Saturday, March 27, 2004
IT'S A METAPHOR! LET'S STOMP ON IT!!: There's a fluorescent light at work just before you get to the men's room that's been burnt out since at least before Thanksgiving. Unlike the other parts of the ground floor with the ultra-high ceilings, ths light's only a few feet above your head as you go in. If somebody bothered to tell another person, it could be fixed very easily, but it's been left as it is since last year.
There are a lot of periphreal things that simply aren't right at this workplace; for instance, if the toilets overflow, there's no on-hand maintenance man, so you've got standing water on the floor until the next morning. The heat in the main workspace never works right, so you get consistently cold air in the winter; the reverse is true in the administrative office, where they're burning up most of the time. I've only seen the guy who allegedly runs the place on the ground floor once in the entire year. He's actually there, but he spends all his time in the administrative offices during the day shift; the single time he's actually spoken to anybody who wasn't a supervisor was to browbeat us for not meeting production on a study, communicated in open threats of termination, and what he said showed he was utterly out of touch with the day-to-day reality on the job.
Actually, a lot of the "motivation" comes in implied threats these days. As a call center situation, they have actually mentioned the spectre of outsourcing to help spur on production. Most of the people on second shift are college kids, or the emotional equivalent, so none of this has the desired effect. They're just marking time, some even making a conscious effort to stay under production so they can be sent home at break, which is an utterly alien attitude to me. If I'm not there, I don't get paid, simple as that.
Taking all this into account, I'm thinking that lightbulb as a perfect representation of why I've been in the same rotten, ultra-low-wage job for almost a year. The bulb's been burnt out for a long time, but I've gotten used to disappointment and things simply not working out to plan, so I just left it alone for awhile. And now it's been one whole year.
(reads the above again)
Gah, this blog is starting to look like a BLOG. Gotta fix that somehow...ummmmmm...uh...JANET JACKSON'S TITS!
...
Well, it worked before...how about the dream I had last night? The government was trying to help Australia avoid some catastrophe by shifting it through the center of the earth to the other side of the globe. Unfortunately, it got stuck about halfway to the core, and nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it.
Well, it's gotta mean something.
Anyway, if you've been wondering why I haven't been doing more entries this month, the work thing is probably the reason. It's the only one I'm giving you, anyhow.
There are a lot of periphreal things that simply aren't right at this workplace; for instance, if the toilets overflow, there's no on-hand maintenance man, so you've got standing water on the floor until the next morning. The heat in the main workspace never works right, so you get consistently cold air in the winter; the reverse is true in the administrative office, where they're burning up most of the time. I've only seen the guy who allegedly runs the place on the ground floor once in the entire year. He's actually there, but he spends all his time in the administrative offices during the day shift; the single time he's actually spoken to anybody who wasn't a supervisor was to browbeat us for not meeting production on a study, communicated in open threats of termination, and what he said showed he was utterly out of touch with the day-to-day reality on the job.
Actually, a lot of the "motivation" comes in implied threats these days. As a call center situation, they have actually mentioned the spectre of outsourcing to help spur on production. Most of the people on second shift are college kids, or the emotional equivalent, so none of this has the desired effect. They're just marking time, some even making a conscious effort to stay under production so they can be sent home at break, which is an utterly alien attitude to me. If I'm not there, I don't get paid, simple as that.
Taking all this into account, I'm thinking that lightbulb as a perfect representation of why I've been in the same rotten, ultra-low-wage job for almost a year. The bulb's been burnt out for a long time, but I've gotten used to disappointment and things simply not working out to plan, so I just left it alone for awhile. And now it's been one whole year.
(reads the above again)
Gah, this blog is starting to look like a BLOG. Gotta fix that somehow...ummmmmm...uh...JANET JACKSON'S TITS!
...
Well, it worked before...how about the dream I had last night? The government was trying to help Australia avoid some catastrophe by shifting it through the center of the earth to the other side of the globe. Unfortunately, it got stuck about halfway to the core, and nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it.
Well, it's gotta mean something.
Anyway, if you've been wondering why I haven't been doing more entries this month, the work thing is probably the reason. It's the only one I'm giving you, anyhow.
|| Eric 3:11 PM#
Sunday, March 14, 2004
FINALLY! A day for the guys. Not for the young, but very little I've posted so far is...
|| Eric 8:57 PM#
IT'S MY BRAAAAAAAAAAAIN!: I've always been fascinated by the workings of the brain, and the things you can make it do if you know the right way to coax it. The main result of this interest is my on-again, off-again pursuit of lucid dreaming, but I tripped across Neil Slade's website which claims to have a technique to rewire your brain (literally).
From what I've seen of his pages so far, Mr. Slade states there's a part of your brain called the amygdala which is about the size of the tip of your thumb. In his theory, it acts as a switch to "turn on" the frontal lobes, and as a result, your higher consciousness. He presents a simple visualization technique (you had to know that visualization was involved in this routine) that trips the switch. Also, unlike the lightswitch rave, you get better and better results the more you flip the amygdala, since each flip builds more neural connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.
It's interesting stuff, although he kind of lost me with the stories about making a cloud disperse just by looking at it, and let's not mention the "drought breaking by ESP" experiment. I've got a bit of Agent Mulder in me--I want to believe--but I'm not quite ready to bite the hook on all of it.
Yes, I tried flipping the switch earlier; it wasn't quite the epiphany that was advertised. Maybe I blew a fuse and should stick a penny behind my ear to complete the connection. Anyway, it's something to do.
From what I've seen of his pages so far, Mr. Slade states there's a part of your brain called the amygdala which is about the size of the tip of your thumb. In his theory, it acts as a switch to "turn on" the frontal lobes, and as a result, your higher consciousness. He presents a simple visualization technique (you had to know that visualization was involved in this routine) that trips the switch. Also, unlike the lightswitch rave, you get better and better results the more you flip the amygdala, since each flip builds more neural connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.
It's interesting stuff, although he kind of lost me with the stories about making a cloud disperse just by looking at it, and let's not mention the "drought breaking by ESP" experiment. I've got a bit of Agent Mulder in me--I want to believe--but I'm not quite ready to bite the hook on all of it.
Yes, I tried flipping the switch earlier; it wasn't quite the epiphany that was advertised. Maybe I blew a fuse and should stick a penny behind my ear to complete the connection. Anyway, it's something to do.
|| Eric 2:32 AM#
Friday, March 12, 2004
OH SWEET MERCY, LET ME BE: Remember The Mullets? The TV program we thought it was gone forever thanks to the complete indifference of the American public?
Guess what's back on the UPN schedule? God must be mad at me because I didn't go see The Passion of the Christ.
Guess what's back on the UPN schedule? God must be mad at me because I didn't go see The Passion of the Christ.
|| Eric 10:20 PM#
Sunday, March 07, 2004
ONLY A MATTER OF TIME, I GUESS: Somebody has decided to serialize the Diary of Samuel Pepys in handy blog form. That's all I'm saying tonight. Now scram.
|| Eric 12:14 AM#
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
BUT I LOVE CHEF: (or "Time For Another Space Filler")
When you watch as many cartoons as I do, you see a lot of ads intended for children, and even if you have no children, you just shake your heads in disbelief. I gave a passing glance to the game ads in previous days but the pitches for toys and kid foods like Fruit By The Foot and other consumables which promise a hallucinatory experience (from eating CANDY!) haven't even been touched on.
The current Chef Boyardee ad, for instance, is a genuine head scratcher. You might know the one I'm talking about: the kid tries to drop a can of Boyardee into mom's shopping basket, mom rightly says "We had Chef last night," and the kid's mushmouthed whine causes some type of half-assed miracle where the can follows them home and rolls right into the child's overjoyed lap. At least, that's where I think they were aiming, for reasons I'll be more than happy to bore you with.
We'll start with the little girl, who barely showed a flicker of emotion throughout the whole ad, giving the entire production a muted quality almost unheard of in kidvid ad time. At the moment of truth, when the can rolls up to the kid for the happy reunion, the little girl gives us a small but nervous smile, a genuine sense of unease. Of course, my first thought was "That was the BEST TAKE they could get out of her? Was the casting office closed for the holidays?"
After I ditched those thoughts, my evil imagination kicked in. A few possibilities as to what was going through the kid's head:
--"This isn't Beefaroni! Lousy can..."
--"It's the GHOST OF BOYARDEE, coming to seek vengeance on moms everywhere!"
--and my odds-on favorite, "This can is a sentient lifeform, and now I must open its body and eat its brains."
Well, what would YOU think? Does it make me a social pariah to dwell on these things, or just a miserable failure at finding other hobbies?
When you watch as many cartoons as I do, you see a lot of ads intended for children, and even if you have no children, you just shake your heads in disbelief. I gave a passing glance to the game ads in previous days but the pitches for toys and kid foods like Fruit By The Foot and other consumables which promise a hallucinatory experience (from eating CANDY!) haven't even been touched on.
The current Chef Boyardee ad, for instance, is a genuine head scratcher. You might know the one I'm talking about: the kid tries to drop a can of Boyardee into mom's shopping basket, mom rightly says "We had Chef last night," and the kid's mushmouthed whine causes some type of half-assed miracle where the can follows them home and rolls right into the child's overjoyed lap. At least, that's where I think they were aiming, for reasons I'll be more than happy to bore you with.
We'll start with the little girl, who barely showed a flicker of emotion throughout the whole ad, giving the entire production a muted quality almost unheard of in kidvid ad time. At the moment of truth, when the can rolls up to the kid for the happy reunion, the little girl gives us a small but nervous smile, a genuine sense of unease. Of course, my first thought was "That was the BEST TAKE they could get out of her? Was the casting office closed for the holidays?"
After I ditched those thoughts, my evil imagination kicked in. A few possibilities as to what was going through the kid's head:
--"This isn't Beefaroni! Lousy can..."
--"It's the GHOST OF BOYARDEE, coming to seek vengeance on moms everywhere!"
--and my odds-on favorite, "This can is a sentient lifeform, and now I must open its body and eat its brains."
Well, what would YOU think? Does it make me a social pariah to dwell on these things, or just a miserable failure at finding other hobbies?
|| Eric 4:18 PM#
