Vacation at Club Med

Well, nothing like Christmas to bring on a desperate need for vacation. Take urbanite Kimberly, an accountant at a high-end magazine, mother of two, wife of of an immigrant...on $45,000 per year. Does anything about this fail to make sense to you, dear reader? For giggles and grins, let's assume the city is Chicago - one of th emost expensive cities in the country to make ends meet. The immigrant husband speaks marginal English and has a penchant for additional liasons. Christmas has been stressful for Kimberly and I happen to be her friend, Crystina, well actually her neighbor. But when you're that close in proximity to someone and you're already involved on a friendly, shallow plane then it's a little difficult to extract gracefully.

Well, you know, this is a Christmas story Mrs. Carnegie, so I will keep it brief. I kept getting phone calls through the day starting a couple of weeks ago. You know, 13 calls in an hour while I was at work. But i decided not to answer, doesn't that seem a little "off" to you? So the calls keep coming and one day I answer and what I hear on the other line in Kimberly saying "oh, Crystal, I showed up at work today and I was locked out of my computer!" My response was "Call IT." She waiteda beat then said "Well...they packed my stuff up too and escorted me out of the building." But I'm still a little slow, I don't understand what she's saying. Granted she'd come over to my house a week earlier to give me a preview to the 30-slide powerpoint detailing her supervisor's shortcomings for an upcoming meeting with upper management. Apparently she didn't take my advice.

So, she was fired. They were kind enough to give her two months severance and even a letter explaining WHY she was being dismissed (incompetence tracked over a period of months and an excess of unauthorized days off from work). Kimberly wouldn't open the letter until I started getting upset since she swore she didn't know why she was fired. In addition to the termination letter, there was also a pile of mail at her home, including several letters from her landlord explaining she was 1, 2, 3, then 4 months behind in her rent. I suggested she wake the baby early in the morning and g to the food stamps office and subsidized housing and take a portion of her severance check to the landlord and beg not to be evicted.

Then, predictably, she told me just how much was needed to keep the eviction from happening. But, really, could I afford to give a $2000.00 gift to a marginal friend who is down on her luck due to her own mismanagement? No, I couldn't! So, I volunteered to take care of the kids while she went out job hunting. Instead she checked herself into the UC Chicago Psych Ward and I got a 3 a.m. call from her unintelligible husband mubling about could I take the kids for a few hours until some other relatives could take over. For a week I babysat two children, both toddlers, with little discipline and master manipulation skills.

So, for Christmas Kimberly took a vacation at Club Med (turns out whenver the sh*t hits the fan, she checks herself in for a little breather) and I spent the holiday wrestling with car seats and cranky babies.