For you city dwellers, a septic system is a way of disposing of the waste that goes down your sink, toilet, dishwasher and processing it when a local municipality is not capable of providing sewer.  Part of this process involves a septic tank, which is literally a large tank in the ground that holds all of your solids (human waste, food scraps).  Once every six months to a year this tank must be pumped.  It’s a smelly job and not for the weak.

This is not some major company, there is no office address, no 401k for employees.  Here is a rural family, whom likely has a mortgage, a car payment, a work truck payment and a baby.  The wife is a stay at home mother whom also juggles answering the phone for clients, dispatching the husband to jobs, bookkeeping for the company, shopping, laundry cooking… the list goes on and on.  The husband is out before dawn every day.  He leans over moves a 75lb man hole cover (some times four of them) and sticks an apparatus that looks like a giant beater from your mom’s kitchen-aid mixer into a hole in the ground to break up smelly, deteriorating human waste that has been in a hole for 6+ months.  Every night he comes home from work….want to guess what he smells like?

Yet despite all of this, they press on and they work day in and day out.  They chase the American dream, participate in capitalism and bring a much needed service in an industry that is not glamorous.  I respect them for what they do, and I hope everyone else does as well.



Needless to say, one summer when I got to work in the office I loved the experience, no matter what I had to do, even make blueprints… See kids, before the days of digital wide format scanners; blueprints were actually blue (shocking I know).  This happened as the copy was made using a mixture of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, and boy did it smell!

So today, I can only say that I am happy to still have a job in an industry were I can continue my passion of carting around 24″x36″ sheets of paper all rolled up.  It’s one of the perks I readily enjoy, it reminds me of the hard work I put in on the job site, and to be grateful for what I have in life.

I must say I am blessed in my life that I have one of the most mild cases of TS as they are often not present.  Tics have ranged from heavy blinking, to a little grunt in the throat.  The tics typically flair up when I am extremely stressed, tired or inebriated, rarely lasting longer than a week, often 48 hours.  Sleep, a relaxing weekend often does the trick just fine.  For some reason it’s just taking me a bit longer this time round than usual to get over it.

So please bear with me, feel free to point it out, have a little fun with it, I don’t mind, just don’t think I’m some crazy weirdo.  And remember, at least I’ve got a Golden Ticket

Well now I am all grown up, and I still break lead like Evel Knievel broke bones. At least my employer provides me with unlimited refills.

The point is, I love using 0.5 mechanical pencils, they bring joy to my every day life.

1) Milton County residents – If you know your history of the Atlanta area, you know that Milton County merged with Fulton County in 1932 to save it from bankruptcy during the Great Depression.  As an individual who lives in former Milton County, I am personally insulted that MARTA still considers my community to be a poor, fiscally irresponsible part of the community and named our rail service the red line.

2)  Tree Huggers – To save money I have no doubt that Marta spent a significant sum of money to print rail maps in bulk.  These not only include the maps inside the trains, but pamphlets which can be found on any bus or train operated by Marta.  How many trees are we wasting here?

3)  Tax Payers – For the same reasons as above; not to mention the numerous man hours spent to re-render, re-draw, and put up these new posters, pamphlets and web based maps.  Last I checked, the Center for Pan Asian Community Services was not willing to flip the bill for this.  But again, what’s $10,000.00 for a government authority that stands to lose $1,200,000,000.00 over the next 10 years.

4)  The Asian community at Helen Kim, director of advocacy and education at the Center for Pan Asian Community Services; the tip of the spear in this push.  Though Kim may feel violated by the naming of the yellow line, an unforeseen result is the national publicity which helps educate people, whom may already not know, that yellow is a derogatory term towards Asians; not to mention that they all look like a bunch of whiney bitches.  I have the feeling that most people in the Asian community never read into this matter till someone brought it to their attention; then again, I’m not Asian, and I don’t let matters like this bother me.

5) Black people – the AJC.com article explained how MARTA CEO Beverly Scott actually went as far as to find this “matter” necessary to bring up the Atlanta Civil Rights Movement.  Yeah, right; I did not see 750 Asians thrown in jail over this.