I'm a connoisseur of leisurely things.

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. 😉

How many of you have caught people at work stealing items? Not stealing items from The Company, but stealing items from other employees. In the past, we had a small volume of subtle yet not irrelevant thefts; gloves, food, radio, and one time $300 in cash. However, the following story I believe takes the perverbial cake. Sit back, and listen to the tale of the Thief of All Thiefs, and we’ll call her MM.

The date is sometime in December of 2004. MM had worked for our company for about a year or so, functioning on-par with an average employee that has occupied her position. She wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but she came to work ontime, didn’t complain, and generally did what she was supposed to do. She had a few annoying quirks, but no more than the average person, so she was your regular Jane Doe employee.

She claimed to have it rough. (From here on out, I’ll be using the word “claimed” as, based upon the ending of this story that you will shortly read, I do not know what is and isn’t true anymore.) She claimed to have an ill husband, and a teenager involved in a recent car wreck, sustaining debilitating injuries.

For Christmas 2004, our company “sponsored” a family in need of financial assisstance. That family was M&M’s. She received close to $1,000 in cash and an assorted array of gifts, donated by other employees.

A woman that M&M worked very close with at work – we’ll call her CA – often volunteered to help M&M out in many ways, some financially but usually help on the everyday things. For example, CA would often let M&M borrow her 2003 Nissan Pathfinder on a daily basis while at work, either to rest in, do her errands, and so forth.

Around May of 2005, M&M tendered her resignation, stating she would be leaving as of July 1st, 2005.

On July 1st, a Friday, our company threw her a going away party, and several employees – including CA – gave her expensive, personal gifts.

At the end of the work day on July 1st 2005, Claire left as she always did, at about 7pm. She took her car keys out, and went to her car. Except it was gone.

She was 100% positive that it was stolen.

In speaking to her, CA said that M&M asked her once what the best way to make a copy of a car key would be. The joke around the office from July through Thanksgiving was that “hey I got a Pathfinder for ya, but you gotta go to South Carolina to pick it up.” Jokes along those lines.

To make a long story short, on Thanksgiving Day, CA received a call from a detective with the South Carolina State PD. M&M had been pulled over for a minor traffic infraction, and she got pulled over in a 2003 Nissan Pathfinder matching the description & registration/plates of CA’s stolen Nissan Pathfinder.

M&M had either driven it herself, or had someone drive out of work on 7/1/05. Stupidly, she never changed the plates or sold the car for parts. She continued to drive it, thinking she was safe.

Among other charges include identity theft, identity fraud, and probably a host of “conspiracy to committ…” charges, as it looks like all theivery was premeditated. Unless she has a pleabargin, she probably faces double-digit prison years.

She has 3 small children, who, without a father in home, will most likely be seperated.

A family ruined by one person’s selfish acts, or alleged acts of despiration.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Hopefully, I’ll have some better news to post here, but this little tale really hit a nerve as it’s someone the entire company trusted, and someone who a few people considered “family”.

Back in May of 2002, I read a story on CNN about how a professor came up with a formula for caclulating the value of your time. The formula is: V=(W((100-t)/100))/C, where V is the value of an hour, W is a person’s hourly wage, t is the tax rate, and C is the local cost of living.

It shows that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and that by washing your car by hand as a hidden cost.

The professor illustrated how this equation can show people how valuable their time really is in relation to any task they need to perform. As he put it, “…it can judge the financial cost of a takeaway against the time taken to cook dinner, or the relative benefits of using a taxi or saving with the bus. Traditionally, wages or salaries have given an indication of how we are valued at work, however, by looking at salaries against taxation, the cost of living and regional variations, we can see how much one hour of time is worth whether at work or home. What this helps us understand is that as the value of our time rises, we are likely to buy more of it, which explains why people are paying to save time, like having someone to cut the lawn or clean the house.”

Article:
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/05/29/time.money/index.html

Well, it’s been a while since the last post. Not that anyone cares (or should care), but here’s why…I was sitting around about a month ago, and a friend of mine said he needed help his blog. He has a blog detailing through text and pictures, his trip around New Zealand. Given broadband that his access to decent free servers for picture hosting was spotty, I offered my help by giving him storage space on one of my websites to host his pictures from.

So, I was trying to make this work for him, when I realized that my hosting provider couldn’t accomodate me too well – no sub FTP accounts, no subdomains, etc. No cpanel or fantastico. I’d been there (Hostsave) for about 4 years, and had been content. Email was 99%, and general uptime was considered “the five nines”. I had been a little frustrated with the lack of services, and this I guess, was the kicker.

So, I decided to move two websites from Hostsave to Hostgator, and move all of my websites off of Network Solutions and put them on Go Daddy. So, I went from 2 registrars and 3 web hosts to 1 registrar (GoDaddy) and 1 webhost, Hostgator. 🙂

So, in making all these changes (especially trying to move from Hostsave that didn’t have cpanel/fantastico to Hostgator which did), it meant a lot of broken links. In addition, I decided to stop using www.blogger.com and get into something a little more indepth, like my Fantastico-provided WordPress which is what this blog is now run on.

Tolerance:The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.

Like in most offices, my day job has a “suggestion box”, where employees can anonymously submit suggestions, which get read aloud monthly at our BPNR (financial) meetings.

On Tuesday, we had our most recent meeting. At the end of the meeting, our branch manager read the suggestions. The suggestions this time really fucking insightfull, real time-wasters. Without further adue, here is what they were:

1) Could people please make less noise when congregating together to leave at 5pm. Some employees have to work till 5:30 or 6:00pm and we find it disturbing.

My comment: Fine. Thanks for approaching the 2 or 3 people that might have been doing it one or two days. You had to be a coward and submit an anonymous comment. You are now known as no balls.

2) Cursing. There is too much foul language used at work.

My comment: Go fuck yourself.

3) Please refrain from eating Chinese food at your desk – it smells.

My comment: My head is still spinning, so I have no comment.

People, these were the suggestions that were in the box this month. The voices in my head haven’t stopped screaming since this meeting, so I don’t know what to make of it. What I do know is we have a bunch of fucking pussy babies at work.

So, what have I been doing. For one, I have been generally louder than usual. Secondly, I have dropped the f-bomb in casual conversation. And today, I ordered Chicken w/ brocolli.

Do you ever come across something that you weren’t expecting, and you say to yourself “Jesus, finally a great idea” or “boy, I didn’t really expect that great idea coming”? This happened to me the other day.

I live on Long Island, and love it or not, the only way off of it on roads is to go West, toward NYC, at which point you have your choice of 3 basic ways to leave:

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• Through Manhattan
• Through Brooklyn to Staten Island and into New Jersey
• Through the Bronx, North to points North of NYC or New England

Since the very day these roads were built, most roads leading in and out of NY have tolls on them, these days usually in only one direction. With the advantages of computers, the 1990s found the “EZ-Pass” System established in NY, and as the years have gone on, it extends throughout the Northeast Corridor. Instead of actually stopping at the toll both at the Verrazano Bridge to pay the $9 toll leaving Brooklyn, you can go through the toll as long as you have the RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tag, called “EZ-Pass”. A sensor at the toll lane will “talk to” your car’s EZ-Pass tag, and bill your account for the $9. You don’t even have to stop, just slow down to the posted 5-15mph limit, and you’re on your way.

Beautiful.

Now, I went to the University of Delaware for college, from 1993 to 1999 (no wiseass, I lived there for a part of the time, didn’t take me 6 years to finish school thnakyouverymuch ;). During my time there, I made many round trips from Newark, DE to Long Island, NY. Thankfully, the NJ Turnpike Authority finally deciced (in 1996 or so) to utilize the EZ-Pass system on the TPKE. Great! So, here I go, traveling southbound toward Delware, only to wait a full hour (most of the time) at the exit 1 (furthest exit southbound on the TPKE entering Delaware) to use my EZ-Pass to pay the damn toll. Now, I bet you’ll ask why. 🙂

NJ did use the EZ-Pass system on the Turnpike, and implimented it without any major problems, but they didn’t do anything to the tollbooths to accomidate the amount of cars that still had to travel through them. The sheer volume of cars caused a slow-down, and EZ-Pass or not, you were still waiting to pay your toll. This caused me major headaches, a few latenesses to work and class, and probably drove me to drink a little more than I should have sometimes. 🙂

And here is the part of the story where it relates to the title of this post. 🙂 This past weekend, my girlfriend and I took a trip down to visit my old college stomping ground, the U of Delaware. We took the Long Island Extressway to the Belt Parkway, through Brooklyn, and over the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island. From there, we took Route 440 to the Outerbridge Crossing, into I-287 into New Jersey, and then finally onto The New Jersey Turnpike south. A about an hour and twenty minutes later, I’m approaching exit 1 of the New Jersey Turnpike where I have to pay my toll, and I began to explain to my girlfriend about the long delays I used to encounter here and what a tremendous bitch at every level it was. I was so pleasantly suprised when I noticed a completely redesigned toll booth system, consisting of several “express EZ-Pass” lanes. Huge, wide lanes that would accept EZ-Pass and you could go through at the posted speed limit of 65mph. No more wait, no more hassle, and that put me in such a great mood. 🙂 Evolution is a wonderful thing, when done right. 🙂

While great, I think it’s a decade late. Testing was done with the EZ-Pass system, and the system correctly handled an EZ-Pass tag on a test car doing 130+mph.

Here’s some interesting facts about the tolls around NYC:

• When it opened in 1964, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was the world’s longest suspension span. Today, its length is surpassed only by the Humber Bridge in England.Its monumental 693 foot high towers are 1 5/8 inches farther apart at their tops than at their bases because the 4,260 foot distance between them made it necessary to compensate for the earth’s curvature. Each tower weighs 27,000 tons and is held together with three million rivets and one million bolts. Seasonal contractions and expansions of the steel cables cause the double-decked roadway to be 12 feet lower in the summer than in the winter.

  Located at the mouth of upper New York Bay, the bridge not only connects Brooklyn with Staten Island but is also a major link in the interstate highway system, providing the shortest route between the middle Atlantic states and Long Island.

  In Brooklyn, the bridge connects to the Belt Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and to the largely residential community of Bay Ridge. On Staten Island, which saw rapid development after the bridge opened in 1964, it joins the Staten Island Expressway, providing access to the many communities in this most rural of the city’s five boroughs.

• Current toll for Verrazano-Narrows bridge = $9.
• Amount of cars per day that cross it = 150,000 (thats $1.35 million/day)
• Total road tolls I paid on my round-trip: ~$26.