Category: General

It’s not yet “The Day” but it is the beginning of the long holiday weekend.

If I were working for a better employer, I’d have the weekend off and wouldn’t have to worry about driving anywhere. But that’s not reality.

As one of my grandmothers used to say, “Shit in one hand, wish in the other, tell me which one fills up first.”

She could be a very salty lady…

This is the second year that I’ve ending up working through the holiday. It’s weird, I’m not at all in a Christmas spirit. I see all the ads, and the decorations and it has absolutely no effect on me. It’s surreal, I’ve done no shopping, and sent none of my usual cards, ( I should be working on it now), but I’m simply not motivated.

Part of it, is that its been way too warm. Part of it is that most of the people I deal with through work are not in the holiday mood, many of them are as selfish as normal and to be honest, depressingly stupid. Some of the people I deal with, are so massively stupid, I wonder how they’ve survived at all.

I’m going to try to watch some of my favorite holiday movies today to see if I can get a bit more into the holiday mood.

While I’m working on Christmas Day… I’m watching the Die Hard series, even if I’m not paying full attention to it. Hey! Don’t judge, the first two movies happen at Christmas.

I blew off the company Christmas party. Actually the one for our branch of the company. There were several parties, the nicer ones, we weren’t invited to.

It’s demonstrative of the implicit class boundaries that exist where I work. My department is considered the dregs of the company and are therefore not welcome at many events… But a party held at a Zoo?

On the other hand, I can see the higher-ups not wanting to hang with the vast majority of the people that I work with. That’s why I didn’t go to our party.

Even if I’d been invited to the better class parties, I wouldn’t have gone. With maybe 3 exceptions, I don’t consider my co-workers as people that I’d like to hang out with at any time.

Company parties are in general, dangerous.

Offend the wrong person or be perceived in the wrong way due to an offhand remark (or as so often happens these days, an out of context remark… Whether TRUE or not,) and you’re done. No promotions for you, and you’re at the top of the layoff list.

In my particular case, after almost 2 years, I’m still confused with another guy all the time. Since I can prove that I didn’t go, even if he did… I have absolute deniability.

There is clear evidence that he’s been given credit for multiple compliments and some awards that were supposed to go to me. There is also clear evidence that I’ve been blamed for mistakes that he made. Including absences, and that is taking a lot of fighting on my part to correct.

Thank goodness for my mistrust of the company.

I’ve been keeping records since the first or second week of my employment. When my Supervisor talked to me about attendance, I pulled out my records and suddenly, my Supervisor was very interested in making sure that the company records were accurate. I had his full and complete attention when I mentioned that location data was also recorded when I made a time entry, in my phone. Uh huh… yeah you might want to pull the biometric scans of my attendance before making accusations.

I’ll admit that was kind of a nice Christmas present. I truly enjoyed watching him start to sweat. It really made me smile.

I’m not that supervisor’s employee anymore, so hopefully my new supervisor will be a bit better.

But enough about work. It’s still my day off and I choose not to think about it.

Perhaps I’ll sit down at the computer and work out a digital holiday card. Perhaps not…

It’s not that I don’t care about my friends it’s just a matter of energy, this year has been exhausting!

Under normal circumstances I’d like a little boredom at work.

But there is too much of a good thing.

Today’s been one of those kinda days. Too much boredom, just about the time I start something I’m interested in, the phone rings and I have to reconfigure my brain to filter all the useless flotsam and jetsam that someone feels they need to tell me and boil it down to the essentials of what the problem is.

Then explain why someone doesn’t need 2 grand worth of new shit when the problem is that they need to turn on, the 2 grand of shit they already have. Some people, a lot of people, actually are absolute idiots!

It’s the Millennials who are often the worst! My god! It’s terrifying that these people are the folks that will running things in a very few years. More terrifying is that they’re reproducing!

It’s like watching Idiocracy developing in real life.

Oddly old people are usually pretty easy to deal with. At least they know what they don’t know. They follow instructions verbal and written, and aren’t prone to thrashing about flipping shit on & off at random. Also once you explain something to them, they get it, if you can explain it in terms they can wrap their heads around.

Oh don’t get me wrong, idiots and assholes exist in all the types of people that I talk to. But the Millennials are among the worst, and don’t even get me started on Canadian Millennials! WOW! Arrogance and stupidity have combined in them, creating a horribly toxic stew of smugness and elitism.

The funniest thing someone can do when calling a tech support line is threaten to take their business elsewhere.

I mean really? Do you honestly think that your threat (empty or not) is going to move any technical support person to see things your way? Tech support folks are generally shat upon by everyone! The corporation that they work for, the customers they talk to, and virtually everyone from the janitorial staff to executive management will take every opportunity to fuck with them. So yeah, take your business elsewhere, please!

Go ahead, ask to speak to my supervisor! It would be the first time in a month the fat bastard actually did anything, aside from waddling his fat ass to a meeting to tell everyone what a shitty job they’re doing. Not that he or she would know, because they’re hiding in their offices all day.

You want good service from a tech support rep? Be Nice! Have a sense of humor, don’t be a jackass and suddenly things will happen that aren’t even supposed to happen. Yeah, Tech support people know how to work the system. There’s a lot of tweaking that a TS person can do if they’re motivated because they liked you, or your attitude. Especially if that TS person can place orders directly. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not likely to give away the store, but they’re likely to help you out if you’re in a jam.

I digress, Sundays are either really good days or really bad days. There’s no middle ground. Either all the phone calls are jackasses or the phone calls are nice people who are relaxed and happy to be able to take care of business without trying to squeeze it between meetings, or on their lunch hour.

By the way, most tech support reps are lucky to get a 1/2 hour for lunch. So don’t talk to them about how difficult it is for you to talk to them on your lunch hour when they’re lucky if they got to eat their dry sandwich and take a shit in two separate places. Yeah, think about that one… Not a good idea to bitch about taking time out of your lunch hour to spend 10 minutes placing a call, when the guy you’re calling has two sick kids, a wife who’s filed for divorce, and he has to decide which of the following things he has to sacrifice on his 1/2 hour lunch break speak to attorney, eat a shitty sandwich (when he hasn’t eaten in 2 days… gave his food to his kids), or take a piss.

Guess how he’s going to react to your petty whining? Yep, he’s not going to be impressed.

Anyhow, this is the stuff I think about on a slow day.

Well that, and stuff like: When you’re dying and your life flashes before your eyes… Is that a data upload to God?

Be glad you’re not in my head all the time… It’s a very weird place.

Hope you had a great Weekend.

Trying something new.

Going to try blogging from the Nebo application. This is a nifty handwriting recognition program that may allow me to write while I’m sitting at my desk listening to somebody yak, telling in their life story (all of which is irrelevant to the problem they’re having.) Anyway while listening for my opportunity to actually ask the questions that I need to ask.

I’m wondering if I can keep up with my writing while being bored out of my mind.

I dont know how this is going to work but it’s worth the effort. After all I want to get some use out of this fancy Apple Pencil.

I’m wondering if it would be practical to continue writing portions of my books using this method as well.

I suppose time will tell and of course practice with the application and the pencil. I wish the pencil tip had a bit more drag against the screen. that would lead to a more realistic Pencil / Paper experience.

Maybe a screen protector on the ipad with a bit more texture, would help.

I’m also curious about the  iPad Power and lifespan if I’m writing all day on it.

Thus far it’s worked pretty well for this little short post.

Weed Whacking, cable devices removed, credenza reworked.

Laundry is running and I’m backing up data on the network at home.

Later today I’ll head back down to San Diego for another installment of Tech Support follies!

I like the new fiber speed up here. Still haven’t figured out why the upload is faster than the download by a significant amount.

Oh hey I can Google it on fiber! Wheee.

Huh, it looks like with fiber, these speeds are normal and in fact the speed I’m seeing here is better than what is advertised. When was the last time you paid for a service, and got more than you paid for?

 Happy Weekend to all.

In the last week or so, Apple has updated their IOS and the Mac OS.

Against my better judgement I updated all my devices. Surprisingly, everything worked exactly as expected.

Hey, I can’t ask for more than that.

Now I’m in the process of figuring out how things have changed and how to use all the new features. One thing that has surprised me (even before the OS upgrade) was how much I use my iPad. 

Since I got the iPad Pro I’ve found that I don’t fire up my MacBook Air as often. Don’t get me wrong, that little machine is fantastic, but I really only need it for stuff that requires a lot of computing horsepower.

The iPad handles most all of the day to day computing needs and since I’ve got the cellular version, I’m never wanting for communications. 

I’ve been writing, blogging, emailing, and spreadsheeting using the iPad, it’s handling the job search, and even handles some of my TV / movie watching.  Couple my iPad with a cloud based file sharing program and there’s pretty much nothing I can’t do.

The new OS seems to have made the iPad snappier and I’m using the multitasking and file handling just like I would if I were on my MacBook. 

I noticed that my MacBook burned through a battery charge pretty fast today, I got curious about where my power was going and found that there were a lot of background activities. Looked like they were all “One-off” processes. Stuff like indexing, virus scanning, and other file oriented things. I suspect that those processes will reduce over time since the file system has to be converted. I’m going to be watching battery life over the next few weeks to see if the CPU load drops.

Noticed kind of the same thing with the iPad and iPhone over the first day or two. So I’m thinking that it’s a file system conversion kind of thing.

In all, I’m happy thus far that I did the upgrades and look forward to learning more about the changes in the coming weeks.

If you haven’t upgraded, I’d say go for it. You might appreciate the change.