Phones

Phones

Let's do the time warp

October 29, 2009 – 2:55 pm

I went out with some of my soon-to-be-fired coworkers last night. It was a lot of fun but I exercised poor boozing form and today feel awful. Today is our last 'real' day on the job, since tomorrow will mostly be us dumping our company laptops and Blackberrys and probably having Security escort us out the door. But of course, the real work has been drying up for some time. I get a couple of emails a day with some small matter to address and the rest of the time I can sit here wondering when the crushing enormity will hit, when I realize the money is running out and I still don't have a job …

I've never been out of work more than a month or so, and that was when I graduated with my MA in Poetry and couldn't find work in my lil' college town for 3 months. Since then I've been gainfully employed. I get so antsy when I'm out of work usually, it spurs me onto the job market like Garfield on lasagna. You should see what a Yes-Man I turn into when I get in the interview room. It's quite a skill.

But I haven't yet felt that fear seep in, mostly in part to the generous severance package ($$$) I have been given. One wonders what it costs a company to keep an employee at a desk in their office, what overhead arises, since they're basically giving me 6 months' salary to leave right now. I guess there's a way things are done in Corporate America, though much of its lessons are lost on me. My whole time here has been full of inexplicable decisions by management, with strange, almost insidious behavior from the those in a position to fire vast swaths of the company. I have to assume it all makes sense to someone, cuz I sure don't get it.

I'm all packed up here, it should be pretty simple to walk away from this office. I'm still having no end of trouble getting my new mobile phone to work; I suspect the Radio Shack management might have a thing or two in common with my (ex) company. But, rest assured, I soon will be texting, tweeting, sexting and swtweexting, sending missives rife with bad usage to my similarly-dyseducated cohorts. OMFG. Hey, wasn't that part of the title over CBGB's?

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Job | Comments (2)

The Finish Line

October 28, 2009 – 9:35 am

I'm a couple of days away from employment freedom and financial slavery. Work has dried up nicely, most of my work has been farmed out to people around the globe, or just forgotten entirely. I have about a day and a half of official workday left, and then on Friday I have to come in to dump all my office gear and then I fly the coop.

I just picked up my own cell phone to replace the Blackberry they let me use for the past year. I'm gonna miss it, especially the whole not-paying for anything on it. I decided to go with a pay-as-you-go plan from Virgin, as my calculations put it at the absolute cheapest for the best service. So far that has been sort of true.

I am on my 2nd phone so far, the first one had a defective camera, so they just gave me another. This one seems to be having trouble running its applications, giving me lovely Java errors when I try to access the Email program. Yes, I'm getting a bunch of non-phone related stuff on this, if only because I would like to continue to appear to be a "with it" with my "finger" on the "pulse" of something. Which is hard when the damn thing won't work.

So it looks like it's back again to Radio Shack for me! It has dawned on me that perhaps the root of the problem is that I shouldn't have gone in that godforsaken store in the first place. Radio Shack has been in decline since kids stopped building crystal radio sets, and in their death rattle they decided to become glorified cell phone stores. And yet, they can't even seem to get that right. Why is it still so hard to get things that just work when you purchase them? Everything has to be riddled with issues and no one knows how to fix them.

They will invariably just give me another phone, which probably has something wrong with it as well. I have 1.5 days to get a working phone (the Radio Shack is right across the street from my office). After that, god help us all.

I'm going out for drinks with the ladies of my office today, though, that should be pretty interesting.