no, really, make me try harder

i had a difficult time on the way home tonight, but then it's never easy to come home from a lousy day at the office and find a dozen people waving placards in front of your apartment building. it's even worse when they're shouting and pointing at you. i thought my wave of staff cuts had passed so gradually and carefully that nothing was really going to come of it. well, it turns out that my web team thinks i took took ideas they presented to me last summer and used them as the basis for the site's new template. they were out for a drink tuesday and ran into intern janelle (who still has her unpaid job, of course), who was there meeting a college friend of hers - my former personal chef, marc. marc left me two years ago because i had started talking about eating vegan for a week, a plan he saw as both ludicrous and potentially harmful. he was afraid not just that he'd be fixing vegan sausages and lentil soups for a week, but that i'd trick myself into becoming a full-on vegetarian. well, he was right about that.

so anyway, marc quit rather than watch his creative options become limited by what he saw as a permanent dietary change. he harbors a lot of bad blood, mostly due to the stale french fries he used to find in the kitchen trash on weekends, when his carefully prepared meals were going untouched. he always felt i owed him a better severance than i'd offered, but it was all in his contract. good grief. people wonder why i'm still keeping a legal team. please.

two years later, it was my bad luck that janet introduced him to piers and khaled, who have become increasingly angry with me these past few days, as they've slowly drunk away their own severance checks. upon hearing of my staff cuts (marc always hated the site, so of course he'd been out of the loop), marc made a few calls to some chefs who'd worked catered events for me in the past. most of them hate me even more than marc does. people don't seem to understand why i need professional help to serve popcorn and carrot juice, but i pay for quality, you know? i figured that my habitual use of craigslist was wise, considering i can never get one chef to work more than two parties. well, unfortunately for me, freelance craigslist chefs have some kind of web forum or something, and the url seems to have the words "no," "carrot," and "juice" incorporated in it. i've always been who i am, although my preferences may change, and i'm sorry that my ex-employees have so much pent-up anger over the limitations my choices have placed on them. apparently, my parties have resulted in an organized, angry online community of freelance chefs. they've always kept to themselves, stewing in their own frustrations with me and other past employers, but when they heard i was downsizing, marc had them ready for blood. thus, i arrived home to a mob of angry chefs and web developers shouting and jeering at me. just when i thought i'd successfully navigated through the situation without so much as throwing an elbow, marc and khaled came tearing out from behind a huge potted plant, savagely basting me with turkey juices and plastering me with giant capital letters cut from the newspaper. that seems like some seriously weird stuff to premeditate. it's funny what people spend their time on when they're out of work.