Life

It’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’m at work. Ugh.

On the bright side, there aren’t too many other people here, so I’ve been able to snag the stereo, drag it over to my area, and attach my iPod to it, so I’ve got good tunes without having to have my headphones on all day.

Gotta take life’s pleasures where you can, right?

Especially at 8:30am.

It looks like Dave Winer and John Teggatz have all the cold weather that Dad is complaining he’s missing in Anchorage.

Dad also mentioned a couple articles from the Anchorage Daily News about the warm weather up there.

But it will be a long time before people on both sides of the Alaska Range forget what for many has been the strangest winter in memory — especially over the first part of February, supposedly one of the coldest months of the year.

Days of rain. Massive overflow on rivers. Fairbanks drivers “playing car hockey” on roads glazed with black ice. People taking 10-minute flights to the next village because ground travel was nearly impossible. Potholes sprouting like pussy willows.

Thanks to a persistent southerly flow of air, Fischer said, Fairbanks experienced its warmest average daily mean temperature on record — 13.6 degrees — for the 133 days from Oct. 1 through Feb. 10.

South of the Alaska Range, the wacky winter has forced the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race to change its restart next month from Wasilla to Fairbanks.

“People are really starving for snow right now,” said John Wilbur, chief ranger for the Alaska State Parks Susitna/Denali ranger district. “In the Willow area, there’s no recreation at all.”

Meanwhile, here in Seattle, it’s cloudy and 41. Pretty average for this time of year, from what I understand. Yeah, I think I’ll be sticking around in the Pacific Northwest for a while.

(And on an entirely unrelated note: I really wish that Dave’s RSS feed had individual posts linked to their permalinks. Some link to the permalink on his page, some link to the first external link in the post, and some don’t have any link associated with them at all. It’s a pain in the butt. Just my opinion.)

My boss got back to me with Xerox’s employment offer. What did they use to try to entice me into the Xerox family?

A position as a Xerox temp (as opposed to a third-party temp contracted to Xerox) with an \$11/hr pay rate (I’m getting \$11.20 through the temp agency) with no holiday or vacation pay (which I get through the temp agency) and no medical benefits (which I’m eligible for through the temp agency).

Needless to say, I turned them down, and re-started another 18-month cycle as a temp contracting to Xerox. My boss is still optimistic about future possibilities, but he made it clear without actually saying so that he thought it would be in my best interest to do what I did and stick with the temp agency. So, for now, I’m still where I was before, with no real changes for better or for worse. Guess I’ll keep keeping my eyes open.

Anybody know of any Dream Job openings?

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.)

I’m a bit late posting this, as I’ve been battling with a flu/sore throat bug that’s kept me in bed and downing NyQil for most of the weekend, but Friday’s fun was seeing Henry Rollins spoken-word act at the Moore Theatre here in downtown Seattle. While I’ve never been a huge fan of Henry’s music (Black Flag, The Rollins Band, etc.), I became a big fan of his spoken-word performances a few years ago after one of the people hanging around the Pit brought over a videotape of Talking From the Box.

Rollins is an incredibly intelligent man, and does great spoken-word performances — cynical, insightful, hilarious, disturbing, and about ten or twenty other good adjectives. I’d been able to see him once before when he came to Anchorage a couple years back, and as soon as Candice let me know that he was going to be in Seattle, I knew I’d want to go again. As it turned out, Candice picked me up from work and we went, then met up with Chad, Rick, Casey, Liza (Rick’s roommate), Kim, and Kayo, and then we all went out to a bar after the show. The show was great, the after-show party was a lot of fun, and I had a blast, up until I finally had to head home and put my sick self to bed.

I’d had the Rollins spoken word album Think Tank for a while (autographed by The Man, even, after the show in Anchorage), and I highly recommend it. At the show Friday night, there were two new spoken word albums available — Talk is Cheap, Volumes one and two, both of them 2-disc sets, and both of them just ten dollars each! At the moment they’re only available at his shows, too — needless to say, I’ve got them both.

Snippets from a couple articles about Rollins from local papers plugging his show:

“In a way, I think it’s good that major labels have charged so much money for their wares,” he said. “Because it’s going to cave in and there will only be one record company. A new release will just say, ‘FM Music,’ and it will sound like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lopez put in a Cuisinart with the Korn guitar player, who will be out of a job….”

— Seattle P-I: Henry Rollins likes to keep himself ‘off balance.’

“TO ME,” SAYS Henry Rollins, “the way to really get close to the material is to go at it from almost an insane or an absurdist angle. If you just go for the straight facts, you know, they kind of come up to meet you with a fist in the face. It’s like the idea of us getting into a war with North Korea. I can’t see it happening, but the way for me to internalize it is to envision these old guys running around the war room with hard-ons, looking for some payback for when they had to bail out of Pusan in the ’50s. Or Donald Rumsfeld’s thing: ‘Yeah, we can handle two wars! Absolutely two wars! How ’bout fuckin’ three? Come on, you motherfuckers, we’ll start two half-wars over at your house, and we’ll have another one on the White House lawn right now, bitch!'”

— Seattle Weekly: Henry Rollins Brings the Noise