Personal

Looks like I’m working late tonight. I’ll be here until about midnight or so, and catching a ride home with one of the other guys in the store. Busy busy busy — bleah.

On the upside, I finally got a chance to talk with my boss about my possible future with Xerox, a conversation that I’d been itching for for a while now. When working for Xerox, a temp such as myself can be used for a maximum of 18 months before the situation needs to be re-evaluated. I’ve known that the tail end of my 18 months was coming up fairly quickly, but wasn’t at all sure about what I’d be looking at when it it. Some of my questions finally got answered today.

It started when my boss called me into his office and handed me a Xerox job application. It turns out that my deadline day is February 8^th^ — this Saturday — and if something wasn’t done by then, I’d end up locked out of the pay system. I went ahead and filled it out (getting a paycheck is, overall, a fairly nice thing), and we spent some time talking about my current and future options.

The current situation boils down to this: between now and Friday (since the eighth is this Saturday) Xerox has to make me some sort of offer for employment with them. Exactly what that offer is going to be is unclear at the moment, and depends very much upon a big numbers game within the company involving not just headcount for this printshop, but headcount for the region. Worst case scenario, they’ll offer me a ‘temp-to-hire’ position as a Xerox employee (rather than through a temp agency), best case scenario, they’ll offer me a full time permanent position. Either way, if I don’t like the offer they present me with, I have the option of declining. Should I decline, than they can either restart my 18 month cycle as a temp, or I can choose to wave goodbye and find something else.

I asked about what options might lie for me if I stayed with Xerox — as I’ve mentioned (groused over [whined about]) at times, nearly a decade of working in printshops is quite enough, and I’m getting more interested in finding other avenues to explore. My boss indicated that not only is there generally a good amount of movement within Xerox, but one of the things he’d tried to stress on the paperwork determining what offer Xerox will be making me was my versatility here. In the time I’ve been here, I’ve shown myself not only able to use any of the bindery equipment that I’m technically here for, but also able to run any one of the production printers, both black and white and color, not to mention putting in a few months re-coding an internal website — and doing all this on the base salary of your basic “bindery monkey.” So, while timing is always a bit of a question, it does look like I wouldn’t be stuck “pushing the green button” if I chose to stick around.

There are also various training options that I could take advantage of down the line, from internal training classes to possibly going back to school with Xerox’s help financially (on the assumption that whatever I’m going to school for would benefit Xerox in some way — networking or technology classes they’d be likely to pony up for, underwater basket weaving I’d have to pay for out of my pocket).

So, all in all, it was a good talk, and I ended up a bit more optimistic than I had been before. I’m still somewhat undecided, and definitely keeping my option to just renew my contract employee status and then look for something else in the back of my head, but at the very least, it’s worth seeing what my options are and what Xerox offers me. As long as I’m at least maintaining my status quo, it’ll be worth thinking about — maybe I’ll get lucky and things might even improve a bit. Who knows?

As before, though, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently as to what I want to do in the upcoming months. I’m currently working as a temp employee at Xerox, which is all fine and dandy, except for two things.

The first is simply that after nearly a decade of “pushing the green button,” I’m getting a bit tired of that. Well, more than a bit. It got old a long, long time ago.

The second is that Xerox’s policy allows for holding someone as a temp for up to 18 months, at the end of which a hire/fire decision needs to be made — either they hire the temp on as a full Xerox employee, or they let the temp go to find other things to do with their life.

My eighteen months ends in mid-February, and I’ve been considering just what to do when the hire/fire decision is presented to me (that, of course, is assuming that it is presented to me, and they don’t just opt to kick me out the door). I’m not entirely convinced at this point that I’d want to sign on to Xerox full-time — I’m already pretty tired of playing with copy machines, and to be entirely honest, I can’t say I’m overly highly impressed with Xerox as a company, after my years of working with them both as a customer and as a (pseudo-)employee. Besides, pushing the green button only has so much of a future to it, in and of itself.

So, a while back, I’d gone poking around Apple’s job site, as it was rumored that they were going to be opening an Apple Store just outside of Seattle, in Bellingham, and I signed up for their job search. Tonight I got e-mailed details on four job openings for the upcoming Bellevue store, and decided what the heck — it’s worth a shot! So, I’ve applied for two of the positions: Mac Specialist and Mac Genius.

Who knows if anything will come of this, but hey — it’s worth a shot!

Back when I worked at TimeFrame, I worked with a ‘gentleman’ by the name of J.C. Truly a piece of work, this guy was — I mean, I hate to call the guy a prick, but the only reason he’d ever wear a tie would be to keep the foreskin from snapping up over his face. At one point, he moved down to oversee TimeFrame’s Juneau branch. Apparently not too long after he took over that store, his employees were going over his head and calling the store owner directly to complain about him. He managed to rub everyone the wrong way.

I first met J.C. during my job interview, but I didn’t really get to know him at all until I actually started working there, when he was my shift supervisor. My first day working with him, I hit my break time, and told him that I was heading out back for a smoke break. “No problem,” he said, “I’ll join you,” and we went into the back alley. I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. J.C. reached into his pants, pulled out a pipe, loaded the bowl with pot, and started taking hits.

Two hours into the day, on break, and my supervisor is getting stoned in the back alley. He offered me some, of course — one must be polite, after all — but I declined. Quick tip for employers: this isn’t the best ‘first impression’ for a new employee to get. I formed a lot of impressions about J.C. and the business itself on that smoke break (many of which, unfortunately, were confirmed in the months and years to come).

Of course, to hear him talk, J.C. could do no wrong. Any mistake around the shop was due to the incompetence of the clueless idiots that he had to work with, and he never could understand why all of us couldn’t live up to his example. Needless to say, he was a joy to work with.

Flash forward six or seven years to this afternoon. I’m carrying a stack of copies into the bindery area of the print shop, when I overhear Karen mention J.C.’s name. Not sure if it was the same J.C., I asked her about him, and she confirmed that he’d just moved down from a print shop in Alaska when she worked with him at Ikon a couple years ago. As it turns out, three of the people I work with now had worked with J.C. at Ikon after he left TimeFrame and moved to Washington. Funnily enough, they all have the same impression of him that I do — and, in another stunning coincidence (for I’m sure that’s what it must be), all three of them turned in their resignation at Ikon so that they could move to Xerox on the same day, three months after J.C. started working with them.

I know it’s a small world, especially when you’re dealing with the Alaska/Washington traffic (which seems to flow both ways fairly frequently), but it’s always something of a shock to hear a name from six years ago being bandied about.

Everybody’s got a ‘Happy Place’ of one sort or another. The mental refuge you keep for when nothing’s going right, or something you’re witnessing is just too disturbing for you to deal with at the moment. Back off, find your Happy Place, and relax until things have calmed down.

My friend Casey, for some reason, always reveled in doing what he could to destroy people’s Happy Places. Just one of his kicks, I suppose. For instance, one girl’s Happy Place involved playing with a lot of puppies. If I remember correctly, after discovering this, Casey went out and found a copy of the old novelty song “Dead Puppies Aren’t Much Fun” and gave it to her. She needed a new happy place after that.

He never could touch my happy place, though. See, I’ve always had a strong fascination with a lot of very “dark” things. One of my favorite authors is William S. Burroughs. One of my favorite visual artists is H. R. Giger. For many years, I had a fascination (obsession) with trent reznor of nine inch nails. Happy, sunshiney, cheerful stuff like that.

My Happy Place was an animated movie.

Script by William S. Burroughs.

Score by trent reznor.

Animation and art direction by H. R. Giger.

Directed by Terry Gilliam and/or David Fincher and/or Darren Aronofsky and/or David Cronenberg (either joinly, or each taking a different section of the film, or possibly a series of films…whatever).

Casey never did find a way to destroy that particular little Happy Place. He tried making me visualize slapping a “Smiley Face” in the middle of it, but I started having too much fun envisioning a “Smiley Face” as drawn by Giger, and Casey gave up.

My Happy Place was — and is — safe and unscathed.

(Loosely inspired by BlogFodder.)