Soooooooo, So Sad

I believe that, until about 10 minutes ago, I spent the entire day with my belt on but unlatched.
I find that of personal interest as an example of how oblivious I am.

Wednesday #8

Damn, this is embarrassing but I forgot it was Wednesday. No job for 3 months and suddenly the calendar has no meaning....


But to make it up- here's a damn cute picture of a puppy:

Wednesday #4

Wednesday #4 was cancelled due to helping someone move today.

But for the hell of it, let's say I tried something new anyways. Um... uh... masturbating with day-old cupcakes or something marginally insane like that. Yeah- that sounds reasonable in reference to me. Yeah.

Various Amusement

You'll need to cut&paste this link. Verdamnt blog won't allow it as a hyperlink:
http://www2.b3ta.com/bukkake/


Gimme a break, I'm bored.

“What’s Wrong With People” Rant #20

OK, lemme set this up first:
Last night, I was helping out someone at a screener by making certain no one unauthorized was sitting in the saved section. For those of you who don’t know (and there were plenty last night), there’s an agreement with the movie studio that a certain number of seats are left available for authorized press, promotion employees, and special guests of the studio. If the seats aren’t kept open, the studios wouldn't have any more free screenings. Before anyone entered the theatre, they were told not to sit in the taped-off rows. Naturally, several groups tried anyway.
One older couple started to remove the tape to head for some reserved seats. I stopped them and asked if they were with the press and on the list. The woman said “yes”. Before I had the chance to inquire further, the young lady in charge had come up and asked them for their names (she had the list). The woman immediately stated her son was a lawyer. No one had asked. Turns out they were not on the list, nor would New Yorkers visiting their son in California with one of them working for a small, local (New York, local) magazine that has zip to do with movies be considered “authorized press”.
Regardless, as most of the reserved seats were empty, the woman in charge was kind enough to let them sit in the that section.

Why is it necessary for people to be dicks when offered something free? Is the general concept of free something that has been forgotten?

This is not the first time I have witnessed this. When I was in college, a homeless man asked me for some change. Oddly, change (quarters) was all I had on me. Taking out $1.50 for the washing machine at the laundromat, I handed him over $10 in change. He looked at it with an expression on his face like I had just crapped in his hand, got up, and stomped off. Clearly he was expecting more- probably in bill form.

For me, it’s a sad commentary on society that people think they deserve more for their money when they paid nothing; that they deserve better than what’s available when someone is simply being kind to them. Sure, there’s got to be some cut-off minimum- no one would want free food that’s spoiled. But seriously, what happened to common sense?

“I’m me. I didn’t pay for this but I think I deserve better than everyone else, and I’ll lie and make vague threats to get it.” That’s all I really heard from that old woman at the theatre, like it is dubbed over her whiney voice.
Damned if this type of snobbery doesn’t set off my instinct to crack noses with the palm of my hand. Sure- I could have handed them out at no charge, but would people have expected more?

“I Want To Be A Japanese Cow”

This rant started years ago when I was laid off my job. It was a good job- great pay, plenty of opportunities and room for advancement, lots of travel. The work was hard but rewarding. And I liked it. But, as will happen, some jag-off new VP came in and saw how to save some pennies by looking at short-term savings, and laid off 80% of all the personnel in the section I was in- nationwide. The really amusing bit here is that this VP was later “let go” as he misplaced most of the inventory of the Oakland warehouse. What happened? All of us who were laid-off knew, but why tell?

My next job lasted little over a year. This was a supervisor position in an understaffed facility, so my group was required to do all manual labor- including taking out the trash even though we had janitors. The job was OK, but the management had… issues- seemingly random procedures, decisions for the now instead of down the road, and amazing lack of ability to communicate with their employees. Every year, they would have a round of lay-offs to show these savings in their annual numbers. Then, when their new budget was set, they would hire new personnel to do the same jobs but with different titles. The first round happened just after I was hired, and I was let go during the next year’s round. I heard later on that the management there was under internal investigation from the corporate office, and most of the management left within a few weeks of each other. Coincidence?

About 2 weeks after, I found a new job with a direct mail company. The phrase “direct mail” means “junk mail”- the crap that fills up your mailbox every day. It comes with your name on it, is a meaningless waste of trees, but let’s you know “HEY, you exist”. There were 3 owners, and each wanted me to do something different as part of my job. You see, my job description was so vague and blurry that they had to come up with stuff to justify my salary. I started with simple data verification, then quality control, then was made the liaison with the Post Office, then blahblahblah. By the end, I had no idea what the hell my job was but I seemed to be co-running the office. One of the owners was artificially chemically unstable (*SNORT*). His decisions were erratic at best and he was prone to fits of rage (once making allusions of taking a baseball bat to an employee’s head during a meeting) and shouting. One owner almost never spoke, he just fixed machines. The last owner was an OK-kinda guy. Their main source of work came from the mortgage industry and when that popped so did the company. Within a 6 week period, they laid off almost ½ of their workers, myself amongst them. This hapened, again, about a year after I was there. Not too much later, the rage-aholic was found to be siphoning off company funds and was bought out. He soon opened a rival company doing the same business, only a few blocks away. There’re rumors he might now be under investigation by the IRS.

Less than a week later, I was at my new job. I was hired just in time to go directly into their busy season where they would do almost 80% of their yearly business. So I had to train myself and the seasonal staff. The busy season went fairly well, and the job itself was relatively easy. The owner was a different subject- hypocritical, self-opinionated, with a dislike of hearing anything that wasn’t “yes, sir”. After the busy season, he started letting the seasonal personnel go- which made sense. Then he started moving some of the staff he retained to other sections- again, made sense at the time. Then he started letting the remaining full-time employees under my management go, to the point where there was only me. I was doing 16% (the owners’ number) more work than the summer before, primarily by myself when there were 3 people there the summer before. It was during this time that his instability really got to me. When I tried to get help, he yelled then got me the extra help. When he told me I could get whatever I needed for my area and I did, he yelled. When I tried to tell him what he wanted to do was unsafe, he yelled. When I told him there was a problem with employee moral, he blamed me (even though the employees has specifically named him as the issue). Thankfully (yes, thankfully (it was like having a 300-lb weight with diabetes and bad breath being lifted off my head) I was fired. One of the reasons? I wore tank tops twice in my 13-month employment. I understand he is now under investigation by both OSHA for safety issues and the Fair Labor board (for several reasons, including making derogatory remarks concerning gender preference).

And this all leads me back to the title: “I Want To Be A Japanese Cow”. I was out at dinner not too long along with a young lady, and we were discussing food. I mentioned wanting to eat a real Kobe steak one day. She didn’t know what that was, so I explained that Kobe beef is from a type of cattle in Japan which is fed beer & sake and massaged regularly. She, in a somewhat tipsy state, proclaimed the title of this rant. And I have to agree- the idea of being pampered for years before being slaughtered does indeed seem better than years of dealing with fools before old age & death.