To trudge

When I first started my job, I parked in the second level of the parking ramp just outside the part of the building where I work. When my shift changed to start a couple of hours later, that lot tended to be filled, and I resorted to parking in the overflow lot just south of the building. That parking lot has been torn out to lay the foundation for a new satellite building to the headquarters, mirroring the existing satellite building across the street, which, coincidentally, is where I've been recently forced to park, picking up a shuttle van from the first floor of their parking ramp.

Today, however, I stood in the shuttle loading area as the ten minutes before the start of my scheduled shift ticked away with no sign of a van. I called my supervisor and assured her that I wasn't late (a defensible point being on company property), and that I would be walking the half mile or so to work. She assured me that she would look into the matter of the shuttles, but eventually, I found that it was easiest to just ask one of the drivers. He explained that the vans, as of this morning, only pick up at the front of the building, not at the parking ramp. The shuttle driver explained that it's a short walk to the new shuttle stop, through the building that my security badge does not allow me to enter, and that signs indicating this change were posted, inside the building, which my security badge will not allow me to enter.

I can assuredly walk around the outside of the building to get to the shuttle, but it's only slightly shorter than the half mile walk to my own building. If getting to work gets one step more difficult, I'm taking a short cut through the construction site next time, throwing myself down the pit and living like a king for the rest of my days off the settlement.

It was an invigorating stroll in the 2° morning air, though I can't imagine it did much for my already grotesque choking cough. One of the callers I spoke to today told me that I shouldn't be at work, a sentiment echoed by my nearest co-worker. She told me I'm going to make everyone else ill. I explained that when the company begins calculating my quarterly bonus on how often she calls in sick, I'll start concerning myself with epidemiology.

Until then, I am a plague rat with an average call handle time 7% below goal threshold.

It would be an easy segue to make fun of Discordianism.

I learned today that I share my birthday with the anniversary of the discover of Eris, the largest dwarf planet in the solar system. This is doubly coincidental, as I am, technically, the second largest dwarf planet in the solar system.

Today is my birthday. I have opted to stay home and continue my recuperation from my Crippling Illness during my Hellish Week of Mandatory Overtime. It's probably for the best, though, in the spirit of recuperation, I should probably cut this blog update short in favor of going to bed early.

But, for the record, Discordianism is also a funny religion.

If it kills me...

The noble cyanocrylate Jackson pine that had adorned my parents' living room has once again been crammed into a brightly hued body bag and shoved under the stairs for another 11-month long nap. I've always liked January. My birthday's in January, though that promises to be a non-event at best this year. It's also horrifically cold, which I enjoy, but that's not really it either. Mostly I like a new year. It's a fresh set of downs. I've always (or nearly always) been future-oriented. I'm a guy with not much going for him but potential. That's probably less and less true at the age of 30, but I'm told 30 is the new 20 by people too young by that math for their opinion to matter. In any case, I've knocked down two days of my two months of alternating toil and hibernation.

All in all, I'm in a good place. I managed to get through Christmas and New Years without major injury. I'm still a touch gimpy from my twisted ankle on Halloween and I can still feel some of the lump in my face from what was once a mighty black eye earned on Thanksgiving. Also, unlike the previous two holidays, I managed to not get broken up with through past couple weeks, though that was mostly by the severely efficient means of not having been dating at the time. Terms are more or less amicable, though Laura has put her assertion that she was "not going to wait around for me to deal with my Stevie situation" into fairly expedient action, Facebook status updates tell me. I met him last week. Nice enough guy, by the less than august standards of Guys Who Come After. Though his Facebook does list his religion as "Norse Pagan." That's troubling.

I'm hoping that's either intended as irony or that he's using "religion" as a synonym for "hobbie" or "thing I use to select tattoo designs," because the alternative is that he thinks we're going to some day drown in the blood of the Midgard serpent, or that it's a pretense intended to elicit toothy BJs from fat Wiccans at Summer Solstice bonfire parties behind their dads' cabins in Dakota County.

Trifles, in any case. Best of luck to them both.

In other news, some combination of my recent severe illness, winter beard, lack of grooming, my new default winter outfit, and crippling cynicism is really working for me, because the white trash girl at the gas station told me I looked nice today, and Sassy Black Lady at work agrees with her.

Tomorrow is both my birthday and my last scheduled 10-hour workday of the week. Snow is predicted for the morning commute.

Here's hoping all your dreams come true as mine have.

My New Years resolution is 1080p

I'm working something like 10 hours of overtime next week. Tomorrow is my supervisor's last day at the company, and he'll be spending his last day doing annual performance reviews. It seems to be like he got tricked into complicating his tax return, but I guess ultimately I'm pleased to get my review from a guy who has already learned to find me amusing rather than abrasive and contemptuous of company policy. Everything seems to be going well toward my plan to work from home. Notwithstanding, that is, the home.

Which brings me to the main part of my plan for 2011. Back in Minneapolis by March. As of Wednesday, I will be 30 years old and living in my parents' basement. It's an arbitrary milestone, but it's an unseemly one just the same. So, for the next two months, my plan is to spend as much time at home and at work as humanly possible (exceptions to be made for birthdays, etc.) If I send you a text inviting you out to a bar, tell me to go home until I can invite you over to my apartment.

Usually, I'm quite skilled at sleep-walking through a period of several weeks in order to reach a goal unreachable by any means other than persistence. The start of the new academic semester will make it easier to keep my head down and my expenses low. There's a lot of TV to be watched.

Seems like a good time to get a few more entries in on my various other abandoned blogs, too.

Wish me luck, and buy me a drink next Saturday.

Cubicle wisdom

The half hour of my workday with the least obvious benefit to me, or anyone else, is the final half hour of the day, a period granted the simultaneously sterile and cloying title of "Supervisor Interaction Time." The idea seems to be mostly to get us used to dealing with the people who will eventually be our immediate superiors, but while we're still in training, which is done by trainers, they have precious little to impart.

To wit, yesterday, the half hour was spent reading from a list of motivational quotations, attributed variously to Einstein, any number of self-help authors, and "anonymous," which I assume means "someone who wrote one of those chain e-mails."

They asked, after we discussed the page of treacly wisdom, if anyone had any quotes by which they tried to live, or at least to keep in mind in the workplace. I spent a period of my teens reading any number of collections of literary and philosophical quotations. In spite of that, it's probably for the best that the boss didn't call on me for mine, because after 8 hours of sitting in that chair, everything but Mencken escaped me completely.

Economic Indicators

While, undoubtedly, there's a great deal for a person to learn about the world of whatever-it-is-I-do, it has seemed clear for the past six or seven weeks, that four months of training probably isn't necessary. I spend half the day doing the actual job, at this point, which makes it very difficult to convince myself, or the majority of those in my training class, that the remaining four hours of training and instruction are valuable enough to warrant full attention or even complete consciousness. HEY PARENTS, THAT WAS A JOKE, I'M A HARD WORKER AND EVERYONE AT WORK LIKES ME.

Seriously, that's a little true. Except for my trainer, who has an unnerving lack of affect and seems to find my casual confidence and easy command of the material a little tedious, all the coaches, supervisors and even less popular co-workers seem to find me charming and interesting.

It's really a relief to have a job that feels permanent. It's been a while. It's been quite a bit longer than it's been since I had a job that was, technically speaking, permanent. The pun seems obvious, but my job at SHPS always seemed destined for disaster. I guess every disaster looks like it should have been predictable after the fact, though. That's probably a good lesson for me at the moment.

The biggest annoyance at the new job until recently was a web filter tight enough to turn rubbing alcohol into vodka. Luckily, the new future phone has solved by daily Facebook DTs quite nicely, albeit only at pre-determined work-appropriate intervals. The phone has also been a nice reminder of how much I had missed being able to buy something nice without agonizing over its impact on my finances over the next six weeks.

I tell you, kids. Things are looking up.

Forward. A bit.

My apologies, Internet, for the unforgivable lapse in this admittedly fairly young blog. Many of my readers are no doubt aware that this was not, as one might assume, the result of usual shiftless nature, but rather distraction by another, somewhat more productive project.

Back in early August, in an uncharacteristic fit of ambition and optimism, I decided that I should start posting Craigslist ads. One hundred of them, in as many days. I didn't tell everyone about the project immediately, as I usually do with a new undertaking, which makes it all the more surprising that I was as conscientious about continuing it as I was, until recently. Eventually, many or most of my friends/usual internet readership became aware of the project, and I was convinced to transcribe the ads, in their entirety, to a new blog, 100 Days of Craigslist.

As you can no doubt tell from reading the most recent entry, as well as, I suppose, the earliest, the project was met with success quite aside from its dubious acclaim throughout the local 50-year-old divorced woman community. The project lasted 50 days, though, which makes only slightly less catchy of a title for a book.

My standards, according to friends, co-workers, ex-girlfriends and a recent fortune cookie, are unreasonably high. Of the several dozen applicants, only five or six reached the point of phone numbers being exchanged, and one three culminated in actual face-to-face meetings. Pleasant but awkward, initially, but the most recent put a firm halt to the project.

I was on my way to Uptown last Tuesday night because of an unusual bout of generalized irritation with being at home, so I sent a few text messages to see who was interested in passing an evening drinking extremely cheap beer in school-night-appropriate amounts.

Maria, a considerable amount of champagne into her own evening of irritation at being at home, agreed enthusiastically, and I picked her up for a lovely evening on the patio at Cause (pronounced "Sauce.") The majority of our conversation consisted of my recounting of The Craigslist Ad Project up to that point. I told her about a few odd coincidences, some hilarious setbacks (which, if you know me in person, I would encourage you to ask me about, because they're not necessarily appropriate for Internet publication for various reasons), and the remaining possibilities ahead. Most of my focus for the future was on the lady-scientist who was among the more recent respondents, but who had failed to respond to her text that evening.

Maria wished me the best of luck, and read 40-some days worth of ads after I dropped her back at her apartment, and I drove home and went to bed, after writing another quick ad for that day.

At about 7:20 the next morning, as I was driving to work, I got a phone call. Oddly the first phone call I had received since getting my new phone, so I spent what seemed like a very long time figuring out how to answer, and then glancing quickly back and forth between the screen and the brake-lights ahead of me.

Eventually, I gathered my senses enough to say "Hello," and was met by a surprisingly chipper apology for having missed my text the previous evening, and an offer to go out after work that day. It seems that if I want a date after work on any given day, all I have to do is wake up too late to shower. I nonetheless agreed with more enthusiasm that pre-10 o'clock Dan is known for.

Jimmy's is a delightful bar. I had never been there for happy hour, but its one small double-paned window doesn't mar its dreary dankness in the least during daylight. We talked our way through the initial awkwardness and the first couple pitchers of "whatever is the strongest" between the two nearly interchangeable domestic taps at Jimmy's, until deciding to move on to The Vegas Lounge. It went very well.

If you've never heard a drunk girl with an English accent standing on a sidewalk in Northeast, complaining about what George Lucas did with Star Wars starting in the late '90s, then I really can't recommend it enough. At the end of the evening, we arranged another date for Friday, and I went home to put The Project on hold, much the the mixed chagrin and congratulations of its readership.

Some time the following day, through a mixed haze of post-first-date head, and Old Style hangover, we discussed that she was leaving town the following week, and, that being the case, squeezing in an extra date before the one we had already scheduled seemed like a good idea, just to make sure we had as good a time as the bar-light and beer had made it appear. Eventually, that tally grew to four dates in five days, with the total time spent together just over that of a normal work-week.

I know I always say "cautiously optimistic," but I can't actually remember a time, past the e-mail stage, when caution has been the right choice.

I'm going to be pretty annoying for a while.