized I left out two steps last time I made the bread. The first was to flour the dough and let it rest for 15 minutes before making it into a ball (will have to research to find out why I had to do that). The second thing is I forgot to take the lid off of the dutch oven the last 15 minutes I was baking the bread. Oops. Also, I think I only baked it for 30 minutes instead of 45.

I'll let you know how it comes out. My brother, his girlfriend, and the FRG are coming over for dinner tonight. FRG is making everything but the bread. Thankfully.

phone book procrastination

I'm procrastinating finishing my book proposal, YES, I'm writing it AGAIN, new format this time. I'm following the format from The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. It's a great resource for any writer (I'm not just saying that because they are helping me with my book). There's samples of EVERYTHING and explanations on why, for example, a pitch letter or proposal is good. I finally started reading it after talking to David Sterry a few weeks ago and wish I had this book a year ago.

It turns out a lot of the stuff I had in my original proposal and cover letter was right. Then two editors, who are actually great editors, gave me all this advice about making my letter and proposal sound "more professional". Instead of the funny stuff I wrote they had me put in boring crap. So now I'm taking the proposal I wrote 1 1/2 years ago and trying to enhance it along the guidelines in Essential Guide.

But it's taking a long time. It's hard to summarize things. And then I have to make them funny. I can make stuff short but then have to re-edit to get in some one liners, then it's too long, then I have to fix it again. Ech.

I'll put it out on my blog when I'm done.

I've also spent the past week editing and rewriting large parts of my book. Again. I thought I would be done by Friday but I was so burned out I decided to work on the proposal instead. Anyway, the final rewrites will be done by Wednesday of this week. I think the book is funnier and I hope I've taken care of the problems people complained about (two stories had "no point other than climbing" and "not enough personal stuff"). I think the ending is much better too.

Maybe someday...this damn thing will be on a bargain bin shelf at Barnes and Noble...

bye bye phone books!

I just read an article about this great new service that lets you opt out of receiving phone books! The address is www.yellowpagesoptout.com. You can choose to receive no books or only certain books.

Who uses a phone book these days anyway?

bronchitis

Have you ever wondered what it would feel like if you injected bleach into your lungs? It feels like bronchitis, which I have had, seriously, for two fucking weeks. So much for bragging that I haven't been sick in 5 years...

Surgery, oh yeah, that thing. It's going well. I have some gross scars, a little pain, but other than that, I've fine, except that I got bronchitis. Which is the worst illness I have ever had. Especially when I have a coughing fit and this green stuff that looks like spackling flies out of my mouth. I've been told by my doctor that the spackling stuff is what's known as a "productive cough".

Great, because other than my cough, I haven't been productive at all.

I was also told that quitting smoking cold turkey right before my surgery was "a stupid thing to do" and "possibly the stupidest thing a patient has ever done". I'm allowed, by my doc, to smoke 2 cigarettes a day to help my lungs get through this difficult time. I know it seems counter-intuitive to smoke while sick, but it helps with my cough, which is exacerbated by suddenly quitting smoking.

Right, enough bitching about being sick. I promise to go back to writing interesting things in the next few days, assuming my bronchitis keeps getting better...

I give Joe the finger

My friend Joe "Brassy" Josephson was driving to the outdoor retail show the night I had surgery, but he wanted to know how I was. I sent him this picture giving him the finger (hee). For the record, because I've had frostbite in a lot of fingers, my middle finger was the only one they could get a reading from.

Check out all those jacked up IVs they put in my arm. I was like you dudes are doing that because I have good veins, not because I need them. Which made the nurses laugh because I do have great veins and it gave the interns a chance to practice. Interesting fact - new needles for the IVs are plastic, not metal. But still, I don't like having that shit in my arm. See that blue thing? That's to monitor my oxygen. I unplugged it and forgot to plug it back in...oops...I got yelled at for that.

 Joe had recently burned his fingers, so he sent me this pic of his finger in response to my middle finger picture. Of course, he's not really giving me the middle finger.

And now, I have to go lay back down on the sofa and watch a movie or something. Still feeling tired and it's uncomfortable to sit up for long periods of time. And somehow my eyes are messed up, they've been blurry since the surgery...

surgery

 The surgery was a huge success. It's amazing that, even though my innards were chopped up I have less pain now than before surgery. My doctor said that the tumors were sitting like a bowling ball on top of all my other organs and that's why I was in so much pain. And all along I thought I just had an ulcer.

My anesthesiologist did a great job (and was a smoker, and told me that he would have snuck me out for a smoke break if the doctor hadn't shown up). He gave me something he called "medicinal bourbon" to relax me. I don't know what the fuck it was, but I literally felt it hit my vein. He said it normally takes a few minutes to kick in, but right as it went into my arm everything in the room got crazy. I vaguely remember saying "Did anyone else notice that everything in the room just turned purple?" Then I don't remember anything. My mom said that I was carrying on as if I had been on a drinking bender for hours. I'm glad I don't remember what I said.

When I came to in the recovery room, I was still pretty jacked up. The nurses said I kept laughing uncontrollably. Surprisingly I didn't vomit once. The key is to take Dramamine before surgery if you are allergic to anesthetic. Wish someone had told me that 10 years ago. I'm normally vomiting my brains out in recovery. This very sweet orderly took me to my room. I remember telling him "look, you've had a lot to drink, maybe you should let me drive". He told my mom that I was the first patient he's ever wheeled up to a room that was like a happy drunk.

I stayed at Rose Medical Center. Say what you will about the annoyances of HIPAA, one good thing is hospitals can no longer crowd patients into a room. I had my own room, a huge contrast from my last hospital stay when they packed 3 other patients in a room the same size as the one I stayed in at Rose.

,

The nurses were bored because there weren't many patients on the floor. They kept bringing me stuff to eat, even though I wasn't hungry. They would show up with ice cream and then say "oh, you can't eat this can you" and then they would eat the ice cream while sitting on the edge of my bed. After re hydrating I started feeling more human and was able to show the nurses how to do a little hack on their computer system to make it easier to enter patient information. I learned how to use all the computers in my room so I could get out of bed to pee or wander the halls without setting off any alarms.

After getting knocked out for surgery your lungs get lazy. One thing I had to do was breathe into this machine to register how strong my lungs were working. My lungs were kind of shit (this is also supposed to keep you from getting bronchitis, but I got sick anyway because my mom got it, supposedly because she was with me in the hospital).

I had asked the nurses what I had to do to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. I met all of the tasks they gave me by Thursday night, but they wanted me to stay so I did. At 3 in the morning me, two nurses, and a nurse intern had a contest with the breathing machine. I won for the strongest lungs, which surprised them because I smoke(d). Then they said I kind of cheated because I didn't tell them that I also run.

One of the nurses, Kathy, came in to see me every hour. I always woke up when she came into my room and she would tell me stories about her family. She also would bring me popsicles and as much coke as I could drink even though I was supposed to be drinking water. She kept telling me to order a sandwich from room service (yeah, hospital with room service) but I really couldn't eat anything. And she took me off the "standard diet" delivery so I could order what ever I wanted for breakfast and dinner.

When I left the hospital they didn't even make me ride down to the car in a wheel chair.

If you're ever in Denver and need surgery, I highly recommend Rose Medical Center. It was seriously the BEST hospital I have ever been in.

five points batmobile

While doing laps around my neighborhood (you have to walk a lot after having abdominal surgery) my mom and I came across this.

Weird. What the fuck is this thing? The batmobile with empty gun turrets? Oddly, on the same corner some guys were selling drugs. Maybe it's their car.

Very subtle. Not.

weird things the French eat

Yesterday I was way swamped with work tying up loose ends before my surgery. It didn't help that I had a conference call from 754 to 1030 last night...

FRG offered to make me dinner since I didn't even have time to go pick something up. Dinner consisted of potatoes broiled in spices that are from FRG's "prah vansss" and salad. If you can roll the S sound out really long when saying provence you get extra points from the French.

He also brought two kinds of cheese. One was Roquefort cheese, which I've had, and the other was Morbier, which FRG used to make when he lived in France. For the record, we americans do cheese wrong. It was in the wrong kind of plastic packaging and the sticker on the cheese, according to FRG, "is stupid and sucks". I guess in France the cheese is served in leather jackets with matching pants.

There was a very long explanation about the temperature at which you serve cheese, as well as how it's made. Morbier has this green stripe in it because back in the day farmers didn't have a big enough pot, or what ever you make cheese in, to make the whole cheese (I didn't know cheese had to be a certain size) so they would put some stuff (I didn't really understand the word) in to mark where the cheese was stopped so the next day they could make more. Making cheese is totally stressful. You have to press it, get the whey out, make some bacteria grow in it, and beat it to pieces with some metal blender thing, but if you beat it too much all the cheese goes down some drain thing. But it you beat it into too big of pieces it's "totally fucked up" as the FRG helpfully put it.

I disgraced myself by sticking a knife into the middle of the cheese and pulling a blob of it out to put on my baguette. FRG looked at me as if I had picked the cheese up with my toes and said I must never do that again, specific guidance being "You cut a whole slice, put it on your plate, and then you can spread it on your bread". Who knew... He also cautioned me not to eat the rind of the cheese. As if.

I was a little worried about the cheese because it smelled sort of like feet, and things that go into your body come out smelling at least 4 times as bad. I figured if the Morbier cheese made me fart they would have to block off my house as a toxic waste site.

He also brought prosciutto to go with the potatoes. I never had it before, and was not pleased to see that it looked like the skin that's peeled off of an infected blister. Gross. Also, the label on the package said "Boar's Head". It took about 5 minutes for FRG to convince me that was the brand name of the meat place and not where the meat came from (I have reasons to be suspicious - he told me about how in his village people drink blood from a pig right after it's been killed - "with spices" he said as if that makes drinking blood alright - you apparently have to share your blood with your neighbors and they share their blood with you when they kill a pig - I'm glad you can't raise pigs where I live).

After smelling the prosciutto and attempting numerous times to put it in my mouth, I finally ate a piece. It was like pig sushi. So gross. I told FRG "this tastes like raw bacon" and he said "that's essentially what it is". I almost puked.

He said I have to be more adventurous in eating if I expect him to continue cooking for me. So I plan to take him for sushi after I've recovered from my surgery. We'll see how he does with raw quail eggs.

Fair is fair, even when it comes to the french.

French translation

While hanging out with my French rope gun (who would have imagined I would become friends with someone who is French, real French, not Canadian French, and worse, from southern France) I've had a few moments of confusion over his English. I've provided some translations of French English in case you decide to become friends with someone French who "speaks english".

While we were driving in the worst traffic ever on Saturday to go skiing, FRG was (oh wait, I just noticed, the abbreviation of french rope gun almost spells frog - I did NOT do that on purpose) telling me a story about getting in trouble in high school while taking some test they have to take to graduate. He didn't study for the exam, but he and his friend devised a little plan to pass the test. But, what I heard when he was telling the story, was "I was accused by my teacher of being a shit" (I can see that, he's french) and "she accused me of shitting with my friend" (okay, that sounded weird, even for french boys in boarding school). I finally figured out shitting was cheating. I have not corrected him on that word, and have encouraged him to tell that story to more people because it was so funny.

He was also telling me, after skiing that he was worried about his harm. He then went on for a few more minutes about his harm. I thought at first he might have been talking about how dangerous ski conditions were on Saturday (half the runs on the mountain were closed because of high winds, and I literally could not see more than 2 feet in front of me due to blowing snow while I was skiing). I finally realized he was talking about his arm. Which is interesting BECAUSE...

A few days previous he was showing me pictures of climbing areas in France and Washington State. In one of the pictures he said "Look, that is art lake". I thought that was a kind of stupid name for a lake, though it was very picturesque and had a nice reflection of flowers in it. So I said "Yes, I can see why someone would want to paint that, which is why it has that name I guess." He looked at me as though I was a moron (that happens a lot, especially in the gym when I am trying to learn proper footwork or how to use a gri-gri). Later, in another picture, I noticed that the lake was in the shape of a heart, and realized he had been saying "heart lake".

So I accused him of randomly leaving out or adding an H to words. He said that he doesn't like to say "arm" because "it sounds stupid, and is a stupid word". So he will add an H or extra vowels to words he doesn't like to make them "sound better". He also leaves off consonants on words. He refuses to say "th" and replaces it with either an F or an S sound. If I make fun of his pronunciation he asks me to say phrases in French. He especially likes my pronunciation of my cook ware, Le Crueset. When he says it it doesn't even sound like a word you could spell.

I guess I'm going to have to learn some French so FRG can write a blog making fun of me...

my quit smoking program

So I will hopefully quit smoking starting this thursday, when I show up at the hospital at 530 am to get my uterus cut out. Fun.

Don't recommend that as a quit smoking program for everyone, but getting rid of the curse and a nasty nicotine habit all on the same day seemed like a good idea to me.

my bread! like jesus, it finally rose!

my bread! it's really flat but tasted good...

Mickey Mouse uterus - a gross blog you might not want to read

On Wednesday I went to the doc's for a check up. I have to do that every year since I had problems back in 2004 requiring surgery. I almost skipped the appointment because I just had one in April of last year, and had a pap smear (if that mention bothers you, don't read the rest of this) in December that was normal.

Well wouldn't you fucking know it...during the ultrasound my doctor started freaking out and taking lots of pictures. That's never a good thing. I could see the screen and could see the dark spots that are tumors (know how to spot them after my last surgery). There were 5 big enough for her to take pics of, and smaller ones. Plus, I have some tumors growing on the outside of my uterus. My doctor, who is very cool, said my uterus looks like Mickey Mouse. Which would be funny if it didn't also suck.

So now I have to get a hysterectomy. My doctor wants me to do it as soon as possible because the tumors grew so fast (8 months), they're big enough for her to feel by just poking my abdomen (not that I have a lot of fat on my abdomen, but still, that's gross). I go see a specialist tomorrow to figure out what the fuck I'm going to do.

Positive thing: no more monthly curse. Negative thing: a lot of blogs I've read doing research say that constipation is a problem, along with gas, and potential weight gain. And some other crap stuff.

The cool thing is I met with my veteran yesterday and she had the same surgery. My vet was a combat medic and I'm her mentor to help her transition into a commercial job (I'm volunteering through an organization called ACP). She's great and really tall. She said she'll be my surgery mentor since I'm helping her with the job stuff. I like that we are helping each other.

More to follow after my appointment tomorrow...

quiet please, my dough is resting

So last night, after 2 glasses of wine, and while switching to the second DVD for Godfather II, I decided to make some bread. I had been given an "easy" recipe from the ladies at La Crueset when I bought my pots. It's a bread I can make in my dutch oven. In theory.

I thought last night went pretty good. I put my flour through the flour shifter (shocked I own one, aren't you). Then I didn't exactly measure the amount of yeast I put in, but more should be better, right? I had to do some mathematical calculations on the water (perhaps that's where things went wrong).

This morning when I checked my dough it looked exactly like the directions said it should. Bubbly on top. I luckily checked the directions around 2 (I'm making the bread for dinner tonight at 630 - my rope gun is coming over and is making me chicken picata) and found out the dough had to be taken out of the bowl, rolled in some flour, laid on a towel with more towel on top, and that it still needed another two hours to "rest" before being ready to cook (for an hour and a half - that seems excessive).

I rolled it out and did just what the directions said, except that it said to form the dough into a ball, which was kind of impossible because it's like a total blob. Then it said to rest the dough on its seam. Seam? What the fuck is that? I just put it on the towel and it sort of oozed into a flat kind of thing. I tried putting more flour in but the recipe said you can only do that if you do it quickly and not to man handle the dough too much. It was supposed to rise to twice it's normal size.

Anyway, after an hour it's still the same old blob as before. I even turned on the oven to give the dough more heat and that's not helping (it's sitting on top of the oven).

Damn. Fucking bread. How about this dough blob? Less resting, more rising.

I will post a picture of it after it's cooked. Should be good for a few laughs.

OR victory from the jaws of defeat!!!!!!!!!!!

I was kind of bummed last night that I lost pitchapalooza. But, when I was walking home, in a way, I felt like something good was going to happen. I talked to Brassy last night and he cheered me up, but still I felt like there was something unfinished, or that something was going to happen.

This morning I checked my email, and had one from someone in my writer's group that I haven't really met. He was at the pitch last night, he's a published author, and an award winning screen writer splitting his time between here and NYC (which is why I haven't met him). The email said:

Hi, Franki,
After the event, I bought a book and got it signed.  I put in a
nice word for you with David (the pitchapalooza panel guy).  He wants to follow up
with you and was really impressed with your pitch, Franki.  He
wanted me to make sure you contact him.  His email is [deleted].

Good luck!  Awesome job tonight.

I was shocked, surprised, excited, and stunned that this person who's never met me, or read anything I've written, would go out of his way to help me. I sent a profusely thankful email back to him, offered to buy him a drink, and then got on the stick and sent an email, which was probably crappy, to David. Now I guess I'll wait and see what happens.

In the mean time, I got a response back to my thankful email:

Your story is CAPTIVATING!  I have not seen your writing, but if it is anything like the way you tell it verbally, I believe you will inspire many people.  Plus, you're a really nice person and I want you to succeed.

See you soon.

 

Stay tuned...

I lost

Well, tonight was a weird experience...

When I got to the pitchapalooza 64 people had shown up to pitch. I was like uh oh. They had us put our names in a basket to be randomly selected to pitch. They said they would take 30 people. I didn't get called. Then they said they only had time for one more pitch (19 had been done) because Tattered Cover was closing early. I thought as hard as I could for them to pull my name as the last pitch.

Amazingly, they did.

From the first 5 seconds of my pitch there was an audible gasp from the panel. Then they laughed at the cadaver knee part. When I finished they even applauded me (they didn't applaud anyone else). The main guy said my pitch was perfect and that he loved it. A guy who is a book rep said he thought my book would sell really well and that if the media got their hands on me they would eat me up (his exact words). They all said there wasn't a single thing about my pitch that they would change (unlike every one else that had pitched). I told them I had gotten some rejections on my book and the book seller said "that's because they aren't reading your pitch, but that's going to change - don't see those as rejections at all".

The one woman on the panel asked if my stories were true. I said I had the pictures and witnesses to prove it which made everyone in the audience laugh (maybe because of the way I said it, I don't know).

Then the woman and the book seller went out of the room to pick the winner. I put my hat on and got my jacket ready. Everyone was like "what are you doing? you had to have won!" When the woman and book seller walked back in the room a bunch of people from the writer's group started saying "You know you won".

Which was embarrassing because I didn't win. The woman who won wrote a memoir about making a major change in her life from being a house wife to a feminist. Her pitch was so boring compared to some of the others that I didn't even remember what it was about (someone pitched a kid's book about the Cat Intelligence Agency, where cats solve crimes by manipulating humans - thought that was a great pitch).

Afterward a bunch of people came up to me, that I didn't know, and told me that they really liked my book idea. It was weird.

So, I'm going to change my cover letter to my one minute pitch. Find some agents. Send them a paper copy of my letter, chapter summaries, and the first five pages of my book. And keep going. I have to be close at this point for something to happen.

pitchapalooza

Tonight I'm attending an event with my writer's group. It has the dumb name "pitchapalooza". Everyone gets one minute to give a verbal pitch to a panel of experts (what ever that means and how ever they qualify as an expert). The winner gets a 15 minute consultation that may or may not lead to book publication.

I spent Saturday and Sunday trying to come up with my pitch. I can't decide today whether I'm nervous or not. I wish I knew more about what the format for the event was going to be, and how many people are going to be there. I'm wondering if less people will come because of the snow we got yesterday.

Here's the final version of my pitch:

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have your head almost bitten off by a great white shark? Or to take a 70 foot fall in front of eight tourists while rock climbing in the gunks? Or to complete the Alcatraz to San Francisco swim after learning to swim on the internet?

Me too! That’s why I did those things and then wrote a book about them. My Other Nine Lives is a completed collection of 9 humorous non-fiction essays about my experiences in learning extreme sports, despite having little athletic talent and a knee built out of cadaver parts as a result of an accident that doctors thought would leave me crippled for the rest of my life.

The stories are woven together by a biographical thread that provides insight into managing extreme pain through extreme sports, as well as detailing my romances and mis-adventures with professional extreme athletes. It’s the usual travel adventure book, but with homicidal sled dogs, falling ice, and screaming barfies.

american express - I should have left home without it

My fucking head is going to explode. Seriously.

I spent 5 hours today (luckily had a lot of conf calls - multi-tasking!) going through every corporate am ex statement since March of 2007 along side the scanned in copies of all of my expense reports trying to find out why I have a $1,400 balance on my card.

If that sounds like not such a hard task, let me clarify by saying I have at least 2 expense reports every month, and for the past two years have had one submitted a week. Last year I charged about $200,000 worth of stuff to my am ex.

"Well," you're probably thinking "can't your company just run a report to see what expenses on your card haven't been assigned to an expense report?"

Yeah buster, I'm one step ahead of you on that one. I tried that. We use a system, the same one I've used at every company I've worked at since 1995, that uploads your charges and then you assign them to an expense report and the bills get paid. But, what has happened is somehow charges that I didn't make got assigned to my account in the system. Charges I did make probably ended up on someone else's account (for example, I had an airfare that never showed up in my card data). That has never happened to me before in the 12 years of using the system other places - only at this company.

When that started happening last year I called the morons who handle this shit in my company. They said "oh, just delete those expenses if you didn't make them." Regarding my missing charges, they said "you can't put them on a report manually, they will be rejected. We'll try to figure out what's going on."

What, me worry?

Anyway, since November of 2009 I have been trying to get this issue resolved. Even though Am Ex and I can both prove that expenses being applied to my account were never made by me, my company can't figure out how to take them off my account (e.g. $900 of stuff charged in New Jersey - car rental and hotel - when I can prove I was in the UAE when the charges were incurred). Am Ex tells me they can see the name on the receipts and it isn't my name - they know whose account the charges should go on but my company can't figure out, in their system, how to move the charges.

My company suggested I pay the $1400 until things get sorted out because my credit card is about to be turned off. Fat fucking chance. After almost a year and a half this problem is not any closer to being resolved. I can probably sweet talk am ex into cutting me a break, again, but I'm racking up late fees to the tune of $45 - $80 a month. But I'm afraid if I pay the charges my company will never give my money back.

They did give me a form to fill out for expenses over 1 year old. Unfortunately, after I filled it out and sent it in, I found out it was the wrong form. I filled out the new form a week later, and was told the process of who I have to submit the form to was also changed, so the person I sent it to just ignored it, and my subsequent emails, and it wasn't until I went to her boss that I found out I wasn't supposed to send the form to her anymore. No one can tell me who to send the form to, but they're going to email me real soon.

I would ask my manager, but he's not really my manager because he's working a different job now and they haven't replaced him with someone else. I inquired who my manager was and the response was a copy of the job description for my manager with the suggestion I apply for the position.

Fucking fuck I am annoyed!