The Journal of Mors Indutus

Well, it wasn't the worst birthday I ever had (parts of it were quite pleasant, unlike my birthday in 4th grade where I got sand in my eye...) but having a cold/allergies/whatever caused my throat to feel like I've swallowed steel wool does not make for a pleasant experience. At least my throat is feeling better today, although it's developed into a rather nasty cough and for a while this afternoon my voice sounded like a frog with throat cancer. Thank God I'm not working in Tech Support anymore. Having to talk on the phone with this would have sucked copious amounts of balls. Think when I get home it'll be time to pop a few benedryls and take a nap.

In other news, only about a week and a half till the wedding. Very much looking forward to the wedding, and the subsequent week of vacation which will be the first time I've had an entire week off since the summer of '05.

Woo hoo! I'm getting upgraded to Minion status! Job comes with a nice raise and I won't have to answer phones anymore! At least not calls from customers! Happy day! I truly have much to be thankful for.

Mors' quote of the day:

"I've shoved so much sunshine up my ass in the last 3 months that I've started shitting rainbows."

Well, I re-rolled Deus Ex Somnia. It's now a blog. Cause heavens knows there aren't enough blogs around. The comic is still there, just at deusexsomnia.com/comic instead of the main page. Check out Deus Ex Blog. I've been kind of kicking this idea around for a while, mainly since I stopped regularly updating the comic. I probably won't have much time to draw until the summer. It's been way too busy at work, and that kind of pushes all the stuff I used to do at work to home. Anyway, it's easier to write than to draw, so hopefully I'll be updating a bit more often. And with that, it's bedtime. Wake, work, sleep. I feel like I need a vacation.

Well, this week has been okay so far. I noticed last week that I was developing a bad attitude towards work again, so this week I'm trying to have a good attitude. It's somewhat hard. I have lots of reasons to have a bad attitude. I've been working here for 3 years and I've only ever gotten one (1) $0.30 raise. So I'm making thirty cents more than the people who just started, yet I'm far more knowledgeable and have a ton more duties. I've been stuck doing my old job AND my new job and both have been swamped. I've been working 40+ hours a week for the past 6 months. And I'm still not full time. I don't even care about the money, but I've had this chronic sore throat thing that keeps coming back every couple months and I can't even afford to see a doctor about it because I don't have health insurance. It's very discouraging. But that's the bad stuff. At least I have a steady job, which given the economy in Michigan lately is not a given. I'm getting overtime, so I'm making good money. I paid off my car this month, so I can start saving towards the wedding and contribute to fixing up the house. If things continue like this I should have no possibility of getting my hours cut...

I can't think of any more positives at the moment, but I'm sure there are some. Somewhere. Bugger.

Whew! It's been a busy couple of days! Drove up to Traverse City this weekend with my fiance for a family Christmas get-together. We left Friday night after she got out of work, drove up and got there around midnight. Stayed up till two, got up around 9 the next day, went to meet her Great Aunt, went back to the house for hors d'oeuvres, went out and had a hayride (would have been a sleigh ride, but for the lack of snow), got back and had supper and then opened presents. We had three rambunctious children running around, although given that it wasn't too bad. After that we packed up and headed home. We left Traverse City at around 11:30, didn't get home till about 2. Still, it was better than getting up at 7 to drive down and be home in time for her to go to work at 11. Went to church and then went over to my parent's place for pancakes. I actually managed to have a civil and meaningful conversation with my father. Then me and my sister went to see the Lewis Black movie (Unaccompanied Minors or something...) For a Christmas kids-beating-up-on-adults movie, it wasn't bad. I also managed to get another wallpaper done yesterday and then went to bed early, cause I had to be here to work by 8AM. It's been steadily busy all day today, but at least I get out at 4:30. Have to go pick up the present for my little sister and her boyfriend, and see if I can get my laundry started. Christmas is a week from today. Kinda snuck up on me this year. complete lack of snow may have helped. But that was my weekend, next one looks to be even more hectic, but it'll be fun too. Just got to make it through this first week back on the 8AM shift. Maybe I'll just go home and take a nap instead.

Well, today is my first day in the new cube. Formerly ghostrider72's cube. So far I am definitely digging it. The main pluses are more privacy since my back's to a wall now instead of open to the entire department and no one is going to be walking behind me, a 19" monitor which definitely makes 1280x1024 easier on the eyes, and I'm no longer right underneath the heating vent which in the old cube was blowing dry air right in my eyes. Definitely a nice change. And it looks like I should be finding out if I get full time this week or early next week. Boss' boss' boss told me he's trying to get some clarification of budget at the meeting this week and should know if they can get me full time then. W00t! Although at this point, if I don't get it I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. Best to just hope for the best at this point I suppose. At least I feel like people in management are on my side on this instead of working against me. The new desk is definitely an improvement, if I get full time I'll be flying high. If not, I'll just start working towards a promotion. Captain ponytail got bumped up, I could be next! Bwa ha ha!

Well, I had a wonderful weekend, despite having to work Saturday morning. Last night, I went to the TSO (Trans-Siberian Orchestra) concert. It was excellent. Orchestral Metal is my kind of music! Orchestral Christmas Metal rules too. I had a great time. I was flying high! Right up to getting in to work this morning, when my co-worker gave me a "Hot potato." I had to call back a customer who wanted us to drop everything and go out and fix his problem. There wasn't any wiggle room in our schedule for us to do that, so he was going to be mad a hell. When I actually called him, it wasn't that bad, but the dread before hand was enough to sap my TSO Euphoria. The guy channeled Randy Savage, "That's not acceptable, bruthur!" So I transfered him to the supervisor. But the super got his revenge. I'm now in both the special queue that I've been in for the past 4 months, that is associated with the 5 or 6 jobs I do currently AND the main queue. Which means my job just got busier on an order of 10. On the plus side I've still managed to get through all my usual browsing, and I looked up and it was 1pm already. Crazy. Just a four more days (not counting this one) before I head up to Traverse City with my fiance. If they go this quickly, it should be cake.

Well, as you may have notice (or not if you're viewing this from your own friend's page) I redid my site layout for LJ. I think it looks pretty good, but I may need to do some minor tweaking from here. Of course, if anyone has any suggestions or comments, they're always welcome. Getting this done on a Monday between calls is a minor miracle as well. Not having any major outages for a few days makes things run so much more smoothly...

So I'm sitting here alone at work right now. Well, not alone but I am the only one covering this particular call queue. It honestly could be a lot worse. Considering [major city] is down, I'd expect there to be 10 calls in queue. Instead, it's been pretty steady. This is pretty much how it should be, which is a pleasant surprise given how things have been going for the past couple weeks. It seems like the job has been finding new and interesting ways to drive me towards mental breakdown. We're grossly understaffed (even worse when two out of the five people call out) and can't seem to get ahead no matter how hard we try. And the worst part is that I can't argue with people. Before, when I was troubleshooting dialup, if someone called and said our service was crappy, I knew that we had the best equipment around and engineers that were really good at their jobs and I could argue, if only in my own head, that our service was excellent, the customer is just being bitchy. Now, I can't argue. Our service sucks. I'm losing hope. It feels like we, as a company (within a company), are treading quicksand. The more we try to streamline things and get ahead, the more problems jump up that distract us and get us even further behind. I have no faith in the equipment. I know the engineers are good at their jobs, but the best of them has been away from the stuff for over a year, and the rest are unfamiliar with it at best. Given the issues we've been having and the poor level of customer support caused by being so grossly understaffed and under-trained, it's a wonder to me that we have any customers left in certain areas. And yet, many (certainly not all) of the people I talk to are fairly patient. There are the occasional assholes who don't accept that there's nothing we can do to fix the problem at current. (It's always fun when someone demands that you troubleshoot their individual problem when there's a well-known group outage.) Some of these people have the patience of saints. "Okay, I guess we just won't use the internet today." Our customers are resigned to poor service. And that's just sad. They're used to it. We're like the phone company, people call expecting bad service and are resigned to it cause there's nothing better available. That's not the kind of thing I want to be a part of. We're working to make it better, but it feels like we're going backwards. And that's a very disheartening feeling. And I'm still part-time. I need full time benefits, cause I either need some vacation days, or health insurance to pay for either the ulcer or the mental hospital. Which is better than the alternative. I could stop caring. I'm on the verge. I have a hard time not caring, but once I get there it's hard to break out of. I managed to get there at my job at the grocery store when, the night after I worked my ass off, the boss gave me the same march around to show me what I missed. It happened in my first job in tech support when I got yelled at so much by the owner that I said "Screw it!" It even happened at this job a few years ago, when I got burned out in tech support and started slacking off. I really don't want to go back there. It's not fair to my employers or my co-workers. (I only really care about one of those, guess which.) I have no problem working hard if I think there is any chance of progress. I'm losing sight of that. I haven't seen any progress recently, just regress. I have faith in this company that things will improve... eventually. I'm probably just thinking too short-term, but still the lack of visible progress is distressing. I know my co-workers are working hard to improve things, and I will continue to work towards that goal. And in the meantime, I have massive amounts of overtime this week.

Money! It's what I want.
Money! It's what is hot.
'Cept freedom! Freedom is what we really sought!
-The Runaway Five (Earthbound)

I'm beginning to seriously loathe Tuesdays. Honestly, this is the worst day of the week for me, and has been for quite some time. For some unknown reason, people tend to be the bitchiest on Tuesdays, and I'm usually tired and not in the mood to deal with that. Today has been particularly bad with one of our 3 employees calling out sick. I'm just sick of dealing with people (aside from certain exceptions) today. I need a hug. It's been I while since I got the "I know it's not YOUR fault, but your company sucks so I'm going to take out my frustrations on you." thing from a customer. I could probably have done without any of that. Plus there's the stuff that is just not working for no apparent reason. Or at least no reason that's apparent to me. Or you find the apparent reason and fix it, but it still doesn't work. I'm honestly not paid enough to put up with this shit. I've been working 40+ hours a week for the past 4 months, why the hell am I not full time? I need some vacation and sick days before I get an ulcer. Thankfully, I have this Friday and Saturday off. I need a vacation, even if it's only a day. I'm really, really sick of having to deal with this crap. Why do people have to be such belligerent assholes? I understand that your internet connection is important to you, but if I'm bending over backwards to help you, the least you can do is stop bitching about how it's going to take an extra day or two to ship you a new modem. I'm sorry we can't drop everything to drive halfway across Michigan to replace your modem. I'm sorry we can't force SBC to speed up their line installation. I'm sorry. It's not my fault, but I'm still sorry about it. Please stop the yelling. It's not going to make me inclined to help you. Soooooo sick of this shit. And really wish that the one remaining co-worker would answer the damn phone once in a while. We have a queue now, there's no reason I should be taking 90% of the calls. </bitching>

Well, I'm feeling a bit better today. Still hurts to swallow, but not nearly as much. I'm much more alert today, probably helps that daylight savings time ended and I got that extra hour of sleep. It's been wierd. I've been going to bed really early all weekend, nearly went to bed at 8 last night, but I managed to stay up until 9:30. I usually stay up till midnight, no problem. This cold has really been kicking my ass. Once I'm healthy again, I definitely need to start some sort of excercise routine. Hopefully being back in GR will help reduce the amount of sheer listlessness I've been feeling. Starting your day sitting in a car for an hour and a half does not do anything for your alertness level. So looking forward to being back at the home office. We got our schedules today, looks like I'll be getting 40+ hours a week for the forseeable future. Money is good, cause I've got a wedding coming up, and those things are darn expensive. I just hope I get full time so I can have sick-days and vacations and health insurance and all the things that would have made getting over this illness a lot easier/faster. It's kind of a cruel irony, you work till exhaustion, then get sick. Once sick, you continue to work to exhaustion so it takes a lot longer to get better. When, if you'd taken one sick day to just rest up and take care of yourself, it most likely wouldn't have been nearly as bad. But since you're working part time and don't get paid sick-days, you have to keep working or you run into money problems... Such is the life of the part-time employees, even ones who work 40+ hours a week.

Anyway, since I'll be back in the office starting wednesday, I'm going to start bringing my own food to work instead of eating fast-food all the time. My friend oggr6 has been keeping track of his savings since he started doing just that, and I think it would probably work good for me too. I really need to cut down on the expenses. I've managed to cut down on some expenses, but I'm spending about $350 per month on food, gas, and entertainment. (FFXII shipped two days ago! I can't wait till it gets here!) I can probably drop that down to about $200/month, which would be $50/week. My car gets great milage and has a tiny tank, so it usually only costs me < $20/week, that leaves $30 for food. Or $5/day. With that much savings, I'll be able to pay off my car that much quicker and start saving for the wedding (and honeymoon!) Hooray!

Well, it looks like I'll be down in BC for another week or so. The due date for the integrated phone system has been moved to Nov 1st. So I can look forward to another fun week and a half of fun in Cereal Land. Not that I mind awfully much at this point. This week (so far) has been the best week down here in terms of stress and phone volume. We're actually getting caught up on some stuff. It's very nice. I've had a chance to do non-phone related activities! Crazy! On the minus side, I caught my wonderful fiance's cold so I've had a sore throat the last couple of days. I'm feeling much better today though, so hopefully I'll be okay. It always sucks when you have a sore throat and it hurts to talk when you talk on a phone for a living, but it really couldn't have picked a better week to happen. I'm still a bit wiped out, but all in all I'm doing okay. If today continues like it has been I'm definitely considering bringing my drawing down with me tomorrow. It'd be nice if I could get a bit ahead again, considering how far behind I've been lately. I've been finishing the comic for the next week on the saturday or sunday before they go live, which means that if anything came up during the weekend, I stand a good chance of missing the deadline. I'd like to be back to being 2 weeks ahead at least. If so, I might be able to go back to doing color occasionally, and maybe do another wallpaper. I'm running into a bit of writer's block to. I have a couple more storylines mapped out, but I'm not sure how to transition from here to there. Story of my life really. But really, if I can get ahead and start drawing at work again, that'd open up a lot more time for more important stuff like hanging out with my fiance and helping to plan the downstairs bathroom that we're going to have to completely redo. (We have it gutted, when we bought the house it hadn't been used in 3 years and was completely disgusting so we ripped it all out.) I'm now hoping to have the design and framing done by spring. That's the easy part of course. But anyway, things are going well, looking forward to being back in GR. Looking a lot further forward than I was a few days ago, but I'll live. Now if you'll excuse me, having completely jinxed myself, there's a bunch of calls that need answering. Peace out!

I've had an idea that I've been kicking around for a while of starting my own computer repair shop. It's pretty much what I was thinking of when I got that degree in computer science. I know with Best Buy, Circuit City, and all the big chains that the market is somewhat saturated, so I'd have to make this one a bit different. Aside from selling and repairing computers, I'd also like to offer classes on basic computer and internet use for people who had a computer dumped on them and don't know how to use it. Those "Here grandma! Now you can email us! K-bye." type of things. I doubt it'll make me rich, but I think I can make a decent living doing it, and at least I'd be in charge. Right now I'm trying to gather some info on what I will need to get started. I don't want to run it out of my house, so I'll need to rent some store-space somewhere. There's got to be some empty buildings that I could rent out around here for not too much money. I'll need to buy software, some monitors, furniture, computers, and stuff like that. As some of my co-workers mentioned, I'll need liability insurance, just in case. This business is going to be about service, real, actual, talk to a human being service. Which means I'm going to need to hire some people to help out once we get going. I want to make it a fun place to work, not just give lip-service to that ideal. It helps "service with a smile" if the workers are actually happy working there. Right now I'm in the preliminary "thinking about it" stage. I know there's some of you out there with a lot more experience than me, I'd value your ideas and opinions (other than the "Don't do it" ones.) I think I can make this work, and if not what do I have to lose? I'm young, if it fails spectacularly, I'll at least have the experience moving forward. If it succeeds, I'm all set. I'd rather try something and risk failure than sit around working tech support for the rest of my life. Those who do not try have no right to hope for success. What do you, the readers at home or work, think?

It's been too safe, it's been too safe for too long. - Stavesacre.

"Stop strip-mining the human resources!" -me.

We've been freaking busy lately. Oddly enough I'm still in a somewhat decent mood. I'm sure that will change by the end of the day. On top of our normal begining of the month billing crap, we also have not one but two aquisitions. They haven't really increased the number of workers though. I did get called into work yesterday, so I may wind up with more than 40 hours this week (overtime pay would be wonderful), but we're still getting slaughtered. Thankfull they have everything ported over, so once this batch of calls is done, it should (accent on should) quiet down a bit. All told, this hasn't been nearly as bad as some other aquisitions we've had, we're just a bit less staffed than during other aquisitions. Oh well, we'll get through this and at least I get plenty of hours for the next couple weeks. I could definitely use the money. I need to get that darn car paid off ASAP. The next payment isn't due until July of next year, and I didn't make a payment last month because of other expenses. Once I get that sucker paid off I should be good to go for getting some savings together to either go back to school or maybe eventually start my own business or something. Who knows? Skies the limit. I'd like to get my friend's opinion on what you think I should do. I'd kind of like to start my own computer repair center, I think I have some ideas for making it stand out a bit from other places. I'd like to become a philosophy professor, but that market is rather saturated as well (Practically the only thing you can do with a degree in philosophy is teach it to other people.) Or I could get my teaching cert and begin teaching highschool (college would be much preferable.) Or I could go to Seminary and become a pastor (not my first choice.) Or I could be an architect (another saturated market.) Or I could try and make a living on my comic (very unlikely.) Pretty much I need ideas on actual careers I can do, because obviously my bachelor's degree in computer science and 5 years of tech support experience is getting me nowhere. Any ideas on careers I could be interested in or comments on the ideas I posted?

Okay, so my last entry on my blog yesterday is either an essay on the failings of modern corporate culture or I've taken bitching about my job to the next level. I wonder which it is...

Blog Entry

Two nights ago I stayed up late reading the latest Timothy Zahn book till 3am, and got about 5 hours of sleep. Last night I went to bed at 12:30, got a full 8 hours of sleep. Yesterday I was fully awake and didn't seem to have lots of energy. Today I feel like a zombie. I'm rather confused by this. I should be fully awake today, having had a good night's sleep last night, yet I'm falling asleep at my desk. I'd wonder more about this, but I'm too sleepy...

After today I have one more day of work before the long weekend of Christmas. Lets hope we all don't overdose on family togetherness. Work got into the spirit of things by giving us all Christmas Hams. One of my co-workers doesn't eat ham, so I got two. How can you not eat Ham? Isn't Christmas the time of year when all good Christians eat ham, open presents, and thank Jesus we're not jewish. I don't know about you, but I hope to get a dreidel for christmas. I'd take it to work and spin it on my desk while I take calls. It'd be endless fun and would still be a better present than socks.

My employers are big on morale boosting schemes. What they forget is that tech geeks tend to have the morale of tepid oatmeal at the best of times. Every Christmas, they have us fill out appreciation forms for all of our co-workers. We got them delivered to us today. Apparently I'm appreciated being knowledgeable and funny for the most part. The most frightening appreciation came from my manager. "He will come in early when I call in the morning." That she put this in future tense fills me with dread. The fact that I have come in early in the past does not mean I want to make a habit of it. Some of these make no sense. "I appreciate the calm way he handles every call. No one beats up their desk like you." Somehow these two statements seem a bit contrary to each other. But I can't complain too loudly since my appreciations were along the lines of thanking my health conscious co-worker for warning us of the dangers of high-fructose corn syrup and our exceptionally tall co-worker for being exceptionally tall (and therefore superior.) Well, I for one feel appreciated. I'd feel more appreciated if I got a raise though. I'm just saying.