Prairie: in this case, I think it (the profanity in my last post — Michael) was effective and justified, and pretty much exactly what I would like to say to dear old President Bush
Prairie: oh yeah
Prairie: ‘course, I probably wouldn’t get a chance to say it, because I would be being dragged away by the secret service, because if I could get close enough to talk to him I would more likely kick him in the shinMichael: it’d almost be worth it!
Prairie: it would totally be worth it… and if anyone asked, I’d just salute the flag, and say I slipped and hadn’t meant to kick him
Michael: sounds like a good alibi to me Michael: i’ll let you know next time Bush comes through town
Prairie: okay, cool
Prairie buys steel toed boots
Prairie: (and the people secretly monitoring internet conversations have just added me to the list of potential terrorist suspects)Michael: you and me both, I think
Prairie: oh well
Prairie: better a terrorist than a republican
Prairie: at least the terrorists are fighting for a real cause
Personal
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Solving the problem
\<xterm> The problem with America is stupidity. I’m not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don’t we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
— found on the bash.org Quote Database
Work, work, work
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.
Tired of the 'renovations'
Grrrrrr…. I woke up this morning to find a note slipped under my door telling me that the power to the building was going to be cut off again today, due to the construction/renovation work currently going on. Fat lot of good that note did me, though, considering the power was already off when I woke up. I’m just glad I didn’t oversleep, since I didn’t have my alarm to get me up!
Then, when I come home, there’s a note on the front door of the building letting us tenants know that the water will be shut off during the day tomorrow.
I’m getting so sick of this. Our building hasn’t had working laundry facilities for three months now, so we all need to try to find time to truck our laundry up to the nearest laundromat (open only until 9pm, and charging \$2 per wash). We had a full month without reliable hot water, which ended with four days without any hot water. The heat has been an on-and-off thing. Water is apparently still an on-and-off thing. We keep getting told that they’re “almost done,” that the construction work will be done “any time now.” We’re all sick of hearing that, and quite a few people have left the building because finding a new place was less of a pain in the ass than putting up with everything here. Ugh. Time for this to be done. Finito. End of story.
Anyway, if you’re a regular or semi-regular visitor here, and couldn’t get through, that’s why. No power to the building, no power to the computer, no website. Bleah.
Hopefully this really will all be done with soon. I’m more than ready for it to end.
An honest job application
Rick sent me this a long time ago, and having job stuff on my brain, I remembered it and dug it out to post here. What follows is (at least in theory) an actual job application submitted to McDonald’s by a 17 year old applicant a humor piece by Greg Bulmash.
He got the job.
Name: – – – – –
Sex: Not yet I’m saving myself for the right person.
Desired position: Company’s President/Vice President. But seriously, whatever’s available. If I was in a position to be picky, I wouldn’t be applying here in the first place.
Desired Salary: $185,000 a year plus stock option and should it not work out — a Michael Ovitz style severance package. Seriously, make an offer and we can haggle.
Education: Yes
Last position held: Target for middle management hostility.
Salary: Less than I am worth.
Most notable achievement: My incredible collection of stolen pens and post-it pads.
Reason for leaving: It sucked.
Hours available to work: Any.
Preferred hours: 1:30-3:30pm (with 1/2 hour lunch break). Monday, Tuesday & Thursday only.
Do you have any special skills? Yes, but they’re better suited to a more intimate environment.
May we contact your current employer: If I had one, would I be here?
Do you have any physical conditions that would prohibit you from lifting up to 50 lbs? Of what?
Do you have a car: I think the more appropriate question here would be “Do you have a car that runs?”
Have you received any special awards or recognition? I may already be a winner of the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstake.
Do you smoke? On the job — no, during breaks yes.
What would you like to be doing in five years? Living in the Bahamas with a fabulously wealthy sexy super model blonde, who thinks I am the best thing since sliced bread. There again I’d like to be doing that now.
DO YOU CERTIFY THAT THE ABOVE IS TRUE AND COMPLETE TO THE BEST OF YOUR KNOWLEDGE? Yes, Absolutely.
Sign Here: Aries.
The job application joke above is ©1997 by Greg Bulmash. Visit his sick humor site, his insult site, or his hamburger site.
Crossing my fingers
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!
Small World
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.
Dreamblogging
Where does the dream stop and the blog begin? ;)
Bizarreness. In dreamland last night, I was in the midst of a very pleasant time flirting with a girl (who looked suspiciously like Xeni — extremely odd, as I’ve never even come close to meeting her, and only know of her from her contributions to BoingBoing), when she stopped to jot down a couple notes on a scrap of paper. I caught a glimpse of the paper, which was titled “blogging ideas,” and midway down was written “did he see that I linked to him yesterday?” So, then the dream bounces over to BoingBoing and I start checking the guestblog in their sidebar (really, it wasn’t Xeni, I swear I’m not some psycho net-stalker — the dream girl had a different name, one that I can’t remember anymore as the dream fades, though) to see where I was mentioned.
That suddenly switched to a bizarre sequence where apparently Cory (BoingBoing’s webmaster) had given one person the main column, another person the guestblogger column, and had told them that the “best” blogger would get a permanent paid spot as the primary BoingBoing blogger. The two of them then immediately posted this, and then started alternating between throwing links up and slamming each other in an effort to take the top spot. After this went on for a while, things got so intense and spiteful that Cory took back over both blogs, admitted his mistake, and closed down BoingBoing.
Then my alarm went off.
Happy Places
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.)