In which I spend way too much time with a colleague who turns out to be a complete flake

This guy Rolando and I started working for the paper company on the same day in Miami. We were paid the same amount. I know this because he foolishly made a copy of his offer letter and left the original on the copy machine and oh like you wouldn't have looked. Honestly. Of course I looked.

We banded together in defense against some of the other people in the office, one of whom was a sweaty, pale blond guy who spoke no Spanish yet was in charge of Latin America sales and who told me during my interview that he would never live in Miami (he lived in Boca Raton) because he had children.

I was quite puzzled, as there were many people in Miami who also had children, including my next door neighbor Mousson, whose 15 year old son Rudolf overfed my cats when I was out of town, telling me, when I gently suggested that he might have given them too much food, "But zey were 'ongry! Zey were crying!"

Then I realized that Pat was just a big fat racist jerk and that his opinion meant nothing to me.

Rolando and I tried to become friends, but I realized soon that there was no hope. The first sign was the day he saw the book Army of Angels in my briefcase. I rode the train from Miami to Boca, where the office was, 60 miles away, and had a lot of time to read every day. This was in the mid 90s, when people were not expected to work 24 hours a day just because they had laptops and cellphones. I read. I even had time to read The Economist every week. Three hours on a train every day will do that to you.

But Rolando was not a reader. He was not a student of history. I'm not sure what he was.

I don't want to sound like an intellectual snob. I know there are many bright people who have not been exposed to things that you would think everyone is exposed to. The great IT guy who was always so helpful to me in Memphis had never heard of Anne Frank.

He had never heard of Anne Frank.

How do you grow up in the U.S. and not know that?

But he was a product of Memphis City Schools, which, for those of you who do not know about Memphis City Schools, is not the best school system in the world. The county mayor once gave a speech in which he said that every day, when he woke up, he thanked God for Arkansas and Mississippi just so Memphis wouldn't be in last place.

Rolando asked what the book was about.

"Joan of Arc," I answered.

"Who's that?" he asked.

Oh Lord.

Rolando had gone to private school. His dad was a bigwhig with an international company. Rolando had gone to the good schools in Venezuela and Colombia and the U.S. He got his MBA at Northwestern, which did not admit me, not that I'm bitter about that. Actually, I'm not. I still went to a top school and I paid only $5,000 for two years of tuition and fees.

Plus it probably didn't help my chances at Northwestern in my interview when I asked the alum who was interviewing me what made Northwestern ten times better than U.T. that they charged ten times as much tuition. The alum was not amused and sputtered that you couldn't look at just tuition. I shrugged. I was paying for this. I wanted to know. But Northwestern made it easy for me and didn't admit me. Whatever.

But Rolando, who was educated and who had gotten into a school that had not admitted me, did not even know who Joan of Arc was. For dumb.

But that's not what made him so flaky.

One day, when I mentioned that my friend Susan and I were going to the Keys on Saturday morning to go canoeing, he asked to join us. Sure, I told him. Just be at my house at 7:00 a.m. That's when we're leaving.

Susan and I waited. No Rolando. We waited some more. Still no Rolando.

I finally called the phone number he had given me. He was staying with his parents until he found a place and I didn't want to call so early, but I was worried that maybe he'd had an accident between his mom and dad's house and my house and wouldn't you want to know if you were a parent?

His mom answered. "He's still sleeping," she told me.

"Screw him," I told Susan. "We're not waiting."

That's still not the flaky part.

Rolando and I had to go to Cincinnati for two weeks of training. We decided not to fly back to Miami for the weekend in the middle but just to stay up there. "There's some cool state parks in Kentucky," I said. "We could go to the park, stay in the lodge and the company would pay for it."

Our boss said fine. He didn't care. As long as we spent less than tickets back to Miami would have cost.

We checked out of the hotel that Friday before driving to the park. Rolando had a $150 phone charge on his bill. He had called the plant in El Salvador on the hotel phone.

"Why didn't you use the company calling card?" I asked.

He shrugged. "It probably wouldn't save that much money," he answered.

"What!" I said. "You really think that the company wouldn't negotiate a better rate than the hotel charges?"

"Nah," he said.

He had another $40 on his bill for laundry.

"What laundry?" I asked.

"My socks," he said.

"Socks? But why?"

"I didn't bring two weeks worth of socks," he said. "I had to have them washed."

"But you could have washed them in the sink!" I told him. "Or there's a washing machine in the hall! You could have washed them yourself for a dollar!"

"Nope," he said.

I was stunned. Such disregard for company resources! Not that I hold any love in my heart for that place. Just yesterday, LinkedIn sent me the suggestion that I join the paper company alumni group.

"Just as soon as I join the 'All the guys who have ditched me' group," I muttered.

But I was always a good steward of my employer's money. Why would anyone deliberately waste money? Especially when it was not necessary?

We drove to the park in Kentucky. The lodge, unfortunately, had only one room available. We were going to have to share a room for two nights. Ick. Not pleasant, but not un-doable. I would just rather not have that level of familiarity with a co-worker. Fortunately, I had brought my usual frumpy pajamas with me. Not that I think he found me in any way alluring. I had met his girlfriend, who was 15 years younger than he and I were and about 20 sizes smaller than I.

By the time we got there, it was too late to do anything but eat and go to bed. Rolando had a long conversation with his girlfriend - on the room phone - while I read a book and tried not to listen.

The next morning, he got out of bed, wrapping his sheet around him to walk into the bathroom, holding it closed with one hand while he grabbed his clothes with the other.

He had slept nude.

When he left the bathroom, after his shower, the sheet and his towels were on the floor.

Leaving your wet towels on the floor is so damn rude.

I said something to him and he told me that the maid could pick them up.

Yes, he was a spoiled rich kid.

Hotels have signs now saying that they are so conservation minded and they care and they will only change the towels daily if they are left on the floor. Towels left hanging are a sign that the customer wants to re-use them.

I have no problems whatsoever with using the same towel more than one day in a row. It is horribly wasteful to wash them every single day. But it is a bit disingenuous of the hotels to claim that they care so much. They are just counting on most peoples' natural courtesy and good home training to hang up their towels. Still, it's smart marketing and I don't blame them for it. I do wonder, however, about people who can just toss a towel to the floor and leave it there. How were they raised?

After breakfast, we went for a hike.

Rolando hated it.

Trees! And limbs! In his way! Bugs! BUGS!

Oh for pity's sake. I hate hiking and am about as big a whiner as you will ever meet if I have to walk up hills when it's not part of a gym class, but this was not bad at all. It was just pretty mountain countryside with very clearly marked paths. Birds, flowers, trees. Hiking lite.

We trudged back to the lodge and had lunch. Went back to the room, which the maid had cleaned, although I had hung the towels because I just couldn't stand it. Rolando went to look out the third floor window - and jumped back, shrieking.

"What's that? What's that?"

I looked up from my book and squinted. "Oh. A squirrel."

"But it's jumping!"

I looked up from my book again. "Yeah."

"IT COULD JUMP INTO THIS ROOM AND BITE US!"

"I doubt it," I answered dryly.

"IT COULD BE DANGEROUS!"

"No," I said.

"We should leave," he announced. "I don't care if we have another night here. We should leave."

I thought back on the time we had already spent together: nude sleeping, towels on the floor, grouchy hiking and now, irrational fear of squirrels. How much more of this could I take?

I closed my book and stood. "Great idea," I said.

The End.

In which the neighbors prove to be complete losers

My Miami duplex was part of a pair - two duplexes sharing the same yard. My across the yard neighbor, Mousson, was great. We were friends. Her duplex neighbors were two Argentine guys whom we rarely saw. There are more fun things to do in Miami for a young man than hang out with his neighbors.

My duplex neighbors were jerks.

The first neighbor, who moved out after a year, had two big dogs that she let poop in the yard and on the sidewalk. This would not have been a problem except I had to go past her half, on her sidewalk, to get to my half, on my part of the sidewalk.

She did not think it was her responsibility to clean up any dog poop after her half of the yard or the sidewalk. Actually, I don't even think she cleaned the poop out of the yard.

My half of the sidewalk was always poop-laden, which is bad for its own sake but really bad considering I rarely got home before dark. Once I had navigated my way through the land mines that Neighbor's two DOBERMANS had left, I still got to smell the poop as it wafted into my bedroom window.

She finally moved out.

Then Marta and her husband moved in. At first I thought, well cool! She's from Venezuela and her husband is Brazilian, so I can practice both Spanish and Portuguese.

Then I asked Marta to watch my place while I was on vacation for two weeks. (Mousson was in Haiti for the summer.)

"Please take my newspapers," I asked her.

"I don't read the paper," she told me.

"Then please just put it in the trash," I asked her. I hadn't put the paper on vacation hold because there was a rumor that some of the customer service people at The Herald would provide that information to burglars.

"Please move my mail away from the mail slot in the door," I asked her.

"Please water my plants," I asked her. Then I gave her my house key.

Then I went happy to Ireland with my friend Lenore. Tralalalala I don't have to worry about my house in Miami, where I have to chain my washer and dryer to the outside wall next to the back door and guess what? dryers are not meant to be outside in the rain and they will rust on the inside and you cannot get rust out of your clothes for love or money, where late-night revelers from Cocowalk pee on the side of my fence and throw used diapers and condoms into the ditch, where my license plates have been stolen twice and my car has been broken into by thieves who smashed the window and stole everything - my prescription sunglasses, the spare change in the ashtray, four quarts of motor oil - except my music cassettes, which was a real slap in the face. I mean, you guys steal the old shower curtain in the trunk in case I had to change a tire in the mud yet you don't want my music?

Philistines.

I returned from Ireland with a little gift for Marta because she had done me this enormous favor.

My friend Susan, who picked me up from the airport, and I arrived at my house.

My car interior light was on.

What the?

It was on because the door was slightly ajar.

Because it had been broken into. Again.

I opened the gate (the one with the "Perro malo" sign that kept out nobody but the FedEx guy, so when I got my job offer and signing bonus from my post-yellow truck employer, it was delayed for three days as I tried to convince FedEx to deliver it) and saw two weeks' worth of newspapers in the yard.

I tried to open my front door. I had to push hard to get through the mail that had accumulated at the mail slot.

My plants were dead.

I went next door and knocked. Marta opened the door and started to speak fast in Spanish: "They tried to break into your house! They broke into your car and then we heard somebody late one night trying to break into your house so we called the police and yelled at them and they went away!"

"Thank you," I said. "Thanks for preventing them from breaking into my house. But - um - Marta? How do you think they knew I wasn't at home?"

She looked at me wide eyed. "I don't know!" she answered.

"Do you think it could have been that all the newspapers were in the yard?"

She gasped. "No! That's how they figured it out?"

"Yes," I told her. "That's why I asked you to put them in the trash."

"Who would have thought," she mused as she shook her head.

Yeah. Who would have thought.

She never did explain why she hadn't bothered to close my car door.

In which I realize I have a bad landlord and even worse neighbors

When I got the job in Miami, the Yellow Truck Sweatshop Employer, who shall go unnamed, flew me to Miami for a few days a month before I was supposed to start working so I could find a place to live. That day, I found a cute, cute duplex in Coconut Grove. A little stucco house with wood floors and a porch and arched doorways and a built-in bookcase. It was to die for. Expensive, but hey I was rolling in the dough now.

I also got my drivers' license in about two seconds because Florida allows you to make appointments at the DMV. I was the only person who seemed to have figured this out, because when I got there, there was nobody at the "appointments" counter and a huge line at the other counters.

Driver licensing is the one public service that Florida does well. Getting license tags and getting the car inspected were nightmares. My first year, I got to the car inspection place, which closed at 5 during the week, not that I could have gotten there even if it stayed open until 7, or 8, or 9 because I would still have been at work, on Saturday morning at 7:30 in anticipation of the 8:00 a.m. opening. There was already a long line around the block. When they opened the gate, we moved into four lanes. After I had been waiting 40 minutes, someone drove from the outside, around those of us waiting, and to the front of the line.

NO ONE DID ANYTHING!

Another car decided to try the same trick. I thought, "Not on my watch, buddy," so I honked and did the Latin America finger wave, which is when you move your index finger from side to side. That means, "No way in heck are you doing this and if you do, there will be severe repercussions."

It worked. Spurred by my example, the other drivers showed a bit of cojones and honked as well. The breakaway car had to slink to the back of the line. That had probably never happened to him before, as line cutting is an enormous problem in Miami. They would even cut in line at communion at church, which come on - you're not going to miss communion and it's not like church will end any faster if you cut, unless you're like me and leave right after communion because you cannot stand to hear one more awful song from the "Gather" hymnal.

Back to the landlord. He seemed like a decent guy, although it's pretty clear from some of my other rental decisions that I am completely incapable of judging landlord character. I told him if he would buy the paint, I would re-paint the living room. He dropped off the paint and the brushes. I asked where the dropcloths and the tape were.

Oh no me preocupe, he told me. Don' worry 'bout it.

I didn't understand how he could be so cavalier about his own property. I bought tape and dropcloths because although I do only a half-assed job on things like washing dishes - clean enough not to give anyone food poisoning is my mantra - I am a kick-ass painter. Dishes can be re-washed. Painting is a different story.

He did jump to my aid when I called him to announce there were rats in the kitchen. Or rat. I didn't know how many. At least one - it was eating my bread (through the wrapper). Then I saw it scurry under the stove one night. In a completely instinctive reaction, I jumped onto a chair. When you see that scene in a movie, do not laugh. It is what rational people do in response to seeing a nasty, disease-laden, eats the noses off babies rat.

He came over the next day with a mousetrap and the advice to get a cat or a snake. Because snakes eat rats, you know, and wouldn't it be nice to have a snake roaming the house?

The trap didn't work. I put cheese in it and the rat stole the cheese. I read that I should use peanut butter instead. I tried that - the peanut butter was untouched, but the bananas were nibbled upon.

I bought poison, something the landlord had been unwilling to do. Cheap? Ignorant? Who knows.

I saw the poison level (the box was in the kitchen) decreasing a little bit each day, but saw no dead rats. A few days into it, I came home to find a stoned rat in the poison box.

He had been eating the poison and was happy, happy, happy. I tried to sweep him out of the house, thinking to take advantage of his drunken slowness, but he still scrambled under the stove.

The next night, the same thing, only this time the rat had the nerve to wave at me.

Then I didn't see him again, but a few days later, I smelled a whiff of something nasty. That whiff became a horrible odor.

The rat(s) had climbed underneath my floor to die. And to decompose. Thank you, humid Miami climate, for carrying that stink into my house for two weeks.

I checked into getting cats. I went to the adoption fair that the crazy cat ladies were running at the bookstore. I picked two cats, but could not take them home until my house had been inspected by the crazy cat lady.

"Vere vill ze kitties eat?" she demanded.

"In the bathroom."

"Zey cannot eat in ze bazroom!"

"Um, in the kitchen?" I said weakly. It's not like she would be coming back to inspect once the cats arrived.

She seemed satisfied with that answer.

"Vere vill ze kitties sleep?" she continued.

I shrugged. "Wherever they want, I suppose." Had she never observed a cat in action? If someone can tell me the secret of keeping a cat from going where you do not want it to go, please share this information with me. Primo and I have two cats who have taken over the kitchen. Over the house. I have surrendered and now use a cutting board (stored in the cupboard) for preparing all food because I do not want my food to touch the counter where the cats have trod using the same feet they use in their litter box.

"Vy do you vant ze kitties?"

"Because I have rats," I told her.

She staggered and put her hand to her chest. (OK, not really.) "You cannot haf ze kitties if you haf ze rats!" she exclaimed, horrified.

"Why not?" I muttered. "I have to work for a living. Why shouldn't my cats?"

Somehow, I passed. I don't know if the cats could have killed any rats, but perhaps their constant killing and eating everything but the heads of the cute bright green geckos that lived on my blinds served as a warning to the others. The heads and tails would disappear on Saturday mornings when I would put on my glasses and clean the house. The rest of the week, I just didn't look. Plus I usually didn't get home from work until like midnight and who cares if she has a clean house at midnight. Have I mentioned I hated my job at the place that rhymes with "Sider?"

I don't think the rats were scared of the cats (whose names I have forgotten - shame on me - I had to give one of them away when I moved to Cedar Rapids - the other was killed by a car and more about that later when I talk about my really clueless neighbor), but perhaps their mere presence was a deterrent. Yes, there was the gecko killing, but it's easy to pick on something smaller than you. The rats were almost as big as the cats and it's not like my cats were hungry or anything because during the day while I was at work, they hung out with my neighbor Mousson (not the bad neighbor - Mousson was really nice), who, along with her teenage son, Rudolph, fed the cats on demand. Cats need to be a little bit hungry to be truly effective hunters.

Back to the landlord. His responsiveness kicked into super low gear when I discovered that the roof was leaking and that the plaster above my sofa was getting soggy. I called him every day for five days, telling him that there was a leak and it was damaging his ceilings. On Sunday, I awoke to see that the plaster was sagging about an inch. It was going to fall.

I pulled as much furniture out of the living room as possible and covered the sofa with an old sheet. A regular sheet. I didn't have many old sheets in the sense of "used up and replaced by new sheets" because I had been in grad school for two years, then a year unemployed, then two years of Peace Corps, then another year unemployed, all of which meant that I had only the sheets that I had had for years.

But a sheet is easier to replace than a sofa, so there you go, just as the Good Towels are easier to replace than the basement carpet when the sewer drain backs up, which it has done every summer since Primo and I bought our house. Primo freaks out that I am bringing the Good Towels downstairs to blot the water ("blot" being used in the sense of "try to sop up the five gallons of water that are now inhabiting our new basement carpet") but I point out that the carpet cost $1,000 to install and yeah, the insurance paid for it but still do we want to go through that hassle again and towels are not that expensive at TJMaxx and you can even get stuff that's not made in China, which is a quality I seek as I am not a fan of slave/prison labor.

I called my landlord again and left the message that the ceiling was about to fall and he might want to arrange for the repair.

Then I went to a movie. When I returned, the plaster had indeed fallen - a chunk about 3' x 8.' I pulled my trash can in from the street and began tossing the plaster into it.

Do you know how heavy wet plaster is?

It is very, very heavy. And a trash can full of it is very, very, very heavy, even when you are dragging it back out to the curb rather than carrying it. I could hardly walk the next day at work. Who knew my glutes needed so much work? I should have left it for the landlord to clean, but I didn't want wet plaster soaking through to my sofa. And he probably wouldn't have done it.

Why he just hadn't fixed the leaky roof in the first place I do not know. Wait. I do. I was in Miami a few years ago with my former boyfriend (the one who gave me the belt sander, which I still love) and we drove past my old place. Only it was gone. It had been replaced by some crappy new construction. My place had been built in the '40s. It was solid, good construction - wood, stucco, tile. The corners were square. The materials were high quality. It had character.

It had been replaced by a McCondo. So sad.

I was going to talk about my bad neighbors, but I'll do that next time.

In which I have a huge crush on a co-worker friend and think he likes me back but then he outs himself to me

I moved to Miami for a job with a big company, which will remain unidentified but let's just say "yellow trucks," in the sweatshop known as corporate finance. It was a horrible, awful job, where we drones (aka "financial analysts") worked until 9 or 10 at night because the director and VP wouldn't meet with us to review our work until 7 p.m. and really, who would have a problem with that after arriving at work at 7:15 a.m.? After all, we could drop our dry cleaning off on the first floor and there was an on-site cafeteria and a gym. Why would anyone need to go home?

I hated that job with a passion. Hated it. The only thing that made my one year and one day there somewhat bearable is that I liked four of my co-workers a lot. They all quit shortly after I did. The others are still there. Are you seeing a connection?

I especially liked Liam. We got along great, hitting it off from the beginning because of our shared love of travel and our shared hatred of our workplace. Although who wouldn't want to go through the past 15 years of annual reports and calculate what the stock price, revenues, and profits would have been had the company not sold its aircraft division ten years earlier? That is Very Useful Information. One of my co-workers had to do a cost-benefit analysis of installing a security system in the building. It didn't matter that the system had already been installed and the money already spent.

Liam had majored in Chinese or Asian studies or something like that. After college, he got a job running a small factory in China. He spoke Chinese fluently and had traveled all over Asia. He returned to the US to get an MBA, then got his job at The Sweatshop.

Liam and I became fast friends. We went to lunch together, volunteered in a business program at an elementary school together, went out to concerts together, went dancing together. We got an opera subscription together. We would use the tickets investor relations got to attend gala events together, like the Yo-Yo Ma concert and the small dinner afterwards. Oh yes. I have been not ten feet from Yo-Yo Ma. Are you impressed?

Liam had an out of town girlfriend, Claudia. But they were having problems. He would discuss the problems with me. I hoped he would ditch her. I never met her. He didn't have a photo of her. But she sounded like she did not deserve him.

I thought it odd when Liam told me that he had given Claudia a fancy camera for Christmas. Not very romantic, I thought. But that was before Primo gave me a digital SLR for my birthday a few years ago and before a former boyfriend gave me a belt sander. Those are two of the best presents I have ever gotten. So the camera should not have given me pause at all. At the time, though, it did.

Liam and I spent so much time together that our colleagues thought we had something going on.

"We're just friends," I told them.

"Right," they said.

I would then say, "Look at Liam. Do you really think we go together?" Liam was 6'2", blonde, green eyes, fab body. Gorgeous. And smart. And super nice. He'd been picked for the Cutty Sark clipper sail from Norway to England. As in, they picked the civilian crew for their photogenics.

A guy like that can do much better than me. Not that I am chopped liver, but I am not the female equivalent of Liam. Brooke Shields is the female equivalent. (Except she has a lot more money than Liam does.)

I was flattered that they were so convinced.

But no.

One day, Liam asked me if I thought it was better to be with someone who was like you ("you" in the non sex specific third person sense) or one who was different.

Thinking, "I am the one who is like him! We both love chocolate!" I answered, "Definitely the one who is like you."

"Yeah," he sighed. "I think you're right."

Then he told me he had something important to discuss with me and could he come over to my house that night.

Oh yes! This was when he was going to confess his feelings for me! I knew I wasn't his looks match, but we clicked on everything else. It could happen.

I bought a baguette, some good cheese and some grapes. Liam showed up with a bottle of wine.

Oooh! Makeout city tonight! My only other social and - other - actions since I had moved to Miami had been a phone message one Friday night asking if I wanted to buy a septic tank, which I did not because 1. I was connected to the sewer system and 2. I rented. Having a guy over was a big deal.

We started talking. I was waiting. Waiting for him to tell me, "I want us to be more than friends," because really, how many guys hang out with a woman as much as we did without an ulterior motive?

That is not what he told me.

What he told me was that he wanted to tell me something important that nobody else at work knew but he was tired of having to keep secrets all the time.

He told me he was gay and that Claudia was a man.

"You're dating a man named Claudia?" I asked. I didn't get it.

"No!" he told me. That was the name he had given to his boyfriend, Pedro, so he could take about him/her at work and nobody would suspect anything.

My jaw dropped. I usually had pretty decent gaydar - I had several gay friends from the Peace Corps. But they were out. Maybe guys trying to hide it in a suit and tie corporate environment could turn it off.

Well crap.

Well rats.

Well I knew it was too good to be true.

Oh well.