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Why is it that Nobody does their job right anymore?

Took the car out to Palm Springs today.

It was 111º out there.

When I got ready to go, guess what? The A/C in the car FAILED.

Last service I paid the dealership to do a routine maintenance on the A/C since it didn’t seem like the system was blowing as cold as it used to. Makes sense, the unit hadn’t been serviced ever i figured a little freon or whatever they use now and we’d be good to go.

The service cost me $350.00. So what I found out today is that I PAID $350.00 to initiate the failure of my A/C!

It’s a damn good thing I couldn’t get to the dealer today… I’d have had several choice words!

However, it’s probably better that I’ve got a couple of days to cool down (so to speak). Better to be professional than walk in like a nuclear bomb.

I’m just annoyed that every other week I’m driving to the dealership instead of driving my car to places that I’d like to go.

On the plus side… perhaps if enough is replaced now… by the time I’m completely out of warranty I might just have a reliable vehicle.

Funny, I’m not usually such an optimist.

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Just watched the last Shuttle Launch.

I’m sitting here teary eyed with pride and sadness at the end of an era.
I hope to hell that this doesn’t herald the complete end of the American Space Program.
So much of the innovation and technological advances of the last 50 years can be directly traced to our space program. If we fold, I suspect we’ll be taking yet another step down the path to being a third world cesspool.
I’m cynical about the Tag line CNN has been using describing the Shuttle launch.
It’s like they’re trying to get us to believe something by saying it over and over again. Something about blasting into the future or some such drivel.
I’m not sure how they figure that but obviously it’s the PC thing to say.
it is the end of an era to be sure. Lets hope and pray it’s not the end of Americas innovation as well.

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Decisions, Decisions

Today is the last day that I can take advantage of a school that I think I’d like to attend. The problem is that said school costs 1500.00 and while I’d really like to do it I’m a little wary of the cost at this time.

See it’s not just the cost of the school, it’s the cost of accommodations while I’m at the school too.

Plus this isn’t the only class that I’d like to take. I’d also like to head to Ft Lauderdale and take one class from a dive school to determine if I want to invest a lot of cash to become a resort dive operator/dive instructor. I’m looking at that as a pathway to a new career.

I can drive to Ft Lauderdale. I can probably afford the one class, it’s again the accommodations that present the major expense.

Then there’s the trip I’d like to take up the coast to add photos to my portfolio.

All of these things require cash & time. The cash I have more or less, the time is questionable.

Since the company has put us on furlough it’s really put a monkey wrench in my travel plans. How can I take off without knowing if I’ll be called back at a moments notice?

It would be the real shits to be attending a 5 day class in Ft Lauderdale and suddenly find out that I have to be at work here in California the next day. Unfortunately, my company has that kind of planning… Everything is mandatory,  (I’m reminded of The Princess Bride. “I don’t think that word means what you thing it means”) and the expectation is that the employees are always sitting in their cubes available for instant spur of the moment meetings.

I guess I’m playing it too safe. Maybe I need to just say fuck it and go live, instead of hanging on tender hooks waiting for one of the upper management morons to decide what the fuck they’re doing.

After all they’re not paying me right now are they?

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I’ve got a bad case of Phone-itus

A couple of weeks ago my cell phone just blanked out. No rhyme or reason, it was working fine one moment and bang the next it was completely useless.

Oh it did manage to annoy the hell out of me be telling me it was receiving messages and phone calls but wouldn’t let me actually see the messages or answer the calls or in fact control it at all.

I pulled the battery, I pulled the sim card, I rebooted it, nothing worked. The next day finds me in my local cell phone store. They confirmed that yep the phone wasn’t working right. So we start the process where the phone insurance sends me a new phone and we’re good.

While I’m there I see this beautiful new smartphone. Wow! nifty display, cameras front and back, 4G THE WORKS! (Yeah I’m a techno whore! SO What?) I’m drooling and I’m thinking hey maybe I should just upgrade to this beautiful baby and keep the phone the insurance is going to send me as a backup.

Mind you we’re talking about a 400.00 upgrade here.

The internal justification was all that more reasonable when I was told that I wouldn’t have a working phone for at least 4 days in large part thanks to a Google mapping mistake.

A lot of  companies  are using Google to verify shipping addresses. In my case, Google has my address in the wrong city. This has on more than one occasion  prevented products from being sent to my house.

This time the insurance / cell phone company couldn’t verify the address and categorically refused to send the replacement phone. This means that I’m going to have the phone sent to the other halfs workplace, because after all the house that I’ve lived in for 20 years is suddenly non-existent! Google says so, it must be true!

The whole time, the little voice is saying “Dude, you gotta have a phone… This one is freakin beautiful and you KNOW you’ll be happier with it than your old phone.”

I’m weakening in my resolve to do the right thing, and frankly PISSED off that Google has refused to correct the mistake that is now impacting my life on a fairly regular basis.

After a lot of back & forth in my head, I’ve finally beaten the fuck out of that little “Angelic guy on my shoulder” and decided to go for it.

The new phone, and an assortment of accessories is sitting on the counter. The clerk is scanning the bar codes and the total isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I’m starting to get excited “Oh boy a new top of the line phone… goodie, goodie”, it’s like Christmas.

Shut up, I know it sounds insane. You should see me with a new car…

Just sayin…

The clerk asks me for the sim card out of my messed up phone. I pop the back off, pull the battery, pull the sim and hand it to her.  Because I’ve now got pieces of phone filling both hands I pop the battery back in the phone, and snap the back cover in place. After all I want to caress, hold, and watch the new phone as it powers up.

“Oh goodie, goodie, almost there. New phone! this is gonna be so cool!”

Out of the corner of my eye I see a light that I shouldn’t see. I try to ignore it, then I hear a start up tone and bigger than shit my “broken” phone is powering up normally. It’s sitting in my hand with a bright crisp clear display asking where the hell the sim card is.

DAMN!!!! I MEAN DAMN!!!

The “Angelic guy on my shoulder jumps up and says I told you so!”, The “Devil guy is stomping around screaming fuck, fuck!, fuckity, fuck!” The techno whore in me is whining in a most un-masculine fashion “But I waaaaannntttt it!”

I look at the clerk, Hoping that she’s gonna pull an I dream of Jeanie blink and my old phone will be dead again. She doesn’t.

Ever so reluctantly I tell her that we have to cancel the deal.

I can’t justify it anymore, I’ve got a working phone in my hands, that unconsciously I’m trying to strangle… Nope, the paper thin justification is gone. I can’t do it. It’s a chunk of change that I don’t need to be spending right now.

The clerk hands me back the sim card. I put it back in my old phone hoping against all reason that the damn thing doesn’t power up again. Nope, there’s the start-up tone, and the display is working right… Well SHIT!

I leave the store bummed, annoyed and feeling like a kid that got socks instead of a new bike for his birthday.

I had to do the adult thing. I know it was the right thing. Doesn’t make it any easier….

I will say this… the Next time my phone screws up… It’s outta here! And the latest new beautiful smart phone is going to be in my greedy techno whore hands!

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On with the business of living…

Hope everyone had a nice 3 day weekend.

(Note: when I started this post I was pissed off… By the time I got to the end I was chuckling because this is so often typical of my life.)

I’m now on furlough instead of actually being layed off.

Here is a snippet of an email exchange with one of my co-workers. In re-reading it, I note that I’m pretty pissed off and it comes through loud and clear. I’d actually tried to tone it down a bit. Sheesh if this is toned down I wish I’d saved the original draft! I’d have made my Marine friends proud with the colorful use of swearing!

Furlough instead of layoffs is almost as bad as just continuing along the layoff course that they had chosen. This is FAR more stressful since YET AGAIN the company has thrown everyone into a state of uncertainty. I’m actually FAR MORE PISSED about this than anything else. I mean I’m supposed to hang out waiting for the 20th? Ooooo there may be an immediate start date but no one has a clue when? We ALL know we cant run our lives like this… Why does the company think they can run a business like this?

I’m angry because it appears that the company may well be simply maneuvering so that that can screw people out of their severance pay. I never did buy that BS line that billing  no-work burned the employees severance.

I suspect that they may have found out they didn’t have a leg to stand on and all the sudden they’re looking at $$$ and have decided that they don’t want to cough up the bucks.

The real problem is the none of the retained employees will ever trust the management again. If those employees are smart they’ll go ahead and keep looking for something else. Either in another division or a completely different company. Most probably a competitor.

I don’t believe for a New York Minute that there is any project, or last minute save. I think that the 20th will come and go and then we’ll have the furloughs extended another 30 days then we’ll be out of work.

Everything they have done over the past 60 -90 days seems shadier and shadier with each change in direction.  I firmly believe that something else is going on and that the company is not playing above board or dare I say it? Ethically?

 I took the furlough because it extended my effective health care benefits. I figure the longer I can go without having to pay the outrageous COBRA rates the better…

I’ve just finished the process of filling out the unemployment forms online.

I anticipated that this process would be an extremely annoying process, something akin to having an old railroad tie shoved unceremoniously up my ass…  So I put it off until today.

I  didn’t want to go into the weekend in a sour mood because of the stupidity of dealing with bureaucratic crap.

Turns out… I made a good call!

The forms read like RAP. Did ya, ba dom ding, Diiid ya, ba dom ding ba dom ding Did ya, Did ya, Did ya. I pretty much HATE RAP!  This form did a pretty good job of sending me off the deep end. Of course this was AFTER me spending 2 weeks trying to actually call Employment Development to find out if I was even eligible due to the furlough. The Employment Development Department is apparently so busy that they can’t even answer their phones.

I figured what the hell? I’ll fill out their forms online and then we’ll have a negotiation when one of their people CALLS me.

During the filling out of the forms I found out that my company had fucked us all in Oh, so subtle ways.

The Employment Development department asks this…

Provide your employment history for the past 18 months, including your very last employer. If you worked for a temporary agency, a labor contractor, an agent for actors, or an employer where wages are reported under a corporate name, your wages may have been reported under that employer name. You may want to refer to your check stub(s) or W-2(s) to obtain the name of your employer.

Note: Failure to report all your employers, periods of employment and wages correctly may result in your benefits being delayed or denied.


Employer Name     Beginning             Ending                   Wages       How were you Paid?
                           (mm/dd/yyyy)     (mm/dd/yyyy)           Earned ($)

I read the question to mean, Put your employer name for the last 18 months. Well I’ve had the same employer since 2007 so the beginning date is 2007 and the ending date is 2011, pretty easy right???

But then the Wages question becomes inclusive of the whole beginning / ending period.

This leads me to try to come up with total YTD earnings for the past 5 year period. Which then leads me to discoveries about the lack of information and difficulty in obtaining it from my company.

First, they went “Green” so they have us all sign up for direct deposit. Then they tell us that the will not be sending paycheck statements any more and that we’ll have to look at our statements online.

Then they take the ability for us to look at our paycheck statements from our own computers at home away. Initially, we could print the statements in PDF format to a file so that we could keep offline copies for our records from our home computers. About a year ago the brilliant IT people did away with the PDF option, leaving only XPS.

Now the only way to see or get a copy of your paystub is by being connected directly to the company network and OH yeah it’s against the company policy for you to attach personal storage devices to your work computer so you have to store the image of the paystub as XPS, then email it to yourself, and it has to be zipped and encrypted.

The XPS format is great if you’re a windows user. But if you’re a Linux or Mac user… OH Well… you’re screwed because you’re different! You chose not to drink the Microsoft Kool Aid, your problem not ours. (I’ve since found viewers for Linux and Mac. and I know a couple of little tricks that have gotten me past this problem.)

The above is frustrating… But the kicker is when you finally work through all this other shit and  look at your paystubs.  The magic works, the page is viewable and you find that most don’t  have YTD information. In fact only one year in the past 5 actually has the YTD data.

Ya just want to throttle someone. GRRRRRRRR!

I ended up pulling what tax records I have (lost all the records in a fire in 2008) and having to call the accountant for other records. For the rest of the information, I had to open each and every paystub and manually add the information that I needed.

All of which just fed my frustration…

At one point, in my efforts to answer this single question (EDD wouldn’t let you move on if it was blank) I had 3 computers up and running and more total computing horsepower at my fingertips than was used to send men to the moon.

Don’t ask.. it just worked out that way.

If you ever had any doubt that I’m a QA person…

All you need to know is that this kind of thing happens to me all the time. The absolutely simplest thing turns into a raging furball.

It’s as if I just notice stuff others don’t.

Or else the Gremlins of our high technology world seem to really enjoy messing with me…

Maybe I need to make a Gremlin repellant and then retire to a tropical island.

Me, the Ocean, a nice hut, and no freakin technology…  Except the boat would sink with me on it, in sight of the island…