Job

Twist away the gates of steel

March 6, 2008 – 11:43 am

Sheer Hatred, originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

My company is now officially another company. Whoopee. The last week has been super annoying, the kind of week that makes me want to push people's buttons just because you know you can quickly have them as annoyed as you are. This is the kind of week that you almost wish for a crowded subway, just so you have an excuse to elbow a stranger in the ribs. Luckily, this is a wish I don't have to hold my breath to get on a regular basis.

I supposed over all the transition has been pretty smooth, I just have lots of tedious stuff to do, people pushing me from all sides even though none of them really know what they want. They just know somebody is supposed to be doing something, so everybody's been running around like their hair's on fire, if only to look like they know what's going on.

I skipped a company party to pick up some TNR cats from the shelter. It's times like these I suspect my priorities need to be reevaluated. But then I remember that trapping wild cats doesn't adequately fund the lifestyle I enjoy that has proper resources to trap and hold feral cats. Then I shut up and I get back to work. You should get back to work too.

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in BARC, Cat Fixin', Cats, Feral, Office, Strays, Tedium | Comments Off

0 for 1

February 14, 2008 – 3:21 pm

Scores The other day I trudged uptown to the Bed Bath & Beyond way over past 1st Ave and 61st St. It's nice to have this big box store sort of nearby, but it's always a bit of a hike. I go by the Roosevelt Island tram, which is always fascinating in its total obsolescence (don't get me wrong, I hope they never dismantle it!) I also realized that the area I walk through also contains Scores, the 'gentlemen's club' once patronized by Howard Stern until his friend who worked there quit and now they go to a place called Ricky's.

Ugly from Day 1 I also go by Trump Plaza Apartments, a building unique in its design in that no matter the time period, it always looked dated and tacky, yet without style. I dunno, maybe it's the super-scripty calligraphy noting the name of the building all over the place. I walk though part of Sutton Place as well, eyeing actual brownstones and fancy stores I shall never patronize. I balked when I first found out I would have to work in midtown; now I'm pleased to be able to see all these parts of the city I would never set foot in otherwise.

A rump named Trump buys a lotta junk Anyhow, I went to BB&B to buy a warm mist humidifier, because our house has been so dry this winter we are all suffering. I can't even pet the cats without creating sparks worthy of a Mr Wizard episode. Plus it's irritating my nasal passages (it's also possible the 10 cats currently in the house are adding to this). So I pick out a decent, basic model, thinking dimly that I should open the box to check it out before purchase.

E 61st townhouses "Aw, nah," I think to myself. "I don't wanna be one of those people who opens up boxes in the store." I don't know where this came from, but I had noticed a lot of the boxes had obviously been opened, including the one I ended up purchasing. Still my logic prevailed, I was above tampering with an item before I purchased it.

61st brownstones The box was just large enough to be cumbersome, one of those things that makes you conspicuous on the train. I managed to get it home with only a few scowls, and brought it up to our bedroom. I unpacked the humidifier, only to find a huge-ass crack in the plastic reservoir.

Roosevelt Island Tram docks At first I thought I somehow cracked it in transit. But then I realized, that's why it was still on the shelf even though it had been opened. Somebody smarter than I had the foresight to make sure the damn thing wasn't all smashed up before they lugged it halfway across New York. Alas.

Feelin Groovy So today I had to drag it back. It actually worked out well, because at my initial purchase I had forgotten I had a coupon good for 20% any item (it was actually addressed to Matt but he has no need of the girly gear sold at such stores). So I returned the cracked one, and bought the replacement (I checked it out this time first) and saved ten bucks. I just hope this thing does the trick. I already feel like an old lady, now I'm an old lady with a humidifier.

Oh yes, and 10 cats.

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Health, Midtown, Office, Shopping, The City | Comments Off

You don't have to go home but you can't stay here

September 24, 2007 – 10:44 am

We are back from the Virgin Islands and dealing with all the shit that has been hitting the fan since we left. As they have been warning us for the past year, the parent company who owns my division has sold us out to some other company. This happened in the middle of my vacation and since nobody can be trusted to handle anything while I'm gone, I found myself at an internet cafe inside a tourist spot in Charlotte Amalie, posting boilerplate statements from the CEO and whatnot while people played pool and drank all around me (okay, I was drinking too).

Ultimately, this 'transition' as they constantly refer to it, probably won't be that big a deal, it sounds like everybody will get to keep their jobs, though they might just be telling us that so nobody freaks out prematurely. Other than this ground-shaking stuff, we have all the usual post-vacation blues of having to catch up on work and dealing with having to get up every morning in a sub-resort quality home full of cats who are not as accommodating as the ones we spent the week with.

Actually, the cats are fine. They all weathered the week well, it seems, even the outdoor ones. One of the kittens has already been by and there's even a new kid in town: a big orange tiger cat. We'd seen him around but in the past week he seems to have befriended the locals. He's fixed, so I think it's just the neighbor's cat (he was previously spotted darting into a window down the street). Jefe has a lovely new habit, however: he grabs the roll of toilet paper and just starts biting it, ripping out huge wads of paper which are all over the bathroom now. Jeannie noted that it resembled the act of rending meat from the bone, maybe he misses the chicken wings upon which he used to subsist on the streets.

Anyway, we took nearly 400 photos, which I am going through now (so far 50% seem to be of the little lizards which run all over the place there). So I'll soon have a whole album/write-up of the experience, but in short: the folks who put us up are now our favoriteist relatives ever and we intend to spend much more time with them in the foreseeable future. And I'm not just saying that since they let us stay in the super fancy deceptively large house in the middle of a subtropic island which contains those white beaches you see in postcards and the cheapest liquor I have ever seen (where else can you buy a liter of Bombay Sapphire for $13?) It was a great time all-around, in every way pretty much the polar opposite of New York City (in a good way on both sides).

Except for the stray cats! There were only a few, but each one corresponded to stray cats we have here, which was pretty strange (there was a calico whose markings matched Flossie's unusual patterns, AND is currently nursing a littler, just like she is). So we felt at home. Anyway, I gotta do all this stupid work now, I'll talk more about the trip shortly. Work sucks.

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Cats, Good Stuff, Vacation | Comments Off

Feel the filth inside me rise

July 25, 2007 – 1:39 pm

I've been hobnobbing with the Jet Set in the penthouse suites of significant buildings downtown. Well, one suite in one hotel. I did a 2-day long training for my "career development." I don't know if it'll really help my job but it was a welcome respite from the stupid stuff I have to do every day in the office. However, missing Monday and Tuesday uptown means missing my favorite dishes at the Indian food cart. Have I ever told you guys about that?

Reluctant as I was to move to this uptown office, I must admit that lunch options for a vegetarian are pretty good. There's a middle eastern cart right outside my office that makes some of the best falafel I've ever had, and there's restaurants like Burritoville, which although wildly overpriced, at least set a precedent for vegan food in the area. There are also two Indian food carts. Yes, two. I don't know if they are related, but they set up on the same block right down from each other. I notice one gets much more business than the other, so I go to the one with no line.

Both usually offer the same menu (which makes me think they are related): some main dish and a side dish over rice with some salad and roti or chapati. The entrees are things like Chana Masala and Daal, with Aloo Saag as a side dish. And most of the time it kicks ass. They serve the same rotating menu every week and Monday and Tuesday have the best stuff (the aforementioned Masala and Daal). Anyway it's four bucks for this big platter.

Anyway, the training was fun, but now it's back to the grind. But even that's not so bad, provided people don't hassle me too much over the next couple of days. Meanwhile, the kittens continue to grow. All of them have been eating solid food for a while now, and are getting really big. This has also brought up the newest issue, getting them to use the damn litterbox.

I kept putting them into the litterbox but they just haven't been getting it. Lucy doesn't like the corncob litter I'm using (chosen because it's nontoxic and kittens tend to eat everything) so she's not exactly modeling the behavior. Then we noticed the kittens were pooping under the bed. Great. But at least this gave us some 'samples' to use as a guide. I put some in the box and lo and behold, just before we left for work this morning, one of the ginger cats was going to town in the litterbox! A couple of the other kittens witnessed the incident, so hopefully the gears are turning and they'll all get the message. The only problem now is that Lucy, while she won't use it herself, insists on scratching around in the litterbox, tossing litter across the room. This morning she flipped over the whole box. I'm gonna have to nail it to the floor.

Stay tuned for progress photos. One of the kittens is way huger than the others, it's weird!

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Cats, Food, kittens, Office | Comments Off

What you'd like to sell me I'm not buying

July 20, 2007 – 2:07 pm

It's the end of another frustrating week! I guess it wasn't all bad, but I'm building a new web site for my job and I have to use the most irritating content management system software ever created. This CMS replaces the old one, which previously held that title. Before they rolled out the new system, they promised it would alleviate the issues of the old system and generally make life as effortless as sipping a mojito under a palm tree at dusk.

However, the opposite is true.

The system is incredibly convoluted and completely useless, except as a means to drive me insane. It could only have been designed by back-end programmers. No offense, but you how when new products come out, ie Apple Computers, they use words like "elegant," "intuitive," and "robust"? These are the three words that absolutely do NOT describe the system I am working with now. I can't even get into what's wrong with it here, because it would take so long to explain how Rube-Golbergesquely insanely overcomplicated it is. So let's talk about cats!

Three of the four kittens are eating solid food, and I think somebody used the litterbox (something's in it, I dunno what). Walking into the room now is akin to stepping into a racquetball court while somebody shoots ping pong balls at your ankles with a potato gun. Well, it's not that bad, but it probably will be.

Meanwhile, Marbles wasn't seen for a couple of days, then she showed up last night looking slimmer with decidedly mauled udders. We had hoped to get her to have her kittens inside the house, but I think she didn't dig all the other cats around. So her kittens are out there somewhere. After she loaded upon food, she dashed across the street. I followed her a bit to try to figure out where she nested. But instead of darting into the parking lot, she hopped up the stoop across the street, where a man sat smoking. He petted her, and Marbles looked completely at home. Jesus, does she live there? Has she been playing the homeless cat routine in an effort to get two feeding stations in the neighborhood? And is she doing this at more locations around the neighborhood?

Of course my main questions is, if somebody owns her, why the hell isn't she fixed? But I've learned this question falls on largely deaf ears in the neighborhood. I just hope plans are being made for the kittens, and they won't just end up rooting through the garbage in a couple of months. I'll be very interested to see how many people show up at the mobile spay unit on the 30th. Which reminds me, I should put up some flyers for it soon.

Which brings me to another pet-related irritant: pet stores that sell puppies and kittens. the pet store on Broadway off the Kosciusko stop on the J has some of each. They don't really have much space to move around in, and who knows if they ever get taken out of them before getting sold. Besides the less-than-great conditions they live in, the puppies may well be the products of disreputable breeders, aka 'puppy mills,' grinding out as many dogs as possible, health and safety sacrificed for profit (how much money do these places make anyway?)

The Prospect Heights Message Board has a huge thread on a new pet store on Flatbush that reportedly is selling such puppies. Although I feel they may have immediately jumped to worst conclusion (that the owner is trafficking in unhealthy puppy mill dogs, keeping them in unsafe conditions in the store, and indirectly adding to the crisis of the homeless pet population), but so far most of their suspicions seem to be true, although I have not been there myself and am admittedly getting all my info here from a message board. It's the Wikipedia Effect, I guess, but just because anybody can claim anything they want as fact … doesn't necessarily mean it's NOT true, right? Isn't living in the modern age a blast?

In any case, it's a depressing situation to me even if the puppies are registered or whatever they do to prove a dog isn't the result of a mother and son dog gettin' it on. It just goes back to the irrefutable fact that there are so many animals in shelters, why in the hell would anybody buy a retail dog or cat? Frankly, I didn't need to see Best in Show to suspect that people who are into dog breeding are not operating on the same wavelength as most of us.

Anyway, I guess the simplest way to handle these pet stores is just not to shop there. That's easy enough for the one in Prospect Heights: I don't live anywhere near there, and if I did, I'd go to Acme Pet Supplies. In my neighborhood, there's Pets Ahoy, the aforementioned pet store, and the Pigeon store near my house, which may or may not have cat supplies (their hours seem to be something like 'Noon to Noon-thirty, weekdays'). Given the schedules that most New Yorkers maintain, how possible is it to avoid a pet store if it's convenient? For my part, I don't go by Pets Ahoy on a regular basis, I work near a Petland Discounts (they sell rodents and birds, the latter I'm beginning to think shouldn't be there either), its only real failure is that Science Diet cat food is $20 for an 8.5lb bag!