But Wait, There's More!

The Sound of One Hand Packing

There are of course, many things worse than losing your job. From being forced to watch 9 straight hours of SpongeBob Squarepants with your feet glued to a paint mixer, to having President Neuvo Bush read something you wrote....out loud....in public....in front of cameras.

But one of these things is also....changing locations and keeping the same job.

1. You're usually expected to actually DO your job and move at the same time to some degree. So if you happen to have a particularly stressful job...more to the joy of the whole experience. I wonder if Air Traffic Controllers ever have to actually 'move'. Do they have Pioneer leering over their shoulders as they guide planes into the pattern...trying to pack up the slinky and yo-yo collection and avoid mid-air collisions all while someone asks them for a new address they obviously haven't memorized yet but had better get it right because otherwise the Pez dispenser collection will end up on a tuna trawler going to Grenada. Ah...relaxing.

2. While you're at work, you lock most of your neat shit up. Some of us have offices, some don't. But private or not there's usually a credenza or file cabinet of some kind with lock to keep out the thieving bastards that always lurk around looking through all your neat stuff. Don't think so? Set up a webcam with a motion sensor just for kicks. You'll be shocked at who comes peeking through your pencil drawer when you ain't around. Anyhow, now you have it all in moving boxes...*unlockable* moving boxes. And heaven forbid if you labled them...so don't. Now all your stuff is boxed up and easily 'movable'....or 'shopable' as the case may be. Just kind of makes me nervous in a generally distrusting sort of way, ya know?

3. Let's say your work group has a lab of some kind. Computer Lab, Genetic Testing Lab, Perfume Reverse Engineering Lab, Cosmetics For Rabbits Allergic Reaction Lab...whatever. If you don't want every friggin nice piece of equipment missing, gutted, broken, dropped or generally buggered in an annoyingly intermittent sort of way, you'd better pack all that stuff up yourself, or else. In these days of 'economic distress', there's no telling HOW little the dude who's in charge of moving your huge mound of expensive crap is getting paid per hour. And you can bet your ass he's got a latent mutant ability that will turn a million dollar scanning-tunneling electron microscope into the world's heaviest 'machine that goes "ping", then bursts in to flames' faster than the deviled eggs disappear at a family bar-b-que. Count on it.

4. You WILL be given labels to put on your stuff. And they WILL have 15 different blanks to fill out. And all you'll be given is a 5 digit number that represents the global position of where your precious stuff will end up. And you can also bet that NOBODY will know how to fill out the damn thing correctly. "What does AREA mean? What do I put under BUILDING NUMBER? Do we even HAVE a building number?" And you'll have people point out to you, when you're half through labeling your stuff, that *they* filled out their labels differently. But they won't *tell* you that their way is correct. Oh no, that would imply responsibility on their part. No they were just telling you that to instill a vague sense of insecurity about how you interpreted this shipping fiasco. Tell them to go play in the street. They may not, but chances are they'll shut up and leave you alone.

5. On the day before the day before the move, someone will ask you if you want to move early. Well, strike that, they won't actually ask YOU...but someone in your group. I can only hope for your sake that you work with the kind of people I do who can 'Just Say No' and not change the schedule 38 seconds from zero hour.

And all this is BEFORE you move. I'll get into my list of AFTER once I feel it's worth writing about. Unpacking is always far more painful than the opposite. Except with explosives.

Just as a warning, if you get creeped out easily, don't listen to the EVP audio alone in the dark.

This subject facinates me, I thought I'd share this:

http://www.ghostpix.com/

A few words on getting stuck:

1. Be prepared, if your piercing is visible, to be enlightened. People you thought would care, don't. And people you thought were really easy-going are fighteningly uptight about the whole thing. People are looking at me now like I'm an axe murderer, and I wasn't even *talking* to Otis....all day even.

2. If you're getting your eyebrow done, like me, you may have to wear something really hideous and thick for a few days before you can get it to look the way you want. I'm wearing something right now that is the size of a tractor inner-tube..but silver. You have been warned.

3. You may know a few people who have tats. Don't take any shit off the inked crew; can they hang thier sunglasses from that picture of J-Lo? Didn't think so.

4. Keep it clean, but don't go overboard. You don't want it to heal up too fast so don't go applying Neosporin with chassis grease-gun. In other words, refugginlax.

5. Have something made from old jewlery; it's still yours, but it's in a different place. Reduce. Reuse. Recyle. Rinse. Repeat.

If at all possible, get someone who is already pierced to take you and help in the support process. Who knows, they may even pay for it. Must be a 'virgin' thing

Ugh, starting to thunder here...so before I loose all this, night bruthas and sistas!

Media Player Schmedia Player

"Updates are available to make your hardware even more obsolete and make it possible for us to capture even more marketing information from your activities without notifying you. Would you like to continue?"

"Yes"              "No"

I truly busted Microsoft today, not like it matters even in the most cursory of ways, but I'm arranging my wfm files for about 2 hours. I finally get a cd together that I want to burn, and by the time it finishes 'converting' the 3rd song that DAMN window comes up about 'new updates' for windows media player would  you like to install them now?

What *now*?...you mean RIGHT now? This very second...don't wait until the conversion or burn process completes..oh of course not...how silly of me, no we can't have that...stop everything you're doing and download our latest coagulation of crap to slap  onto our already bulbous and oozing code like wad of wet modeling clay on the side of Jabba The Hutt's ass. Sure, nothing I was doing was more important than what MICROSOFT wants that's for damn sure! I'll just click on yes, put on some Tracey Chapman and beat the crap out of myself, shall I? CCCHRRRRRRIST!!!!!!!

Can it be ANY more obvious that this little watchdog reports back to the mothership every time you burn a song to a cd? Oh yea, and it checked for updates while it was walking by the fridge, why not. Oh and why not interrupt that very process with a popup window that advertises to 'upgrade' the very code you're running at the time. 

Don't get me wrong, I knew it was going on, and when, and where... LONG before now. I mean,  just because you've been cleaning up the dog turds for months and you know he's been eating out of the litterbox doesn't mean that catching him taking a crap in your shoes while you're wearing them with a Dolly Madison dusting of litter still on his nose isn't enough to make anyone a bit flabbergasted even with the painfully obvious.

I'm filling out a virus report on Norton's web site...just to see what kind of reaction I get.

It's Better With The Butterfly?

Is it just me? I mean, I have WAY too many email addresses; but the only one that gets far and away the raunchiest nudeteenasiansexfetishfistingpeckerpufferpills junk mail is my Hotmail account.

Now granted, I'm not a *paying* MSN member, so perhaps I'm not privilaged to have my own butterfly...but doesn't that seem a bit like the wolf guarding the sheep?

A few Something Awful Nuggets:

HOT, Boring Fetish Action!

The Pizza Matrix

Dragon Fantasy Mystic Shadow Dungeon Horizon Event Online 7

Yesssirrreee, I am now a Certified Cisco Networking Associate Professional Engineering Architect Design Specialist with Cheese, Sour Cream and Tomatos (hereto referred to as a "CCNAPEADSWC Grande", which translated into French, Binary, then have it's vowels replaced with the ones from that goofy Microsoft Outlook font and translated back into English after being copied back down onto a Big Chief tablet by a 4 year old running on 15oz Frappachinno, 3 Ding Dongs, and one of those 5 ft. Pixie Sticks actually spells 'Loser Without A Life'...which, it turns out now that I think about it, to be frighteningly more accruate than it is funny)

And during this certification exam (and I'm about as certified these days as you can get without having some schedule time in my busy day to play with electricity while strapped to table if you know what I mean) they actually want you to take exam time to make comments on the questions. How crappy is that?

"Well we gave them 90 minutes to put as many comments on the questions as they wanted."

...of course you did, leaving out the fact that you have to actually TAKE the exam in that time as well. Oh sure, there are *only* 60 questions, but you can't go back after you answer one. So you have to answer it AND critique it at the same time. What kind of glue-sniffing trog thought of that one?

On a lighter note, I just got back from the opto on monday and she says my prescription in my right eye hasn't changed. That's good news, cuz that's the one that little redneck turd hit me with a 5 d-cell flashlight in. To this day, I'm glad the hit gashed open my eyebrow and the blood blinded me, because I'd be in jail for murdering his tobacco-spitting carcass if he hadn't. I had not been till then, nor have been since, so angry at another human being that murder seemed not only an acceptable option but one I would have gleefully carried out with my bare hands. Kinda scared the crap out of myself; and the cop thought I was crying for an entirely different reason. Wait a sec, I said lighter note....<rewind>...Oh yea, they made this 3D model of my retini..or retinas...anyhow, they both look just like a Leroy Neiman painting of an anus. How funny is that?

So she's explaining what I'm looking at, and I'm digging on her perfume by the way, and she points out my optic nerve and I'm thinking to myself "That may be what YOU call it, but I know what it looks like sugar. And judging by that, my eyes being as blue as they are is just a coincidence, lemmetellya." And I'm nodding politely trying to keep my mouth shut because I'm desparately wanting to tell her that I've been wearing glasses since I was 8 and I know all this stuff, and yes my left eye is shaped like a football, just say it FOOOOOOTBALL...don't be polite and say the cornea has a point to it in the front making several different focus points on my retina, just tell me it's shaped like Madonna's bra. You know you want to.

So....my left eye needs a bit of adjustment, so with the new prescription I pick out some silver Hugo Boss frames that are very nice (the picking out the frames part is the ONLY part of all this I enjoy in the first place) and head home. The car begins to politely 'ping' at me telling me I need gas so I stop and fill up. When I go inside to pay I get a carwash with it and they give me the slip that has the seekrit code on it to punch into the control panel. *I*, however, don't realize I can't read it until I'm next in line.

Squint...punch...squint...punch....(angry beep)...Multilply this by about three times and I finally give up and leave the line before I get mauled by the pack of impatient drivers behind me. Once I get back inside and explain that I can't read the slip, she looks at it for a second and without even a 'Hmmm' or a 'Huh', she writes down a number in pen next to it. Once I see the number written and look back at it, I can read it clear as day. I punch in the code and that one works.

I suppose the moral of all this is that no matter how simple something is, we all need the obvious pointed out to us once in a while, even if it is by a total stranger. Well, that and wash your own car ya lazy bastud.

The world of 'firsts' has always facinated me. However, I must admit, with the 'conversational puppy' aspect to my personality I tend to gravitate toward the more mundane and 'left under the couch' kind of firsts. Like...

"Your highness shines out like a shaft of gold, when all around is dark."

MoonGlow