Moving day

I found a new place today, the thirtieth. Move out day is tomorrow. I drove down ninety-five percent of my with-me possessions and am about to pack the car with the last of it.

Now this is God picking you up and setting you down where you need to be. My new landlord will probably drive me insane with cleaning but after this place, he is welcome to do so. A former Colombian, he works in Catholic and immigrant outreach. Sometime, I will write up our conversation with the one I had with an American kid who lived in Saudi Arabia and the one I had at KLUG with the Russian exchange um, students? Businessmen? Whichever, I will post it here; truly, we live in Fortress Disneyland and the world is much scarier than we thought.

A day of discovery:

1. I always surprise myself with how well I learned packing from Dad. I stuffed almost everything I brought down here into a single carload. I only have a chair, the computer, bedding and a few clothes left. When I crept out of the apartment complex, the speed bumps bottomed out my suspension.
2. How empty even carpeted rooms sound with nothing in them; surprising even after all these years and moves. A lonely sound.
3. I need furniture: a bed, especially, perhaps a dresser. I may make that an excuse to shift my days around and drive up to Kalamazoo, though really, I could not bring down a bed with my car. Maybe if I bought a supercheap ticket, I could fly? But what would I do if showed up and the rental truck was not available?
4. My new place, on Sunday afternoon at least, is nine minutes from work. Bliss. Happiness. A lot cheaper.

Time to pack the chair and computer. My landlord has Wifi (wireless) internet only so my computer will be disconnected until I get such a card and hook it up. So use work email only, and do not send to my Google Mail address because I can't access it from work.

Guh. Bed. Now. While I can enjoy it.

Wonky of sleep...

Speaking of wonky, I was on the phone till a little after ten tonight. I can barely think straight. The woman and I were joking about each of us downing some Scotch after we hung up.

Two places, and a couple people who will hotel room with me if they fall through. Feeling a bit twitchy, here.

And another thing about the 30-day contract people... I am basically their slave until they get tired and release me from the phone. I feel like a genie, which reminds me:

A genie, imprisoned in a lamp, alone and desperate to escape, promised it would grant three wishes to whomever released it.

A thousand years later, the genie swore to bring untold riches and treasure to whomever would free it from its prison.

A thousand years after that the genie swore unending pain and torment on whichever luckless bastard finally set it free.

Genie, I so totally understand you.

Another lesson...

Don't read H.P. Lovecraft just before going to bed... especially do not read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" because that one is the scariest of the bunch...

I am still looking for a new apartment. I have a number of good leads, though, including a couple very near where I work. For that matter, I have been looking through jobs ads as well, and found an opening in Ypsilanti which might be interesting, though it lists GM as one of its customers and I am not sure how much longer GM will be around.

I found one duplex which would be fantastic. It is in Inglewood, which is right across the Cumberland in a little neck of the river, with a fantastic, gorgeous park just down the street. Cross your fingers...

My current schedule is Mon-Tue-Fri-Sat, 9 am to 8 pm. Traffic is much lighter then, which is nice. My call volume is up and my refunds are down, which is also nice.

I lost some personal possessions when my group got moved while I was out for two days. The guy who took my desk threw out the notebook I kept during my training and my aspirin. I hope to get my headphones back, at least. Nice guy. I am currently sitting next to two guys who are pretty cool. The one is friendly, the other is post-modern cynical. Better than isolation, I guess.

I am not looking forward to moving, but I have little choice, as staying here with all new roommates does not attract me. Also, I do want to live closer to Nashville and a night life of some sort, even if it is only some cafés.

Yes, I should be sleeping. But that story...

"Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--"

*shivers*

QOTD: "In his house in Raleigh, dead Elvis lies dreaming."

Things I failed to mention, being wonky with lack of sleep

I bought a watch, one of those hybrid pocket watches that hang, upside-down, from a belt loop. With my keys, key card and my new watch all hanging from my belt loops, I am starting to resemble Batman. With the key card on one of those retractable reels, I can swing across caverns created by the Building Densification project (I am not joking, that is the name) or, for stubborn problems, garrote people to death like a British commando.

This watch rocks. I used it to time my breaks. Two breaks of exactly 30 minutes total time. Heh. But I find myself wanting a watch fob for it. Also, I regret that I could choose the stopwatch OR the compass.

I bought an umbrella. I got to use it about twenty minutes later. Thunderstorms here hit like a wall; you drive along and suddenly, you can't see. The rain also comes in bands that you pass in and out of. Surprisingly, aside from the ant situation created by roommates too dumb to realize that ANTS LIVE ON SUGAR and that DRIED SODA POP on the counters is nothing more than DRIED SUGAR WITH FOOD COLORING, the bugs here are not too scary. Excepting, of course, the beetle I saw crawling along the parking lot next door which I saw while standing on a THIRD FLOOR BALCONY. I think it was a beetle, puppies do not glint in the sodium lights like that.

I have today and tomorrow off, therefore I will be apartment hunting for these two days. I have a bunch of numbers to call. Here's hoping.

Great, now I can't sleep

Okay, my earlier post? The one that claimed I would be feeling better, and posting more?

Well, that was a load of happy horsesh… um, you know.

I apologize for not posting here since my job actually started. My energy is very low as this job is extremely stressful. I have three categories of customers:

Normals: these are the ones with the 30-day getting started contracts. They are not necessarily smarter nor better prepared than my other customers: they simply have not had their computers long enough to do any damage to them. Some normals are tricky, though. One guy, who sounded nice enough, wanted to “fix AOL”. Without reinstalling. Folks, AOL has released three different versions of AOL 9.0! They don't know how to fix it either! I was on the phone for two hours before I pounded that through his skull!

Okay, so maybe they are stressful, too.

Muggers: using threats and abuse, they try to get what I can not give them: free support and/or miracles. A decided minority, but more upsetting when they do show up.

Leapers: they have term papers, theses, and business reports they need to recover now, exactly in the form they were in before they messed up their M$ Office installation. Suicide is a definite undertone in these conversations; police negotiators should train with DOC to learn just how desperate the people standing on those building ledges are. Fortunately, I have an ace up my sleeve that many others do not: I know about OpenOffice.org, the free software M$ Office-compatible software suite. It works, it is easy, and installing it won't mess up their current Office installations any more or less than they were before.

Ten hour days are very exhausting. Gene, our trainer, advised us to keep our favorite analgesic pain relievers in our desk drawers; he was, of course, absolutely right.

I have slowly begun to beat myself into a proper tool for this job. I am too easily affected by other people's emotions and that is a critical failing in this job. Almost by definition, most of our customers are simply irrational.

I have been getting a lot of fan mail, though: I am a hit with some people. I had one woman at Boeing with a problem we were basically powerless to solve, but I managed to cheer her up by asking about the 787 versus the A380, comparing the latter to the Concorde: an impressive money hole. Government in civilian aviation: really, did the R101 teach us nothing??

Honestly, though, my calls are down and my refund rate is too high. I fear I will not make it at this rate. Which is a bit overblown: I am learning a lot about Windows (aside from learning that I will never, ever run Windows on my computer ever in my life). But it is obvious I need to learn faster, and more.

One spot of good news: my new schedule is nine AM to eight. Yay! No more rush hour traffic!

I also need an apartment, and have a few phone numbers to call. I also drove around looking at places listed in one of those free apartment guides (gaining familiarity with the local neighborhoods). Other than that, I have not moved forward on this, and I need to. I am just so drained that I am incapable of writing, or coding, or doing anything other than surfing the net (which is just watching TV, 21^st century-style). I sit in front of a computer all day, but web surfing is out: I am jumping almost every minute of the day.

So what have I learned?

Some good news on cystic fibrosis.

Reading this article gave me instant flashbacks, “Yeah, that is why I moved, too!” In Michigan, the lawmakers fund huge tax breaks for old industries that repay them by going out of business or moving out of state. They pay for these with high taxes; exactly like Europe, they cosy up to cartels, then tax the hell out of the little guy starting a business in his garage.

Socialism is for the people? Which ones?

In the New York Times, meanwhile, we discover that “the supply siders” are trying to paint the growth of America's economy as overly stellar: after all, revenues have not reached 2000 levels (they do not specify real dollars or not). Interesting, though, that they are so close with such a radically lowered tax base. The rest of the article is not worth the foolscap it is printed on, of course, for they cite no names for “revenues did not match expectations.” It is all spin.

[H]ow many big al Qaeda secret plans has the New York Times revealed?… A [British reporter] went undercover at some mosque at Brighton, in England, and came out with all kinds of material. How come nobody at the New York Times seems to be interested in devoting any editorial energy to exposing what the enemy's up to? That's an important question. —Mark Steyn

In other news, Ann Althouse is still cool. My favorite comment: “I would use a stronger example. Creationism is relatively benign. Why not allow Neo-nazi's to diverge from Western Civ to teach the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Or Ex-Keagles diverge from a biology or genetics class to teach race theory?” In the world of slippery slopes (a code word for “stop thinking here”), how shall we oppose teaching creationism in biology (as opposed to social or religious studies) unless we oppose Barrett teaching that CIA controlled demolitions destroyed the Towers?

The U-W is reconsidering their hiring policies since getting tarred-by-association with Barrett:

If my arguments that the “Islamic terrorist threat” is fabricated, that “al-Qaida” is really al-CIA-duh, that the “Bin Laden confession video” is ludicrously phony, and so on, were viewed as crazy, I would hardly have been chosen to teach the introductory courses on Islam at both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Edgewood College of Madison next fall.

Wait for it.

Ugh

I am not feeling too up, lately. The first two weeks on the phones is up, and I have taken quite a beating. The most important thing is refund rate: Dell on Call is a satisfaction guaranteed service, and the goal is one or less refunds a week.

Well, Monday was a two-refund day. Basically, when someone has a disk drive with NO C:\ PARTITION left, we are in data recovery territory, and DR is a no-win situation. Basically, no one in the industry will guarantee your data can be recovered and I can say, with little fear of correction, that the chances of me pulling your data off a HDD with a messed up partition if YOU REFUSE to purchase Partition Doctor is about a million to one.

I know that I, in effect, have to sell this solution but I have a hard time in sales. I will blog more here but I am really just stressed out from my learning curve and wanting only to veg lately. I will be better in the future.

Gore Vidal was right

WARNING: politics

“Thus the honest man has a reputation as a liar.”

I do not have Gore Vidal’s United States here with me, but I do remember something he wrote: the individual stories of history are largely an amalgam of facts accepted as genuine by a shifting majority. This was not some deconstructionist diatribe, rather Gore was resignedly accepting, among the controversies over his novel Lincoln, that his contemporaries’ self-serving gossip was being taken as fact. (Gore did not understand how Truman Capote, by far the worst offender, could never bring his astonishing gift of fabulism to his actual fiction.)

Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is dead, and Nick Berg's father says:

“Zarqawi felt my son’s breath on his hand as held the knife against his throat. Zarqawi had to look in his eyes when he did it,” Berg added, pausing to collect himself. “George Bush sits there glassy-eyed in his office with pieces of paper and condemns people to death. That to me is a real terrorist.”

In other news, the Donner family, late of the infamous Donner party, was stranded with a broken axle twenty-one miles behind the cannibals in the main party, munching on wildlife, roots and the family dog.

People do like to note that three-quarters of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi-born. No one likes to note that the Saudis had already exiled half of them from the kingdom. Zarqawi was Jordanian, as was Abu Nidal, and the kingdom of Jordan wanted them both dead, and performed valuable field assists to the American effort to bring a thousand pounds of high explosives to Zarqawi. Both countries are valuable American allies. Both have problems. Both are far less dysfunctional than, say, Egypt or Iran. Or, for that matter, Ba’athist Iraq or the Afghani Taliban.

Accepted facts. Handle with care.

All weakness tends to corrupt; impotence corrupts absolutely. — Spalding Gray

Hooray and ugh

Today I learned that the people behind the lighttpd web server wrote the entire thing in K&R C, that is, they wrote without function prototypes so that the compiler has no idea where any given function should be found, nor what arguments it takes. Dennis Ritchie, though noting that ANSI-style declarations are a bit clumsy, approved of function protypes.

Some people are on crack.

In happier news, I scored a 92% on my final at Dell. For the rest of the week, I'll be on the phones from ten to seven p.m. The test took out four people from my class, and we are now down to seventeen.

Lord knows I should have recopied my notes in preparation for tomorrow, but I found Ian's copy of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and watched that instead. Existential tragedy makes me smile.

Our trainer, Gene, was really good. He is just a fun guy, and really good at teaching. We had a couple reps come in from the floor who really knew what they were talking about, but Gene really just got us moving. Someone once said that was Patton’s true talent: talented at tactics and strategy, but a genius for shoving the whole thing in motion. Gene did that well.

pantransit.reptiles.org: 16MB MP4 of Snow-bo

verabee.com: 5MB Quicktime of the same movie

Heh heh. I also got him to show the film linked to above (the latter has a bit about the film) today after the final. He thought it was funny, if a little twisted. Which, of course, it is, heh.

I got my oil changed. I also put in a new air filter. No news yet on any possible action by the apartments on my unauthorized sublet. We shall see.

“Time and love have branded me with their claws”

This morning we had our first hailstorm since my arrival. The hail was small, about a quarter inch or so in size. I know a guy who does vinyl siding and he said all his work was repairing hail damage. Hmmm. I knew I needed an umbrella, but now I know I need one made with aluminum mesh rather than polyester.

Last night at midnight Baptist Keith turned twenty-one. He celebrated by going out and buying a single twenty-four ounce beer. The Captain and Tennille came out just to see him drink it. It was rather funny.

My car is halfway unpacked now. The interior is empty but I need to clean out the trunk, which can wait until everything I have dragged upstairs is put away.

I have been very busy with various things, some of them useful. First up, I now have a monitor for my computer. It is Dad's old Macintosh monitor. It used a cable with a DB-15 plug, which is to say it was a plug with fifteen pins in two rows of eight and seven. PCs use an HD-15, with three rows of five.

Why yes, getting them to talk to each other took a bit of persuading.

Running Gentoo Linux, as I do, I have had to run about two hundred package upgrades that have accumulated over the last two months.

The truly sad thing is that not buying a $30 used monitor may have cost me quite a bit more. I got nabbed by the police Thursday night.

As most of you know, I have been using the Activity Center computers to post to this blog, read and send email, what have you. I once saw a cop down there using the computer: badge, uniform, gun and all (everything but his hat). He never paid attention to me. Sadly, Thursday night he chased a bunch of non-residents out of the pool; not that I care, but I had just walked up with a cigarette and he asked me a few questions.

I was unaware that he was a resident of the complex, that he was, in effect, the "house cop". Mixing public law enforcement with private contracts is a bit of dirty pool, in my opinion. Had a manager grilled me, I would have cheerfully lied through my teeth but as it is, I try not to lie to cops.

So the policeman (who is not your friend) went and got a manager, who informed me that subletting was going to be expensive. I suppose that my sublessor and I shall split the cost, but it is going to be expensive.

Blast.

In other news, there is one heck of an ant infestation in the kitchen, because Certain People can not be convinced that ant colonies send out scouts who look for crumbs (or entire pizzas left on the counter) and that they invariably bring the whole worker colony along for the food.

Last week we had our first session on the phones. For my first call I got to help a guy take about twenty-five screws out of his laptop to yank the whole thing apart so the plug of the touchpad, the mouse-like apparatus, could be removed and reinserted. I was sweating the whole time, but it worked. Dell will be hiring up to a thousand people for our call center over the next year, so I am hoping for a permanent position here so long as I am not an outright danger to my callers.

Monday we take the final. Tuesday through Friday we take calls on the floor under the eyes of the trainers, then we get rotated out into our stations. I took the time to locate mine, it is right next to the windows. I am a bit scared but mostly looking forward to it. Today I will be typing my class notes into the computer, rearranging them into a far more coherent form, then I will be mailing them to myself at Dell. Wish me luck.

So tired

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...?

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.