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Ahh My Weekend.

Yeah, my weekend is probably not your weekend. But my Thursday mornings are sacred to me.

I sleep late, have a civilized breakfast, sit quietly over my first cup of coffee, and write.

Sometimes I write here, but often I’m writing other things, stuff that I’m passionate about, and it lets me take a break from working on the insanity of living.

My life is more complicated than I’d like…

My Thursday morning is my take a breath day. I highly recommend it. Get a cup of coffee, sit naked on your couch and just BREATHE.

Don’t bother with the TV, radio, or music. Just sit, enjoy the silence and sip on your morning beverage. I can tell you from experience that all the bullshit happening in the world… Will still be happening when you decide to tune back in.

You could check out for six months and when you come back, the soap opera will still be going on, and you’ll not have missed a damn thing.

So take some time for yourself. You’ll feel better. I promise.

Have a great day.

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OK, I drank the Kool-Aid

So I love my Rolex. It’s one of my favorite things.

However, lately more and more people have been taking notice of it. Granted if I lived in a better area it probably wouldn’t be a big deal but I don’t live in a better area…

I live in an area where there are a lot of seemingly desperate people and there are a lot of homeless people. A recent event catalyzed the decision I made yesterday.

I was coming out of a grocery store Wednesday, and there was a homeless guy asking for money. He said, “A white dude with a Rolex can afford to give me 5 bucks…”

Defenses came right up and I decided that my beautiful Rolex was perhaps a little too ostentatious for the area in which I reside. $5 Bucks? How soon before it becomes $100, or $1000?

This isn’t the first time… I’ve had one guy pull my sleeve up while waiting in line at a convenience store and say stuff like, “NIIIICCCEEE, what’d that cost?” Another time a cashier at a food joint fixated on my Rolex and announced to the entire room, “We got a guy here who can buy all our lunches.”

This latest incident is the most threatening, and one of the many reasons we as a society can’t have nice things…

Soooo, I’d been considering an Apple watch, and decided as I briskly walked away from the homeless guy, it was time to buy one.

My lovely Rolex will be put in a safe place and I’ll enjoy the benefits of a watch that I have to recharge daily. Sigh!

As always the guy at the Apple Store was very nice and helpful. I got what I wanted and it came in a nice black box.

I have to admit there are some things that may prove useful about having a computer on my wrist.

I can change the face to match my mood.

Currently, Micky Mouse is tapping his foot on my wrist.

I’ll have better information about my walks and reminders to get up and stretch will be welcome during my work day. Having the ability to place and receive calls ala Dick Tracy Might not be something I’m actually going to like, but if it’s an emergency situation that might not be such a bad thing.

I guess this is a sign of the times.

Being White has become a liability. Having worked your ass off is no longer something to be respected, (regardless of your skin color) but instead, means you’re a target for people who absolutely believe they are entitled to your shit because if you’ve got money, you’ve surely got money to give to them simply because they happen to be breathing.

Increasingly, I find that I don’t much like the world we live in.

The set up on the watch was pretty easy. I was finished before my lunch arrived at my table. Everything that is, except the cellular part of the setup.

it was then, I got sucked down the rabbit hole of technology. Turns out that my cell phone carrier can’t verify my actual billing address.

THANK YOU GOOGLE!

Yep The old Google screw-up (Ongoing for the past decade) bit me in the ass yet again.

Apparently, when Google was driving around taking pictures of our homes and neighborhoods, without our permission I might add, they made mistakes. NO! NOT The Google!!!!

They drove into my rural town and promptly listed my physical address as being in a neighboring town almost 10 miles away. But they maintained the correct zip code. This created a disconnect between the ZIP code registry and the Township. Effectively rendering all the addresses Google mapped on that day invalid, nobody except Google can fix it, and at this point, the error has been propagated across so many databases, it will likely not be fixed in the data.

Instead someone in the town council will simply cede our end of town to the neighboring town because it’s easier. People have had to rent boxes in neighboring towns just so they can get medications and Amazon packages.

We’ve been trying to get Google to revise this mistake for over 10 years. No Luck! Google is too big and too powerful and because they’re rarely wrong… It means that the general perception is that they’re infallible.  Another decade or so, and Google will be elected Pope!

All this meant; for me to actually enable the cell phone functionality, on the  watch required 3 hours on the phone with my cell phone carrier instead of simply being able to enable the technology with my phone. The first 1.5 hours was with a lady in God only knows where, who obviously had no idea about first world problems.

She did however alter my billing plan such that she tripled my monthly bill.

Ahem…

The second call, early this morning resulted in my having to reset the watch (losing all the configuration data I’d put in), resulting in being able to see that I had an account and that the watch connectivity was actually available. The third call, finally put me in contact with a guy who knew what was going on and was able to actually make the connection between their services and the communication unit in the watch.

What should have been a simple thing turned into a clusterfuck.

I now have 13 days left to return the Apple Watch if I don’t “Just Love” it. I like it thus far, but I don’t know if I “Love” it. My Rolex I absolutely “Love” and have loved since the day I bought it.

Time will tell I suppose. But I like the idea of my Rolex sitting in a safe, out of reach of the people I’m forced to live around here in San Diego. Alternatively I’d prefer to feel like I could wear my shit without worrying about getting bashed in the head by some asshole who thought what I had… should be his.

Call me old fashioned.

My brother is right…

I need to get the hell out of Kalifornia and move somewhere a bit more like his neck of the woods. Somewhere more like Mayberry.

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Merry Christmas to all and to all a Good Night!

Worked my normal day.

About halfway through the day, I started developing a slight cough, that rapidly turned into an annoying chest wracking cough. I’m apparently not alone, everyone in the office is coughing so something is going around.

Merry Christmas!

The incoming phone calls and emails, were of the wacko variety. I’m not talking about minimal crazy… I’m talking WACKO!

The thing is that Holidays bring out the loneliest folks in the society. These are people that need to talk to anyone! They’ll gin up any excuse to talk to anyone about anything. AND They Do!

8 Solid hours of CRAZY it very draining and toward the end of the day tests, My Patience!

Merry Christmas!

I can’t blame lonely people for wanting to talk, but they shouldn’t be calling medical companies with fictional issues. Medical companies have to document everything they’re told no matter how crazy or strange. Each issue has to be documented throughly and submitted to the FDA.

So after 15 or 20 fake issues you spew at tech support… We’re not amused! But Thank you SOOO Much for making us work late and keeping us from our families!

Merry Christmas!

However, once home, I made dinner for myself, and started Die Hard it’s a Christmas tradition for me.

Yippie Kai Yay!

Now I’m actually having a Merry Christmas! The cough is still getting worse and I’m running a slight fever. But I’m drinking a cup of green tea mixed with a bit of whiskey. It may not cure me… But I’m not sure that I much care.

Merry Christmas!

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Well Merry almost Christmas…

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!

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No Matter how many times I say it…

I’m ignored.

I’ve been maintaining a few Web sites for folks. It’s not a big deal, I have the tools necessary to do it. But it takes time…

Generally not a lot of time, and often I can tweak things on the fly from my iPad or even my phone. But I kinda need the data that folks want me to put into their website. I’m after all not a mind reader and with my work schedule, the people I deal with every day, and being pretty much exhausted all the time I have little patience for uncooperative people.

One of the folks whose site I maintain, has been planning a move, from one location to another. They sent out a notification to everyone on their mailing list in late September or early October. 

Fortunately, I was on their mailing list.

When I read the notice from them, I sent an email and said “You’re going to need to update the web site, send me all the information as soon as you can so that I can get ahead of your move and the website is up-to date”

I got a reply, “Yep, we’ll send you the info.” 

Then nothing…

UNTIL an email the day before Thanksgiving, again to the general mailing list that their shop would be closed Thanksgiving through Dec 1.

I sent another message, “OK I’ve got the new address from your email notification. I’ll update the basics Over the Thanksgiving holiday.” Silence…

I updated the website based on the information I had. I sent a link to my sandbox so they could verify the information is good. Still silence.

4PM on Black Friday, OH we want to add a whole new page can we do that?

I sent back a message, yes we can do that, what do you want the page to contain?

Silence.

Then, early in the week I get an email that has two JPEG images of their brochure. No other explanation, just a typing chore for me to transcribe the text from a photograph into something that I can even begin to incorporate into a web page.

Gee… THANKS!

It’s not like there’s only a small amount of text this brochure is so text dense that I was reminded of war & peace, or The Dead Sea Scrolls!

It would be nice to know what it most important and what could be left out. 

I’d haCbe68874ve run OCR on the photo, except that the copy they sent me had a bunch of marks on it making it look like a “Captcha”. This rendered OCR almost completely useless.

Again… THANKS!

I’ve finally got most everything into a usable format and now it’s about wrangling the text into some kind of organization and onto a page. Given that today is my one day off this week… I’m not a happy camper because this is not what I’d like to be doing today.

I’d like to be writing, and napping, having sex… Instead of sitting in front of a fucking computer doing someone else’s shit which is what I do all day long, every day at work.

This probably wouldn’t annoy me all that much except that these are “Friends” (Apparently I’m not on their Christmas list) and by the way THEY DON’T PAY ME. Taking advantage of your friends is the surest way to not have friends anymore.

Yep, This started out as a One-off to help them get their business running and now 3 – 4 years down the road I’m still doing it for nothing.

Grrrrr.

I guarantee that if they were paying me even 25 an hour, I’d have all sorts of pictures, and word files to put in their site. I also know exactly what they wanted and how they wanted it. Instead of working from something that is almost completely useless. 6 to 8 hours paid time would be “Too Expensive” I can hear the whining about the cost now.

Oh and I’d probably have had the time to do it in an organized way, instead of their usual method… PANIC MODE!

I’m thinking it’s time for me to put all their files on a thumb drive and mail it to them with a nice letter explaining how to transfer their domain to another location. Reminding them that failure to pay for their domain renewal will result in the loss of their website and rights to their domain.

Yeah, I’ve been handling the backend stuff for them too.

I think the time has come to cut my losses. Whatever happens after that it would be on them.