What I’m Blogging

BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.

PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cubefarm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.

MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.

SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and
whiny.

SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace

IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

404: Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested site could not be located.

GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake)

WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks.

CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm

Received by email. Author unknown

What a way to spoil a good buffet lunch. “You will soon have a different job”. How vauge can a tiny piece of paper, with several lucky numbers, be? Is it a new job to add to the existing jobs I already have? If so, my wife and her soon to be hired divorce lawyer, would like to know. Is it a completely new gig without the old ones tagging along? Will it be better or worse that the ones I have now? Is this a fortune or a curse?

…You will soon have a different job…

This small slip of former tree with writing on it is causing me some anxiety. I’ve had new jobs, and pretty much, nine times out of ten, they are the same old job merely with different character names and locations, but the plot remains the same. Sort of like cheap romance novels.

One would think that any product that caused this much grief and uncertainty would have to be regulated by the government, or at least carry a warning label. But to be fair, fortune cookie words are to the brain what Chinese food is to the stomach; thirty minutes afterwards it’s gone, and you are hungry again.

I spent a year at work this March. Sure it wasn’t a linear temporal year, but somewhere in the vast universe of reality and the rest, I aged at twelve times the rate of normal. The “Bug Hunt” from the 4^Th was the catalyst for this cycle of aging, how the company and I reacted was the cause of my disappearance from the face of the earth. Objects moving faster than time do not appear in the visual spectrum, nor can they be heard. In a time warp, no one can hear you scream.

PCs were scanned; networks secured; nasty bugs terminated with extreme prejudice. It’s nice and pristine now, at least until the clever north wind blows in the next disgruntled hacker bent on mayhem.

Presently, it appears that time and I are back in sync, but technology and work stand ever ready to tear a rip in time again. The question this time is how will I react to it?

I hate Windows. I hate large corporations that deploy and use Windows. I hate it more when they do so without the benefits of real security and anti-virus software. And “Oh ya”, I hate people who code viruses and trojans.

…minutes, hours, days all meld together…

For the last week the team at the office has been battling an infection on a massive scale. Several of the little buggers got loose in the TV Land network and now the cries of “unclean” echo from coast to coast. Minutes, hours, days all meld together, as the task of clean up expands to fill all available time. Long days, little sleep, and an inability to perform any other activity has taken it’s toll and I spent the majority of my weekend “off” sleeping.

The Company has hired an army of contractors to patch and clean their thousands of machines. Vendors are lining up to pitch the latest and greatest security offerings. The economic fallout from it is going to be huge.

I get rotated back into the line tomorrow. Hopefully the madness will have subsided by then, but I’m, as ever, not hopeful.

There’s a saying in the IT world, “The install expands to fill all available time” and my recent work experience bears evidence to the truth of the maxim. My particular install is absorbing all time around it. I’m expecting a call any moment from some institute of advanced quantum physics as there must be a rip in the space time continuum as a result.

…some ten days have passed by in the process…

It would seem to be a simple thing; install server, load OS, load application. It isn’t. The open source version of the application works on one OS, but the released version of the application doesn’t. Reboot, reformat repeat… several times.

You fiddle with it, you tweak it, and you finally get the damn thing running. It’s almost a shame to let the users at it, because you know they are just going to break it. But oh well what can one do? Then you look up from your desk, and realize that some ten days have passed by in the process. Bloody hell! How did that happen?

Time to reintegrate into what ever is left of my life…

Someone someday is going to have to explain to me the benefits of “Soldiering on”. I think it comes from those same traditions from our imperial past as “stiff upper lip” and all that rot. I have been sick for the last week or so, but I’m still going into the office. Standing by the guns all day with my fellow workers who are more or less in the same boat as I am. We are all sick, and our constant and close association has lead to just one thing. Yes, that’s right - the creation of a super work-flu virus.

…scientists are baffled by the outbreak…

It has all the same aspects of the normal flu, however it also attacks the common sense centres of the victim’s cerebral cortex. Once infected the victim is grumpy, miserable, and against the better advice and judgement of his better half, obsessed with going into the office anyway.

Scientists are baffled by the outbreak, and believe that the only cure may be bed rest and a swift kick in the arse.

Restarting after vacation is hard. There are a million things to take care of that were let go during the time of rest. It seems that for every day spent resting and enjoying your family, the workload of the first week back at it is increased “logarithmically”. With mountains of tasks to do, it is important that your head is in the right place as well. Unfortunately, mine is not.

My body is at the desk in front of the keyboard, my mind is at home reading, relaxing, and raiding the refrigerator for snacks. This whole working thing is going to take some getting used to again…

Can you feel the love in my career? Well the nail has finally been put in the coffin of the contract neotiations. For extra safety, we drove a stake through its heart. The deal is done, signed, sealed, delivered, I’m theirs.

…exactly where I wanted to be…

So now I get to go back to the mayhem that is the TV Station for another four months at the money I originally asked for oh so long ago. I was told that it would never happen, I was told that I would be out on my ear. I accepted all of that and now look where I am, exactly where I wanted to be.

Funny how things go.

Now to enjoy the holiday - Wassail anyone?

They’re back… Yes the contract that came and went, and then left and returned, only to depart, has (dramtic pause) come back with a vengence. Sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you get gum on the bottom of your shoe that you can’t get rid of.

Seems like the client and the agency are now in sync about where the rubber meets the road, and I am engaged for a four month gig starting just after new years.

Please, no rush to congradulations. It’s early and the whole thing could evaporate in a puff of smoke again.

Yesterday came and went, the contract ended, and surprise, surprise, the client wants me back for January and February. The worm not only turned again, it is by now positively spinning at RPM levels that could be harnessed to power a small city. This contract is becoming the Hotel California; you can check out, but you can’t leave.

…I’ll be home for Christmas…

Well now the client and the agency need to fight over the details. I signed a contract with the agency as you remember, but the client didn’t want to continue. Now the client wants to continue, but the agency doesn’t. I figure that in any battle about who is paying and who is getting paid, the client with cash will pay the piper and call the tune.

So it’s not over yet. It’s only getting more bizarre. If they can’t play nice and share their toys, it’s no different from where I thought I was going to be a month ago, and I’ll be home for Christmas while they fuss about it.

No it’s not some armageddon inspired rapture tale. Besides, I’m pretty sure I don’t have a ticket for that “flight”. Rather it’s the start of my last day at the TV station.

Half a year flies by so fast in retrospect, and at times it feels like I’ve been there a lifetime. In any event It’s head first into the land of the underemployed, at least until after the holidays anyway.

Goodbye desk.

Goodbye coffee machine.

Goodbye guy who lurks around the office and nobody knows what you do.

Goodbye.

Buddha Fortune Cookie

Apparently, Buddha knows something that I don’t. That’s OK. He being all enlightened and such. For me, the mere mortal with two days left to go in the contract, things are not as clear.

There are no assurances of anything coming soon, but I’m going to blindly accept the smiling Buddha’s optimism. I’m going to take that leap of faith and throw myself at the ground, hope to miss, and thereby learn how to fly.

Crazy? Maybe.

Fun? Absolutely.