So, we still are homeless today.  

Unfortunatly we haven’t closed you; and I learned that home buying is a lot more …. what’s the word I am looking for??? Nerve Wracking!! Than I thought it would be.  But I did get to skip out of work 4 hours early and have lunch at the Texas Chili Parlor (which looks like a dive but the food isn’t to bad).  So while Kimmy and I let ice cream melt away at our stress I sit her comfortably knowing that tommorrow contractors will be slaving away over our future home.  The idea of someone slaving away over our future home is comforting.

And that’s all I wanna say about that.

So on to other news,  I have revived my Rock vs. Co-worker challenge!!  Fun times!!  Excitement all around!!

So my day job (the thing I do when not moon-lighting as a super hero) is phone system stuff and IVR development.  What makes it mostly interesting is that I’ve not actually been trained on most of what I do so every day is a learning experience.  I liken it to being tossed off a cliff and learning to fly, although sometimes the lessons can be incredibly painful.  So IVR developement, IVRs are wonderful things that help to keep you away from customer service.  They are like mini-turing tests.  If you are smart enough to push the right buttons then you get to speak to a person.  The problem is, IVRs are supposed to be rational; unfortunatly management loves to put their hands all over them.  Even more unfortunate, not all managers are created equal.  Some of them only exist to torment me, I am sure they torment others but their main purpose is to torment me!!  Poor me!!  Look I am so distraught that I am using multiple !! marks!!  So for tormenting me -1 pt, at some point I swear I’ll look up the score again.

I have too much junk at my desk … it is amazing but I have actually lost the phone on my desk, I know it is there because I can here it ringing. I was going to post some photos, but I can’t find the camera … I think it is on the desk.

So its been a while since I have expounded upon the obtuseness of my co-workers, but every since one of the managers fired a few the, well of humor & pain has run a bit dry. Luckily yesterday it rained (something broke), and when it rains it pours (emails flowed like whiskey at an Irish … well any Irish event). To be fair it was part of the phone system that broke so the first logical group to contact is us (score 1 for logic), however it was the phone system in another office that was 1,653 miles away (take that logic) … so not a lot I could do. Luckily my superior brilliance instantly deduces the problem and in the first 5 minutes of all hell breaking loose I fire off a solution. Sadly it takes another 32 minutes and 37 emails before the problem is fixed. I am going to wager that in that 37 minutes I could have done something profound like world peace, or at least tamed the bear so I feel justified slapping my co-workers with a stinging -1 point.

Of course the nature of the problem is even funnier than me penalizing my co-workers. I was going to draw this out for my rapturous audience but since even my stick figures cause ocular bleeding I decided words were far safer; trust me folks … ocular bleeding isn’t fun. So I decided on a happy little narrative … so once upon a time there are three servers, let us call them Router, CAP, and Switch. Now Router, CAP, and Switch have an important job of preventing all hell from breaking loose and usually they cheerfully do this, BUT Router slept with Switch’s attractive 21 year old daughter so they currently aren’t speaking … and poor CAP is stuck in the middle trying to facilitate communication between the two in an effort to prevent all hell from breaking loose. Well after a while CAP decides this sucks and decides to flat out not talk to either Router or Switch. This is all fine and dandy but, they aren’t working and all hell breaks loose. Now the best solution would be to fire CAP, congratulate Router for scoring on Switch’s daughter, and replace Switch with some one less whiny and possibly more attractive. But! Don’t you hate butts … Switch has some photos from a office party and well getting rid of him would be costly so someone (i.e. a tech) has to walk up to CAP and slap him for being a whiny little snot, and tell him to get back to work. Then there is the process of stuffing hell back in a box, cleaning up, and trying to explain to people why the three servers decided to have drama on a Wednesday afternoon.

Fun times all around.

I have to admit that when I saw this I really wanted one. Unfortunately it looks like the earliest release date is going to be 2012 and well since it looks like the end of time according to the Mayan’s (my bet is someone gets nuked because everyone is fed up with continually rising gas prices), I probably won’t get one. So oil is up again today (as of 1:59 CST) and is currently sitting at $145.03 which annoys me, by the time I go to fill up gas will probably top $4.00 here in Austin. Yeah it is a pain having to blow $80.00 every month on gas; I would love to telecommute but since I am tech support I pretty much in the office no matter what. Speaking of tech support who new a short holiday week could leave me so bitter. So in a bitter rage topped off with frothy annoyance I have decided to update my Rock vs. Co-worker’s challenge. At last glance we had left the rock with a stunning victory of 0 pts. vs. the co-workers with a stunning -4 pts. Unfortunately the co-workers have done a stellar job of annoying me this week so I have deemed it time to penalize them once again. First -1 pt. for waiting to the last minute; I keep trying to explain to people that waiting till the last minute on something really pisses me off don’t do it. But in a stunning reversal I had a manager not only request something two weeks in advance but actually followed up and reminded me; so I feel justified in throwing 2 pts. back. However, I love however’s, certain co-workers have been deemed un-trainable and worse alarmist … which makes more work for me, since there are two of them, and I have to block out two hours Monday to deal with it I feel fair in nailing them for -3pts!

So we got three new hires at work last week. I like to assume things, until proven wrong, and I assumed that they were going to keep me busy. Luckily I was wrong; while they seemed timid around the computer they asked intelligent questions and didn’t cause me too much grief work. When the new hires arrived Monday morning I assumed that they were going to drag down their fellow co-workers in my Rock vs. Co-Workers contest; again I was wrong…my problem children did a splendid job of dragging themselves down. It reminds me of that old quote, give some one enough rope ….

A majority of the week was quite and the score didn’t budge in the Rock vs. Co-Workers challenge. Nobody did anything brilliant, but nobody did anything stupid either. I assumed I was going to have a quite week, but by Friday stupidity was running rampant. This brings up an important point ….since I am the judge and jury of the Rock vs. Co-Workers challenge there is a certain amount of bias in what I consider stupid. So I thought I should clarify that ….stupid is anything that makes more work for me. So there are no stupid questions, just stupid people asking questions; but questions don’t make more work for me so I encourage people to ask away. So that is it, pretty much the only thing that gets my co-workers dinged is doing something that makes more work for me. This includes fiddling with something, breaking said something and then asking me to fix it while forgetting to mention that you were fiddling with it and this is what you did. Case in point, one of my co-workers is responsible for dragging down the score. We use wireless headsets in the office; everyone thinks they are cool and love their wireless headsets. I advocated for using the wired kind so people would be forced to stay at their desk and because they were $300.00 cheaper, but since I am a temp my opinion is worth less than a screen door in a hurricane.

There are two problems with wireless headsets; problem number 1, to lighten the load on the headset and the wearer’s ear they made the headset as light as possible. This gives a smaller mike boom so to compensate they jack up the sensitivity of the mike. No big deal unless you have a bunch of sales associates who howl, well like howler monkeys. If you don’t fiddle with your mike’s settings you will pick up a lot of background noise. Insisting that the phone line is broken because you hear a lot of noise does not endear me to you. Having to prove it because your manager opened a ticket makes me less happy and wastes about 3 hours of my time; -1 point. Problem number 2 with wireless head sets. Because we have about 80 employees using them and they all sit with in 50 feet of each other you will get feedback on them if you wander around; this isn’t the phone system’s fault, it does not have crossed wires. Again, dealing with the ticket and wasting 3 more hours of my life; -1 point. Finally after I prove to you that it is your headset and that you need to adjust it, if the adjustment fails don’t send me a vague email telling me your phone is broken, I assume the worse; -1 point for wasting 1 hour undoing your mistake.

So if you have fingers and have been counting; the current score in the Rock vs. Co-Workers challenge is Rock 0 and Co-Workers -4. 

Sweet zombie Andrew Jackson on a pogo stick we passed 50,000 page requests; it happened sometime last week, I wasn’t really paying attention, and now I feel special. Now if only I could get my fraking desktop to work I would be in business. I think I have isolated the issue to be with either my mother board or the bios. Rather than taking the mother board and using it as a Frisbee I am going to try the insane and flash the bios and then update it to see if that works. Since I have never actually flashed I bios, there is a good chance that I will have a $90 Frisbee that flies like crap. More importantly I have to actually find a floppy drive, which may or may not be a pain. Once that gets done, I am looking forward to that new 500 GB SATA hard drive. I don’t currently have 500 GB of crap but I am sure it won’t take me long to fill it; I am thinking the best of Abba.

Luckily the conference call I am on currently give me a lot of time to actually think about what I want to load on my home computer. I still wonder how I got put on this call, I only inject about 5 minutes worth of content and I spend the other 55 minutes waiting for it to end so that I can actually go back to work. Of course I always end up on this call when I have things to do and am behind. Currently am fighting with our support center to give me the executables I need to add some machines to active directory. I could Google how to set up active directory for these new machines but at this point it is a matter of pride and principle; plus it helps me waste an entire day while being able to blame some one else.

Now to the juicy part which I know you have all been waiting for, co-workers vs. rock; I really need to get a logo for this and possibly put it on a computer. Last week the rock was up by two points but my crafty co-workers started to catch up. First one of my co-workers wanted to pirate our anti virus software and asked me how, a big NO NO; minus 1 point…but in a clever turn of events they asked me if I recommended anything for anti virus protection after smacking them down…plus 1 point. That brings the current score rock 0 and co-workers -2. To finish off the week there were still lagging DST issues. Rather than bug me, one of my co-workers asked for instructions on how to resolve the issue himself, clever co-worker…plus 1 point. In a surprising turn of events co-workers narrow the rocks lead; I was quite impressed. So far today, no one has done anything I would actually consider stupid so the score still stands 0 to -1. The way this week is shaping up, I am actually expecting my co-workers to narrow the score and climb into the positive range; although there are a few wild cards that could drag them down….stay tuned for another exciting episode of co-workers vs. rock!