• I have a cold right now, one of those three-alarm colds that crawls up into your sinuses with a hot poker and goes to town. Upon waking up this morning, I blew my nose, and though I’ll spare you the gory details, there must have been about 20mm³ there. And, according to the scale this morning, all that weight is coming directly off my waist. Colds are such strange things.
• Note to self: do not blog after taking two Sudafeds.
• Speaking of which, my sister is about to give birth to a baby whose sex as of yet is indeterminate. [Editor's note: Chris Hubbs has reminded me that the sex of the baby is indeed already determined. This should read "unobserved".] I have taken it upon myself to remind her in every way possible that the pain of giving birth is just the beginning of a wonderful journey in snot and poop and vomit.
• Babies, they’re everywhere. This Sunday past, I attended the baptism of Marlene and Mark’s baby. Cutest little thing ever, by the way. It was actually awesome to see all her friends and family come together to celebrate the sign of the covenant, actually (and pardon me if my wording sounds too, well, grandmotherish). Even though I don’t really know Marlene or Mark that well, it was good to be there, and inspired this little poem. That is, in fact, the first baptism I’ve consciously attended (rather than just happening to be there by default) since Kevin’s baptism back in the day.
• Note to self: “Drink lots of water” does not refer to coffee.
• Either I have discovered in myself an ability to make even the most clear issues unclear, or the world isn’t as simple as we sometimes make it out to be. I have a hard time, for instance, with the idea that everything is either black or white; or perhaps I have a hard time with the idea that we can know all the time, that we can differentiate. Sure, a lot of things are perfectly and obviously black and white; but a raft of others seem to be grey, whether they are or aren’t. Maybe I’m just arguing that humans can never actually know everything.
• I have a friend who holds himself above scripture: he discards whatever he likes if it sounds stupid or old-fashioned to him. Since I figured this out, we’ve stopped arguing about a lot of things — except politics, of course — since we just don’t share any common theological ground to begin on. We don’t really agree on the basics, so of course our end points are dissimilar. A wise man, a preacher, once told me that the only thing you can do for such a person is pray that they will one day accept scripture as authority. I find more truth in that idea these days than I used to.
• If you leave your job and don’t leave them with adequate resources and information to replace you, you are irresponsible. If you don’t at least make the effort, I mean. Two weeks notice is sometimes enough, sometimes not.
• If there’s one album you must buy this year, it’s Sean Hayes’ Flowering Spade. It’s, simply put, freaking amazing.
• If you’re considering picking up Interpol’s Our Love to Admire, don’t. They’ve managed to make an expanded musical palette more boring than the original four-piece.

Addendum:

• When you specify a tolerance to the fourth decimal place and then find it undersize to to the fifth decimal place by three hundred-thousandths of an inch, I’m going to explain to you the concept of rounding up, and how, if you want to specify five decimal tolerances, you can twenty thousand dollars per tool. Then you can either take the tool and use it, or throw it in the garbage and see if anyone else will kowtow. I tell you, I should not be in customer service.
• Language is important. It’s the language of deity, the great divider between humans and animals. This is why, when I hear people talking in hillbilly/hiphop slang, I think they’re stupid. They may not be, but they’re acting like it. Intelligence and language go hand in hand.

It’s frustrating to be told to do what you’re already doing, what you know you need to do, and what you know how to do; while at the same time not being told about what needs to be done, what you don’t know how to do.

Especially when it’s urgent.

Assertion: If only the most competent people in an organisation are promoted, they will inevitably rise to positions where they are incompetent, and say there.

Assertion: If only the most incompetent people are promoted, so as to limit the damage they can do, they will inevitably be incompetent, period.

Conclusion: Management is always incompetent.

At work these days, I really can’t do the amount of work that’s put in front of me. I really can’t. I’ve mentioned this before, and recently, even, but it’s just getting worse and worse.

We have three salesmen, where we once had no salesmen. These are people dedicated to getting us work, and they do. Unfortunately, Ed and Jerry both used to help around the office, but now spend most of their time actually selling stuff. So I’ve lost those two helping hands. Elyssa is pregnant, and leaving in a few weeks. So I’ve lost that set of helping hands. Margaret helps out a lot, and there’s still Rebekah. So basically there are two people to handle all the grunt work. Where once there were at least four, and sometimes five.

I have no one to delegate to. I have to do everything myself. I have no help to do things that need to be done but are secondary tasks. I have no associates, no team, no nothing to help me get the work done. Not a living, breathing soul to keep me accountable, to make sure that I’m actually getting stuff done, to work with me to eliminate errors.

It’s not that these people are hard to find. Office workers are pretty much a dime a dozen, if you’re willing to train them. It’s not like they’re terribly expensive either. I mean, I understand that your human cost is high in any company, but it’s a necessary cost, you know? Eliminating jobs by attrition may be good for the bottom line, but I doubt it’s a very good strategy overall.

So I don’t know what I’m going to do around here. I can’t keep saying, “Well, that didn’t get done because I didn’t have enough time in the day to do it,” because that’s starting to sound like a line, I say it so often. I work ten hours a day here, regularly. I’m not stupid. I’m not working dumb.

And it’s not just me. Everybody here is pretty much either underpaid or overworked, and sometime both.

I’m still not sure how to make this work, you know? I’m getting extremely stressed out with the amount of work I have waiting for me. It’s like this huge thing, always trailing behind me. And it’s really getting on my nerves.

• Bell Canada’s customer service is surprisingly good, even when I was, you know, getting rid of services from them. On that note, I no longer have a land line and a telephone number.
• Did you know that neither Gizmo nor Skype do VoIP-In services in Canada? I wonder why that is? In any case, it’s pretty useless.
• I’m beginning to get horribly sick of passive-aggressive people who instead of saying what they mean say something close to what they mean. Like for instance instead of asking, “Why didn’t you call the customer a week ago?” they say “Why didn’t we call the customer a week ago?” Well guess what: I still know what you mean. You know what you mean. If you don’t have the stones to call someone on something, don’t say anything at all. Or don’t wear the big boy pants until you’ve been potty trained or something. I don’t know. I’m horrible with the analogies.
• Every time I turn around there’s more stuff to do around here. Now I’m directing the website, developing the catalogue, creating a system to properly track regrinds and working with a contractor, quoting specials, directing specials production, buying special carbide, making purchase orders, managing our IT infrastructure, doing software audits, and last but not least eating and sleeping. I think I need someone to help me do these things because honestly if it wasn’t for this blog, I’d have gone crazy the last few days.
• I don’t have any lunch and am thinking of going to Wendy’s. I shouldn’t, though. Their fries suck and everything they sell is laced with beautiful, beautiful fat.

There’s this guy my shop has dealings with that is, in the words of a less couth co-workers, a lying cheating bastard.

Now, I like to give people a chance, so I agree to make some tools for him. Four pieces of Tool 1 and four pieces of Tool 2. We made the tools in exactly those amounts, and sent them over. They worked alright. To be absolutely clear, I looked at the the tools myself before sending them out. Everything was good.

This morning I get a call from him that he’s short two tools. Nay, he claims we have given him six pieces of Tool 1, and two pieces of Tool 2. Which is of course impossible: not only did I inspect the tools before they went out (4 of one, 4 of the other), but I dropped them off myself.

These are not similar tools, either. The shank size is the same, but they’re radically different on the front end. In fact, one of them is much smaller than the other. So we have a choice: either someone is lying to him, or he is lying to me, or the space/time continuum itself has ruptured and the world is not as it seems.

But I think he’s lying to me. Such is his reputation. And so this guy joins that group of customers who, when quoted, get the “as if made out of diamond” pricing, as they’re not even close to worth dealing with.

When someone gives me a crap excuse that I know is a crap excuse and that they know is a crap excuse and we both know the other knows it’s a crap excuse but there’s nothing to do but accept the crap excuse and try to work around it. I pretty much hate that with all my heart.

Oh, this is a cute. One of our customers owes us quite a bit of money. The sort that always has and pretty much always will. So instead of having us put them on hold, they sent over a cheque that brought them under 120 days, promising Monday they’d send another cheque to put them somewhere withing sight of 60 days.

This is, of course, enough to get them off hold for minor orders and such. However, this afternoon, I get a call from an Indian gentleman who I have a unique working relationship with (as he and I both are unique individuals, he being the sort of unique individual who repeats everything at least a thousand times). He places a giant order with multiple items and an astronomical price tag. Couple this with the phone and his repetition habit; I was stuck at my desk for just under 15 minutes.

While he’s talking, the timing of the order seems a little… fishy. Something is not right in the state of Denmark. So I check, and sure enough, they’re off hold till Monday, at which point they’ll be back on hold again, unable to buy anything from us, or procure any of our invaluable services.

This just to say we’re not stupid. If you place a gigantic order almost exactly equal to the amount you’ll be paying in a few days, you might as well have not paid at all. And frankly, we like our money. Nay, we need our money, much like you need our tools.

You know, where there’s an omnibus post about me because I’m frankly sick and tired of my blog being about other people? I mean, you and your pictures and your quotes and your comments. It’s my blog! Mine, mine, mine! (That was for those of you who who have seen Scrubs.)

This morning I dropped off some tools in Mississauga; I walked through the shipping receiving door, and was greeted by the smiling face of a 70-year-old man in a turban. So he was Sikh. But that’s not what this story is about, so much as how the English Bits of his brain seemed to be malfunctioning: he began gabbing at me (not to me, but at me), making hand motions whilst spewing out words that, while being words that I know and love, weren’t arranged in any particular order and seemed to be chosen quite at random. All of this together isn’t so strange. Old men do sometimes get a little batty, and sometimes their employers continue to issue paycheques through some fluke of the system or some misguided sense of duty. What was strange, however, was when he hopped onto a fork life - that’s right, a fork lift - and drove it Evil Knievel-style across the plant floor. At which point another, younger man called across the shop for me to not “pay any attention to him”. But he’s driving a forklift!

It was my mother’s birthday yesterday, or at least the celebrations thereof. We ended up going to an all-you-can-engorge-buffet where we, true to our genes, engorged all we could. But it was good. Though of course my mother gave herself a birthday present and commanded no alcohol be consumed. We ended up giddy with laughter anyways, between Elyssa and her banana-flavoured natural remedies, me and the five-axis Imperial March, Rebekah with her trademark mix of clueless humour and pop-culture references, and Kristin asking me what she considered “hard questions”.

I like it when people surprise me. Like, when one of you asks me a question I didn’t see coming. Something stunningly out of the ordinary. Something unexpected. Yet for the life of me, I can only think of three times in my life I’ve been knocked on my ass, hard. In the same breath, I only like being surprised after the fact; I like to see things coming.

The Kahvi Collective rules. A netlabel, all electronica, all free. Some of it is repetitive, some of it is boring, some of it is just plain bad, but the majority of tunes on Kahvi are quite listenable. Plus, you can download in both OGG and MP3 if you like.

Do you ever drink from the keg of victory? I have, today. There are a lot of jobs on time: this has a lot to do with the company quoting more realistic time frames to customers, not to mention implementing processes that facilitate streamlining and reveal untapped synergies. Someone, tell me what that means.

You’re surrounded by technology every single day. Do you know how to use it? Why not? I’m not asking if you know how to program in C or write and embedded OS or name for me the top three web application platforms. Just, do you know how to use it?

I wish I could be another person for a day, so I could watch myself. Have you ever felt like you would annoy yourself greatly? I want to find out if I would. Or, if there was some way to videotape myself. But then, I already like watching my videoblogs enough (I know, I’m Narcissus), and I have a feeling I’d be too entranced watching the video of my life to care enough about being annoyed with my foibles. This is not to say that I’m perfect, or don’t annoy anyone; it’s simply to say that I have an ego the size of Kansas.

On that note, I watched Dark Side of the Rainbow, and I seriously don’t get what the fuss is. If anyone sees connections between the song and movie, it’s got to be in their mind. Weird how humans are wired to find patterns where there are none; or perhaps how the universe is wired to create patterns.

The creation vs evolution debate: how important is it to you?

No one’s said anything funny today. It’s a shame. We’ve all been terribly work-oriented and probably just a little bit bloated.

It occurs to me that the photos of people eating cake below are all of my relatives. Rebekah is my sister, Elyssa is my sister, Steve is my cousin by marriage, Stu in my uncle by marriage, and Jerry is my uncle by marriage. The odd thing is that both Steve and Stu were not dating their wives (did they even know them? Someone clear this up.) when they started working here. So, Matthew Reckman, how are you planning to wedge yourself into my family? I wonder.

This calculator comes with a manual the size of small novel. I don’t want to calculate pi to the 1,000th digit guys (I’m not that white and nerdy). I just want to do some basic trig, and some arithmetic.

That’s it. I’m back to work, doing thangs. Please remember that I value and will try to respond to your comments!

I got the most awesome unbirthday present last night; thanks, guys, it was… priceless. And comfortable.

Jay-Z, here’s the thing; when you come out of retirement after the mostly-pure-gold that was The Black Album, people are expecting things of you. Like that you’d be, you know, good. Your latest song? It’s meh. It’s meh, and you’re recycling your lyrics.

Last night I worked till 6:30 just getting parcels out the door (this is not normal). Do you ever get an adrenaline rush from getting something done just under the wire? I know, it’s weird, and silly, but there you have it.

Pretty much every morning I have a venti bold at Starbucks. I like stopping off there and talking to the people, like TCG, and TAG. (Tasty Coffee Girl and Tiny Asian Guy.)

Now, to the batcave.