Tag: job

No-context writing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes, I feel like I haven’t done any writing in a while, and then say that I haven’t really found anything that’s sparked any inspiration to write.  But then I chastise myself that the whole point of me wanting to write doesn’t always have to have specific context behind it, and that sometimes, it’s just the urge to write, even if there’s no specific subject at hand.

Despite the fact that I’m still offline, a notion that isn’t ever not there whenever I sit down to write, it’s been an entire week since I last ranted about how much the Morbius movie is probably going to suck.  Since then, no matter how much I scour the news for an interesting topic, various websites and feeds to hope to see something that piques my interest to turn into a word explosion, it’s been pretty barren out there for my interests and inspirations.

Regardless, such shouldn’t be an excuse to go stagnant for too long, and despite the fact that I don’t really feel like I have anything to write about, the inherent urge to write is still there, which brings us to now, where I’m sitting in front of my laptop with a word doc open, no specific topic in mind, and my fingers still moving.

For the most part, a lot of this general writing stagnation probably has to do with the fact that these days, I don’t really have a tremendous amount of free time anymore.  Such is the nature of being an adult, and trying to maintain my place in the working world, as well as undertaking the responsibilities of a job that is no longer really on the ground level anymore.  At work, I’m often times operating with varying levels of stress in place, with there seldom being none at all, and simultaneously I have to remind myself that my decisions hold more weight than they used to, and that I am actually responsible for other people.  I can’t phone it in as much as I’d like to at times, and sometimes it feels like I’m doing less work, which feels strange, especially since I still see that the workload amongst the team hasn’t exactly dwindled.

Outside of work, has been a tremendous amount of other work, specifically all related to the planning of my own wedding.  I’m not going to pretend like it hasn’t felt overwhelming at times, the sheer amount of tasks and things to consider before June, because it sometimes does, and I hit points where I don’t want to do anymore work at home, and just want to marathon something on Netflix or watch the WWE Network for four hours instead of doing actual work.

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Life is fleeting

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the weekend, a work colleague of mine passed away, inexplicably.  She wasn’t much older than I was.  I saw her on Monday from afar, as I no longer sit right next to her like I used to before my promotion.  Apparently, she left early, citing that she wasn’t feeling well; and nothing more was thought of it, because the seasonal flu was very much on our floor, and numerous people had already succumbed to it, and were either already called in sick, or were leaving early.

Little did I realize that it would be the last time I would ever see her.  It’s frightening to think of life being as fragile as that.  As we were primarily co-workers, there’s only so much that I really knew of her, but I never knew if she would have any health issues to where the flu or byproducts of the flu could actually become lethal.

But aside from being “just” co-workers, this was a person that I probably would have considered my closest confidant at work.  I don’t fraternize with my peers a tremendous amount, and especially now that I’m in management, I didn’t necessarily always feel that it was that appropriate, so it somewhat of a big deal that she and I were as candid and frank with each other in our own hushed conversations throughout the work days. 

When I was still an artist, she was my coordinator, and we had a working relationship that was just about the epitome of a well-oiled machine.  We came into our departments at relatively the same time, and each went through our series of lumps learning said departments, and the first year of working together was bumpy at first, but solely in work process, and not personally.  She was an extremely hard and diligent worker who chose to be in our department, whereas I was assigned to it; she wanted the challenge of dealing with a complex department, while I just liked having a job.

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The implications of this are not good

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Get ready for Cryme Tyme: the City of South Fulton passes the “Ban the Box” ordinance which no longer makes job applicants have to disclose if they have a criminal background

Shortly after New Years, I hit a freshly formed pothole, and blew a flat.  I was not pleased about it, since ultimately it’s an incident that nobody is really held accountable for, and I was out $500 in order to replace all my tires, since they were pretty much due for a change.  Regardless, I went on the internet and tracked down the protocol for reporting the pothole to the county, and within two days, I got a message stating that the pothole was resolved.  I drive on this stretch of road regularly, and I can confirm that it was patched pretty immediately.

I’ve stated that I’m still on my old neighborhood’s Nextdoor, since I can’t bring myself to walk away from the source of unintentional trainwreck entertainment, especially since it’s a subscription that not just anyone can get access to unless they live (or lived) there.  One issue that has been fairly persistent in my old hood (aside from theft, vandalism, celebratory gunfire, ordinary gunfire, bodies being found in the trunks of abandoned cars outside of Publix), is potholes.

They’ve been so problematic, it’s gotten to the point where it’s even been on the local news, with hopes that public exposure will shame GDOT into fixing it immediately, to which I’m not actually sure if it’s worked this time, because this tactic has been employed so many times.  Otherwise, this is an issue for the City of South Fulton, because its within their jurisdiction and they’re responsible for the infrastructure of themselves.

Needless to say, the response has not been swift, probably not been addressed, and I’ve seen numerous threads about all the cars that have fallen victim to the same potholes.  Sure, maybe they all shouldn’t be on 22” low-profile wheels more susceptible to blowing out on potholes, but that’s another story, but frankly people shouldn’t expect their tax-paid roads to be completely pocked with deep and detrimental potholes in the first place.

The point of all this introduction is that if people thought living in the City of South Fulton was bad before, imagine what it’s going to be like when anyone who ever wants to work for the city, will no longer have to disclose any criminal offenses they’ve had on their records?

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Happy Moloch Day 2019

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Anyone who’s been reading my brog with any regularity knows what this is all about.  Frankly, I’m not particularly feeling like going through the whole spiel again about how and why MLK is pronounced “Moloch” in Aramaic, and how Moloch, the ancient demon god most certainly came before Martin Luther King, Jr. and therefore had the grandfather clause rights to use MLK over Martin Luther King, Jr.

Really though, the whole point of this post is the fact that I’m currently locked in a training session at work for a software that is basically the equivalent of using bamboo chopsticks to try to put a car together.  Those people who are unfortunate enough to be around my person have heard diatribes and long-ass rants about my feelings about this, so I’ll try to be less verbose about it in a brog post, but the bottom line is that due to the Benny Hill-cueing music-needed training session that I’m in that’s in a laughable state of disarray, with the leadership that’s mandating all this happening, I have the time to write this.

Teammates are dumbfounded and bewildered at the disorganization of this, and I’ve been keeping notes of just how pathetically bad things are, with how the IT monkeys are running around without leadership, trying to keep on an agenda that doesn’t exist.  The third-party representative of this software is twiddling his thumbs doing jack shit on his phone while people on other teams are trying to figure out what comes next. 

But hey, this has helped chew up some of the time until the end of the training session, to which because of just how unorganized things have been, my boss decided to throw in the towel on the rest of the session, and now I’ve written a lot less than I had anticipated.

Whatever though.  Happy Moloch Day!

I try to not talk about work too much

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

But I’m fairly sure that I’m about to embark on the roughest patch of my professional career as of today.  For how long?  That has yet to be determined, but if the past year has been any indication, it’s probably not going to end as soon as I’d hope it would.

The funny thing is that back in November, I almost drafted a post about how it felt like I was doing less work but making more money after my promotion in September.  How I didn’t really feel like I felt like I knew what I was doing in my new managerial role, and that I felt a little bit of labor guilt on how I was doing actual less labor, but going to more meetings, and delegating tasks, but I was in fact, making more money in the process.

But almost as if channeling Murphy’s Law, as quick as I began having these thoughts, things began changing very fast, and a long-looming black cloud over my career had begun pouring its initial drops of rain onto the landscape, and a few weeks later, here I am, feeling like I’m about to be starting the roughest patch of my professional career.

Obviously, I’m not going to go too in-depth with the context of everything, because one, nobody really cares at the end of the day, and two, work is one of those topics that I try to be deliberately vague and keep some things private if possible.

But long story short, since I’ve found that this situation is often times best described and explained through analogies: my entire team of graphic designers, copyrighters and coordinators have been mandated to change to this new suite of internally-made software, despite the fact that our current existing process is a perfectly well-oiled machine and has warranted the slightest need for change.

Except all of the software is garbage; hastily-made, constantly being updated and tinkered with while trying to be test driven at the same time, making it nearly impossible to really beta test.  Furthermore, the entire project is being helmed by an IT guy, who unfortunately sits at a higher paygrade than I do, and subsequently has the pull to force this onto us, without anyone really knowing why an IT guy has any say on how a creative department operates on a day-to-day basis.

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Did Atlanta really lose the HQ2 sweepstakes?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In case you missed it, Amazon finally ended their year-long goose chase of deciding on what city was going to win the privilege and exalted honor of being home to HQ2.  And because contests don’t really need to have rules or hold true initial claims anymore, not just one city, but two, were picked to split HQ2 into what I guess might be HQ2 and HQ2-2 or HQ3 or whatever they choose to call it, but the bottom line is that there wasn’t just one winner, but two co-winners: Crystal City in Virginia, and Long Island City in New York.

Admittedly, in the start of the whole HQ2 saga, I was actually hopeful that Atlanta would end up being the winner, especially after it made it past the first few rounds of cuts, and bettors were actually placing odds on the whole thing, placing Atlanta along with Austin, Texas, as the odds-on favorites to be where Amazon decided to go.

I think a part of that was just kind of the sports fan in me, that is pretty eager to see Atlanta, or the state of Georgia get any sort of win, that even a competition like where a major corporation is deciding to go, would’ve been sufficient enough to be able to declare that Atlanta came out with a major win.  And the knee-jerk thoughts of what a company like Amazon would be capable of doing with its arrival, like jettisoning property values, infusing the city with fresh new people that might be able to break the norm and shape something new, and the outlandish thought that being home to HQ2 might just supercharge Prime deliveries for the hometown immediately came to mind.

But then as time passed, and the saga drug on and on and on, with more cuts and more bullshit happening, where Atlanta kept moving on, but kept dumping more and more money into trying to impress Jeff Bezos and Co. to come to Atlanta, it began to get old hat really fast.  Skeptics were quick to point out that a place in the DC/VA/MD would have the inside track, since Bezos owned the Washington Post, and why wouldn’t he want to base his primary business near the major media outlet he owned?

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Ben Affleck hair

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that I make a lot of observations at the gym; it’s one of the great settings for the observation of mankind to occur, as it’s at the gym and the ensuing locker room in which the male species has a tendency to strip away societal norms to their truest selves, whether it’s extreme narcissism, misogyny, douchebaggery, or all of the above.

At my current gym, it’s unmistakable that the vast majority of the members are about as white as Paul Ryan’s interns, so naturally this doesn’t just open the door, it kicks it open for ridicule and judgment at how insufferably white it is.  And I’ve already pointed out whether in writing or not, many of the so-white behaviors of the locker room, whether it’s bitching about European vacations, tariffs affecting their businesses, or my recent favorite, the fact that there are quite a number of them who show up to the gym, don’t work out, but still take a shower; and then lie about what they did at the gym today to any colleagues that happen to be present.

However, I have noticed another thing recently that’s caught my fascination, and that’s the immense precision that Ben Afflecks put forth towards styling their hair.  The way my gym locker room is set up, the toilets, urinals, sinks and the accompanying mirrors are like in this separate alcove away from the rest of the lockers and showers.  So when I’m done dressing out, and I want to go fix my own hair in the mirror, there’s always a good chance that I’ll turn the corner into the sink/toilet alcove and then every sink will have Ben Affleck standing in front them, with them very precisely working on their hair.

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