Mars Retrograde to Me: You're Fired. Me to Mars Retrograde: Up Your Nose with a Rubber Hose.

Okay, so Mars is retrograde in Libra and I really shouldn't have been shocked by what happened right after I got to work on Tuesday, on the approaching Moon-Mars conjunction.

But what the hell, the Sun was also exactly trining my Neptune and Mercury (forming a grand trine in water). I thought that would be more than sufficient protection. In fact, I was no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop; I was plenty tense the day before, figuring if there was gonna be any blowback from the events of last Friday night, it would happen on Monday.

I couldn't have been wronger. It was on Monday that my fate was sealed via an upper-management meeting. The so-called team with whom there was some unpleasantness on Friday night (which was not my fault -- it was a design issue, not my department) turned out to be a bunch of turncoats. This Gang of Four apparently didn't complain to my mild-mannered, lower-than-low-key Libra supervisor (who hadn't been there on Friday night when the team gang-up occurred, though the other evening-shift person had been, and she claimed without my asking her that she'd never seen anything like the shit that happened, shit that involved my methods and my competency being called into question, so I'm not crazy). No, the team went straight to upper management to get rid of my troublemaking ass. I even know which one of them was the instigator to throw me under the bus: she was the classic down-masquerading-as-an-up with tacky dyed blond hair and a face that only a Mack truck would love. This was the charmer who had never bothered to learn how to spell my name correctly even though it was right on my work email.

Fittingly, my Libra supervisor was the henchman on Tuesday. Due to some typical snafu my name was not in the corporate reimbusement system, so my supervisor paid me in cash for the cabs I'd had to take home two nights in a row from staying at the office till 1 a.m. to get the tons of absolutely necessary work done, then he wanted to know if we could talk for a minute. I felt like a regularly scheduled prostitute being given the boot after above-and-beyond services rendered.

I was never even given an opportunity to defend myself. That hardly seems fair -- especially since if anyone should've been fired, it shouldn't have been me.

But fairness seems to be in rather limited supply these days. My oldest friend, who shuffled off this mortal coil nearly seven years ago, had some old-school astrology book that claimed when Mars was retrograde, "bullies prevail." That's it in a nutshell.

So much for snitches winding up in ditches. In this case, it's the rats that ratted me out for the heinous crime of wanting to do my job correctly that won. Last Friday night, the Sun was within half a degree of opposing my Pluto -- I was right to be paranoid, but never dreamed I'd get fired over the kerfuffle, and never figured my best defense would be to go on the offensive and complain to my supervisor over what had transpired. The other evening-shifter told me on the phone on Wednesday that Libra Supervisor was "a nice guy, but won't stand up for us when there's a problem." As a result, I am back to square one, where I was in January, newly cut off from EUC, not making enough coin as a full-time freelancer, raising worrying to an art form.

So much for thinking that I wasn't going to have to deal with the fearsome-sounding Cardinal Cross in April, starring Uranus, Pluto, Jupiter, and...oh yes...Mars. Stay tuned (as opposed out out of tune).