29 posts tagged “work”

Well, it's Friday, and that's gotta count for something right?

I've been feeling kinda blah lately (not physically blah. Mentally blah). There's a lot of stuff going on at work and school which is weighing on me a bit right now, so I'm not feeling terribly peppy at the moment. Well, actually with work it's the lack of things going on that's the problem. I've been stuck on this one issue for a while now. One of our customers is having a problem I can't reproduce no matter how hard I try, even if I duplicate their setup exactly. I'm not sure what's wrong, how to fix it or how to even work around it because of the restrictions in place with their particular setup. And they're starting to get a little impatient. I also can't really ask anyone else because I'm the only person who deals with this sort of stuff here.

So I'm stuck. Which is really frustrating for me because I should know the answer and I should be able to fix it, but I can't. This doesn't really help my issue that I discussed earlier about feeling like this isn't what I'm really supposed to be doing. I feel like I'm in over my head or something, I guess would be the best way to describe it.

School is being a pain too because I'm still behind a bit on my project but I'm going to spend more time this weekend to get it going again. I find it really hard to get home from work and jump right into working on another thing I really don't want to do. And my frustration with all of this has caused me to deviate a bit from my weight loss plan, which is totally my fault and I'm jumping back on as of today, but I haven't done any exercise this week at all because I haven't felt that I had the energy.

Oh well...onwards to happier news. Syracuse won their game last night in the NIT Tournament which means they get to play one more home game on Tuesday before they head out to Madison Square Garden (if they win anyway). I'm going to this one alone because my dad has a doctors appointment thingy and I had assumed since the only other people I'd consider asking (Wassy and Jay) don't like sports that they wouldn't be interested. As it turns out I was wrong on that last count after I bought my ticket because Wassy said she would have gone with me. Bah! Noted for the next time this comes up.

This weekend isn't looking terribly fun for me though. I need to spend a lot of time working on my project for school to prevent myself from becoming pushed farther behind. I basically have 4 weeks to finish up the whole deal now and I want to get back on top of things before they totally spiral out of control. I'll be very glad when all of this is over.

The first day back from vacation is always horrible. No exceptions. Which is why yesterday I had such a hard time concentrating at work. It was extremely hard for me to keep my mind on one task at a time which wasn't good yesterday because of the fact that I was working on something that was a little complex and I kept losing my place and having to start over from the beginning again. Sigh. I hope today is going to be better.

After work though, things went a bit better. I did my exercising while starting to watch Cowboy Bebop which has potential right now, but it's hard to tell so early into it. Then I sat down and played Xenogears, which I've come to realize again, is probably my favorite game ever. Such a cool story, and you can always pull something different out of it each time you play it. I'm about 1/3 of the way though the game (20 hours in or so) and things are just starting to get really really good.

On the school front, I was still unable to contact who I needed to contact. On my Rogues airbags front, I haven't heard anything about the parts being in. I'm probably going to call up this morning since my work phone was acting wonky for a couple days and may not have recorded the message if they left one. I'd like to have airbags at some point here.

Ah...fall. Leaves falling from the trees, kids going back to school, relief from the hot summer temperatures (sorta)...All good things. Of course, it also means the beginning of the annual charity fund raising drive. I want to preface this rant by stating that I have no problems giving to charity. The specific charity in question does lots of really good stuff to help the community. It's just the way the fund raiser drive is handled here. I want to repeat again that any cynicism you detect here is not because I don't believe that people aren't going to benefit from contributions. Heck, if they just passed the forms out I'd probably donate more money per year. But...read on.

My current place of employment is a trend setter organization, meaning we have our fund raising drive first. This usually involved having a mandatory meeting where you would go in the morning to listen to a representative of the organization talk, as well as a guest speaker who attempts to make people part with more of their money by explaining exactly what they did with the funds. After this you were given out your donation forms and told to turn them back in by the end of the day. Cut to one year ago. Instead of having the meeting in the morning, it was turned into a mandatory catered lunch/meeting and you had to turn in your forms before you went back to work. This irked me because I prefer to use my lunch to get away from people and to relax during the day. Not listen to what amounts to a sales pitch, usually the same one I heard last year (again, I know that this charity does good things for people).

This year takes the cake though. Not only were we expected to go to a lunch/meeting, we were expected to drive to another office to do it. This was the last straw for me. I'm not going to drive out to a different city (wasting gas mind you) to hear the same speech I've heard for 4 years now. I ended up using some vacation time to take the afternoon off, which was handy because I needed to do some homework anyway.

I should also point out that 100% participation is also pushed...heavily. One year, I was late handing in my form, so they sent out a memo listing the people who hadn't turned in their forms yet. To the entire office. Nothing like a little public humiliation in the morning. The feeling is that if you value your job, you should probably donate. Oh, and the prize for 100% participation? A Pizza Party. Yup. Pizza Party. What are we, in elementary school?

I don't mind giving to charity. I mind it when it's pushed onto me as something I have to do. If they just handed out the forms without the rest of this junk, I'd give more money each year. I just don't think it's any business of my employer to tell me "you're going to donate to this charity!"

Ok, rant off...sigh. If you excuse me, I need to find my checkbook.

I have lots of wierd dreams that thankfully have not come true. For example, I dreamed that I was in a motorcycle race however my bike wouldn't pass inspection due to the fact that I couldn't produce a valid license key for my bikes copy of windows xp.

Yeah...I know...

I honestly can't think of an actual dream that I've had that came true. Now if we're talking about dreams as far as the concept of desires goes...then of course. My dreams tend to be smaller and short term though. No big "i wanna be an astronaut!" (apologizing for my bad spelling here...typing this on my treo) although...I did want to go into space for a while until I learned about the whole concept of g-forces...but that's another story.

Usually, my dreams are small scale. Fish ownership, finding a job that's decent, getting out of college alive...

Those last two are, I admit, large goals for some...but they're both fairly immediate and small as far as effort on my part at this point in time.

My week, to put it mildly, has been horrible. Work related things...school related things...general blah like feeling. So I was glad when the opportunity came up to go out with my friends last night and relax a little bit. We went out to Zebb's and then went back to their place to watch some anime that Wassy is trying to corrupt me into liking. Chobits is actually pretty good. I don't like most anime, but certain things I have gotten into. This might be one of them.

I also picked up my PS1 memory card from her that she tracked down for me. I bought Final Fantasy VII over the weekend and forgot I didn't have a PS1 memory card to play it with, so I've been using their pocketstation temporarily. She stopped by a used game store on her way home the other day and found one for me. I was hoping the previous owner had some interesting save game files on there, but they only had two saves for Tactics Ogre, whatever that is. (UPDATE: I have been informed that this is actually a good game. Go figure.)

I've also got a copy of Xenogears coming my way from eBay, now that I actually have a memory card to use with it.

On the subject of fish...I'm wavering a bit. I'm not really sure if I have a good place to stick anything other than a smallish bowl and I don't really want to do that. But on the other hand, I really, really want to set something up. Arrgh!

Well...back to work I suppose.

After my wonderful 2 day vacation on account of having The Cold From HELL(tm), I'm back at work with what could be described as a bad head cold.

I took a nap yesterday after posting that message and woke up feeling decent. I also actually moved past surviving on a diet of toast and ginger ale with some actual foods! Mostly because I ran out of bread...but that's beside the point!

I'm not feeling great, but I'm functional...somewhat. Oh well. 2 sick days in a row is unusual for me.

The last real update I threw up here was on Monday, so I feel compelled to post again.

I had class Monday night. It's a Western Civilization course which consists of reading a lot of the stuff written by the great thinkers of the western world and trying to figure out what lead them to their ideas and such. The teacher sounds awesome. The 3 hours I was there just flew by. I found a good teacher...amazing isn't it? It sounds like it's going to be a lot of work, but it's going to be a lot of interesting work.

Tuesday was...not a good day. If you recall, I fell down the stairs Monday morning and my tailbone was bugging me all day. Well, it got worse on Tuesday. I even passed on going home for lunch because I didn't want to get in and out of my car more than I had to. Other than that, an overall unremarkable day.

Today, I work up feeling better. Not nearly as sore as before. A very, very busy day at work that I thought would never end. I IMed a friend around 3pm: "Please tell me it's not really 3pm and that my clock is slow" "Actually, I've got 2:58 here" "...You're not helping". It finally did end and here I am, relaxing at home, not wanting to look at another piece of code until at least tomorrow.

I've got a growing laundry list of things I need to do. Call the bank, call cingular to change my cell phone's rate plan from a regional plan to a national plan, call the hotel I made reservations at for the Washington DC trip to make sure they've got the reservations, call my high school to get my transcript sent to my college so I can skip out of the foreign language requirement...

Sigh...I wish this stuff would just do itself.

Today's whirlwind is finally drawing to a close, so I've got the chance to document it a little bit.

Big happenings at work today. We had a major reorganization of the software department. 3 people from department lost their job, 2 of them developers, the other in testing. I made it through OK due to my web development skills I guess. We also lost another developer who was shuffled off to a different department, as well as most of our customer support people (3 out of the 4).

I guess we weren't turning enough of a profit to justify having all of those people hanging around. It was kinda a depressing day for me because I really liked one of the guys who lost his job and it's a real shame that it had to happen. I'm still a little shocked by it. The day started so normally and then all of a sudden, the entire software division is gutted.

My plans still stand. I'm trying to get my degree and see what I can do about getting out of there before something else happens, I think.

I went out to dinner with my parents tonight to discuss the whole situation. Not really to figure out what to do, just to vent. I think everybody there was stunned by the downsizing...as far as we knew, things were going pretty well for us so far. I'm just glad I came through it with my position still intact.

I've got this weekend to rest, releax and regroup. Next week is going to be interesting.

I'm home sick today. I appear to have caught the stomach bug that's been going around. One of my friends got it the day after we went bowling last Friday, his wife came down with it yesterday and it appears I've got it today.

Luckily, it seems that I don't have the horrible puking version of it, but I feel odd if I move around too much.

I hate being sick :(

At least I get to watch the Price is Right and play some PS2. The Wii has way too much movement at this point to be doable.  

I have to go to work today. Blah! And then I have to work a whole TWO DAYS this week! I'm not sure I can manage...

Long weekends have spoiled me. I honestly can't remember what I was last working on when I left on Thursday, so...today should be pretty interesting.