WTF? Me, a day walker? I’m going to be rubbing elbows with the Norms? It seems I’m to go on the day shift earlier than expected. Next week, in fact, the new hire is coming in to replace me. I’ll be going days as soon as he is up to speed. I estimate a week, 2 weeks tops. Ain’t that some shit? I’ll be working wed-sat. So sunday monday and tuesday off. 7a-3p wed-fri, and 7a-7p saturday. the 7am thing is going to suck for traffic, but at least I get to leave before rush hour. I have ALL my evenings to myself. I get to have this “social life” thing I keep hearing about now. and I even get to try out “sleep”. I wonder if I can handle it all.
I often complain about that Cipher Trust company eating up all my time at work, keeping me from doing actual “real” work. That aside, a few of the engineers are pretty cool. In some instances, a lot cooler than some of the people I work with. Here’s a snippet from one of my coworkers trying to unload a phonecall onto the poor engineer. The stupid is so thick you could cut it with a knife, but it would have to be a pretty sharp knife:
(06:17:59) Coworker: sean is on phone
(06:18:09) Coworker: he wants to talk
(06:19:12) CipherEngineer: I understand this – and right now, I’ve got mark on the phone and people calling my work line and house line. Sean can wait or we can call him back – I understand he called 15 minutes ago
(06:19:13) CipherEngineer: but I’ve been on the phone 30 minutes with a volitile customer
(06:19:24) CipherEngineer: Kev may have stepped away from his desk
(06:19:36) CipherEngineer: I don’t know – I’m not there
(06:19:38) CipherEngineer: if you have to
(06:19:42) CipherEngineer: ping “BigBlueSwope”
(06:19:43) CipherEngineer: that’s BJ
(06:19:56) CipherEngineer: he’s L3 on duty
(06:20:00) Coworker: keith you want to talk sean
(06:20:10) CipherEngineer: ……you’re fucking with me, right?
Notice he gives the engineer a hearty 4 seconds of consideration before completely dismissing everything he said. I showed this little bit to Dan0 (who works with both of us) and he burst out into loud laugher. a sort of real-life “lol” if you will. closer to a “rofl” even, but he managed to remain standing. The funny is that the above is typical behavior. It’s funny when taken out of context but, as the engineer illustrates, horribly frustrating when encountered first hand. it’s like reasoning with a machine. you know… like a pulley, or perhaps an inclined plane.
I just got Gelb by Neuroticfish. It’s good lovin. I recommend it to any of you industrial/ebm junkies. In one of the tracks he starts out with the old 56k modem handshake tone… then goes on to mix and sample it into the track. Geek . I love that crunchy sound and miss it on broadband. If I was physically capable of making that sound, I’d do it before starting any conversation. I mean, how else would people know I was ready to talk, right?
In other news… I think certain assertions I wish to make would be better recieved were they less ethereal. In an entry yesterday I said, “Believe me my disdain for you is unique and special like a perfect snowflake.” in reference to a company I have a particular sore side for. They continue to be a bane of my shift at work. Also much like a snowflake, if my disdain for you were giant and made of metal I would beat you with it.
It rained “like woah” today. As if the man upstairs had something to prove. When I got home from running errands like a good domesticated little bitch, there was a giant fucking rainbow out. IT was pretty cool actually. huge bright rainbow with a very visible secondary halo. The crazy stormclouds were moving in front and behind it as if in fast-motion photography. pretty neat scene. I stood and appreciated it in a very masculine, heterosexual way as to not diminish my manliness.
Very rarely does work really piss me off. Tonight was an exception. Even when the “cocksaw” event came in, it didn’t make me smirk like usual. There’s a company out there, we’ll call them “Equity Two”, that are a bunch of real pricks about their circuits going down. We monitor the connections from the remote sites to the main site. There’s this whole song and dance we have to do any time one of those connections goes down and comes back up. Even if it bounces for like 20 seconds at 3:00am. We have to build up a ticket and chase telco to find a reason for the outage. Telco can’t find a reason for outage on a 20 second interruption. there’s simply nothing to test. If an RFO can’t be found we have to make them put the circuit in for testing the next night during their set test window. They always come back and tell us the circuit tested clean because, you know, there was never a problem in the first place. It’s the internet, gremlins abound. fucking deal, shit might go down for a few seconds. This is the only company that does this, and they are FAR from the most “important” by any measure. and it’s all to save a few pennies at the end of the month. gg. Remind me to send you hatemail at Christmas, I’ll take care to write it in as eloquent and personal a manner as I can. Believe me my disdain for you is unique and special like a perfect snowflake.
UPDATE – Since I started this entry, I’ve had to open 3 new tickets. This is going to be a good week.
So there’s this telco company we call a lot. We’ll just call them something unassuming like “Sprint” so I don’t have to use their real name. The call center is clearly in the south, since the majority of the people we talk to there have a deep southern accent. It’s always the same crowd, about 20 of them. There’s one little gem among them that stands out from the rest though.
I pick up the phone and hear a sort of nasal male voice on the other end. “Thank you for calling Sprint,”… the names are cycling through my head. Will it be Bill? Jim? Frank?… “This is Monica”. O_o… come again? Monica. Here at the NOC, we call her “Manica” because she sounds deceptively male. Every time I hear her, my brain twists and contorts in impossible ways. Even after talking to her for 10 minutes or so about a ticket, my brain refuses to believe she is a woman. I half expect her to say “By the way this is Bob, lol” at the end of the call.
So I’m moving to 1st shift. neat, eh? It’ll be wed-fri, 7am-3pm and saturday 7am-7pm. so I get sunday monday tuesday off. AND I get all my nights to myself. AND I get to sleep at night. such strange notions! I will have to live and breathe side by side with norms!
I’ll be going on second shift (3p-11p) in a couple weeks, then I’ll move to first shortly thereafter.
One of these days the handwritten word is going to fall under the category of fallen arts. As computers and the internet become more and more the primary forms of communications, especially with the increasing popularity of mobile devices and WiFi, the need for writing things by hand will fall to the wayside. Once schools begin to incorporate tablet PCs and laptops as part of the mainstream, writing things by hand will become nearly useless (since school was one of the last places people actually write things out by hand). Handwriting will be shunned to the corners of lab notebooks, longhand math, and other places where paper trails are deemed a necessity or where chicken scratches are desired to help the brain chug along.
I’m ok with all this because my handwriting sucks. It’s slower and far less legible than my typing. During the rare occasions when I have to write by hand I do it hastily and begrudgingly. I *greatly dislike* having to slow down my thinking to accommodate the sloth-like formation of letters by hand.
That’s all I got. Random thought for the night.
I was leaving work yesterday and one of my coworkers said “Have a happy holiday” as I was walking out of the breakroom with my cup of “get home without falling asleep during the commute and dying” coffee. I replied with simply “No”. you could watch his brain slam immediately to a stop. After a few moments, he said “Wow, never heard anyone respond with that before. Wasn’t expecting that. Fine then, I hope you have a really crappy holiday”.
I like screwing with programmed reactions sometimes. The guy is a joker and we mess with eachother all the time. Normally I wouldn’t mess with random people who are just wishing me well (even if it is programmed wellwishing).
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