odds and ends

odds and ends

• FX has a new show, wilfred, about a guy (elijah wood) who talks to / consults with his neighbor's dog about life...while trying to flirt his way into the neighbor's eye, fairly disasterously. i've seen only one episode, but it was very, very good. looking forward to more.
  
• my haircutterbarberstylistwhatdoyoucallhim was complaining to me yesterday (not whining) about how he's having to assume more and more of the business of his shop, and will be cutting down on the number of clients he works with directly. he says i'm on his keep list, but will be weeding off those who don't tip well enough. he then gave me examples of good tippers: guys who come in and hand over $40 for a $23 cut (with no shampoo), or pay him $50 for full service.
  me, i give the guy a $5 tip and think i'm being generous.
  this sort of complaining makes me think i might go elsewhere.
  
• i used the phrase, "this infuriates me" at work yesterday. to my boss. out loud. regarding something the boss asked me to do. age does have its perks.
  
• just popped a bag of popcorn in the breakroom microwave; a coworker was somewhat surprised, as he'd never considered that one could purchase microwave popcorn from the vending machine, and cook it in the same room. he's a fairly intelligent person, from what i know of him...so, i really don't know how this was a novel concept to him.
  
• last weekend was a tv marathon of the lord of the ring movies, of which, only the second i had seen in the theater; this weekend is a harry potter marathon, of which i've only seen the last three installments. how is it these two series have pretty much passed me by?
  
• don't forget, i'm on facebook, too.

peanuts

i work so fast, i can't be captured on film megapixels.

this is me working on friday...had some stuff to ship off, and the friendly folks in the mailroom couldn't assist me with packaging...ended up being a nice diversion from the normal workday routine, anyway.

work stuff

so my boss was out of town this past week. this was supposed to be a kickback week, where i could get finished so many of those naggy little documentation things that having a boss around, does not allow for completing.

instead, two unrelated servers went kablooey AND a manager in another department decided she was too busy to fulfill a customer order (that only she can process)...meaning that i was on the phone all day attending to server recoveries and figuring out how to get past that non-servicey manager.

and i'm exhausted.

anywayz.

work stuff

work: one of those in-between days when you circle around, waiting on others to respond to your several requests that have been piling up.
 
makes one feel unproductive. some would be bothered by that.
 
i am not.

business travel II

business travel. not as fun as it sounds. and the smell of bleach keeps me awake, a little bit.

i'm stuck in lovely montebello, CA, at a hilton garden inn. i saw a little japanese restaurant earlier today, and thought to give it a try for dinner...until i saw the health code B rating in the window.

so i ended up at carrows, which wasn't delicious, but did have an A rating.

bored, i went to the best buy across the parking lot, just to look through the CDs...yeah, that bored. the only items i considered buying were the essential clash, which i remembered that i already have at home, and a box set of the traveling wilburys...until i remembered that the song that was really drawing me to the CD was the roy orbison-sung "not alone anymore". which i already have.


not alone anymore, the traveling wilburys

business travel

after a saturday at disneyland with the in-laws, i'm in a hotel room getting ready for a couple of workdays in the LA office...to which i'm not really looking forward, but not dreading in any way...it's just an inconvenience working in someone else's office space, if even for just a couple of days.

BUT. when entering my hotel room, i found a gift basket that had been left for another guest. tempted to not mention it to anyone and just pilfer it for myself, but that's inviting bad karma. so i called for someone to come pick it up.

there's something odd about finding physical evidence of a previous guest in a hotel room. it's not as if one expects that nobody's been there, before...but cracking that sense of "sanitation" or whatever is just a tad unsettling.


disneyland was fun. it's odd, odd, odd, how disneyland inspires a sense of nostalgia for something one has never really experienced. that's good emotional manipulation, right there.

a collection of memes has been making the rounds, so here's a bit of it:

nod to calvin:

TEN TO START.

1. Are you single? i am not...happily taken.

2. Are you happy? more than i thought i would be at this point in my life.

3. Are you bored? more often boring, but not bored at the moment.

4. Are you naked? rarely.

5. Are you a blond? i'm not, but people think i am, because my calico-colored hair is going all white.

6. Are you moody? no, that takes too much energy.

7. Are you a lover/hater? lover...except on those whom i hate.

8. Are you hot/cold? i sweat more than anyone i know.

9. Are you Irish? no, but my oldest sister was.

10. Are you Asian? not by birth, but by marriage, perhaps.

TEN FACTS.

1. Name: ken

2. Nicknames: beeb

3. Birth mark: no

4. Hair color: white that looks blonde

5. Natural hair color: calico

6. Eye color: blue

7. Height: 5' 10"

8. Facebook Mood: good: i enjoy seeing what my high school friends are thinking. we're a surprisingly liberal-progressive lot, except for the odd conservative here and there.

9. Favorite color: red

10. One Place to Visit: this year, greece; ask again next year, and the answer will be different


ages since i've posted a song, huh? let's do that in the next post.

training

i spent the past two workdays in a training session, sitting next to someone whose behavior was not much different than a five year-old. he felt it his duty (privilege) to assist the instructor with pretty much any question the rest of us may have asked, or to offer technical advise, accurate or not, to the instructor mid-presentation.

i seriously thought he'd never shut the hell up.

as he was sitting next to me, i was constantly aware of him trying to catch my eye, like maybe the proximity might make us friends or something. if one could read my mind, one would read, "leavemealonedon'tlookatmejustgoaway".

does that make me a bad person? no. it makes him a bad person.

i'm actually looking forward to going back to the office tomorrow. yeah, it was that bad.

stock photo

i'm trying to complete five prerequisite web-based training courses at work before a real-life class next thursday, in between what all else i do at work all day. can't help myself from getting distracted by the poses and expressions used in the stock photo illustrations.

been a while since i posted an adorable track, eh? this one was recommended by a bro-in-law, and it's awesome.


lowiza, the lovely feathers

crazies

today is going to be a crazies day at the office.

case 1:

BOSS doesn't think we should have requested access to a customer interface because it puts too much responsibility on us. i told her i requested it only so that i knew what the customer's experience was if we got involved with problem-solving down the road.

i know that had i not requested it, one day down the road when we were looped into problem-solving and i didn't know what the customer interface was, she'd be asking why i didn't know this.


case 2:

coworker has asked repeatedly why there are two versions of one report. i informed him that "A" is the regular monthly distribution, and "B" is the quarterly distribution, based on "A", targeted toward upper management.

coworker asked, "so which came first, 'A' or 'B'"?
i said, again, "'B' is based on 'A', so 'A' came first."
coworker, "ha ha, it's like the chicken or the egg...which came first? ha ha."

no, it isn't. A came first.

(and for the record, some in the scientific community have determined that between the chicken and the egg, the egg came first...because that egg was laid by a not-quite-chicken bird, whose mutated offspring became the first chicken.)

same coworker answers Instant Message questions by shouting over cubicle walls, rather than typing a response.

twin peaks vs lost: who has the best mysterious asian guy?

day off

dear project leader:

there's nothing better than having a day off work, on a day that everyone else doesn't have off.

cage

dear project leader:

this alien made a mistake at work today. as it turns out, having made the mistake was a good thing, because we now know how to resolve that mistake if it ever happens again.

that's what this alien keeps telling himself.

word

dear project manager:

this alien wonders why so many people use MS-Excel for task lists containing nothing more than text.

surgery

dear project leader:

this alien's workplace PC was in surgery today...but seemed, at the end of a 5-hour procedure, to be fully recovered. this alien thanks you for the good wishes, etc.

in the meantime, this alien was forced to use an empty workstation too far away from his own desk, and found the arrangement entirely disruptive.