zellephantom

Another example of truth is stranger than fiction.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/books/review/the-improbable-victoria-woodhull-eden-collinsworth.html

Woodhull was born Victoria Claflin in 1838, the seventh of 10 children. Her father, Buck, was a one-eyed con man; her mother, Roxanna, was a mentally unstable woman who talked to ghosts. Buck put 12-year-old Victoria and her younger sister, Tennie, to work by taking them on the road, billing them as “AMAZING CHILD CLAIRVOYANTS.”

Two years later, Victoria married a physician named Canning Woodhull. She was 14; he was 28, and he also happened to be a terrible drunk. She had two children with him: a son, Byron, who was born impaired and would need care for the rest of his life; and a daughter, Zulu Maud. Victoria and Tennie struck out on their own, eventually moving to New York, but they brought their Ohio family with them. Spiritualism was both a source of notoriety and a calling card. The shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt hired Victoria as his spiritual adviser and Tennie as his “healer” (she soon became his lover).

Vanderbilt helped the sisters open their brokerage firm; the riches it earned laid the foundation for Victoria’s presidential run. (Her first run, that is — she campaigned for the job twice more.) Finding herself on the brunt end of Anthony Comstock and his anti-obscenity campaign (for salacious stories published in a newspaper the sisters owned), she spent Election Day in the Ludlow Street Jail.

Seriously, if I created a character like that today, people would say she was unbelievable!

Nothing I love more than writing up a post.... and then forgetting to post it. =P

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I woke up late Thursday morning. Like, super late. I woke up at 8:26 and had an 8:30 meeting. I dove into some clothes, sprinted across the apartment, and was the first person to log into our Zoom call. I didn’t even stop to pee (thank dog for middle of the night trips to the bathroom!). This is our weekly database docs writers meeting, that we’ve had to split into two, meeting early one week and late the next, because one of our team is in Switzerland and one is out in British Columbia (West coast, right above WA state for you folks who don’t know your Canadian geography). I was more than a little disgruntled that our Swiss coworker had declined the meeting. She wasn’t on PTO, she’d just scheduled a meeting with another docs team during out regular meeting time. The Nerve! I really hate getting out of bed early for a meeting with someone who doesn’t show up. My manager joked about how we could go back to bed, but Kim and I were both like, “I’m already up and dressed….”

While I was eating breakfast I peeked at Facebook and discovered that one of my reenactor friends had gotten laid off. Which sucks, because he’s having some complicated medical issues with his immune system, and I’m hoping he didn’t lose his health care when he lost his job. I read through his FB post to see what he said about his skills and what he was looking for, then checked out our careers page, saw how many openings we had, and sent him the link.

Between meetings I updated two sets of Release Notes for patches that went out this morning, and kicked off the weekly release for the Helm Chart.

Over my lunch hour I had time to get into Facebook and re-check all the Lowell pages I was checking yesterday. That was when I found out they’d identified the kid with the gun. Reading through the comments was just pissing me off. Which is why I needed to write a post about it to cool myself down.

After lunch I finally got caught up on Slack and my inbox and settled down to get some actual work done. But no, mid-afternoon I spotted that my Director had posted on Slack that my manager will be transitioning out of working here. Which is polite corporate speak for “we’ve sacked him”. She offered to have a drop in meeting at the top of the hour for anyone who had questions.

I texted Kim, who was having a late lunch, to see if she’d seen the message. Right as I was hitting Send, I saw her posting a response, so she’d already seen it. She gets very anxious whenever anyone gets laid off, so I was worried about how she’d take it. We had a short side conversation, and she told me that she was messaging with our now former manager on Facebook. His advice was to lay low and not draw too much attention to ourselves during the meeting.

We met, and heard the same thing as when Ursula was let go. This is not a layoff, the position will be backfilled. It was not a surprise, that when people are let go it is never unexpected. Which just makes me think about all the Ask A Manager posts where she asks, “Have you really made it clear to this person that if things don’t improve they will lose their job? Or have you just hinted at it?” Because Kim said that our manager said that when he had his regular meeting with our Director, there were a whole bunch of issues raised about his performance, but he’d only heard one of them before. So yeah, a little anxiety provoking. And I’m going to have to try to be a bit more productive this fall, just to cover my own butt.

I spent some time on LinkedIn after work. I scrolled through my contacts to see who had one of those “Open to Work” badges across their profile photos. I was specifically looking for people that I could recommend as my new manager, but since I’d already seen the openings, I just opened a tab for everyone who was looking for work, then went back through to see if there was anything I could send them. I sent off e-mails to a Product Manager that I know and one to Tom, because lo and behold, we need a lawyer.

When I was checking back to see if anyone had responded to me later in the evening, I spotted a post from one of my former coworkers, one of the Documentation Program Managers from my last job. He’d published a short story on his website, so I thought, why not? And clicked over to read it.

It was bad. Really bad. Not just because it was a zombie story, but because it just was BAD. Not a single fully developed character in the entire story. Hell, some of them didn’t even have names, they were just The Mayor, or police officers, or anonymous voices in a crowd. No explanation of how people become zombies, or what the symptoms were other than they were suddenly “un-deceased”, which quite frankly didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Not even if they were dangerous or just harmless but mobile undead. And no explanation about why the townspeople seem curiously calm about their neighbors turning into zombies and needing to be rounded up and housed in the local jail. I know what point he was trying to make, but his plot just didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Again, I can write a much better story than that. I need to get my head back in the fiction game and start writing some.