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?

Labels: Job, Phones

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.

Labels: Bad Stuff, Job, Phones

"Do you sell bags of gum?"

The question was pointed towards me, standing in the 'gum' aisle at Walgreen's, trying to decide what bizarre flavor of sugarless gum I would most desired (today it's "Mango Surf"). I turned to the woman and replied, "Um ... I don't work here ..." She apologized, adding how annoying it must be to be mistaken for a drugstore employee. But considering my situation these days, is it really?

I was wearing a tie, as I am forced to do in the office, and I was standing next to a cart full of candy meant for restocking the shelves, so maybe I looked like an earnest go-getter from a previous era. The astute casual anthropologist will note the staff at Walgreen's wears drab polo-style shirts with the company name on it; I was wearing a dark green shirt and a skinny tie I bought in 1993. Maybe I just look like the kind of guy who should be working in a Walgreen's.

I thought of retorting something witty to the woman, like "Well I may not work at Walgreen's but boy, can I market to the older, ultra-affluent set. And their wealthy, layabout children." But I held my tongue. What skills have I gained from my time at this office, what will I take with me to a potential new employer?

I was talking with my coworkers (also soon-to-be laid off) and we determined that all the people we hate in the office are those who do the least, foisting their rightful work onto our more capable shoulders, simply because they outrank us. And as that Dilbert guy noted years ago, the stupidest people really do seem to be the ones who are pushed to the top of the management chain, where as Scott Adams says "they can do the least harm." People with true skills stay mired at the bottom, where they prop up the company's infrastructure. I fear I've been getting pushed into dumbening for several years now.

I've been at this job, in one form or another for over 9 years now. I have the word "director" in my job title. I, as previously noted, wear a tie to work. But what skills do I have? When I first got here I was semi-skilled, with a knowledge of hand-coding HTML and such, which at the time was still something in demand. Now my skillset has atrophied, as I spent valuable programming time on conference calls, flying back and forth to Asia to have pointless meetings with people who would later fire me only because I live in New York and they found this somehow distasteful.

Legions of nerds have come since; they have learned many programming languages as well as the other skills at which I was sort of adept at once, like Photoshop and Quark Xpress (I mean 'InDesign,' apparently no one uses Quark anymore!) Meanwhile I was filling out a Business Requirements Document and sending pestering emails to the regional marketing contacts asking them to update their office list for the website. I can think of ways to render this on a resume, but it fills me with shame to do so.

Plus I'm not even sure I want to continue down this path. Ironically, a fairly well-paid position as a Project Manager might be easier for me to get at this point than the modest remuneration of the semi-skilled 'web grunt' jobs of yore. Maybe I should shoot for that Walgreen's job!

Note: I have 8 days left at this job!

Labels: Bad Stuff, Job

I keep waiting for the heat to subside, but it keeps being hot. I have so many projects to complete this summer, projects I specifically waited for summer to begin, only to find myself unable to complete them because I'm sweating so much I can't hold a paint brush or get a proper grip on the staple gun.

Of course, soon, I will have all the time in the world to do my little household tasks. Unemployment is looming, but for the time being the focus of my paranoia is not so much on the actual getting of a new job so much as on why I'm not sweating over it enough. Maybe it's because I'm doing all my sweating climbing the stairs. But I can't get really freaked about not having a job, which I find odd since I haven't been out of work more than a couple of months since college, and nearly all of those situations were in fairer economic climes than this. It seems like all the people I know who lost their jobs since the economy gave out are still not working regularly, and it recently dawned on me that even though I am technically an adult who moves in certain tech-friendly circles, I somehow don't have any friends or old school chums who are ultra-successful, who have invented something unique or written a one-hit wonder song. In short, my friends are no help in my desire to leech off somebody's good work so I'll have to go ahead and get a job after all. Unless I win the lottery, and I'm starting to think that Quick Pick machine doesn't like me and keeps giving me bad numbers.

I'm trying to formulate a plan for a new web site project, something to demonstrate some skill and maybe be of some use to somebody as well. Considering all these cats we have I have concluded I should build a site to help advertise these cats for adoption, though I don't know who will actually see the site since I'm not exactly Nick Denton. But it will be good to exercise my web muscles and give me something to do at the office since I'm clearly not expending any effort in that area anymore. It's totally way hard to give a hoot about this job now that I know it's going away. I just plan to keep my head down and make sure I come out looking okay in the end.

Now, I just need a name for our home-grown cat shelter adoption joint. I'm thinking of something with the word "hoarders" in the title.

Pictured (from top): Powder, a lovely 14 year old princess I catsat for last week, Hotplate, recent TNR victim, and Granita ("Granny"), recovering from spay surgery in the basement, possibly the mother of pretty much every cat in the neighborhood.

Labels: Adoption, Cat Fixin', Cats, Job

If you thought this site was single-minded before, get ready for "All Job-Loss Talk." As usual, I'm about 18 months behind everybody else on the trends, so you're probably all full up with whining about losing one's job. So maybe I won't do that, even though I sure am thinking about it. I guess I would care more if I liked my job. But here at the flute end of things, I gotta say that the tedium had long won out over the interesting parts of this work. Ideally I'd like to get out of this business altogether and work in a field I actually care about. And I would ... if I hadn't bought this damn house!

The one big trade off of my lousy job was that it provided me with, literally, more money than I knew what to do with. I saved up enough to jointly buy a house, and then had enough left over I was able to let every cat in the neighborhood move in with us. It was the thing that allowed me to say Yes to stuff I would never have been able to otherwise; in some cases it became the thing that forced me to say Yes (would I have all these cats if I had the self-control that limited funds provides?).

So now I am guessing that whatever job I can finagle, it won't be as much as I've been making. I've been looking at my expenses and if I whittle it down to the bare necessities, I might be able to get by doing production art work for a temp agency, which was my very first job in this town, and still one of my favorite things to do (hours spent nudging graphics and tweaking layouts). But that's not a career, and maybe it's time I got one of those.

So I'm going to spend the next 3 months trying to really think of what I'd like to do with my time. Since I know I can scrape by for a while if I have to, I'll try not to let that little voice (who sounds just like my Dad) flare up too much with comments of "Hey! You! You have to get a new job RIGHT NOW. Don't wait for the severance!" I don't know if it will yield anything useful, maybe the best way I can serve humankind is through 6AM conference calls with testy Flash developers and belligerent middle managers.

Labels: Good Stuff, Job, Money

I am back from vacation and finally settling in enough to blog and do things people normally do. We were in St. Thomas again, which was the last place we went for a 'real' vacation almost 2 years ago. We did go to Cleveland last summer, but hey, it's Cleveland. Anyway, as you know, St. Thomas is nothing but beach-lounging and relative-mooching for a week. Jeannie's sister took care of the cats while we were gone, guaranteeing her eventual canonization. People covered for me at work for the first time in recorded history, so this trip did not involve driving halfway across the island to an Internet cafe to do 'urgent' job crap. It was very relaxing; and a good thing it was.

Getting back to work was rough, none of these emails made sense, nor did I remember why I cared about it all. My boss' boss was in town, which should have been a sign. She hadn't been to this office for over a year (she's based in the UK). But she took us out to a fancy lunch and said many nice things about our dept's work. Then like a drunken one-night-stand, the next morning brought with it long faces and muttered apologies.

"This has absolutely no bearing on the quality of your work," she assured us repeatedly. As it turned out, she had come to tell us that our group will be eliminated by the end of October. The work we have been doing will be distributed among the staff who are lucky enough to live in the UK and Asia. Despite the fact that we are a global business and are all well-versed in conference calling and asynchronous group work, management apparently has never been comfortable having the marketing people in the US. So they've quietly hired more marketing people abroad and finally threw the switch.

Reaction was a stunned silence, although later everyone said they had seen it coming. Still it's hard to be told that you're losing your job. I felt a strange sense of relief, like the billion emails I was still catching up with suddenly just don't matter anymore. Unfortunately, they still do sort of matter, I have 3 more months to slog through before emancipation. So how do you ramp up the faux-enthusiasm for work you've been barely maintaining when you know you're getting canned anyway?

I guess I can stop thinking up ways to distinguish myself in the field. No more favors! Troubleshoot your OWN printer difficulties! Create your own PDF files, dammit! I have to figure out what my job has been for the past 3 years so I can update my resume (circa 1999)!

I'm getting a severance "package" which is some money and near as I can figure, not much else. I have the option of paying for my own health insurance and receiving $405 a week from unemployment. I'd be fine with all of this but I'll be out of work going into November, not known as a great time to find a new job. I might get a new job before the deadline, but then I don't get the severance dough, right. Screw that! I wanna get paid!

So now I am faced with the notion of finding a new career, mid-30s style. I sure hope I don't have to work in the same industry as I have for the past decade. I would like to think I won't have to do web-related work, but what else is there? I have a master's degree in poetry; my main skill still is a knowledge of Microsoft Office slightly above that of a novice. I gotta find a way to work in an industry I actually care about, like music or art or cats.

Cursory job searches are demonstrating little so far. I could get a job driving the ASPCA's mobile adoption van, that would be pretty sweet. But maybe I have some other skill I could apply in the service of a discipline I admire, yet to be revealed. I dunno. All I know is I can't believe I have to stay here 3 more months before I can get outta here! Do they really think I'm gonna give 110% anymore? No! I shall give no more than 65% at any time until Halloween.

Labels: Bad Stuff, Job, Vacation

I've spent all morning downloading applications of dubious utility to my company-owned Blackberry. The reason: the company has seen fit to start blocking all manner of websites AGAIN. They did this before, blocking nearly every site that one might find entertaining or distracting. But then they relaxed the restriction and allowed some site, like Gmail (though they blocked the gChat feature). Then a few months ago, restrictions seemed to really relax, and we had unfettered access to all but the most offensive and evil sites (ie, hotrepublicansex.com, etc.) But over the last few days, they have been systematically clamping down again. I have a theory that you can gauge how well a company is doing by how much leeway they allow their employees online. So I guess the company is hitting the skids again. Oh well.

I now have Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr and the Opera Mini Browser installed. It's not as easy to use as their Web counterparts, but at least I don't have to feel marooned at the office. Honestly without these distractions (plus selected blogs), how could I be expected to survive a day at this Mediocrity Factory? Well, I could probably live without Twitter but maybe I'm just not following enough interesting people. Story of my life.

P.S. Don't forget! See SPIKE the Angora cat at the North Shore Adoption Van this SUNDAY in Park Slope, outside NYC Pet, 5th Ave @Union/President, Brooklyn.

Labels: Bad Stuff, Gadgets, Job, Tedium

The local falafel cart has several chefs, and they all suck, except for this one kid. Bad acne and indecipherable accent, for some reason he takes this stuff seriously, dressing up a standard falafel on rice with a ton of vegetables, both raw and grilled. While other guys are content to throw some iceberg lettuce on rice and toss in some dessicated falafel balls, he always fries the falafel at order, and jazzes up the salad with red cabbage, peppers, scallions, carrots and broccoli. Oh yeah, and french fries and eggplant! I skip the mysterious 'white sauce' and ask for liberal amounts of hot sauce, although he put so many jalapenos in already I have to towel off my head, I'm sweating so much.

The other guys who work there on other days merely toe the line to an indifferent lunch crowd, why does he give so much extra effort when he clearly doesn't have to? I dunno. I certainly can't imagine doing the same thing at my day job. Maybe he actually likes what he does for a living; what a foreign concept!

Labels: Food, Good Stuff, Job, Lunch, Vegan

For some reason my company network isn't blocking blogger anymore. This is probably a temporary oversight. But not only that, they stopped blocking Youtube! Wow! The filter they use has a dynamic capability and can filter on a case-by-case basis. Thus, I was unable to access content even on sites to which I had access. For instance, I could view photos but not video on Flickr. But it's all working now for some reason. Yet I have no great burning desire to post anything, since I'm mired in UAT for our new company website.

So in lieu of content here's a video of Georgie in his new home, setting up to pounce on something.

Labels: Adoption, Job, Video

I keep forgetting to blog, or ramble on at length, as the case may be. Now that I can't access blogger from work I rarely post, since when I'm at home I am fulfilled with litterbox-scooping and cat-medicating. Our newest foster cat is actually with the vet right now, we suspect he swallowed something indigestible or he has some kind of virus. I really hope they figure out the situation fast, not only because I hate to think of him stuck at the vet's but also because they charge an ungodly 'boarding' fee for overnight stays. Not to belittle the industry but damn, vets have it made! They can basically charge whatever they want and almost never get called on malpractice. That, and the fact that their charges can't complain about their bedside manor. I'm selling them way short, and if I wasn't so squeamish about guts I'd probably be one, but again, damn!

Anyway, back to blogging, the increased filtration by my company's network finally forced me to learn about aggregators, so now I happily use Google Reader to read most sites; this allows me to read all the blogspot blogs I like, nicely circumventing the ban. Of course it makes your blogroll look like a bunch of spammy emails and you realize that once you strip away the photos and fancy layouts, most blogs are kind of boring. Especially when you can't read the snarky comments, that's where the real action is most of the time. Lucky for me, Brownstoner is still unhindered by my network's prejudices, those guys crack me up.

I should take my site off Blogger anyhow, since they've been deleting people's music posts without telling them. But again, why would I use up my free time doing computer stuff better suited to my hours on the clock? Anyhow, I think I might be able to blog this site directly through Flickr ... there may be a lot more pictures on this site soon!

Labels: Bad Stuff, Cats, Job, Web

I took an actual sick day for the first time in years. Sure, many a time have I stayed home ill, only to end up working as much as usual thanks to the magic of VPN. And I intended to do the same yesterday, my laptop all set up and retrieving email after email. But I just couldn't stay focused long enough to do anything, so I went back to bed and proceeded to sleep for 7 hours.

I can't tell yet if I'm over the illness, which had no symptoms other than 'exhaustion.' I kind of suspect stress had something to do with it but that doesn't really narrow it down much; stress is pretty central to living in New York. Not that I mind it most of the time, but there's the stress of jamming onto a subway car to 'win' a good seat, and then there's the stress of producing corporate websites whose target audience may or may not exist. Plus meanwhile, all around me people have been getting laid off left and right. My morale is soaring.

Today I'll go into pay the piper, to catch up on all the work I missed yesterday as well as whatever they throw at me today. This double-whammy effect is what usually keep me in the office no matter my condition, but I'm hoping that my time out yesterday will have some positive attitudinal effect. Maybe I won't mind all the work if I'm feelin' positive! Yeah

Labels: Health, Job

So I'm back from Singapore again, another business trip of dubious utility. I didn't have too much trouble adjusting to the 13 hour time difference while I was there, but I'm having a hard time getting back on schedule here. I keep waking up at 5 AM and it's annoying. I guess I should think of something practical to do. Barring that, I can write a post. Singapore was nice and warm, and I finally checked out Little India and had some really good vegetarian Indian food. It's nice to wander into a place and look around at the buffet to see nothing but vegetarian food just as a matter of course. The only thing to worry about is what stuff had butter in it, but when in Rome ...

Which is another annoying thing: my company hanged its web filter process AGAIN, so now my website is no longer blocked. Yay; however, they now block all blogger related sites, so I can't get to the control panel to post new entries. Grrr. I think if I had MT or WP or something I could do everything through my domain and not have this issue. But the likelihood of me sitting around, figuring out at long last how to put together a real blog seems small. I guess I'll just have save up my A-material for early-morning posts like these! Lucky you.

While I was gone our little kitten got neutered and vaccinated, so soon he'll be on the adoption market. He won't have any trouble finding a home, he's super cute and very gregarious, plus he has a funny, froggy little voice. Quite a package. It almost seems unfair to have such an easy case. Most of our other adoption cases were much harder, but adopting out a friendly 4-month old kitten sounds like something we could do in our sleep. Let's hope so, anyway.

Labels: Adoption, Job, kittens

Now that I'm in my new office, I am surrounded by people I don't know. I suspect they worked at the same company as I before we were bought out, but who knows? I worked from home most of my career and then worked for a couple years in a satellite office. So I don't know most of em.

There's a guy one cubicle-group over from me, he's middle-aged, salt-and-pepper hair, wire-frame glasses. He is showing all the signs of Mid-life Crisis Syndrome. He's in his late 40s, works in finance, BUT: he drives a kickass motorcycle. See, ladies? He's still cool! He's still cool.

How do I know he drives a kickass motorcycle? Because he wears a leather jacket and carries a helmet in every day. I suppose it's possible he just walks around with the jacket and helmet on, but I have to hope there is a kickass motorbike in there somewhere. It saddened me for a while, he was just like the guy in Weeds who tries to capture some modicum of machismo by getting a Harley and growing a handlebar mustache (played by Andy Milder, pictured above in all of his badassery). But he runs afoul some REAL bikers and gets knocked off a guardrail and winds up in a wheelchair for most of season 3.

The other day I was walking past Mid-life Crisis guy's cubicle and I overheard him on his phone. He was speaking German. Then it dawned on me: This guy's not having a mid-life crisis, he's just German. Somehow that makes his behavior completely acceptable, I don't know why. What do Germans do when they want to remind themselves how cool they are? Buy another pair of leather pants? No one knows.

Labels: Funny to Me, Job

I bought my first blazer since my bar mitzvah days today. What Century 21 could not provide, I found at TJ Maxx. What a store! Actually it was a minor miracle, they only had one in my size and it was just the sort of discounted, innocuous design I was looking for. I take a 38-long, which apparently is rare in these venues. They let me keep the hanger so I'm just gonna leave it in my office all the time in case I need it.

Next: pocket squares?

Labels: Job, Tedium

I usually post during the weekdays here, but I have been stymied in my efforts lately. As you may know, my company was bought out by another company some months back and we are finally being switched over to their network. This has been pretty annoying all around, but everything has been hammered out now and I enjoy full access to the many wonderful opportunities that await me at the new company.

Sidebar: I'm getting so sick of the way office people use the word "opportunities" when they really mean "failure." Instead of saying they screwed something up, they always say they see "areas of opportunity" like they did somebody a favor.

Anyhow, one unfortunate opportunity in this regard is that the new company apparently thinks blogger is dangerous to productivity and has it blocked. This will either have the result of finally, after 5 years at this, to move this operation fully to the server instead of using Blogger's infrastructure. Or maybe I won't bother.

Even worse for me, Flickr is also blocked. I hate that. Half the time I spend during the day is checking to see if anybody has posted new cat photos! Hey, to thine own self be true. So I'm thinking maybe I'll get one of those nifty iPhone things and write it off as a business expense.

In any case, all this upheaval will culminate with me moving offices yet again, a little further downtown. For some reason, nobody is able to tell us when exactly when we will move, but I hope they give us at least a few more days; my cubicle is full of cat food I need to lug home still.

On the home front, I am happy to report the Mugsy (pictured above with perennial worrywart Freddie) is feeling much better and is back to looking like his usual disheveled self. Thanks to Empty Cages Collective, I got some Lysine gel to add to his food, which appears to have helped him fight off the infection. He still could use a good powerwashing but this is about as good as he ever looked.

Labels: Cats, Feral, Job, Tedium

I took an actual vacation from work, but now I am back and I am trying to determine if the time off has made any difference. So far today it seems that all the work I left before is still here, plus a bunch of stupid crap that has piled up in the mean time. I don't mind it so much since I can pull the "hey, I just got back from vacation and I am swamped" for the next week or so. I suppose the fact that I don't mind this means the vacation succeeded in relaxing me adequately. I blew off just enough steam to once again resume my cog-in-the-wheel status.

In two weeks my office moves downtown, which would be interesting if it didn't mean I will have to start dressing up for work. I think I have to start wearing ties and shirts that tuck in. Does anyone know if they make pre-tied neckties that can be buttoned in the back? Not a clip-on, which is pretty obvious, this would be something that would look like a real tie from the front but be easy to attach in the back (the clasp would be covered by the collar). I looked for this but I couldn't really find any; doesn't this seem odd? Why do people waste valuable time tying their ties every single day? I thought about just loosening the knot so I could put it back on, but this tends to rumple the tie. Is this a million-dollar idea the corporate world has been waiting for?

Anyway, I'm back. Our vacation consisted of a short jaunt to the Greater Cleveland Area, to visit some people up there and generally not do anything. The highlight of the trip was holing up in the lovely Super 8 motel, eating junk food and watching cable television. Of course after 3 days of this, we were both totally sick of junk food and agreed that even with 60 channels there was absolutely nothing to watch (although we could almost get by on just Bravo and Animal Planet). We hung out with my sister's family and finally got to see lifelong friend James' new house. We hit up Corky & Lenny's, Tommy's Diner (soy milkshakes!), Aladdin's (best baba ever), and drank free Starbucks the entire time using the gift cards our bosses had given us last Christmas. We ran through the endless aisles of Giant Eagle and the non-crowded Whole Foods, went to the mall and bought some clothes, and remembered to swing by Big Fun on the way to the airport to buy some crap (actually I bought some tin crickets to help train the cats to do my bidding). In short, we lived like Ohioans, if only for a short time.

There is something to be said for sequestering yourself away from your life. I kind of scoffed at that sort of thing in the past, but the older you get, the more necessary it may be. Even if we hadn't gone to Cleveland, we could have booked a room at some local fleabag motel to get out of our house for a couple days. The remainder of our vacation was spent at home, and although we got a lot of work done on the house, that's exactly the problem: you can't sit at home and do nothing. I've tried before but sooner or later I find myself weeding, or fixing something, or god forbid, cleaning. In that Super 8 with the uncomfortable headboard and nonexistent maid service, we were forced to actually do nothing, which is harder than it sounds.

Anyway, when we returned to Brooklyn we set about out our tasks, which included hitting the newish Ikea. We've been in our house for almost 2 years and we still haven't bought any furniture or anything. My night stand is a storage chest; Jeannie's is a chair. Our couch (a gift from our pal Sean M, who has basically outfitted our entire home with his hand-me-downs) once was an elegant fixture from the 50's, but it has been used to the point that it cuts off leg circulation when you sit on it for a while. I don't know that I ever had any political issue with the opening of the Brooklyn Ikea, but if I did, I forgot all about it when I realized we could outfit most of the house for less than one couch from Room and Board.

Ikea was nice enough, we picked out tons of stuff, then came home and bought it online. Annoyingly, a few items were not available online, so we'll still have to go back there at some point. The shipping costs were also outrageous, but we still came in several hundred bucks below my intended ceiling. Who knows when we actually will get the stuff, this doesn't seem to be their strong point.

Labels: Cleveland, Good Stuff, Job, Motel, Ohio, Vacation

Oh god, life is passing me by! And by 'life' I mean summer. Summer kind of sucks for adults, especially when the weather is nice out, like it has been lately. Sure, most of the summer was super hot and I honestly didn't mind coming to my windowless office to bask in the air conditioning that forced me to bring a sweater to work. But it's been so temperate lately, I have been increasingly despising that force that drags me back into this hell hole every day.

Or maybe it's just because my job sucks.

Of course, some would disagree with me. Most of the time I don't have all that much to do. But in the past few months I have had to work like never before, often without much guidance. If I was doing work I cared about, this would be an awesome opportunity to really dig in and test my skill set and grow as a person. Unfortunately those jobs that would provide this rich, philosophically pleasing experience (Kittenhugger, Freestyle Rapper) do not pay the bills. Instead, I'm doing work I don't like for people who demand too much out of us.

Meanwhile I gotta deal with unhelpful tech people who always treat my questions with this weird threatened defensiveness, as if helping me do my stupid job somehow robs them of their elvish secrets and render them only +2 strength and agility. They're cagey and refuse to answer questions straight. They do ask me to call them, but frankly, their English is bad and their phone connections are scratchy and I fear this would be even more intolerable.

Clearly I'm feeling burned out. The remedy: vacation! It's been a year since the last one, and this one promises even less work than the last one! Yes, I'm actually hoping to have no contact with the office while I'm out. Of course, it's pretty doubtful this will be possible, but I swear I won't check my email until I return.

And where does the burned-out web grunt go to unwind? Cleveland, Ohio! Yes, one of the most sought-after cities for people looking for an immersively relaxing experience, Cleveland is synonymous with luxury and sheer happiness. Who can stay stressed out while the soothing fingers of the Cuyahoga river caress their aching muscles? Who can refuse a third helping of zebra mussel salad? Who can resist the temptation of that part of town so relaxing it's called 'The Flats'? I'll be flatlining in no time!

Labels: Famliy, Friends, Job, Vacation

I've been back from my trip for almost a week now. I keep trying to think of something interesting post about the experience, but every time I try I just feel tired. I'm sure that Singapore and Hong Kong are fascinating places but I didn't have any time to see any of it. The work schedule was relentless, leaving me little time to do anything of interest. I do gotta say, if ever you need to take a 16 hour plane ride, make sure you fly at least business class and under no circumstances take an American airline company. For some reason the US doesn't know how to make people comfortable on long flights. I had to take a United flight from Singapore to Hong Kong, the shortest flight of my trip at 4 hours. The trip was no uncomfortable, I had lots of leg room and the plane was also basically empty. But compared to the amenities on the Singapore Air and Cathay Pacific flights I took, it was like riding a bus across the ocean. Cathay Pacific in particular provided individual chamber-like seats that basically force you to lie down and watch movies for 20 hours straight, while stuffing you full of food and offering you a selection of whiskeys. If I win the lottery, I'm booking a series of consecutive flights, so I can spend weeks in this state, without ever getting off the plane. Even the turbulence felt pretty good.

Anyway, now I'm back and have exponentially more work to do, plus I'm feeling residual jet lag effects, and the construction work on the floor below my office continues unabated, the pounding and drilling louder than ever before. I should have stolen those noise-canceling headphones they handed out!

• Photos of my trip

Labels: Job

I'm off to Asia for a week! What an exotic location to go sit in a faceless office building and share Powerpoint presentations! I am pleased to see it will actually be hotter here than this equatorial city. I have a side trip to Hong Kong that will also afford me much opportunity for board room-gazing and airport line-waiting. If anything interesting happens, I'm sure I'll post about it. If you don't see anything here for the next week, you'll know why.

Labels: Business Trips, Job

Today's office phrase I would most like to ban for the rest of the century: "Quick Question"

Offense: It is always a lie, and an impudent lie at that, since in its two-word phrasing it defines the shortest possible time spent reasoning and responding. Yet, the questions and the people who utter this forbidden phrase always end up taking forever.

A true quick question would be, "Should I get out of your face?"

YES.

Or, "Am I annoying you?"

YES.

Labels: Bad Stuff, Job

I'm at the tail end of working 3 shifts over the past 32 hours. I had just enough time to get home, go to bed and then get up and come back to work. I have been overseeing the launch of a new corporate web site, every bit as exciting as it sounds. There's nothing like trying to string together several disparate tech teams to simultaneously launch various connected web sites, finding out the hard way that Rsync means the lynch pin of the whole project won't be published until everything else is done, totally screwing up the delicate ballet of timed launches we had scheduled. Plus we found that our server mirror suck bigtime, so people in New York were seeing something totally different than the people in Hong Kong. And the people in Singapore, well, they were seeing (or not seeing) things nobody else was seeing. Why? No one knows.

And no one cares. Another boring web site has been launched and I'm kind of spacey. Tomorrow I'll be back to normal, and it'll be like none of this happened. Will my work schedule lighten? That has been my major motivation for the past couple of months, that once this is over I can go back to loafing, office-stylee. Of course, it's times like these I momentarily consider I should spend some time thinking about a career I might actually like profoundly, and how much more fulfilling that would be. Then I get an email marked URGENT (like 95% of the emails I receive now) telling me the URL redirection isn't working on an orphan page in Jersey (the old one, not the new one). And I can't even work up the energy to explain that the likelihood that anyone will ever notice it is so slight that we need not waste precious sweat glands over it, but they claim they're only upset because they're getting leaned on by the higher-ups, who no doubt are being leaned upon by their higher-ups, and nobody will admit to being personally invested in anything, only that they are totally not taking the blame for this one. No sireebob. Now, what was I thinking about? Oh yeah, that Britney Spears, she's like such a ho bag! N'est-ce pas?

Labels: Job

Here's a nice half-assed post! I'm totally busy with my stupid job, full of stupid people asking stupid questions for jerks. It may get better at the end of the month, or way worse. It remains to be seen.

We had a bunch of relatives over the house for a week. It just so happened they showed up for exactly the same duration as the horrible heat wave, and I didn't remember until the last day that we do in fact have an air conditioner that sort of works. Oops! But it was fun anyway, they brought duty free liquor from the Virgin Islands, we went to Brighton Beach, and they availed themselves of the local fish market, the little diner down the street, and Lincoln Chicken and Pizza, all places we never patronize. It made me realize if we were non-vegetarians, this little corner of the neighborhood does all right food-wise, assuming you're not that interested in being healthy. The diner sounded really good, too bad they're closed by 6pm every day. And Lincoln got all-around good marks, except for the fish. But for wings and pizza, you could do worse.

Despite our macho claims that we had neutered every cat on the street, we found a few more. We've trapped one so far and gotten him fixed (he has his own interesting story). There's at least one more out there, not to mention the local Gawker cat who is pretty clearly Marbles' daughter! Cat adoption is rolling on, very, very slowly, but we did get Shaolin a new home. Four more to go! Frankly I just want to get this batch moved out before the next charity case shows up!

Meanwhile, I hemmed and hawwed about joining the Bushwick CSA for so long that when I finally decided to do it, it was too late and they were all filled up for the season. This is why I'm a bad vegetarian, you'd think I would have been first on the list, but fear of too many vegetables spooked me into reticence.

I doubt anything interesting will happen here until the end of June, when my workload will lighten a smidge. Unless you all wanna hear about how the tech team returned us a sizing for a project fully 10x what they initially estimated, and have the chutzpah to think we will agree to fund the project at this level, when everyone knows there's a perfectly-functional javascript workaround that would take nearly no effort to implement. Suckahhhhhs!

Labels: Bad Stuff, Cat Fixin', Job, Tedium, Visitors, Weather

How to Get Something Done in a Big Company the Requires Intra-departmental Funding in 13 EZ Steps:

1. Decide that your project cannot go any further until another department is brought in to do work because they own some back-end services they don't let anybody else touch. Sigh heavily at the prospect of getting them to do anything for you.
2. Approach them, pleasantly and gingerly, like approaching a young squirrel.
3. Ask them if they wouldn't mind doing the work that is, after all, their job to do in the first place.
4. They respond: Please have a funding number set up. Secured funding is a must before they can even consider the scope of work.
5. Ask how much money should be assigned to the funding number.
6. They respond they won't know how much it will cost until they begin the project.
7. But to begin the project, they will need that funding number.
8. Which, of course, will need to be set up with a certain amount of money. Spend about an hour trying to wrap your head around this, then pick a huge amount of dough to apply funding.
9. Ask the folks in the Finance Department to set up funding number with this funding. They won't return your emails or calls for one week. When you finally get a hold of them you are fuming and irrational, to which they will respond with insulted shock. Funding number will be created with less money than requested, even though the money 'belongs' to your department.
10. Return to 1st department armed with funding number. They respond with polite frustration, explaining that your funding number is not compatible with their billing system. You try to ask "Why didn't you tell me this in the first place?" but suddenly they no longer understand English.
11. After begging them to complete the work which is now weeks past due, they will finally admit they can do it once one of their Finance Department contacts alters the funding number to match their system.
12. With the money in place, the department can finally get to work. Immediately the entire department goes on vacation. Meanwhile, somebody else finds out about the funding number and, rather than go through all the trouble of setting one up themselves, uses it for their own project. Funding runs out; the project is now 3 months behind schedule and the boss is starting to notice.
13. Send frantic emails to every single person you dealt with during the course of this ordeal and wire some 'emergency' money into the account. The work is done by the next morning, perfectly. Except "American" is misspelled. Which is your fault. Blame it on the contractor in India.

Labels: Funny to Me, Job

You remember that Kurt Vonnegut story, "Harrison Bergeron"? It's the overly-pointed tale of life in the not-too-distant-future when the government makes every equal, not just legally but physically. So everybody has actual devices implanted on their bodies to reign in their innate abilities so everyone is no better than the weakest link in the chain. In this case, it's the mom character, who has no devices at all. Anyway the story is like junior high-grade pedantry about how conformity is bad and how we shouldn't let our leaders legislate too much of our lives, yahyah yah.

I bring this story up because of the father character, he has a little radio embedded in his brain that sends out a piercing tone every so often, "to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains." The noise is just distracting enough to make him lose his train of thought. You see, for the past few weeks they have been demolishing the building next door to our office. There is much drilling, much hammering, some exploding. I'm supposed to be working on Important Business Work here, but the constant pounding is making it hard to think straight.

So I'm thinking of the dad in the story, how he can't remember what he's thinking out after a few minutes; that's what it's like in here. I am frustrated and antsy, but have no idea what to do about it. The simplest tasks are hard to bring to fruition, and I find myself looking forward to the lunch hour, if only to have a reason to get outside the building for a few minutes.

Yet I also feel oddly elated. Outside of the annoyance of the noise, nothing phases me too much. I can't remember the things that are supposed to be worrying me for more than a minute at a time, so consequently I don't feel burdened by them. I am dimly aware that this is an artificial state and that once away from the sound of the piledrivers all my daily worries will come home to roost (most likely as I try to fall asleep). But for the moment I take comfort in the fact that all this noise is dumbing me down enough to feel rather happy.

I think I might get another credit card!

Labels: Funny to Me, Job, Office

I'm hard-pressed to think of anything to write about that's not cat-related, it's really the only interesting aspect of my life these days. I could tell you that the reason I've been so distracted of late is due to the Amazingly Important Web Strategy piece I'm supposed to be working on for my job. I have been tasked with coming up with the Vision and Mission of a thoroughly new site, which will no doubt change forever the face of our industry. Oh yes.

Of course, like everything we do around here, we'll start off strong, with everybody excited about whatever new concepts get brought up. But slowly, enthusiasm will die, and the field will empty once they realize that somebody will have to maintain and work on it over time. Everybody wants a piece of it but nobody wants to work for it. My business is the corporate equivalent of the guy who stealthily goes to the bathroom when the dinner check comes to be split up. Dick move, pal.

Anyway I just completed a brilliant outline (!!! haven't made one of these since like high school), and I'm now translating it to PowerPoint, or The Place Where Creativity Goes to Die. We call these files 'decks' for some reason. What does that mean? It's not a backyard patio platform and it's certainly not deck in the way British douchebags say it. Is it a deck of cards? No, but I assume that's the closest definition, considering the application's insistence of calling the individual screens "slides," as though any PowerPoint presentation could be as fascinating as your family's vacation to the Grand Canyon. I wish they would use terminology from filmstrip technology; each new frame could be preceded by a loud beep!

Labels: Job, Tedium

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.

Labels: BARC, Cat Fixin', Cats, Feral, Job, Office, Strays, Tedium

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Labels: Health, Job, Midtown, Office, Shopping, The City

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.

Labels: Cats, Good Stuff, Job, Vacation

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!

Labels: Cats, Food, Job, kittens, Office

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!

Labels: Bad Stuff, Cats, Feral, Job, kittens, Pets, Strays, The City

I hate to talk about the weather instead of something more substantial (like, um, how smart pigs are or fantasy holidays), but this weather sucks. It's like March got really nice for a couple of days only to make us feel the pain of this crap all the more. I was lamenting that South By Southwest is going on, as it drains the city of most of our bands, for better or worse. But I'm not going out in this muck tonight.

What's worse is that as a homeowner, I'm supposed to do something about it on my little plot of sidewalk. I guess I'll throw some salt out (thoughtfully left behind by previous owner), but you can't really shovel this sleety/icy/puddly stuff. You remember the scene in Fargo when the cop talks to the guy while he's sweeping his driveway ("And then he says, 'Geez, I'm goin' crazy out there at the lake'")? Imagine that falling from the sky, that's what it's doing on the streets of New York.

Times like these I wish my building had its own underground connection to the subway. I think all building within a block of a subway station should have tunnels built so we don't have to walk outside. Better yet, let me stay the hell at home and not bother with any of this crap.

Plans for this weekend include hanging drywall on the ceiling in the basement. This will either go smoothly or the ceiling will collapse upon us and kill us. So if I don't update this blog for, like, a couple of weeks, you'll know I didn't make it.

Labels: House, Job, Mass Transit, The City, Weather

My boss said I could leave early today because of the weather (which I think is actually her guilty conscience cuz she almost never comes into the office at all). But I can't because I'm taking a training that runs from 3-6PM. So that sucks. The likelihood of getting a real snow day is pretty slim at this point in my life. It's times like these I feel should rationalize my returning to telecommuting all the time ("I could work through any blizzard! And I will, too! Sure!") But I'm just about to pass the one-year mark as a real employee, so with my annual pay increase looming I guess I won't rock the boat right now. Plus I'm still not convinced I'm indispensable around here yet.

Anyway, this training is a breeze: it's a web-based teleconference so I can sit here and do the crossword while I'm learning a new content management system for the web site. Which of course I could do from home as well ... damn. Now it's too late to get home before the training starts.

Labels: Job, Office