Tag: job

The reflection post, circa 2019

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
photo courtesy Matt Altmix

If I had to make an observation about what it’s like getting older, I think I would have to say something along the lines of increasingly feeling like there isn’t enough time, like ever, for like, anything and everything.  Maybe it’s exclusive to me, or perhaps it affects millions of others, but I feel that I spent an inordinate amount of time feeling anxious about how I don’t feel like there’s time for anything, or at least, there isn’t an adequate amount of time that I’d like in order to do particular things, and therefore I simply don’t do them.

Like video games, or starting a new television series; typically, I prefer to have like a nice, 2-3 hour block of time in which I can dive in and be properly acquainted with something new, learn the controls, characters, look for critical information that might re-emerge later when stories unfold.  I’m not the type of person who’s ever satisfied with a short introductory period or just a singular pilot episode; subsequently, if I don’t get such conditions, there’s a higher chance that I simply don’t even begin, because there’s always something else I could be doing instead that’s probably actually more productive, or at least essential to my general pace of living, and then suddenly it’s the next day, and I’ve got to go to work, where there’s seldom adequate time for my team to get their tasks done because we’re constantly behind schedule, and are reliant on the partnership of other teams in order to get our jobs done, but they’re lazy and constantly coasting their ways to the next weekend, and then the weekend comes and then it’s almost over, and it’s back to work on Monday where we have yet another planning meeting on how we’re going to catch up, but then the people we rely on are already beginning their downhill coasting towards the weekend on Tuesday afternoon, and this cycle of constantly feeling like there’s no time continues to cycle and repeat.

All this being said, if I had to look back at 2019 as a whole, I would have to say that I think it went by pretty quickly.  Often times, I’ve given thought to how fast things have flown by, and amazed at the idea that when I was a kid, I’d often thought that time couldn’t move slow enough, and how I had all the time in the world to beat and master every single Nintendo game that came across my path.  About how when I was a teenager, I was able to balance time between numerous friend groups, family and responsibilities; like this one time back in 2001 where I somehow remember balancing my newspaper job, going to Baltimore to meet up with some friends who were arriving from out of town for Otakon, driving back to Virginia to meet up with some other friends that night so we could grill out, going to work the next morning, stopping on Columbia on my way back up to Baltimore to visit a cousin, then going to Baltimore for Otakon, taking 200 pictures, coming back home, whipping up a photo gallery and recap of the con for my website, while going back to work. 

Like, I couldn’t even fathom doing that many activities in the span of a week at the age of 37 now.

However, in spite of the perpetual feeling that the clock is spinning faster, this doesn’t mean that my quality of life is necessarily worsening.  In fact, I can say with tremendous clarity that 2019 was a pretty incredible year.  Without question, some of the most grandiose and life-changing events occurred within 2019 and have laid down the foundation for the rest of said life.  Most notably highlighted by the event of having gotten married to my beautiful wife, and having an incredible wedding celebration surrounded by friends and family who all poured into Georgia to celebrate with us.  But then the honeymoon didn’t last that long, or maybe I could say the magic of a Disney cruise was a little too OP in our case, because shortly afterwards did we discover that mythical wife was pregnant, putting us on the fast track to parenthood, and the jarring realization that I was going to become a dad.

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How to reflect on a decade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This year ending isn’t just an ordinary ending of a year, because it’s also the end of a decade.  Naturally, a sentimental person like me tends to want to reflect on an entire decade, because much like individual years, a decade is a nice round chunk of time that one might think it would be easy to reflect upon, but in the greater spectrum, it’s ten full years we’d be trying to look back onto.  Now I like to think I have a good memory, but even without the aid of my trusty brog, it’s difficult to really look back at an entire decade.

Regardless, that’s not going to stop all the self-important jobbers of the internet who will try their darnedest to speak with authority and copy and paste all the same milestones the major news outlets will when it comes to trying to summarize and reflect upon the entire decade.  The funny thing is that most of the internet savvy generations probably aren’t that much older or younger than I am, which means that in the grand spectrums of our respective lives, we’ve only really lived through 3-4 decades, whereas I’d probably estimate that 1.5-2 of them are pretty invalid, because we’re simply not articulate and/or educated enough to have the capacity to reflect on entire decades.

So combined with the advent and growth of the internet, and the notion that everyone has a voice, I’d wager this is probably, at the very most, the second real decade of the modern high-speed internet that people really care to really reminisce about; and I’m being generous by calling it the second, because DSLs and cable internet didn’t really flourish until nearly the mid-2000’s; I couldn’t imagine people trying to use streaming, auto-refreshing social media on a 56K modem, so frankly I see this more as the first real decade that everyone and their literal mothers on the internet are going to be writing about.

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to try to recollect from mostly just my own memories, and stick to things that are more relevant to my own little world, and not the big gigantic depressing one we live in.  If I had any readers, they can google any decade in review, and probably find more worldly and probably more high-profile shit than the things I have to say about the things going on in my own little life, like the start and finish of Game of Thrones, Pokemon Go, the sad state of American politics, all the endless mass shootings, and Bill Cosby being outed as a rapist.

And the reason that I disclaim the whole “if I had any readers” because one of the most devastating things that occurred for me is the fact that despite my WordPress going online in 2010, at nearly the very start of the decade, midway through the decade my brog went down indefinitely, when my brother relocated from one part of the country to another.  A lot of hardware changes meant no more place to host my brog, and despite having the supposed backups, I simply haven’t taken the time or allocated the funds necessary to get my site up and running again.

If I were the type to do New Years resolutions anymore, I think I’d resolve to get my site back up and running again in 2020.  TBD on if that will actually occur, and frankly with the things I have on my plate going into the next decade, I don’t want to commit and then fail to deliver.

In spite of the brog blackout, that hasn’t stopped me from writing.  Even to the day my site went down, I have been writing on a fairly regular basis, taking no more than two weeks off before the internal guilt gets my fingers flying across the keys again, and I’ve got at this point, hundreds of folders of dated and timestamped Word docs, all awaiting their day in which they can be posted retroactively to a brog.

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An accurate representation of my work life these days

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m actually not that particularly thrilled with my work life these days, and have not been for quite some time.  Over the span of the last year and a half, there has been a lot of transition in my department and team, other than the primary software that we’re using to accomplish the same job.  Despite my promotion, it has come with a lot of baggage a lot of strings attached, and I’d be lying if I didn’t at times wish I were still more on the ground, actually doing things, instead of feeling like a managerial stooge in comparison, bouncing from meeting to meeting and spending the vast majority of my days locked inside Outlook, typing away at seemingly redundant emails and trying not to play a game that I don’t like playing in the first place (office politics).

However, among the numerous changes that have occurred, the one that makes my face go 😐 more than anything is the leadership above in me in the hierarchy of the department.  And to quickly summarize is primarily the fact that my previous superior(s) were much more relaxed and gave me autonomy to do my job, and had a more “as long as the job gets done” attitude, the same cannot be said about those who have taken their place.

I legitimately spend more time on any given work day “being coached” on how to subsequently “coach” my reports on how to properly use Outlook calendars to the specific preference of one person, and getting litanies of emails asking me questions about the questionable habits of some of the people beneath me, with all sorts of passive aggressive remarks about how they were clearly not coached appropriately to company standards, and how lots of behaviors need to be corrected.

I genuinely feel at times like I’m in Office Space, where I’m getting chewed out for not putting cover sheets on my TPS reports from various sources, and despite the very clear rule about having 25 pieces of flair, I’m getting spoken to repeatedly about how I, and my reports should be expected to do more than the minimum, AKA a job description.

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Hoarders: office leftovers edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout my career, I’ve worked primarily in office environments.  After around 20 years of this kind of professional lifestyle, it’s safe to say that I’ve been inside of them to know that if you’ve worked in one, you’ve kind of worked in all of them.  Otherwise, shows like The Office or movies like Office Space don’t exist, because anyone’s who’s ever been in office life can immediately relate.

One of the more fascinating sociological observations there are in an office environment is the introduction of communal food; namely the inevitable leftovers that typically occur, because in most cases, office environments almost always end up with more food than there are people capable of eating it all.  Typically, in most places I’ve been, leftovers are often times placed in a break room or somewhere publicly communal, and then some admin sends a wide-reaching mass email to notify everyone that there’s free food leftover.  Cue the chargers.

My current workplace is no exception to this practice.  If anyone on my floor has any sort of catering, the leftovers are often put in the breakroom and the floor admin emails the whole floor to let all teams know that there’s free food available, and then the same people stampede en masse to pick at the remains, and even worse, there are some who simply just collect and hoard, effectively denying those who might actually want to eat immediately.

The thing is, my current workplace is a gargantuan office campus, so there are tons of floors potentially doing the same thing on any given day.  It’s gotten to the point where there’s a Slack channel dedicated to people all sharing information on where there are leftovers somewhere on the campus, prompting people to be going to some odd and unrelated to their jobs corners of the property in order to get some free leftovers.

But among these level-5 scavengers are the aforementioned hoarders who don’t just go hunting for leftovers, but like they do on their own floor, go to hoard and save them, for later consumption.  It’s these particular people that serve as the impetus to this post, because as I’m sure everyone’s seen the office scavengers in their own respective offices, I have to wonder how many people have come across such office hoarders, who go around hunting for leftovers not just for instant gratification, but for preparation for future meals on a larger scale.

Case in point, these particular individuals go as far as to have a stockpile of Tupperware, saran wraps and aluminum foil in their desks, with the intent of hoarding leftover food from around the campus.

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No good deed goes unpunished

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I feel like I’ve written this exact post before, with very similar context, and I know for certain that I used a picture of Poison Ivy the Batman villainess when I did.  But long story short, I did some manual labor for Habitat For Humanity on behalf of the company that I work for, which is a good thing.  But in doing so, I managed to get some nasty poison ivy on my arms despite the fact that I barely spent any time outside, and even when I was, I did not come into any contact with any poison ivy, oak or sumac, which is very much, a bad thing.

I don’t regret participating because of the eventual results of the work I contributed towards, but I do regret participating in the fact that I’m apparently very allergic to poison ivy and I’m basically receiving punishment for having done a good thing.  I abhor the existence of poison ivy, and in my idle bitterness, I googled “why does poison ivy exist,” and aside from some bullshit fluff at how every plant has some potential for medicinal purposes, I frankly didn’t find a single fucking justifiable reason to why this shitty plant and its urushiol-producing relatives exist on this planet other than to troll humans who are susceptible to them.

What really aggravated me was the fact that when I got to the house in question, I didn’t have to look at the property for more than two seconds to know that I should probably work indoors.  The front yard was pretty overgrown, and the back yard looked like Tarzan’s jungle.  I could already see poison ivy, and the vines that were growing on the side of the house was very likely sumac.  And in spite of the precautions I took and the avoidance I exhibited, I still have arms that look like raw hamburger, weeping liquid endlessly no matter how many caladryl or calamine I spread on them.

So I have to suspect that the culprit in question has to be the gloves I used, which came from a generally communal bucket full of gloves, provided by Habitat.  Obviously, I’m not going to accuse and proclaim Habitat For Humanity for maliciously and deliberately supplying urushiol-slathered gloves for their volunteers to use and get afflicted by, but it’s no secret that ivy oil can stick to things for months if not cleaned, and agencies like Habitat have a lot on their plates already, so making sure gloves are kosher doesn’t seem like a likely high priority for their volunteers.

Considering the vast majority of my rashes are on my wrists and arms, precariously where the gloves would have been, it’s an easy guess to believe that I had to have been using some gloves that at some point had done some handling of brush removal or landscaping work, and had come into some pretty significant contact with poison ivy or sumac.  Just my luck.

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Shop talk

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It doesn’t happen, by design, that I talk about my job.  Frankly, most of the time it’s nothing particularly interesting, and probably not really any different from anyone else who works a fairly normal corporate job anywhere in the world.  But lately, my work has been a little bit more encompassing in my daily life than I’d really like it to, and I feel like I’m in a not-that-great position currently, and I feel like everyone I’d vent to is kind of tired of hearing the same old stories about my job, but I still have a lot of thoughts and words that I’d like to get out of my system, that writing about it, seems like the only viable option in order to accomplish that.

Imagine . . .

  • You’re an auto mechanic. You fix cars and motorized vehicles for a living.  You use tools and work with your hands in order to fix said vehicles, day in and day out.  One day, a chef walks into your shop, and gives you a bunch of forks, spoons and spatulas and tells you, these are your tools now.  Please fix my car.
  • You’re a chef. You cook food for a living that feeds all sorts of people.  You use an arsenal of knives, spoons and various utensils in order to prepare all the food that you cook.  One day, a graphic designer walks into your kitchen, plops and laptop and a mouse on your counter and tells you, these are your tools now.  Please make me lunch.
  • You’re a graphic designer. You make shit on computers, using a variety of artsy software, specifically made to make shit.  Sometimes the shit you make ends up on the internet on websites and sometimes it is manifested into something tangible.  One day, an IT guy walks onto your floor and installs this shittily-made, outsourced, glorified data entry program and tells you, this is your primary software now.  Please resume creating advertisements at a high volume and high quality.  Except there’s no please, because this IT guy is a fucking asshole

That’s my life at work, in a nutshell.

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I feel like a lack of time is all part of being adults

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whenever I take the time to write, it’s usually because I’ve built myself a nice little cushion of time to where I can write, fairly uninterrupted, for anywhere from 45-90 minutes.  That, has not happened in quite some time, and therefore I have not really taken the time to write, which in itself gives me a little bit of anxiety, because I don’t ever want to fall out of the habit of writing, because writing is important to me, and it makes me anxious when I haven’t done it in a while.

It’s literally been two weeks since the last time I sat down and did any sort of writing.  This isn’t to say that there’s been nothing interesting or worth writing about, although I will say that the usual bullshit that occurs in Atlanta and/or Georgia itself has been a little on the dull side or a little too darkly serious side, like the prehistoric anti-abortion laws they’re pushing, which are things that I don’t really feel remotely capable of speaking about.  I ran in my first-ever official half marathon, the Star Wars half at Disney World.  UVA won a national championship in an actual sport (basketball).  Women, main evented Wrestlemania, with Becky Lynch winning both women’s championships from Charlotte and Ronda Rousey.  Tiger Woods won the Masters and proved that winning shit in sports absolves anyone of their personal indiscretions because they’re totally related.  Game of Thrones embarked on their final season, and the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris almost burned down, because bad shit always tends to happen this time of year.

Things, have most definitely been happening all around the world; it’s just that I really haven’t been able to build that cushion that I always tend to want in order to do some writing, because it never seems like there’s ever any time in the day for me do such.  Whether it’s the increased responsibilities and the seemingly endless parade of little and large tasks that I have at work, meetings after meetings, I barely have the time to have proper lunches on a daily basis, much less be able to eat food and type words at the same time. 

And then when I get home, whether or not I have to cook dinner or an endless litany of small tasks and daily chores that I feel the need to do in order to have a somewhat kept house, that by the time I’m done with everything, I’m at that awkward point of the day in which I don’t feel like I have enough time to write, or watch anything other than a 30-minute program on Netflix, because I should probably start considering going to bed in order to be a responsible adult and not be tired during work.

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