Daily Bloggery 2009-04-24: Getting my shift together . . .

No WoW or Gwenny news today. Today's news is about work.

The results of the most recent shift bids went up this morning. And the natives are rather restless. Shift bids have two categories of bidders: "winners" and "losers." "Winning" is defined as "getting the shift you want and can live with." "Losing" is defined as "getting a shift that fscks up your life with child care or other issues."
This time I am a winner. Then again, I usually win. The reason I usually win is that I usually take an unpopular shift, defined as working a weekend day.

This time, however, I was very high on the stack rank list, and I chose 0500-1400 M-F. I don't mind early shifts. I *could* have picked something more conventional, say 0830-1730 M-F, but that is possibly the most popular shift. And, for another thing, there are no transit friendly schedules that also work with my medical treatment. Since I might as well take a cab at 4:30am as 5:30 am as matters stand, this is not optimal but no worse. Further, this schedule means that I get off at 2 and can, without taking FMLA time, get to Kaiser by 1530, home by 1700. If I take 2 hrs of FMLA time on Friday, I'm off by noon. Then I hit Kaiser, get done by 1430, at Sac Valley depot by 1730 and in Fremont 3 hours later . . . on Friday. Homeward bound, as long as I hit Ghettoview Station by 9pm I can be home in time for work on Monday -- leaving Fremont by 4:30pm Sunday will do this. This gives us Friday evening, all of Saturday and most of Sunday instead of Saturday evening, all of Sun and a early morning departure on Monday.

Part of this is caused by the rotating bid priority system I mentioned in an earlier blog post. part is caused by certain people stepping up their games -- like me.

Of course, now the natives are restless. At least three people want my shift - one of them has had it for so long he feels he owns it. I don't want to boast and start a bidding war in the secondary shift-swap market . . .
Update: The personal direct emotional appeals for shift swaps have begun. I got an email from a co-worker who figured out that it was I that got the schedule she wants. It isn't hard to do that by checking the published bid ranks and applying a bit of deductive logic. Her reasons for needing to change are compelling, but everyone can make a case based on personal circumstances. I said no.
Not to mention that one of the conditions of employment here is the ability to work any offered shift without respect to personal issues.

2. I went to the doctor yesterday for my leg dressing change -- wounds look good. As I was getting ready to leave for home, I noticed my house keys were missing. Actually they were on my desk in the office. I used the Blizzard Authenticator gadget on the keyring to log into WoW at lunch. Now this gadget was two bus rides and at least one cab ride away from Kaiser. If I was lucky. Even worse, my key ring has on it an authentication gadget that produces a second factor for authenticating into World of Warcraft. No gadget, no WoW. A quick check of the transit schedules made it clear that I could not even get there before the buses stopped. And bugging friends on a Friday afternoon for something that's not exactly life or death (ok, real-world life or death) is NOT an option.

I walked to Starbucks, logged into wifi and had Gwenny send me the phone number for Blizzard Support. I figured if I waited until my roomie was awake he would let me in without my house key . . . but no WoW.

Fortunately, I had my iPod touch with me, and a cute little free app called the Battle.net Mobile Authenticator. When synced on the Internet and linked to the account, it provides the second authentication factor. Of course, the Blizzard Customer Service folks have to do little things like verify the account information first. Once they did that -- "What was the blood type of your first virgin gerbil?" -- and merged the account, I was back online and playing after my roomie let me in.

Daily Bloggery 2009-04-09: Wee need tose steenkin' badgers o' heroism

Daily global update from the World of Me™

Health: SGL is on target and I'm feeling pretty good today. Dressing change is tomorrow.

Social.net: Serenity game is this weekend. It will be good to see Seanan, Richard, Matt, M&D and of course, The World's Cutest Four Year Old™ (Matt may be a no show due to the proximity of BayCon 2009).

Career: My monthly one to one with my manager was yesterday. Executive summary: "Thou are doing things right!" I asked about a possible reassignment to the Home Based Agent team so I can work from home, and he blessed my request. Now to talk to the manager of the HBA team to get the low down. A life without a commute would be very nice -- and could remove the main barrier from being able to relocate to be with Gwenny.

WoW: Ran heroic Violet Hold last night with Gwenny and BOYD. Scored myself some nice epic gloves out of there off the end boss -- Handgrips of the Savage Emissary. Got them enchanted very nicely with Asmo's help as well. With the badges of heroism scored off the three VH bosses, I got me a Totem of Splintering too. In other BOYD news: the guild's website is up and running. We managed to also get some PvP action in too; winning and losing once each in Wintergrasp. All of this translates to more epic-level (purple linked) loot for me that brings me one

Gwenny: Still going very well, still happy.

SotR 2009-03-06

1. Work: Shorter monthly performance review at work: "Looks good." Pizza was served to the team. I eated some. It was good. Before SG was 100. After 2 hrs later 109. Lessons: Pizza is Not a Bad Thing. Unrestricted pizza is a Bad Idea for the insulin-challenged.

2. Health: One goal has been blown for the month. I had a serum glucose reading over 150 mg/dl 3 hrs after a meal Wednesday night. I later discovered that I'd missed a dose of insulin. Remedy: Daily routine modification -- inject evening dose of insulin as soon as I get home from work. Weight is down about a pound this week, right on target.

3. Socio-emotional: No gaming scheduled until 3/22 (Kitsune), nor is a hangout date in the works for the weekend. Yet. Know an unattached geek grrl who'd like to see Watchmen?

4. Music Matters: I've a new Wild Hair up my musical arse. I've started collecting various bands' versions / variations of the trad Celtic classic "Star of the County Down." Between Pladdhog's very uptempo take and "The Starbucks of the County Down," Emerald Rose's version is of course quite good . . . . I wonder if any of the Celtic-punk bands like Flogging Molly or Dropkick Murphys do that one? Since I started playing Mafia Wars over on Facebook, I've had various Rolling Stones tunes running through my head as I put "Don Gorgonzola" and his mafia through their virtual adventures in crime: "Gimme Shelter," "Tumbling Dice," "Hang Fire," and "One Hit (to the body)." I added other tunes about criminality to a playlist -- more about this later.

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Now playing: The Rolling Stones - Hang Fire

Memes and Themes, the LARP

Work has been full of the latter lately.

1. We had a diversity fair the other day. There are company sanctioned affinity groups for AAs, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, women, Christians and LGBT folk. I was going to ask, but was afraid of being accused of bigotry, the following question: Where's the affinity group for "None of the Above"?

2. Next week is an awards meeting. Too many people and too much noise in too little space . . . and it is nominally compulsory, except in the case of medical stuff.
My doc rocks. Appointments anytime I need them. Sorry I missed the awards ceremony again . . . pesky heaslth issues.
Anyway, the manual for events here stipulates that THERE MUST BE A THEME! Usually the theme reeks of TV sports . . . but this time the theme is "50s Pop Cultcha." Of course, I refuse to be amused. The Fifties were "happy days" at the expense of too many others.
SCREW the sock hops, Mel's Diner, etc. The Fifties were NOT all "Happy Days" and Teh Fonze.
I suggested our team do the Army-McCarthy Hearings with a Bill Gates look-alike playing Tail Gunner Joe, the excreseance from Wisconsin. "Have you no sense of decency left, Sir?"
They shot the idea down in flames, naturally.

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Now playing: Babylon 5 - Voices of Authority
via FoxyTunes

Runecast 2008-08-28: career:

I haven't cast any runes for awhile. Here's what I got when I asked:

"Is a promotion at work likely in the next 30-90 dys?"

Here's what my cyber runes had to say to me:
Past: Berkano reversed: Delayed rebirth -- fits a stalled career; I drew Isa (ice, stasis) a year ago, so this fits
Present: Ehwaz, reversed: teamwork (as in horse and rider), difficulties in improvement -- oh yes, this fits
Future: Thuawaz, also reversed. Hammer, as in that of Thor. Thorns, as those on roses. Barriers, Sometimes means senseless violence(!). Thorns reversed -- maybe the barrier is surmountable with less difficulty than surmised before.



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Listening to: Heather Alexander - Flesh Against the Thorn
via FoxyTunes

SotR 2008-08-28 (Health)

I've reached a milestone today with respect to my far-too-long battle with stasis ulcer wounds: I'm down to once a week dressing changes at last! This makes my treatment planning a lot simpler and frees up my days off for things other than medical stuff.

The weekend past was a swamp of existential angst. I'm not sure why that was so. The rent is paid, my roomie seems happy with me -- in large part because I pay the rent before the 1st. I'm getting enough sleep, I'm elevating my right leg, and I'm eating my fruits and veggies. So why did I do exactly nuthin' -- not even playing WoW -- all weekend?

Whatever put me in that shit mood, it's gone. I got a handle on it now; I think all I needed is some good alone time.

Tuesday at work started out blah, but got better. I finished strong. Wednesday was a lot better, Thursday was a cruise. I even made my weekly team meeting and said something that made my manager say "Great Idea, Rich!"
The monthly workgroup potluck -- an event I usually avoid -- was the cherry on the sundae that was My Day @ Work®.

Then again, this may well be the calm before the storm. Busy season, aka the start of the traditional academic calendar, starts next week.

It's also Republican National Convention week in Minneapolis. No teevee for me.

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Listening to: The Elders - True Believer
via FoxyTunes

SotR 2008-08-20

Overview:

Two-plus years ago, I wrote down a series of goals. I was in the hospital at that time and I saw just how badly I was running my life. I reviewed those goals two months ago . . . and I'd made very little progress toward any of them.

After that review, I made up my mind that every couple of weeks, I need to spend the time in meditation on the many personal foibles and weaknesses I need to work on and what to do about them. This is entirely an internal process. Part of this process is spurred by my inching ever-closer to the age of fifty. Part of the spur is that there are things that have been part of my life for several years that simply need to no longer be a part of my life.

The most important single personal foible / weakness: I am sick and tired of dealing with the consequences of the open wounds on my legs. I'd like to be able to swim for the first time in five years . . . to go to the doctor once every three months, not every couple of weeks . . . to be free of wound odors. I'm almost there; maybe a couple more months and I'll be swimming.

To that end, I've made some adjustments: limiting my sodium consumption (diet soda mostly), drinking LOTS more ice water, elevating my legs, getting a full night's sleep, eating more salads and less meat, playing a lot less WoW and cutting caffeine intake by 75%. All of these things help the wounds heal faster.
The "reward goal" I set here is to remain wound free for a year.

My next series of adjustments is financial. So far, I've started my 410(k) at work and started researching the various funds in the plan with an eye toward understanding how they fit into a coordinated plan to make me enough money for my old age. Once I turn 55, I can accelerate my donations, since at my age the lever called "the time value of money" is a little short. My next adjustment is to finally get my oversize ass onto a realistic budget. I found some great Mac software that is NOT published by Intuit and used that to set up a budget that includes putting some cash into savings that is NOT my 401(k). I want a cushion against emergencies.
The "reward goal" here is to have $5k in a savings account for a year. Since I did not envision having the 401(k) then, I'll include 50% of that account (after all, Apple is matching my contributions!) toward the goal. I started the 401(k) a year ago or so, and as of today "my share" is around $1k.

My last "reward goal" is to lose 100 lbs and keep it off for a year. I have not done much in this area; a soon as the legs are healed, I'll be directing my efforts toward weight loss.

One year with all three goals met . . . the reward is a trip to GenCon.

I'm also working on a few other goals, namely work-related ones like "break the career stasis I've been in for three years." My manager says I'm heading in the right direction.



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Listening to: Echo's Children - No Quarter
via FoxyTunes

Assorted asshattery and some hope

Mixed bag of a day, all things considered.

Hope:
In this Tuesday's round of elections, the Republicans lost a congressional special election to the Ds. This didn;t happen in a district the Ds usually win; it was in Mississippi's 1st CD -- a district so nominally pro-R "red" that it isn't funny. Won it by over 10%, not in a squeaker. As in "kicked the elephant in the jimmies." Live by the warmongering moron, die by the warmongering moron.

Asshat:
Speaking of warmongering morons, Shrub gave this little speech to the Israeli Parliament on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel. In it he said something truly extraordinary:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history,"

He was referring to, of course, Democrats, as the appeasers.
Why is this extraordinary? Because for the first time, a political figure serving as the American "president" (NEVER will I refer to the faux Texan empty suit warmongering bastard as MY president) using the occasion of a speech in a foreign country for crass domestic politics. Don't "politics stop at the water's edge?"
Further, by invoking Nazis, the Chimp fell victim to Godwin's Law.
Of course, this asshattery may just be a means of gaining the news initiative after that special election and John Edwards' dramatic endorsement of Barack Obama.

Hope:
I overheard one of my colleagues at work literally going off on another coworker about what an absolute dick GWB is. The second colleague is one of those people who is active in church and does not hesitate to invite you along -- repeatedly. Hardcore R. Since Church Guy is an asshole buddy of my manager, I'm not going to complain unless he invites me again. Last year I nearly throated Church Guy because of his utterances in a meeting about Al Gore and his Oscar-winning documentary. Glad to see him get a dose of reality.

Asshat:
Roomie. Say no more.

Boot to the Head: Work edition

"I'll sing to you a little song / About the things that piss us off . . ."

Good day at work so far, but annoying as hell.

1. Pig-ignorant / lazy as hell coworkers. Three cases of these today, all before lunch.
a. Simple, easy steps even a Master of the Obvious should be able to do . . . but NOOOOOOO, they palm the job off on the Next Tech.
b. IDIOTS who refuse to use their empowerment to help customers because it will add a few minutes to their call times. Customer calls back, I spend the time to Put It Right, to ensure the customer is satisfied, and my metrics take it in the neck.
c. People who can name every minor character on The Simpsons and every break in continuity in their favorite comic books since the 70s, but have not a fscking clue who Genghis Khan was or what he really did.

2. Call monitoring. One of the conditions of my job is that my calls are monitored "for quality assurance." I know that any call may be monitored and evaluated, but this does not happen very often -- maybe a couple of times a week. When this happens once a day, I'm not stressed. Over the last week, I've had FIVE, three in one day, all by the same evaluator . . . who happens to be a member of my team on a coaching rotation.

OK, repeat after me: What. The. FSCK?
I run into him on my way out the door yesterday. Guy says this is purely random. Yeahright.
I get my 1 on 1 with my manager this week. Maybe he can answer my question.

Notes, errata, tidbits, etc

Interesting week . . .

1. Apple announces layoffs: a few friends are affected by this, but nobody in my department. Ironic date choice for the layoffs (May 1 is International Labor Day). The layoffs are jobs here moving to Austin, Texas, folks can take the job there, or another job here, or the severance.

2. My favorite coffee shop just became my former favorite coffee shop. The vibes I got there now are totally unwelcoming, and they refused to power cycle their wireless router when I told them the network is down (other people were having the same issue).

3. I attended the Company picnic to celebrate 7 years of #1 tech support in Consumer Reports last week. I wish I hadn't. The less I say here, the better.

4. My current main WoW character, Dakatirr, has a new epic mount (pictured left).

Epic mounts are cool; they're faster than the standard level-40 mount (which is a whole lot faster than running!) and they look nice. This is my second character with an epic mount . . . and I've decided one of this character's motivations involves collecting all of the epic mounts I can earn on my own in WoW.

The Purple Great Elekk I'm riding now is a racial epic mount, the easiest one to get from a vendor in the Draenei home city. If I were to go to Ironforge, Stormwind or Darnassus (the Dwarven, Human and Night Elf capital cities) and try to buy an epic mount for those races, I'd have to have an "Exalted" reputation with those cities / races. I'm not exalted with them quite yet.

There are other ways to add to my collection. There are three or four mounts you can earn through Player-vs-Player combat in Battlegrounds (not my favorite way to play WoW . . .) as well, plus the one I'm working on right now: a white sabertooth tiger, which is earned through earning Exalted reputation with a minor faction. The three quests are very very very repetitive but they result in getting a butt load of gold from selling leather, ore and uncommon drops from the elite giants you grind on in southern Winterspring.

<=== The kitteh I'm after. Purty.







WoW funny of the day: "If you give a dwarf a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a dwarf to fish, he'll hang out in Ironforge all day leveling his Fishing skill, not camping your resource nodes."

Cheers and Jeers: O:M edition

So sue me, Bill in Portland Maine, over on Daily Kos. Remember who writes your performance reviews . . .

1. Cheers to Blizzard Entertainment. WoW patch 2.4 is out; Blizz dedicated it to the late, great Gary Gygax. Without EGG, WoW and Diablo would not exist. This patch is nowhere as massive in impact as 2.3 was; at least they fixed several annoyances.

1a. Jeers to breaking my damned UI mods, as usual. I guess you can't make an omlet without breaking UI mods . . . bastards.

2. Cheers to Seanan McGuire. Her Bardic Blondeness is coming to town this weekend. I haven't seen her in more than a decade, and I'm looking forward to paying my respects in person to one of my favorite multi-talented artists. She should be your favorite too. Check out her LJ, website and music for reasons why.

3. Cheers to over a century of fearless journalism. My new favorite political magazine is The Nation. I've been on their mailing list since forever, when ex#2 and I used to subscribe to the dead-tree edition of this august journal of liberal opinion. These guys have been around since the 1860s fighting for the abolition of slavery and continue to cover Stuff That Matters (sorry, Slashdot) like elections campaigns and ongoing corruption without accepting a single dime of corporate money.

4. Cheers to filkerTom-foolery: I thought I was hallucinating when I read that Tom Smith, aka the world's fastest filker, is going to be part of the entertainment for Eschacon'08, the lefty blogger con organized by the influential Atrios in Philadelphia this weekend. I'd love to see his set list for his performance . . . .

5. Jeers to sports memes as workplace motivation. Every company seekd competitive advantage through incentivizing its workforce through a variety of means. I have no problems with most of the ways Management motivate us worker bees. I don't even mind those STUPID motivation posters. However, few things this side of the Veil-between-Worlds piss me off more than big time sports. I was raised in a sports-saturated household. There was always sports on TV or the damned radio, and to hell with me if I wanted to watch something mind-streching like Star Trek or listen to music. To this day, I cannot stand sports or TV. This time, it's March Madness, the 63-game marathon men's college basketball tournament. Pick one of the 64 teams (preferably one that stands a chance of winning) as an identity and rank those corporate metrics against them. Frankly, I couldn't care less weather Gonzanga (sounds a stripper's stage name) or UConn or Louisville wins the damned thing. Please. Make Them Stop!

6. Cheers to the Nurses of Kaiser South Sacramento. My wound care issues brings me in contact with a lot of nurses. When I moved south last year I figured I'd have to move my care (which I did) and I worried about continuity and quality of care. Pam, Connie and Valarie, the triumvirate that change the dressings and track the progress of my wounds throughly impress me.

What Am I Thankful For?

A very partial list . . .

Physical: A great job, a roof over my head, enough cash to pay the bills, bandwidth and the means to use it.
Social: Mom, Dad, Ron, Sophia and Sam. Friends like Michelle, David, Kayla, Matt, Richard, Sammy, Duncan, Isabel, Tim, Kate, Sue, Rachael, Don, Rob, Kajir, Heather, Dave, Diane, Gene, Aries, Nika, Mystique, Harley, Rita, Bug, Shalyn and Hillary.
Other: An awesome health care team led by Dr. Nelson . . . the fact that the evil that is Shrub will be out of office in about a year . . . RT and e-Tran . . . PCJ and Panera . . .the music that helped save my life this year: Seanan McGuire, The Elders, Emerald Rose, Leslie Fish, James Blunt, Tempest, Escape Key, Flogging Molly, Roy Zimmerman, Loreena Mckinnett, Niel Young and Weird Al Yankovic.
Media: Serenity / Firefly, D&D, World of Warcraft.

"You work for the US Army? Merry Fscking Xmas!"

Just when you think the fscking bastard in the White House can sink no lower, he manage to do so . . .


This is the kind of thing the sole defense contractor I worked for half a lifetime ago did one year: a week before Christmas, they had guards armed with automatic pistols (these guys were normally unarmed . . . and they were contract guards, not the in-house security guys) and clipboards waiting one morning as employees as they walked in. If you checked in and were on the list you were sent to a "morning meeting" where the contents of your desk, your pink slip and even more guards were waiting. Not everyone was laid off; this method was supposed to stop the rumor mill from grinding on. What it did was point out what a bunch of dinks the management was there.

I don't know about you, but "retarded asshats" does not begin to describe this behavior.

On the other hand, when the last tech company I worked for sent my job to India, they did it *after* New Years' and they gave all of us the bad news. They even held a beer bash on the last day when they collected your badge. I hated being laid off, but the company went the extra mile in treating me like a human being.

Apparently, the gang in Washington will do ANYTHING to keep the mess in Iraq rolling. Just over a year till our long national nightmare ends . . .

The very best thing about Leo . . .

Two words: TIME MACHINE.
Time Machine is the very best single reason for a Mac user to buy and install Leopard . . . and of you are a Windows user, the very best reason to go get a new Mac. Time Machine is a backup and restore utility. In a word, you can, at need, "go back in time" and restore your entire system or even a single file from any 1-hr increment in the last day, any day in the last month and any month thereafter. So, if in the middle of writing your master's thesis your MacBook Pro's internal HD packs it in, if you have TM and an external hard disk, you can restore the last backup (not to mention OS X, all your preferewnces, email, etc) of your thesis once the hard disk is replaced, and on you go.

You can restore a single file, your whole iTunes Library or thw whole fscking startup partition. No more need to use Target Disk Mode and another Mac. No more "log in as root, drag and drop your Home folder (c:\Documents and settings\yourname for you windows users) and HOPE you got it right." For some users, enabling the OS X "root" account is like handing a drunk with Tourette's Syndrome a greased grenade . . . only "sudo rm -R /* is capable of more damage in less time (think dropping to DOS, cd c:, then del *.*). No more Retrospect, .Mac backup 3.x (not a bad program, but it's about as intuitive as brain surgery when compared to TM) or needing to rely on a non-Apple solution.

Best of all, TM does this silently and automaticly..

Windows, by comparison, has "system restore" which is great for restoring Windows system files . . . but it does nto do jack about your master's thesis or your email, pics, music, videos or porn.

I had been looking forward to buying a new external hard drive to try this feature out once my finances allowed for it. Fortunately for me, I won a nice 250 gigabyte USB 2.0 drive today for quarterly sales performance. This is plenty of space to allow me to back up the 100 GB drive in my MacBook (currently about 40 gigs free). I'm going to put at least three partitions on the disk: one OS X for TM (I'm going to names it "HD Welles"), one also OS X (one just big enough to serve as a 10.5 startup disk, probably named "DaVinci" -- as in Leo-nardo) to install Leopard so I can boot off this drive at need and one formatted for FAT32 (Disk Utility does not speak Windows NTFS) so my good friends Michelle and David can back up their docs/music/pics/etc/omg/wtf/bbq.

Since the disk will be partitioned three ways, I think I'll call it "Gaul." Of course, people will look at me funny (not that they don't do that already . . .).

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Listening to: Styx - Suite Madame Blue
via FoxyTunes

Random bits, bytes, nybbles, etc

1. " . . . that [his] name not be lost to the knowledge of men . . . " -- One of the very best folksingers who ever lived has not had his tunage for sale on the iTunes Store . . . until now. When I started buying music via iTunes, I looked in vain for Canadian folk muisc legend Stan Rogers. I was first introduced to Stan's music in, of all places, the SCA (yes, his songs are almost as "period" as an iPod). I first heard Barrett's Privateers at a Society bardic circle. I asked for the lyrics from the bard and learned the song by heart by the time I got home from the event (a 5 hour drive to An Tir for a war). I ran into more Stan Rogers goodness a few years later in the context of what was then the most compelling science fiction RPG background of the 1990s: Traveller: The New Era. Apparently, one of the developers was a Canadian, because one of the adventures for that game involved a starship called the Mary Ellen Carter. In many ways, that song pretty much sums up TNE. One trip through teh google later, I made the connection between these two experinces and Stan Rogers. Once other, more pressing, needs are met, I'll be downloading teh good stuff again. I currently have recordings of both songs -- the rather good 3 Pints Gone cover of Mary Ellen Carter and, in two of the greatest offenses ever recorded against the memory of a great artist, that fools-gold voiced tenor frank emerson's "covers" of MEC and Barrett's Privateers. If you're going to pay tribute to a legend AT LEAST GET THE LYRICS RIGHT AND DON'T DROP VERSES! Biggest waste of two bucks ever. And don't get me started on the waste of iTunes Library space that is his version of The Minstrel Boy! To paraphrase PeeJee from Something Positive, were I female, I could menstrate better music! I can only hope his name is lost to the knowledge of men!

2. ID10T: It's not just for computer novices anymore!
Customer calls in, issue is that his Mac is booting to a blank gray screen on its LCD display. This is not an especially common issue. There are notes from prior contacts where the previous "tech" documented that he did "everything" -- reset SMC, booted to CD, advised trying an external monitor and calling back with the result. He did everything, all right . . . everything but what was to me the blindingly obvious: resetting the fscking PRAM. I had Mister Customer reset the system's PRAM, and lo and behold, built-in video returned.

/rant=ON
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: I simply could not believe this. Resetting PRAM fixes a lot of stuff: USB / Firewire / ethernet / modem port issues, mis-recognition of the hard drive and most especially video issues. Usually PRAM resets are an overused troubleshooting step for issues where they are singularly ineffective, typically startup issues that arise after the OS starts loading. This is stuff any noob fresh out of training knows.

And this guy was NOT a newbie. Nor was he from an outsourced contact center. He sat two isles over from me. He made a customer troubleshoot ineffectually and even left him with the expectation that his system would need service, for an issue that should have been resolved with the very first troubleshooting step tried. He made someone call in a second time, wait on hold to music that may not quite be to taste, for an issue that should have been fixed in less than 5 minutes.

People like him are why I sometimes get angry enough to explode. Why? Because call center tech support reps like me are ranked for perks like desirable schedules, promotions, awards and such by two things: sales and call statistics . . . especially call duration. I got the distinct feeling from the customer that he felt rushed by the rep (something we are NOT supposed to do) because after we did the quick fix on the one system he had two other issues with other computers for me to look at! Fscking stats whores like him do this all the time. So you piss off a customer and leave me to clean up the mess. Not to mention hosing my call stats, which makes getting awards, promotions, and a decent schedule harder.
/rant=OFF
I feel a bit better now....

Are you, or are you not . . .

. . . an arsehole?

My score: 2

0 to 5 “True”: You don’t sound like a certified asshole, unless you are fooling yourself.

I had a question for the runes...

There are some new opporutnities about to emerge at work, and I'm being encouraged to apply for them. I am comfortable in my current duties, but things have become stagnant for the last six months or so. I've pulled runes for virtually every career decision I've hade in the last few years, and all of the draws have been dead-on with respect to what happened later.

"Should I avail myself of these opportunities?" I asked my runes and pulled one.

I got this:

Ehwaz: (E: Horse, two horses.) Transportation. May represent a horse, car, plane, boat or other vehicle. Movement and change for the better. Gradual development and steady progress are indicated. Harmony, teamwork, trust, loyalty. An ideal marriage or partnership. Confirmation beyond doubt the meanings of the runes around it. Ehwaz Reversed or Merkstave: This is not really a negative rune. A change is perhaps craved. Feeling restless or confined in a situation. Reckless haste, disharmony, mistrust, betrayal.

My read: the new opportunity is with a new mobile technology. This fits the rune's traditional meaning since this technology is mobile. Not only that, the rune implies trust and teamwork, which is what this new tech group is all about. I think I'll apply for it!