Broke ass friends

I'm sure everybody has friends who just can't seem to hold on to money but some of my friends take it to the next level. Now this same girl saw me online again recently and asked for a big favor. I instantly knew her request would be interesting but she surprised me by asking to borrow a couple hundred thousand dollars to fund a project she was trying to get off the ground. She claimed it was a sure thing and could provide me with documents stating that she would be paid upon delivery of her product so that in turn she could pay me back.

First problem with this situation is that my conservative nature makes me the furthest thing from a venture capitalist and she knew this. Problem number few was that I, along with anybody else who read that post on her was painfully aware of her financial standings which still haven't improved much since May. The third problem is that I tend to have to write off a portion of the money I have previously lent friends as there is normally no hope of getting it back.. no matter how small it is.

I asked her if she approached any financial institutions on a business loan and she explained that there was no way she could get one due to her bad financial standing. The answer was clear, no. She offered the title to her car to secure the loan, it made no difference.. what does she expect me to do repo her car when she defaults? lol that isn't risk I would take on but she didn't seem to be too understanding. What I found funny was that in her pitch to get capital from me she mentioned nothing of my return on investment. Reality is a bitch eh? Welcome to to adulthood.

back to the rat race

My word.. I have forgotten how horrible the traffic is. Ideally I would like to spend 1 hour in traffic daily, 30 mins to work and 30 mins from work and I would be happy but this week had me in traffic for up to 2 hours :(.

After spending the first few days back at work in hiding at the downtown office I decided to go to the main office building. As I walked up to the doors I noticed a group of familiar faces, it was the people from my floor. I thought it was odd that they were all outside at 8:30am but as I got closer their makeshift placards became obvious and one popped out of the group and pointed at me exclaiming it was my fault. I was on a call with senior management so I only paused to read their message and proceeded upstairs to my desk. They were complaining about the AC being too cold and much to my dismay they blamed it on me even though this was the first time I've been back to that office in two weeks.

After I finished my call I went back downstairs to them to try and address the issue yet again. I had previously explained to them that due to a fault in the design of the cooling on the floor I needed the central AC to operate at roughly 17C to ensure that I don't have hardware failures in a server room which is under my responsibility until we can find a permanent solution(which is in the pipelines). Asking them to adapt to this temperature isn't a ridiculous request but increasing the temperature a few degrees on their floor would result in a huge jump in temperature to my servers and have caused failure before. I was then accused of hiding out and being comfortable in my other offices but it is quite the opposite... I am no stranger to the cold as I think my other offices aim for 15c.

They waited until their vice president came and they all negotiated a middle ground. I hope no new enemies were made lol

Time heals all

I have a long way to go but I am on my way there. Before ending things with noodle on Tuesday I allowed her to explain the situation in case there was by some miracle a plausible explanation and it would have all been a big misunderstanding. After trying to deny deleting anything and accusing me of invading her privacy she started to give her reasons.

I already wrote an epistle here when I started this post a few days ago but that shall go unpublished and I will try to keep my comments on her reasons short.

• She referred to me as aunt because she was uncomfortable telling Joe she was out with her bf
• She kept her conversations with Joe a secret because I would misread it and make a big deal out of nothing. She further went on to explain that I was so jealous lately she didn't want to add fuel to that fire.
• She still maintained that nothing went on between them and she was just being foolish.

Noodle was under the impression that a storm on jealousy raged inside of me? This was news to me.. I always thought of myself as secure and nonchalant. I guess I will keep an eye out for it in future relationships, I don't believe I will find myself acting that way though. On a purely coincidental note on the Monday before any of her activities were exposed she showed me an email from one of her clean accounts from a friend that asked what were the top 3 things I valued in a relationship and asked me to answer. Loyalty, sincerity and happiness was my response... how heartless does one have to be to face me after that and lie?

Truth and time tells all

How does one say goodbye to a friend? Noodle and I were best friends for a long time before we got together, she knew everything about me and she (supposedly)told me about everything current in her life as well. Somewhere along the way during the beginnings of our friendship she met a guy, who we shall refer to as Joe, who she dated for a bit while he visited the island occasionally. This was the only guy I felt she never did give me the whole story on but it was okay though, she was in no way obligated to tell me anything at that point in time.

As the months passed he faded to the background and she started sharing some of her untold stories about her rendezvous with Joe which only served to grow my trust for her as she opted to fill in the remaining blanks without me asking about him. Our friendship grew to the point where she started to pursue me as a boyfriend but I was hesitant as I knew the nitty gritty of her past and what she was capable of but she swore her loyalty to me. After a few months passed I felt sure her intentions were pure she was invited to exclusively enjoy all that my simple forest life had to offer.

We all know how her life in the forest ended and she was free to do anything she pleased. She insisted I misjudged her, apologized for taking what she had for granted and still pursued a relationship with me. Her persistence payed off and my nos slowly changed to yeses and we ended up getting back together again in Negril. Now to rewind a bit back to Joe, even though he was faded to the background they still communicated via phone, email and im but I never payed much attention to it as I accepted him as just one of her friends. A few weeks ago she called saying Joe was going to send her a ticket to go visit him and she gave me an acceptable reason #1 for wanting to go, I told her if she wanted to go she should.

At some other point in time she brought back up her trip again asking several times if I was sure it was ok for her to go, the first red flag pops up in my head now as she seems to be feeling guilty of something, I still give her the go ahead. After questioning her motives again acceptable reason #1 has morphed to shady reason #2, I point out to her the change I noticed and she gets upset saying she told me this already and reason #1 was just the pill she fed her family so they wont hassle her for going to visit her friend. of course more red flags. It is obvious to me that there is more here than she lets on but I left it alone to give her time to come clean on her own as she got upset whenever I asked her about it and blamed me for not listening.

As far as I was concerned noodle was exhibiting textbook cheating behaviours so I kicked back and observed, there is no point to start an argument with nothing hard to back it. When we came back to Kingston after our trip over the weekend she went to the pc as usual to check her emails and other things online but I noticed she only flashed her inbox for a second then ignored it the entire time I was close. I said nothing to her as the last time I asked her to show me something in her inbox she said she would show me later but when later came around all conversations were mysteriously deleted without a trace and she had no idea where they went. I went back on Monday night after she left to find the following email trail in her trash.

From: noodle
To: joe
Subject: Hon!

honey you got my mail right? i sent you the dates. when you have the time please reply or call. hope you are good and things going in your favour. miss you!
take care, Love you.
God bless, noodle
---

From: noodle
To: joe
Subject: Re: Hon!

will you be coming to Jamaica this weekend?
---

From: joe
To: noodle

No, I was thinking you would come up ...
---

From: noodle
To: joe

i would love to come up this weekend except my aunt paid for our weekend already. what about the 2 november?

Aside from changing the names for anonymity and clipping the conversation for brevity the emails are untouched. Now this weekend she speaks of was the weekend she just spent with me. It's nice to know that she tells other men I am her aunt. Aside from those deleted messages her trash was empty, I guess I was too late to catch anything else but lucky enough to find those. I then glanced over her inbox to find this other gem

From: noodle
To: joe
Subject: hello

hi joe!

i know you are always busy, which is why i asked for a weekend thats convenient to you. but here is some available times for me starting 9-11.11.2007 im free, so you make a decision.

i really do miss you, its feels like forever since ive last seen you. i wont go in details how much i miss you and what i miss mostly, we will resolve that when we are together.

take care, love you

God bless

Noodle

wow.. I couldn't help but imagine what was said on the phone/in the messages she deleted and emptied from the trash and from the im chat which she explicitley turned off logging for Joe despite the fact she logs everybody elses conversations. I would love to see her explain this one, but I didn't say a word to her until I saw her online the following day. This post is already long and drawn out so I'll post her response later.

Hero's weekend '07

As being advised by the doctors of blogsphere I tried to book the weekend in Ocho Rios for noodle and I. It would have been the perfect setting to reconcile our defunct relationship but of course by that time the decent, yet still affordable, hotels were already booked out. So on to Negril then, we booked a room at the quaint fun holiday beach resort and kept our fingers crossed the weather would improve.

Friday showed promise for the weekend as there was sunshine for a bit during the day. My only other concern was how would I reach Negril granted that many of the routes were impassable due to flooding or landslides. It wasn't so bad though as the first flooded road I reached only had about 8" of water and was still usable with the aid of the locals who ran through the water telling us where to drive and the second flooded road had a bypass handy at the start. This first picture here was probably taken in Savanna-la-mar by the seawall where there was pretty much no signs of the previous 6 straight days of rain.

What can I say.. they are so postcard-esk, so: wish you were here!

There wasn't much going on in Negril since most of the parties were in Ocho Rios this weekend but I wanted to go to the FameFM Hedo property parties but noodle didn't carry clothes nor was too sure about having me around naked/scantily clad hedonism girls with my new found single status. I was cool with just chilling by the beach and pool all weekend though so it was all good.

We passed through Rick's Cafe and saw one seriously cocky cliff diver. He made his rounds and collected donations then proceeded to climb up a dead tree above the cliffs like he was the star monkey man from planet of the apes. Now about 60 feet above the water he began making poses and pointing at random points in the sky for a few minutes before starting to curse the people below who didn't contribute any money and was trying to take pictures of him diving. He then spent about 8 minutes in the tree top waiting for people to pay to film in before I jumped into the water, at that point all the tourists just left and went to the pool/bar as I am sure they were as disgusted with the man as I was. His whistles and calls to get them to come back didn't do much as they had seen enough.

I didn't really walk around with my camera much so I'll just comment on some of the more interesting(sadly) shots I found on my camera.
- dogs on the beach.. we all know how I feel, esp. mongrel dogs.. eww
- my 1-pac in full glory, maybe I should do something about it, maybe aim for 2 lol
- talk about all inclusive, I would love to stay there but I'm not willing to take out the mortgage for it.

By Monday morning the trip fulfilled all set objectives. Aside from a small spat over scoring after a game of scrabble, noodle and I were an item again and I was a well rested man. We decided to check out early and spend some time in Ocho Rios. The journey was long but the new north coast highway made it a lot easier. There wasn't much to do while we were there so we had lunch then toured the town a bit and found Turtle River Park. The place looked new, I haven't seen it before. Just like my last time off I bucked up on a duck. I should make them the mascot of my vacations.. lol.

1 from 10 leaves 0.

I am pooped, nothing is getting done.

• I dumped my clean laundry on the bed with all intentions to put it away over the weekend yet still I slept beside them last night.
• The pile of dirty dishes in my sink reached critical mass this morning where I ran out of cutlery for breakfast and was forced to do the dishes, I did all the cutlery but 3 dishes were left dirty.
• Work starts at 8:00am but you will probably find me at home at 8:30
• Work ends at 5pm but you will probably find me at home at 5pm as by the time 4pm come I am ready to leave. (the 5pm traffic doesn't help either)

To further complicate things it has been raining non stop for the past couple of days and I really shouldn't be at work now as I applied for this week off and got the go ahead. As usual something popped up and my boss needs to leave the island this week so he asked if I could postpone my time off. What was funny was that it would seem he wanted to send me to Costa Rica instead but I didn't have the requisite knowledge for that meeting.

It has been a long time since I last got some days off work and it is long overdue.

on the hunt again

So I am actively house hunting again.. I'm not sure if that one bid I put in for the apartment in January counts but I contacted a real estate agent and arranged to view a townhouse today. The price was nice and it was (perfectly) located in a quiet gated complex on the outskirts of New Kingston.

One thing I can say is that real estate agents seem to be shiesty individuals, before going I asked whats the size of the place and he couldn't give me an exact figure but said around 1000 square feet. Upon reaching the place I asked him again how large it was and it magically moved up to around 1600 sq ft. I had to laugh. I asked him how old it is and he claimed 12 years 16 at most, this man either knows nothing of the place he is selling or is trying to pull a fast one on me. Upon looking at the dated place my estimate was at least 30 years old, I then took out my tape measure and calculated the place to be 950 sq ft... the place was looking less attractive by the second.

The "young first time home buyer" paint must have still been wet on my forehead as he also told me to hurry up and put in my offer as the place will be gone before the end of the day... oh well my or his loss cause I would definitely not put in any offer or deposit based off the string of lies he tried to feed me. I hope it was really his loss as the last time I was hunting for an apartment to rent I found the perfect place and lost it cause I still had a couple more weeks left on my lease and figured I would find somewhere before it expired, oh well you live and you learn.

One thing of interest was that Usain Bolt and his brother was currently renting the place, I didn't recognise him downstairs but when I was looking at the bedrooms I noticed all of their trophies in their rooms. It's a good thing I'm not a fanatic cause I am sure all the people who passed through before harassed them to no end. My mother told me about a newish (< 5years) townhouse up on the auction block due to foreclosure.. at 1700 sq ft in Mona seems to be out of the reach of my pocket but lets see what the auction brings... lots of wishful thinking.

ps.. I think this is my 100th post, break out the bubbly!