Month: December 2005

I didn’t really do the whole Christmas thing this year (in terms of gifts) for anyone except my girlfriend and immediate family, for no other reason then because my usually plentifull creative side (which is usually responsible for getting gift ideas) took a long vacation this year, sometime around September and hasn’t returned since. After Thanksgiving when I really started shopping hardcore for peoples’ gifts, I was finding dead-ends at every corner. What do you get for the person that has everything? Adults are hard to buy for — kids are the best. There’s nothing like buying for a little girl or boy, because well, they still believe in Santa and that’s 90% of the fun.

Anywho, I did find a few cool things for people. I found some really good stuff at two different websites. My mom had liked some of the items I had purchased for others, and she wanted to know where I had got them. I didn’t realize they were that good, but people laughed or smiled, so I figured that was a good reaction.

I actually picked up some stuff for myself at these two specific websites, I’ll let you know what they are in a minute. One thing I got myself were two rubber [ink] stamps that I got for work. One says “COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT” and the other says “STAPLE THIS TO YOUR FACE”. I’m anxiously awaiting the first chance at work where I can actually slap this on some jackass’s email and hand it back to him or her, voicing my dissaproval. They’ll ask “who the hell are you to do that?” and I’ll reply “go suck a dead rat’s ass”, and then my manager will probably call me in for a little conference. Ah well, I can dream.

Anyway, the websites are:
www.thinkgeek.com
www.x-tremegeek.com

Hope everyone had a healthy, safe, and happy Christmas.

I sort of feel like that guy right now, all be it with less drinks.

I love Christmas. It’s one of my favorite holidays. However, here at our place, we have everyone over. It’s nice because we don’t have to go anywhere, but bad in the sense that there’s a lot of work to do and no time to relax.

We had my aunt over today – my Dad’s sister. She’s suffers from Schitzophrenia, and an outburst today at dinner made the entire scene a little uncomfortable. I feel bad for my Dad only because that’s his only family left, besides us. Everyone else has either passed on, or lives in Germany.

There’s a lot of bright spots to Christmas here, and there is a lot of work too. Not all bad, but sometimes I just feel like resting. 🙂

I’ve actually made a request to Santa this year. I’d like to be cryogenically frozen from about Thanksgiving Day until January 2nd of the new year. Just knock me the hell out. 😉

Sorry for all the slightly negative posts lately, but there’s just a lot of really big annoyances that are happening lately at the day job.

For one, and here is a biggy, the computer system. Let me explain:
The equipment we have in the office at each desk isn’t terrible; cheap Compaq Celeron boxes that adequately do the job, but have no fancy extras. Server-side, our intranet is an unorganized mess, making finding information pretty difficult. What’s worse is the archaeic legacy system we use to “telnet” into; the equipment is easily 30 years old, and frankly, can’t handle moderate to heavy loads too well. However, that is not the worst. The worst in fact, is a shared T1 that we have as our Internet connection. I believe it is shared with another relatively geographically close branch. Putting it in geek terms, the fastest you could pull something off the Internet – if no one else was in the building – would be about 80KB/sec. That’s 12 times slower then our slowest package from our local cable modem provider (Optimum Online), and 15 slower then my speed at my home connection using Verizon Fios. Now, picture 40 people sharing that T1.

When our MIS department pushes out Trend Micro AV signatures through the network, the circuit is maxed out, and basically doing anything except playing solitare is futile. Meanwhile, the phone still rings, people still are looking for products which, because of the system being slow, you can’t enter in the system for the ticket to print to the warehouse for the guys to pick.

Now, in regards to this slowdown, the employees are constantly blamed for poor performance because MIS claims people are on the Internet at non-work related sites, streaming video and audio, etc. From what I have seen, there are very few people doing this, and not take make mountains out of mole hills, you can fill up our shared T1 circuit relatively fast, even with all data passing through it being work related.

The Monday after Thanksgiving has now been deamed “Cyber Monday” but some trendsetter in the Economy world. This is the term for the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend which, statistically, is the largest online shopping day of the year. Most companies, while they don’t generally approve of employees using the Internet during work time to go to non-work related sites, were going to “turn a blind eye” to people using the corporate network to do some shopping in the early AM, lunch times, and after work. Heck, some people at our company don’t have the luxury of having a computer at home. However, our company is different. Our company had specific meetings the week of Thanksgiving to explain to us that there is a zero-tolerance policy for innapropriate use of the Internet using company computers, including on-line shopping.

Here’s the next big issue; Benefits.
Every year, our benefits seem to get worse, yet we pay more. I guess that’s a fact of life, but our company likes to waste everyones’ time by telling us we should go to conference calls to let us know how our benefits will change. Generally speaking, these conference calls take 45-90 minutes, and at the end, you have to listen to people from across the country ask the presenters questions that were already answered in the conference call. I’m not sure why we can’t just have a one-page explanation about how bad we’re going to get fucked and how much it’s going to cost. I know healthcare sucks in this country, I work in the indsutry. I don’t need an hour’s talk and 45 Powerpoint slides on how Healthcare in the United States is a growing problem, and costs are skyrocketing, yada yada. Just tell me how much it’s increasing in price, and how much it’s decreasing in coverage. I’ll try and make a point of it not to get sick.

And here’s another; Smokers.
I dislike cigarette smoke, and next to excessive drinking, I think it’s one of the more harmful and disgusting habits a person can have. That being said, some of my friends at work smoke, and while I wish them the best with their cancer stick, I do have a problem with the quantity of cigarette breaks they take. Let me explain.

It’s my understanding that employees are allowed two, 15-minute breaks per day. For simplicity sake, let’s just call it “30 mins” per day in breaks. The average length of time that a person uses at my job to smoke a cigarette is 9 minutes. That should be 3 cigarette breaks, and then 3 minutes left over to think about how much time they just took off their life. However, at my job, people sometimes go out EVERY HOUR for a 10 minute break. In short, people who smoke are getting an extra 30 minutes a day (at least) in breaks that I don’t get, simply because I choose to be a non smoker because I value life. Management doesn’t do anything about it, and in the end, thats at least 2.5 hours per week that these people don’t work, but get paid for. I wonder how management would feel if I left at 5pm every night instead of 530? I bet you they’d can my ass in a few days. So, the decision I made, is I will be starting smoking in March when the weather gets nicer, so I can sit outside and take 7 or 8 extra breaks per day.

And the last topic/grip for today will be “obnoxious people at work”.
There’s a small handful of people at work, who of course will remain nameless, that think they’re a lot better then anyone else. In reality, they’re a bunch of losers. Bossy, arrogant people with little or no credentials, much less manners. The kind of people that don’t know how to speak to people, and will be nice to you in front of your face, but have nothing but bad things to say about you behind your back. My company has a few of these winners. It’s the kind of people that I love to hate. I made a decision the other day after one woman who I’ve had a problem with for a number of years was being a bit rude. I decided that I would just not say another word to her ever again. Not a hello, not a head nod. Nothing. I’m going to pretned that she doesn’t exist. That is how to beat those people – they are craving attention, and simply ignorning them – a little bit of passive resistance. These people are so aggressive and so arrogant that they don’t know how to deal with someone that simply would ignore them and it eats under their skin. I’ll let you know how it works out. 😉