You are currently browsing the archives for October, 2004.
October 26th, 2004 at 5:25 am
I think I overdid it a bit over the past few days, and it caught up with me today at work. Friday night started with stopping over at home before heading down to Scarbs for something that remarkably resembled a kebab and reasonable quantities of raucous behavior from large numbers of people wearing helmets, followed by going for a strop south and then around the city for a few hours.
Saturday morning saw me up again and realising that I needed to do a lot of shopping. I needed several birthday presents, an engagement present and a shiny set of extremely sharp knives. That was enough effort in itself, but it was then followed by the relative engagement party, a 21st, a short batting of eyelids that one would be hesitant to deem as sleep, getting up, play rehearsals, dropping off to visit the nicest man on the face of the earth (also coincidentally my brother) for his birthday for a couple of hours, then getting along to see Resident Evil: Apocalypse at a session time that meant there would be a maximum of six hours between when I got home and when I would need to be up again to make it to work on time on Monday, minus the time it would take for a shower.
All in all this meant I had a great time on the weekend, but arrived at work a few minutes late with my tie and breakfast in my pockets, shirt half-undone, again unshaven, even more unkempt, having emerged from bed a mere 20 minutes previously and with a breath odour that would make a hungover pirate blush. Comments about my freshly-risen-from-the-dead appearance were the order of the day from arriving coworkers, but I stuck the whole day out (oh alright, I took off half an hour early due to extra-seediness) answering calls and managing to sound perky and bright while intravenously gorging myself on coffee and energy drinks.
Of course at lunch, the boss brought up the fact that since it’s about fire season, the early shift will soon start at 7am, 25 minutes drive from where I live. After brief plots to bring a fry-grill to work to make breakfast on the front counter, I told him it wouldn’t be a problem… I’d just be that little bit extra surly in the mornings. He wanted to know how he could tell the difference.
I hate being trumped.
October 22nd, 2004 at 3:01 pm
So I get to work this morning, unshaven, unkempt and 25 minutes late, and as I come around the corner, I run into my boss. He just smiles, squints a little, looking into the sun and says “On a day like today mate, I would’ve just kept riding”. Then he looks off into space semi-contemplatively, and goes over to unlock the server room. So I waddle in to my desk, kick my PC over and begin to unwrap my breakfast from its sealed-for-my-protection foil packaging.
The place isn’t all bad.
October 20th, 2004 at 5:42 am
If you haven’t noticed, the front page of my website says that I am a cheap, dirty whore who doesn’t pay his livejournal bill. Of course, I can explain. After finally receiving the invevitable “Dear sir, where is our DAMN MONEY!?!?” letter from Honda (who were actually very friendly about everything) after that whole turning their bike into sushi incident (soon to be made into a major motion picture ). So I’d shelled out a large wad of cash and was feeling particularly stingy, when all of a sudden my lj account payment is due. “Twenty-five bucks!” I say to myself, suddenly offended, and decide that there is surely a much cooler, better, free blogger or journal software package I could run to feed my main page.
Much to my disappointment, after looking at wads and wads of packages looking for something free and simple that would neatly archive my old posts and display the most recent five posts, possibly with comment functionality, I found nada. “Wait!” I think, “I have a degree in Computer Science, I could write my own!”. Of course, this urge passed in a remarkably short period of time. If anyone knows of something that’d fit my needs, I’d be interested to know. I want it to output to a pretty plain text feed and let my CSS take care of the rest. Something like postnuke or a giant content management system would be serious overkill.
In other news, I’ve been suitably impressed with Gmail since I signed up for an account. Yes, I know that they have robots trawling my emails to try and sell me relevant text-ads, and yes, some lifeless geek is probably being paid by Google right now to fondle my personal details and read my emails so that they can compile a personal dossier on me containing samples of my DNA they already have that they collected through the public sewerage system and all of this data can be subpoenaed by the CIA and NSA in order to frame me for acts of terrorism in retaliation for publicly denouncing Microsoft which pays off 72% of the United States congress and I’m headed for Guantanamo Bay oh dear lord it’s all over why not just end it all now… but aside from that, it’s a very good service. It also has a comparative nanite of advertising contrasted with the intrusive onslaught of the advertising war-machine that rubs itself over Yahoo and its ilk. If anyone’s interested in an invite, give us a hoy because I’ve got half a dozen hanging around gathering dust.
October 7th, 2004 at 11:12 pm
This morning I faced a vocational dilemma, answer the ringing phone sitting next to me and listen to the woes of some unfortunate soul who has had their attempts at working molested by something going pear-shaped on their PC, or take another bite of my pumpkin scone.
Thankfully the impasse was resolved by my workmate being so starved for activity that he picked up his phone and belted in the dial code to answer my phone from his desk, but the situation illustrates quite well the quandary I’ve been facing with work in general. A pumpkin scone interests me ten-fold more than any particular aspect of my job. I’m convinced that I don’t want to work in IT anymore, it’s never really floated my boat all that much. I’ve tried doing several different jobs in the field and had exposure to a dozen more, and I’ve never been struck by the thought “Hey, I wouldn’t mind doing this.”, it’s always been a means to an end and the end has only ever been getting the proverbial ching-ching for my bling-bling.
As hedonistically rewarding as fat wads of cash can be (or not so fat as the case may have been of late), working for the wage just doesn’t seem to give me any kind of stimulation or gratification. I noticed in a remarkably surreal moment late last week in that I was doing technical support on auto-pilot. I was thinking about some fleeting idea or other (most likely considering something of no material use whatsoever, as is the status quo) when I realised that I was talking, then that I was actually talking someone through configuring their mail account. The whole incident was kind of creepy, but highlights the lack of stimulation I’m actually getting sitting here.
Thing is, if I take off to study something else, I’ll be down a lot of income, the kind of income that I could use to do some hella fun things and buy mighty shiny toys. But as much fun as they’d be, I don’t know if I can drag myself through a job I’m not enjoying and not learning anything from just to satisfy my hedonist urges. Of course I have to keep it up long enough to fill in the financial hole I’ve dug for myself by turning motorbikes into sushi and my skeletal system into swiss cheese, but the end of my current contract conveniently lobs around sometime in December, so who knows.
On a perkier note, my baby is back home in the garage where she belongs. I’ve already procured myself a schmick new helmet and the moment the jacket and gloves I have on order get in, I’m going to be tearing around the streets on two wheels again. I’m gettin’ all fuzzy just thinking about it.
