I left Kalamazoo at about 3:30 PM CDT, and it is now 12:38 AM. This trip went a bit smoother, I think, simply because I have this down now. Also, I did not encounter the congestion I did when I drove north through Nashville Friday evening. Also, I am pleased to note that the A/C drops my mileage by less than one mile per gallon, which is good because I had it on "ARCTIC" until the sun went down.
$2.71 at Meijers on Westnedge
$2.61 at some gas station in old Louisville
$2.50 at Kangaroo gas station here in Murfreesboro
That Kangaroo station must purchase only gasoline that "fell off the truck".
The little bit of Louisville I saw is indeed pretty; aside from the rough neighborhoods I travelled through, I saw a lot of beautiful, older brick buildings. I sort of wish more of Nashville looked like that; of course, it's so big that I could have just missed those parts.
My spawn is obstreperous as usual. At least: one month's absence did not erase her memory of me. She has a summer cold, and the drugstore had no pseudoephedrine in syrup form, so I got to cajole two half-doses of Theraflu down her, one at eleven PM and one at two AM.
My car is stuffed with my junk. Sadly, some bits I could want are not in there, but overall it was a productive trip. In every other wise, Kalamazoo was rather completely stressful.
And HOT. It was hotter in Kalamazoo than in Nashville; what the heck...?
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Saturday, May 27, 2006
My Douglas MacArthur moment
I have returned. I have been here one hour. It is now 3:54 AM EST.
Can I call 'em, or what?
Little Poopsie needs her sleep, so I will let her see me tomorrow. Besides, she is usually a little cranky at night.
On the way back, as on the way there (it seems ages ago) night fell just as I was exiting Louisville, Kentucky (which I still think is pretty, and the Ohio is a very large river). Frankly, driving through a dark Indiana is not that much different than driving through it in daylight.
Can I call 'em, or what?
Little Poopsie needs her sleep, so I will let her see me tomorrow. Besides, she is usually a little cranky at night.
On the way back, as on the way there (it seems ages ago) night fell just as I was exiting Louisville, Kentucky (which I still think is pretty, and the Ohio is a very large river). Frankly, driving through a dark Indiana is not that much different than driving through it in daylight.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Bringing it all back home
Yes, I will be leaving work tomorrow and driving straight up to Kalamazoo to collect all my junk. Sharp kitchen knives, clothes, car title (I need it to register my car in Tennessee), plus, oh, I don't know, my COMPUTER MONITOR, KEYBOARD, MOUSE, you know: general stuff. If I leave Tennessee at 5:00 PM CST (6:00 PM EST), driving 531 miles to Kalamazoo (assuming nothing explodes this time) at an average of 60 m.p.h. is, uh, nine hours, so 3:00 AM.
Yeesh.
Yesterday the class had a gang shadow. This refers to doing one-on-one listening sessions with our future teammates while they take, and hopefully resolve, calls. Some people had horror stories about techs with attitude, chewing gum (loudly) or reading stories while talking to the customer. I had three good techs; one was from Minnesota and was happy to work our queue, because he had a chance to really talk to people and help them. One was a former hardware guy who was much less polished, but quite competent. One was a short-timer who had a bit of a wonky customer manner, but seemed okay. (He had all non-technical calls, so I was not able to really judge his technical savvy.) Again, I am a bit nervous, but I do feel pretty confident. My biggest worry is suffering from stage fright during my first calls under a supervisor's eyes.
I am almost at the end of the third week. When I started this I thought four weeks seemed so long, and I had no idea if I would make it to the end without the car blowing up, or starving, or what have you. I am pretty thrilled to have made it so far and only pray I continue to have the opportunity to see this through.
I got my new ATM card in the mail today, which is also thrilling. Now I must run back to the apartment to get the PIN to see if it works.
Yeesh.
Yesterday the class had a gang shadow. This refers to doing one-on-one listening sessions with our future teammates while they take, and hopefully resolve, calls. Some people had horror stories about techs with attitude, chewing gum (loudly) or reading stories while talking to the customer. I had three good techs; one was from Minnesota and was happy to work our queue, because he had a chance to really talk to people and help them. One was a former hardware guy who was much less polished, but quite competent. One was a short-timer who had a bit of a wonky customer manner, but seemed okay. (He had all non-technical calls, so I was not able to really judge his technical savvy.) Again, I am a bit nervous, but I do feel pretty confident. My biggest worry is suffering from stage fright during my first calls under a supervisor's eyes.
I am almost at the end of the third week. When I started this I thought four weeks seemed so long, and I had no idea if I would make it to the end without the car blowing up, or starving, or what have you. I am pretty thrilled to have made it so far and only pray I continue to have the opportunity to see this through.
I got my new ATM card in the mail today, which is also thrilling. Now I must run back to the apartment to get the PIN to see if it works.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
The Onion overtaken
The Onion is being overtaken by the real news. Hardee's has introduced (this is its real name) the Monster Thickburger: two-thirds of a pound of beef, three slices of cheese, four of bacon, mayo and a buttered, toasted bun. 1,420 Calories.
I'm hungry.
The quote:
All we need are Tycho and Gabe arguing over the burger: "There's no way you can handle that much nougat, let alone the flowing caramel. Hand over that Snickers®!" "You'd have to kill me first."
Really, do all nutritionists lack imagination? I guess they do. Creme brulée, Babe Ruth, sausage gravy, Diamond Jim Brady and Gorgonzola-smothered chicken have left them completely unprepared for this fresh assault.
In other news, the Captain and Tennille are, I fervently hope, going to end up in jail. Probation violations are like that. And dealing out of the apartment to crowds of the young and stupid. Not to mention messing with the A/C controls. That right there will cost them heavily.
I'm hungry.
The quote:
Health-safety activist Michael Jacobson denounced the new [burger].
"They would argue they are just giving people what they want. I would say this is beyond the pale," said Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "Probably no nutritionist ever imagined that a product like this would be marketed."
All we need are Tycho and Gabe arguing over the burger: "There's no way you can handle that much nougat, let alone the flowing caramel. Hand over that Snickers®!" "You'd have to kill me first."
Really, do all nutritionists lack imagination? I guess they do. Creme brulée, Babe Ruth, sausage gravy, Diamond Jim Brady and Gorgonzola-smothered chicken have left them completely unprepared for this fresh assault.
In other news, the Captain and Tennille are, I fervently hope, going to end up in jail. Probation violations are like that. And dealing out of the apartment to crowds of the young and stupid. Not to mention messing with the A/C controls. That right there will cost them heavily.
Tennessee v. Michigan
Churches: Lots and lots. The little ones look like big churches. The big ones look like big cathedrals, warehouses or the Pentagon. Which reminds me, I wanted to look up exactly what a Primitive Baptist is after I saw one of their church signs.
Automotive: Nissan v. Ford/GMC. On the road, people use short beeps instead of long honks. Slow cars (like mine when my transmission acts up) are tolerated. Sometimes, I thought the police were preparing to pull me over when I was only trailing some private citizen who was simply following instead of zooming around me.
Weather: Well, Kalamazoo has a Patchy Frost weather advisory for Monday; Murfreesboro does not, heh heh. The sun down here is intense, though we have not seen much of it lately; the cloud cover and rain have been near constant for about two weeks. I thought I saw a lot of people carrying umbrellas when I came down here, and I note now that Nashville gets about fifty inches mean annual precipitation compared to Kalamazoo's thirty-five. Mean annual air temperature is fifty-seven here compared to thirty-seven back home.
Power: The microwave has the current time on it and had it when I moved in. I am pretty sure no one in the apartment besides myself could care or know about adjusting the time. Ergo, the power in Tennessee rarely browns out.
Let me state that again. The electricity in Tennessee has never browned out while I have been here. No dimmings as if the Atlas that holds up the grid just shifted the weight on his shoulders. No substation switchings that blank everything and cause thousands of generators to cough to life. None of that. Power generation and usage in Tennessee and Michigan are quite different. Through the 1990s, power useage in Michigan was steady at 98 Mwh (million watthours) while Tennessee's grew from 76 to 93 Mwh.
The most interesting thing about Tennessee is that nuclear power provides twice the watthours as in Michigan. 74.6% of power in Michigan is fossil fuel-based compared to only 60% in Tennessee. In fact, hydroelectric and nuclear showed growth in TN (after the nationwide post-Three Mile Island stagnation), while the only move in Michigan was to increase the capacity share of natural gas. Obviously, Michigan's hydro power potential is limited but that is all the more reason to strengthen the atomic sector.
Yes, the Tennessee Valley Authority is supposedly "Socialism done right." But note that TVA, though government-owned, has been self-financing since it expanded into non-hydro in 1959 and has several times heavily slashed its employment rolls to hold costs down, very unlike a government or union monopoly. Until Robert A. Heinlein's Shipstones (nearly perfect batteries, available in almost any size, in his sci-fi novel Friday) become a reality and you buy your power off a delivery truck that replaces the Shipstone in your basement just as the coal and fuel oil companies resupplied your coal and oil, power must always be distributed over wires: those wires are the prime sticking point between public and private.
Thus, some company will always have power access to your street and home. The only question is, how do we assign which territory to which power company? With TVA, the decision was made to assign territory using the "facts on the ground": the Appalachians and the Tennessee Valley were used to define a territory and a company was formed by government, rather than by private interests, to gain and apply the Federal power over navigable rivers. TVA pays tax equivalents and issues bonds instead of stock to finance new growth. The company may hire and fire as any private company might, protected by the Right to Work law in Tennessee. Interestingly, though the board of directors is listed at their website, how those directors are appointed is not.
I do not think these are the reasons for TVA's success: I have no doubt that it would be less profitable without atomic power and that a significant revenue decline would deteriorate the grid. If anything, TVA is successful because it is successful: its prestige as a well-run, public-spirited, nominally Socialist (but positively free enterprise) entity allows it to split the anti-nuke and anti-capitalist activists and install cheap, reliable atomic generators which feed its prestige even more.
Automotive: Nissan v. Ford/GMC. On the road, people use short beeps instead of long honks. Slow cars (like mine when my transmission acts up) are tolerated. Sometimes, I thought the police were preparing to pull me over when I was only trailing some private citizen who was simply following instead of zooming around me.
Weather: Well, Kalamazoo has a Patchy Frost weather advisory for Monday; Murfreesboro does not, heh heh. The sun down here is intense, though we have not seen much of it lately; the cloud cover and rain have been near constant for about two weeks. I thought I saw a lot of people carrying umbrellas when I came down here, and I note now that Nashville gets about fifty inches mean annual precipitation compared to Kalamazoo's thirty-five. Mean annual air temperature is fifty-seven here compared to thirty-seven back home.
Power: The microwave has the current time on it and had it when I moved in. I am pretty sure no one in the apartment besides myself could care or know about adjusting the time. Ergo, the power in Tennessee rarely browns out.
Let me state that again. The electricity in Tennessee has never browned out while I have been here. No dimmings as if the Atlas that holds up the grid just shifted the weight on his shoulders. No substation switchings that blank everything and cause thousands of generators to cough to life. None of that. Power generation and usage in Tennessee and Michigan are quite different. Through the 1990s, power useage in Michigan was steady at 98 Mwh (million watthours) while Tennessee's grew from 76 to 93 Mwh.
The most interesting thing about Tennessee is that nuclear power provides twice the watthours as in Michigan. 74.6% of power in Michigan is fossil fuel-based compared to only 60% in Tennessee. In fact, hydroelectric and nuclear showed growth in TN (after the nationwide post-Three Mile Island stagnation), while the only move in Michigan was to increase the capacity share of natural gas. Obviously, Michigan's hydro power potential is limited but that is all the more reason to strengthen the atomic sector.
Yes, the Tennessee Valley Authority is supposedly "Socialism done right." But note that TVA, though government-owned, has been self-financing since it expanded into non-hydro in 1959 and has several times heavily slashed its employment rolls to hold costs down, very unlike a government or union monopoly. Until Robert A. Heinlein's Shipstones (nearly perfect batteries, available in almost any size, in his sci-fi novel Friday) become a reality and you buy your power off a delivery truck that replaces the Shipstone in your basement just as the coal and fuel oil companies resupplied your coal and oil, power must always be distributed over wires: those wires are the prime sticking point between public and private.
Thus, some company will always have power access to your street and home. The only question is, how do we assign which territory to which power company? With TVA, the decision was made to assign territory using the "facts on the ground": the Appalachians and the Tennessee Valley were used to define a territory and a company was formed by government, rather than by private interests, to gain and apply the Federal power over navigable rivers. TVA pays tax equivalents and issues bonds instead of stock to finance new growth. The company may hire and fire as any private company might, protected by the Right to Work law in Tennessee. Interestingly, though the board of directors is listed at their website, how those directors are appointed is not.
I do not think these are the reasons for TVA's success: I have no doubt that it would be less profitable without atomic power and that a significant revenue decline would deteriorate the grid. If anything, TVA is successful because it is successful: its prestige as a well-run, public-spirited, nominally Socialist (but positively free enterprise) entity allows it to split the anti-nuke and anti-capitalist activists and install cheap, reliable atomic generators which feed its prestige even more.
Home repair
Uh… Bob Dylan has an XM radio show, "Theme Time Radio Hour". Now, now I have a reason to subscribe to XM radio. Well, not really. Money is still tight. But I have to listen to Bob play "Momma Said Knock You Out" for Mother's Day:
But someday.
It just gets more and more exciting, no?
Still no ATM card, but I decided to celebrate my first paycheck by… cleaning the bathroom. Sponge, brush and Comet. I still think Comet is the cleaning product of the millennium. Everything else takes too long and leaves dirt behind. The bathroom was none too clean when I moved in, and I have not helped things, what with the ring I left in the tub when I took my first bath in weeks and the ring I left in the sink when I washed my hands after repairing my front brakes. The toilet is white again. I also had to remove a plug of… uh, something that clogged the throat of the drain, which was about as nasty as you are imagining, or remembering, right now. Perhaps the last occupant washed his or her hair in the sink.
And then I had to fix the drain plug lever, adjusting the ball and lever position and adding an O-ring to the screw cap so the threads would not bottom out before the ball was properly compressed.
And then I had to buy an aerator for the faucet. Why is it that about the first thing I do anywhere new is install or fix faucet aerators? I mean besides not wanting the faucet to splash water all over the crotch of my trousers, or waiting five minutes for a cup to fill so I can rinse and spit after brushing my teeth. What do people do with aerators? Are they unaware that they can be cleaned? Do they steal them for use in meth labs? Should aerators join pseudoephedrine behind the pharmacy counter at Wal-Mart, available only with picture ID, thumbprint and record checks?
One thing I have noticed about these kids (aside from the fact that the Captain and Tennille are definitely dealing) is that they know how to fix, clean or operate nothing more complex than a microwave. Setting the air conditioning at 60°, so constantly running, will freeze the heat exchanger and leave us to steam in an 80° apartment? You don't say! Putting a pan on the oven rack below a frozen pizza will keep the fire alarm from going off? You're kidding!
Baptist Keith believes in global warming. I know the leftists are promoting this pathetic "idea" (the successor plague to the population bomb, dioxin, DDT, tobacco, alcohol, nuclear winter, Alar and anti-communism) but this is actually encouraging. The far ends of the spectrum, left and right, even when advocating the same end, do so with such violently different motives that the meeting is usually utterly destructive. It will be tough to keep the anti-globalization jihad in formation when the first born-again Christian mounts the Earth First! podium and takes a sideswipe at homosexuality.
Oh, and the real reason not to see The Da Vinci Code.
While spinning around the Web, I noticed that two of the all-time great Star Trek episodes, "Shore Leave" and "Amok Time", were written by Theodore Sturgeon. One of the reasons that ST survived so long as it did in syndication purgatory was that "real" science fiction authors (i.e., writers of published short stories and novels) wrote many of the episodes. The most popular episode of the original series, "The City on the Edge of Forever", is a work by Harlan Ellison, right down to the style of the title. The Next Generation had greater budgets, quality control, and ensemble acting but the secret weapon for TOS was always the scripts.
Don't call it a comeback, he been here for years, rocking his peers, putting 'em in fear, making tears rain down like a monsoon, explosions overpowerin', over the competition LL Cool J is towering. LL Cool J — stands for Ladies Love Cool J.
But someday.
It just gets more and more exciting, no?
Still no ATM card, but I decided to celebrate my first paycheck by… cleaning the bathroom. Sponge, brush and Comet. I still think Comet is the cleaning product of the millennium. Everything else takes too long and leaves dirt behind. The bathroom was none too clean when I moved in, and I have not helped things, what with the ring I left in the tub when I took my first bath in weeks and the ring I left in the sink when I washed my hands after repairing my front brakes. The toilet is white again. I also had to remove a plug of… uh, something that clogged the throat of the drain, which was about as nasty as you are imagining, or remembering, right now. Perhaps the last occupant washed his or her hair in the sink.
And then I had to fix the drain plug lever, adjusting the ball and lever position and adding an O-ring to the screw cap so the threads would not bottom out before the ball was properly compressed.
And then I had to buy an aerator for the faucet. Why is it that about the first thing I do anywhere new is install or fix faucet aerators? I mean besides not wanting the faucet to splash water all over the crotch of my trousers, or waiting five minutes for a cup to fill so I can rinse and spit after brushing my teeth. What do people do with aerators? Are they unaware that they can be cleaned? Do they steal them for use in meth labs? Should aerators join pseudoephedrine behind the pharmacy counter at Wal-Mart, available only with picture ID, thumbprint and record checks?
One thing I have noticed about these kids (aside from the fact that the Captain and Tennille are definitely dealing) is that they know how to fix, clean or operate nothing more complex than a microwave. Setting the air conditioning at 60°, so constantly running, will freeze the heat exchanger and leave us to steam in an 80° apartment? You don't say! Putting a pan on the oven rack below a frozen pizza will keep the fire alarm from going off? You're kidding!
Baptist Keith believes in global warming. I know the leftists are promoting this pathetic "idea" (the successor plague to the population bomb, dioxin, DDT, tobacco, alcohol, nuclear winter, Alar and anti-communism) but this is actually encouraging. The far ends of the spectrum, left and right, even when advocating the same end, do so with such violently different motives that the meeting is usually utterly destructive. It will be tough to keep the anti-globalization jihad in formation when the first born-again Christian mounts the Earth First! podium and takes a sideswipe at homosexuality.
Oh, and the real reason not to see The Da Vinci Code.
While spinning around the Web, I noticed that two of the all-time great Star Trek episodes, "Shore Leave" and "Amok Time", were written by Theodore Sturgeon. One of the reasons that ST survived so long as it did in syndication purgatory was that "real" science fiction authors (i.e., writers of published short stories and novels) wrote many of the episodes. The most popular episode of the original series, "The City on the Edge of Forever", is a work by Harlan Ellison, right down to the style of the title. The Next Generation had greater budgets, quality control, and ensemble acting but the secret weapon for TOS was always the scripts.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Speakers
Well, my ATM card still has not arrived, but it was not until I started going to the mail box to look for it that I saw the card in it that listed the last names of the current residents for the benefit of the mail carrier. So perhaps the card is back on its way to Kalamazoo, blast it. On the other hand, Pam sent me a can opener to see if they would actually leave anything for me, and they did; I just got it this morning. And I have actually been paid; I have no checks yet, but I have received my direct deposit.
I celebrated by stopping at Wal-Mart; I now have peanut butter and jam to complement the ham sandwiches.
The last couple days have been interesting. I got ten out of ten on my last three tests, and got to stand up and deliver a lecture on RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) to explain to the class why, exactly, it existed. RAID is a bit odd to explain to people without a background in, or familiar with, industrial-scale computing. RAID is neither data backup nor immune to damage; it can improve hard disk performance, reliability or both, but to most people it is expensive and useless: they would be better off with a DVD-RW making regular backups of important data.
Wednesday a quarterly meeting was held; we lowly trainees were allowed to attend. The best thing about these meetings is that, in exchange for looking attentive while someone recites a speech for the nth time, you get free food. I had a Coke, three corn dogs and two or three nacho servings. (You learn to take what you can get.) The speeches were actually not bad, fairly direct and usually humorous; awards were given; a raffle was held; they even had a pie-eating contest. That was when eight or ten people in my class managed to humiliate themselves by having a smoke break before the meeting was actually over and were brought back as a group in front of a woman who is about two or three spots below Michael Dell. That bought us a lecture on when exactly break is and that meetings were not exceptions.
Was I among them? Me? Wander off without permission or notification, on my own head?
Perish the thought.
Thursday morning, our chief trainer noted that Dell had always shipped Intel processors and chipsets (a chipset is the thing that supports the processor by providing the bus, the channels, to speak to the PCI expansion cards, USB, keyboards and mice, RAM memory, and often the integrated hard disk controller). My hand shot up because I had read the news last night that Dell, for the first time, would be offering AMD Opteron processors in the high-end servers. Our chief trainer read us an email by one of the CEOs of Dell, sent just that morning, noting this. The letter closed with a line, after listing all the changes that Dell would be making to restore growth and crush its rivals, that our trainer had forwarded to his colleagues: "Competition in the future will be much tougher—for them." Heh.
Wednesday and Thursday mornings were pretty rough, anyway. The alarm clock speaker sound was cutting in and out, which is usually a problem with the volume control dial, but this was different. (I am terrified of sleeping through the alarm.) Eventually, I took the lid off and discovered that the circuit board was screwed to the clock base and the speaker to the clock lid. Two pillars with springy ends rose up about two inches from the circuit board to carry the current to the speaker; I bent the ends up a bit to ensure a tight connection, which certainly would have worked had I been able to then reassemble it.
See, the buttons on top of the clock had their own pillars, growing down from the top, which were there to translate your finger presses to the switches on the circuit board. Well, it was impossible to do it; I could not get the two halves to mate at all. The first night I had to borrow Keith's phone as an alarm clock (I had lost mine), the second I was up until about quarter to two trying to fix it. (I had found my phone, but it had no alarm capability.)
And fix it I did. It took one stove burner on HIGH, one pair of Vise-Grips, a drywall nail, solder paste, and the disassembly of my one jumper wire for the two alligator clips on either end. (Had I had both jumper wires in my tool box, I could have gone to sleep at 11:30 PM.)
Yeah. Thursday morning I was pretty wrecked.
I celebrated by stopping at Wal-Mart; I now have peanut butter and jam to complement the ham sandwiches.
The last couple days have been interesting. I got ten out of ten on my last three tests, and got to stand up and deliver a lecture on RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) to explain to the class why, exactly, it existed. RAID is a bit odd to explain to people without a background in, or familiar with, industrial-scale computing. RAID is neither data backup nor immune to damage; it can improve hard disk performance, reliability or both, but to most people it is expensive and useless: they would be better off with a DVD-RW making regular backups of important data.
Wednesday a quarterly meeting was held; we lowly trainees were allowed to attend. The best thing about these meetings is that, in exchange for looking attentive while someone recites a speech for the nth time, you get free food. I had a Coke, three corn dogs and two or three nacho servings. (You learn to take what you can get.) The speeches were actually not bad, fairly direct and usually humorous; awards were given; a raffle was held; they even had a pie-eating contest. That was when eight or ten people in my class managed to humiliate themselves by having a smoke break before the meeting was actually over and were brought back as a group in front of a woman who is about two or three spots below Michael Dell. That bought us a lecture on when exactly break is and that meetings were not exceptions.
Was I among them? Me? Wander off without permission or notification, on my own head?
Perish the thought.
Thursday morning, our chief trainer noted that Dell had always shipped Intel processors and chipsets (a chipset is the thing that supports the processor by providing the bus, the channels, to speak to the PCI expansion cards, USB, keyboards and mice, RAM memory, and often the integrated hard disk controller). My hand shot up because I had read the news last night that Dell, for the first time, would be offering AMD Opteron processors in the high-end servers. Our chief trainer read us an email by one of the CEOs of Dell, sent just that morning, noting this. The letter closed with a line, after listing all the changes that Dell would be making to restore growth and crush its rivals, that our trainer had forwarded to his colleagues: "Competition in the future will be much tougher—for them." Heh.
Wednesday and Thursday mornings were pretty rough, anyway. The alarm clock speaker sound was cutting in and out, which is usually a problem with the volume control dial, but this was different. (I am terrified of sleeping through the alarm.) Eventually, I took the lid off and discovered that the circuit board was screwed to the clock base and the speaker to the clock lid. Two pillars with springy ends rose up about two inches from the circuit board to carry the current to the speaker; I bent the ends up a bit to ensure a tight connection, which certainly would have worked had I been able to then reassemble it.
See, the buttons on top of the clock had their own pillars, growing down from the top, which were there to translate your finger presses to the switches on the circuit board. Well, it was impossible to do it; I could not get the two halves to mate at all. The first night I had to borrow Keith's phone as an alarm clock (I had lost mine), the second I was up until about quarter to two trying to fix it. (I had found my phone, but it had no alarm capability.)
And fix it I did. It took one stove burner on HIGH, one pair of Vise-Grips, a drywall nail, solder paste, and the disassembly of my one jumper wire for the two alligator clips on either end. (Had I had both jumper wires in my tool box, I could have gone to sleep at 11:30 PM.)
Yeah. Thursday morning I was pretty wrecked.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Accidentally
Last night I made a point of hanging out in the Activity Center until a staff member ran the big popcorn machine. Which is where I am, right now. Heck, a lot of guys in that class are. (In financial straits, not in the apartment's AC.)
Fellow trainee David is a very cool guy. So laconic he speaks with a non-Southern drawl, he walks with a tremendous limp: his knee has lost most of its cartilage from a motorcycle racing accident. I had to go to the bank today during lunch and told him so, which led to a discussion on banks that revealed we customed the same bank. He very nicely agreed to drive me, which was nice because we had an interesting conversation and I did not have to risk running out of gas before I got cash to a gas station on my lunch hour.
His car is a white Grand Marquis. Having been in a couple car accidents (and having twice gone through a windshield), he prefers large cars. So, it was a bit like driving with Dad, except that Dad does not drive like a race car driver. I found it very unusual to be hanging on to the hand straps in a big, paternal car like that. We traded crash stories along the way. One of those times he went through the windshield, a Jeep slammed to a halt in front of his friend's pickup truck. Arm hanging out the passenger window, he bounced off the windshield (putting a hole in it), broke the backglass with his head when another car hit them from behind, then went through the windshield again when the front took another hit, ending up draped all over the Jeep's roll bars.
He has almost no facial scars, for all these accidents; probably the kind of guy who prefers full-face helmets. Obviously, he is my new role model.
David had his own business in St. Joseph, Michigan until Whirlpool let him go. We had a fascinating conversation about that, revealing that any cash transfer of more than $4,999.99 requires days to process. Also, even cashier's checks are subject to holds from certain banks. It must make business tremendously hard for small retailers.
Of course, the necessity of arming yourself to make a deposit at the bank in Benton Harbor/St. Joe probably didn't help. The riots there a couple years ago were sparked when a kid was killed by a policeman's accidental weapon discharge. (True? False? More on that later.) Another kid died while eluding police on a motorcycle. This led to the rule that motorcycle riders would not be chased through St. Joe. This led, in turn, to motorcyclists using St. Joe's Main Street to shake off police at 150 m.p.h.
Well. Bad laws are known as such when they reward criminal acts. Rumor has it that Murfreesboro sheriffs, even Tennessee state police, are corrupt. Confiscating marijuana to sell it in county jail, running over a wife's lover and planting drugs on him, various acts. The Tennessean paper ran a story on state police background checks: an allegedly tremendous number had various convictions for violent crime. One had been allegedly convicted of sex with a fourteen year-old girl. (No word if he was thirty-five or eighteen at the time.) On the other hand, with the law outlawing human judgment, anyone who wishes to use his or her judgment is an outlaw, and it's the criminals complaining loudest about those awful police. So file these under "possible BS people once told me".
I am again ducking the question of why I moved. I am just not up to it today, nor has part of that issue been laid to rest, which makes it impossible to write about unless I give myself hours in this blog to dissect my emotions and then bleed them until no color, no life is in them. I keep this blog to avoid having to maintain a mental mailing list, but it also serves a useful purpose: by grouping everyone I know, I just imagine speaking any given sentence in front of them all. It has a wonderfully concentrating effect on my mind and removes the impossible task of rereading every letter to see who should read that particular letter. Anything better said in private is said, later, in private email. This puts me in complete opposition to the general birth cycle of blogs where kids (and dumb adults):
Fellow trainee David is a very cool guy. So laconic he speaks with a non-Southern drawl, he walks with a tremendous limp: his knee has lost most of its cartilage from a motorcycle racing accident. I had to go to the bank today during lunch and told him so, which led to a discussion on banks that revealed we customed the same bank. He very nicely agreed to drive me, which was nice because we had an interesting conversation and I did not have to risk running out of gas before I got cash to a gas station on my lunch hour.
His car is a white Grand Marquis. Having been in a couple car accidents (and having twice gone through a windshield), he prefers large cars. So, it was a bit like driving with Dad, except that Dad does not drive like a race car driver. I found it very unusual to be hanging on to the hand straps in a big, paternal car like that. We traded crash stories along the way. One of those times he went through the windshield, a Jeep slammed to a halt in front of his friend's pickup truck. Arm hanging out the passenger window, he bounced off the windshield (putting a hole in it), broke the backglass with his head when another car hit them from behind, then went through the windshield again when the front took another hit, ending up draped all over the Jeep's roll bars.
He has almost no facial scars, for all these accidents; probably the kind of guy who prefers full-face helmets. Obviously, he is my new role model.
David had his own business in St. Joseph, Michigan until Whirlpool let him go. We had a fascinating conversation about that, revealing that any cash transfer of more than $4,999.99 requires days to process. Also, even cashier's checks are subject to holds from certain banks. It must make business tremendously hard for small retailers.
Of course, the necessity of arming yourself to make a deposit at the bank in Benton Harbor/St. Joe probably didn't help. The riots there a couple years ago were sparked when a kid was killed by a policeman's accidental weapon discharge. (True? False? More on that later.) Another kid died while eluding police on a motorcycle. This led to the rule that motorcycle riders would not be chased through St. Joe. This led, in turn, to motorcyclists using St. Joe's Main Street to shake off police at 150 m.p.h.
Well. Bad laws are known as such when they reward criminal acts. Rumor has it that Murfreesboro sheriffs, even Tennessee state police, are corrupt. Confiscating marijuana to sell it in county jail, running over a wife's lover and planting drugs on him, various acts. The Tennessean paper ran a story on state police background checks: an allegedly tremendous number had various convictions for violent crime. One had been allegedly convicted of sex with a fourteen year-old girl. (No word if he was thirty-five or eighteen at the time.) On the other hand, with the law outlawing human judgment, anyone who wishes to use his or her judgment is an outlaw, and it's the criminals complaining loudest about those awful police. So file these under "possible BS people once told me".
I am again ducking the question of why I moved. I am just not up to it today, nor has part of that issue been laid to rest, which makes it impossible to write about unless I give myself hours in this blog to dissect my emotions and then bleed them until no color, no life is in them. I keep this blog to avoid having to maintain a mental mailing list, but it also serves a useful purpose: by grouping everyone I know, I just imagine speaking any given sentence in front of them all. It has a wonderfully concentrating effect on my mind and removes the impossible task of rereading every letter to see who should read that particular letter. Anything better said in private is said, later, in private email. This puts me in complete opposition to the general birth cycle of blogs where kids (and dumb adults):
- start a blog,
- invite a select circle,
- insult and denigrate anyone outside of that circle,
- get at loggerheads with a circle member,
- get exposed by disgruntled ex-intimate,
- close the blog.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Attrition warfare (update)
I found a little more about the attrition rates at Dell's tech support. I spoke to one guy today who had twenty-nine people in his class (XPS Gold, a higher level of tech support than I am in). Five were hired in the first round, after about six months as temps. Two in the second, a couple months later. Two more were let go.
So, seven out of thirty are now "Dell-badged", which gives us 76.8% attrition. Sounds bad, yes?
No, it doesn't. What happened to the other twenty-one people? According the people I talked to, the biggest wasters of new employees are finding other jobs or poor attendance. In class every day, I observe: some of the most talented people are interviewing elsewhere. (Heck, Nissan is paying part-timers over $16 an hour.) Some of the least are just not the people who will make that boring commitment to be at work twenty minutes early every day.
Everyone is very friendly there; I've not seen a lot of cranky people about. (Just one, who is likely to be my boss. Argh.) I am sure it is a high-pressure environment. I am not sure how I feel about that: it will be either a great experience or a horrible one, I'm sure. And who cares? I will last at least six or eight months, and I will be saving a good part of my income, and time will tell after that.
ETA:
You know, I have no idea what "ETA" means, apart from Estimated Time of Arrival. But I see other bloggers use it, so...
Last night I checked the phone lines and found nothing that could be causing the problem. Either this apartment complex or the phone company has a wiring snafu, which creates a problem, as one roommate thinks he needs to call the apartment managers, and the others think they need to call the phone company. So, again, no phone for a while.
I went to an Episcopal church here in town yesterday. The contrast with Bethel Murfreesboro was pretty extreme. I would rather not badmouth a particular church or congregation in public (or as public as this gets) but I suppose I would rather have my quota of stiff formality in some place other than church. More looking is in order.
I am halfway through Tocqueville's Democracy in America and The Theban Plays of Sophocles.
Because someone asked: to post comments at this blog, just click on a post, go to the end, and click "Post Comment". You get a text editing box to write your comment, and a choice of how to identify yourself. Unless you have your own blog here at blogger.com, go ahead and click "Other". You have the option of entering your name and a personal Web page, but you can enter both, one or none. Click "Publish", and the page should then say, "Your comment is awaiting moderation." Eventually, I get around to approving the comments. This last step allows people to post without having to get their own blogs and keeps out comment spam.
Oh, and I have tried to be discreet in my use of names, so you should be, too. And if my discretion slips, if anyone asks, you never heard of this blog. ;-)
So, seven out of thirty are now "Dell-badged", which gives us 76.8% attrition. Sounds bad, yes?
No, it doesn't. What happened to the other twenty-one people? According the people I talked to, the biggest wasters of new employees are finding other jobs or poor attendance. In class every day, I observe: some of the most talented people are interviewing elsewhere. (Heck, Nissan is paying part-timers over $16 an hour.) Some of the least are just not the people who will make that boring commitment to be at work twenty minutes early every day.
Everyone is very friendly there; I've not seen a lot of cranky people about. (Just one, who is likely to be my boss. Argh.) I am sure it is a high-pressure environment. I am not sure how I feel about that: it will be either a great experience or a horrible one, I'm sure. And who cares? I will last at least six or eight months, and I will be saving a good part of my income, and time will tell after that.
ETA:
You know, I have no idea what "ETA" means, apart from Estimated Time of Arrival. But I see other bloggers use it, so...
Last night I checked the phone lines and found nothing that could be causing the problem. Either this apartment complex or the phone company has a wiring snafu, which creates a problem, as one roommate thinks he needs to call the apartment managers, and the others think they need to call the phone company. So, again, no phone for a while.
I went to an Episcopal church here in town yesterday. The contrast with Bethel Murfreesboro was pretty extreme. I would rather not badmouth a particular church or congregation in public (or as public as this gets) but I suppose I would rather have my quota of stiff formality in some place other than church. More looking is in order.
I am halfway through Tocqueville's Democracy in America and The Theban Plays of Sophocles.
Because someone asked: to post comments at this blog, just click on a post, go to the end, and click "Post Comment". You get a text editing box to write your comment, and a choice of how to identify yourself. Unless you have your own blog here at blogger.com, go ahead and click "Other". You have the option of entering your name and a personal Web page, but you can enter both, one or none. Click "Publish", and the page should then say, "Your comment is awaiting moderation." Eventually, I get around to approving the comments. This last step allows people to post without having to get their own blogs and keeps out comment spam.
Oh, and I have tried to be discreet in my use of names, so you should be, too. And if my discretion slips, if anyone asks, you never heard of this blog. ;-)
Friday, May 12, 2006
First week done
It is Friday, and I have completed one of the four weeks of training. We had two assessments today: out of ten questions on each, I scored nine and seven. The latter was the Dellserv test, which is to say it is entirely about the Dell software which tracks customers, purchases, systems and incident calls. Much of it involved questions I will have little day-to-day dealings with, and I am practically guaranteed to become much more familiar with Dellserv since I will be using it on a daily basis.
At the end of the four weeks, the final will have fifty questions, and we will have two hours to complete it; I will need to score 70% or more to go on as tech support.
At the end of the four weeks, the final will have fifty questions, and we will have two hours to complete it; I will need to score 70% or more to go on as tech support.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Coffee achiever
I am back in the computer room again tonight to blog and to send my resumé to Nissan. One of the guys at Dell training has a lead on a job there. I admit my ambition had not sought so high when I arrived, but last night I spoke to a guy in the Activity Center who had a part-time job at Nissan (I never asked doing what) that paid $16.35 an hour.
Well. And the full timers make $23 plus. That is indeed tempting, and indeed worth sending in my resumé. Obviously, I would prefer to be IT, even in tech support (which is bottom of the food chain in IT), but I would feel I was spitting in the face of Providence not to at least apply online. (I will also be handing a printed resumé to that guy at work.)
I also told the woman who gave me my phone interview at Dell that I would try to put her in touch with Pfizer's soon-to-be-ex-IT staff. One hand washes the other's back....
Speaking of work, I spoke to one older man in training. He was able to give me the name of a computer shop that probably has used Wyse and DEC VT monitors. He guessed that they would sell one for $15.
Oh, yes.
In other news, I read a Rolling Stone issue at the library. It had a review of Liz Phair's newest, very commercial album, which noted, "Why would the greatest mumbler in recent memory choose to be a mediocre pop singer?" A good question. Tonight, though, I popped in a CD and was suddenly seized with a thought: Liz Phair's next great album would be a duet with The Magnetic Fields.
Think of it:
'Cause I always say I love you when I mean turn out the light,
And I say, let's run away, when I just mean stay the night.
But the words you long to hear, you will never hear from me,
I'll never say, happy anniversary,
Never stay to say, happy anniversary,
So I think I need a new hea-ea-art...
You said you were in love with me.
Both of us know that that's impossible.
And I could make you rue the day,
But I could never make you stay.
Not for all the tea in China,
Not if I could sing like a bird,
Not for all North Carolina,
Not for all my little words.
Oooohh, yessss... someday.
I went to Wal-Mart tonight for some groceries as I needed gas ($2.75 a gallon) and I would rather not go there some other time, wasting more gas. I have been living on ham sandwiches: wheat bread, mayonnaise, ham ($2.30 a pound or something, which, for real ham, is a good price), tomato, lettuce and a little onion. Aside from the mad craving for an odd snack just to shake things up, it seems to keep me going pretty well. Of course, my roommates have no pans or sharp knives (I should be glad they have silverware and plates) so I slice my veggies with my ancient Marine K-bar-style knife. (I had forgotten where it was, and am glad I have it now, as otherwise I would have to use a tiny Victorinox pen knife.) I also got more coffee. This was a bit more involved, as it required a hammer and a screwdriver.
A screwdriver; yes, the screwdriver is necessary because I have no cold chisels here for some damnable reason or other and dulling the K-bar would be disasterous. Yes, I have no can opener. Hold your laughter: the tin can was invented fifty years before the can opener so I am not so unusual. My roommates, I think, have never seen cooking that has not involved a microwave. I think they would be confused if they tried to eat anything out of a can without a pull top. (Even Campbell's soup has fallen prey to the new, godless, and opener-less ways.) I punch out three sides, then use channellock pliers to tear off the new flap and crimp down the rough edges.
coffee == creativity
The downstairs neighbors should be glad the floors are concrete and steel because it takes a while to punch a proper-size hole in a coffee can. With a screwdriver. And I had to do it tonight because I would rather not do it tomorrow morning, late for work, bleary-eyed, and terminally short of caffeine: I'm lucky enough to still have all my fingers as it is.
Well. And the full timers make $23 plus. That is indeed tempting, and indeed worth sending in my resumé. Obviously, I would prefer to be IT, even in tech support (which is bottom of the food chain in IT), but I would feel I was spitting in the face of Providence not to at least apply online. (I will also be handing a printed resumé to that guy at work.)
I also told the woman who gave me my phone interview at Dell that I would try to put her in touch with Pfizer's soon-to-be-ex-IT staff. One hand washes the other's back....
Speaking of work, I spoke to one older man in training. He was able to give me the name of a computer shop that probably has used Wyse and DEC VT monitors. He guessed that they would sell one for $15.
Oh, yes.
In other news, I read a Rolling Stone issue at the library. It had a review of Liz Phair's newest, very commercial album, which noted, "Why would the greatest mumbler in recent memory choose to be a mediocre pop singer?" A good question. Tonight, though, I popped in a CD and was suddenly seized with a thought: Liz Phair's next great album would be a duet with The Magnetic Fields.
Think of it:
'Cause I always say I love you when I mean turn out the light,
And I say, let's run away, when I just mean stay the night.
But the words you long to hear, you will never hear from me,
I'll never say, happy anniversary,
Never stay to say, happy anniversary,
So I think I need a new hea-ea-art...
You said you were in love with me.
Both of us know that that's impossible.
And I could make you rue the day,
But I could never make you stay.
Not for all the tea in China,
Not if I could sing like a bird,
Not for all North Carolina,
Not for all my little words.
Oooohh, yessss... someday.
I went to Wal-Mart tonight for some groceries as I needed gas ($2.75 a gallon) and I would rather not go there some other time, wasting more gas. I have been living on ham sandwiches: wheat bread, mayonnaise, ham ($2.30 a pound or something, which, for real ham, is a good price), tomato, lettuce and a little onion. Aside from the mad craving for an odd snack just to shake things up, it seems to keep me going pretty well. Of course, my roommates have no pans or sharp knives (I should be glad they have silverware and plates) so I slice my veggies with my ancient Marine K-bar-style knife. (I had forgotten where it was, and am glad I have it now, as otherwise I would have to use a tiny Victorinox pen knife.) I also got more coffee. This was a bit more involved, as it required a hammer and a screwdriver.
A screwdriver; yes, the screwdriver is necessary because I have no cold chisels here for some damnable reason or other and dulling the K-bar would be disasterous. Yes, I have no can opener. Hold your laughter: the tin can was invented fifty years before the can opener so I am not so unusual. My roommates, I think, have never seen cooking that has not involved a microwave. I think they would be confused if they tried to eat anything out of a can without a pull top. (Even Campbell's soup has fallen prey to the new, godless, and opener-less ways.) I punch out three sides, then use channellock pliers to tear off the new flap and crimp down the rough edges.
coffee == creativity
The downstairs neighbors should be glad the floors are concrete and steel because it takes a while to punch a proper-size hole in a coffee can. With a screwdriver. And I had to do it tonight because I would rather not do it tomorrow morning, late for work, bleary-eyed, and terminally short of caffeine: I'm lucky enough to still have all my fingers as it is.
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