Seriously, fuck this place. This is the third time I’ve gotten jury summons, and the second time within the last six months. Whatever happened to the rule of three years? Can I at least get one calendar year without getting one of these wet blankets in the mail?
You know what though, instead of ranting again about how much this sucks and pisses me off, it turns out that the last one I wrote is still pretty much spot on how I feel about this one too.
Probably because it was only six months ago.
I have a co-worker who goes by “Dan.” Furthermore, he sits right behind me. Additionally, he also does more or less the exact same thing that I do, except he’s like twenty-five years older than me, addled by a litany of physical ailments and is far less competent and adept at the software we use than I am; this is not opinion, it is genuine fact.
Never mind the old man rants that come from him, reminiscing about the days of when Quark was the standard, and how all today’s Adobe software sucks in comparison, or back when he was in the military, or whenever something political in the news happens and he feels the need to voice his opinion to the rest of our group. My objection with him is simply the fact that he goes by “Dan,” because that’s not his actual name. It’s his middle name.
Continue reading “Why do some people insist on going by their middle names?”
For whatever reason, Big Brother has decided to start blocking a lot of websites that I frequently visit during my downtime at work. Most of them are LoL-related sites, and even sites like Buzzfeed and Know Your Meme have gotten the big virtual c-block, but it is safe to say that I do not visit any websites that contain any pornographic or vulgar materials. Come on now, it takes a complete retard to do such things on an obvious monitored network. I don’t hide the fact that I surf on my down-time, but at the same time I also feel that my track record and work management can justify the capability to surf occasionally.
But the biggest blow to this unprovoked crackdown is that now I’m no longer able to access Pandora anymore. This upsets me more than any other site getting blocked.
I’m still in the midst of this writer’s funk, where I feel like I want to write something, but I simply don’t know what I want to write about lately. It’s hard to explain how I’m feeling these days; I can’t say that I’m in one of my bouts of depression or being all ronery-emo, because I don’t really think I am. Work is boring and stagnant, but it’s not like I didn’t know this was going to be the status quo when I took this job. I’m working out and exercising along the same clip, and I feel physically fine, and mentally too, for the most part.
Yet, I can’t really find or think of anything remotely interesting to write about these days, to which that puzzles me a bit. Usually, I lean onto local news, or try to find something remotely interesting on the internet to spark some train of thought worthy to put into words. But Atlanta news is pretty stagnant and predictably boring, and nothing makes me want to write about racist agendas and the obvious racial bias that “my fair city” exhibits on such a regular basis. Not to mention the fact that all the local Atlanta news outlets are money-grubbing rags that recycle the same news anyway.
The Atlanta Braves blog I occasionally write for, I’ve been informed that there are going to be some changes with. Although it’s nothing really that serious, it does make me wonder if I want to continue to obligate myself with writing about baseball on a weekly basis. Obviously, my fandom with baseball has grown a little disenchanted over the last three seasons, but I kind of wonder if this was an opportunity to dive head-first into trying to re-invigorate it, or if I just want to stop outright. Sometimes I think that my position of floating in the middle isn’t necessarily the best idea.
Speaking of baseball, it’s not that I don’t love the game any less than I used to, but here’s an interesting fact: I’ve been to one Braves game all season. I’ve been to more baseball games at Coors Field in Denver, than I have at home in Atlanta. I’ve seen as many games in Detroit and Miami as I have at home in Atlanta. It’s not that I don’t enjoy going to the ballpark, it’s just that the idea of going alone isn’t what it used to be. I tell you, one of these days I’m just going to have to buckle down and get on board with an 81-game plan, and make my damndest effort to do an entire 81-game season.
Maybe this is the kind of slump that happens when I don’t really do anything in my spare time. I’ve been spending a lot of time reading lately, and I have to admit that since I started using my iPad as a Kindle, I’ve been reading a ton of books, and I’m finding it more of a bear than anything else when I force myself to read a physical book again, but my declaring particular authors as “physical book only,” it’s something that I’m not going to abandon any time soon.
But my list of options of things to do when I’m at home is a little stale, and makes me think that it’s contributing to my overall mental stagnancy lately. All I do when I’m at home as of late is either read, play LoL, or watch DVR’d shows. I could be a little bit more productive and try to do some cleaning, but when 95% of the clutter in the house isn’t mine, it’s somewhat unappealing and unrewarding to even fathom, let alone do, especially when it feels like it’s just going to have to happen again in a week.
Perhaps I need more activities to do in my spare time, to stimulate my brain into wanting to write about something. That’s usually what normally happens, when I really find inspiration to write, while I’m doing something else, creating the false conundrum that I need to address and write about something while the iron is hot, but oh noes, I suddenly don’t seem to have the time to do such. Perhaps I should actually address these projects for Dragon*Con while there’s still plenty of time in advance, as opposed to trying to get everything done in the month of August like I ended up doing last year.
But until then, this writer’s funk blows. I like having something a little more focused to write about.
Between kindergarten and the third grade, I apparently had a very poor attention span. I’m pretty sure that if I were a kid in today’s society, I’d have been diagnosed with ADHD, and be put on medication of some sort, but since I wasn’t, we’ll just say that I was a typical kid who erred on the side of hyperactive, and it reflected in my performance in school.
Anyway, the most frequent evaluative remarks I would get during those years of contemporary schooling were along the lines of “needs improvement with paying attention, listening to and following directions.” Such sentiments would reflect in my report cards where I would apparently have low marks in those exact behavioral categories, despite the fact that I was doing pretty well in the actual educational aspect of school. It got to a point where my mother engrained the fear of god into me that paying attention and listening to and following directions were the most important categories to excel at when considering the next report card.
But since effort is one thing, and actual results are a completely other thing, there was a report card where it was more of the same thing; poor marks in paying attention and listening to and following directions. My mom apparently hit a boiling point and beat the shit out of me.
Continue reading “Oh, just a veiled message hinting how I’m feeling today”
Instead of bitching about how much I hate PowerPoint again, I thought about the root of the cause for my hatred: I work with people that think PowerPoint is the greatest fucking concept on the planet. When I delve deeper and think about these people, I come to the conclusion that I work with people wholly unqualified, uneducated, and incapable of their positions, which begs to eventually ask the question of how these people got their jobs. And the answer to that, is sadly the easiest to hypothesize.
I recently read an article about how in Fulton County, the current workforce diversity breakdown currently stands at 83% black, 9% white, with the remaining 6% being “other,” AKA Asians and Hispanics. I live in Fulton County. Fulton County is pretty large overall, so these same statisticians saw it fit to isolate and examine just the City of Atlanta, which is within Fulton County. And within Atlanta itself, it breaks down to 75% black, 9% white, and 16% other.
There are three women in my office who have put blackout screen protectors on their monitors. Y’know, the sheets of film that make screens visible pretty much solely to the user, as looking at them from the slightest angle makes them appear black and impossible to see through. What most people put on their laptops, from when they really don’t want people near them to see what they’re doing on planes or coffee shops; shielding their personal devices in public places.
But yeah, there are a few people in my office who have put these screen shields on their work machines. Since we all work in a cubicle jungle, what this says is that they do not want random people, passing through, to be able to see what they are doing. The question I have to that is, what exactly would they be doing that requires the need for such extreme security measures?
