Sleep Spent

Hey, kids. Sorry I’ve been incommunicado. I’ve been SO busy at work, it’s crazy. I’m still there right now, heh. Going home, though. I got a lot done today.

Saw Arcade Fire two weekends ago! They were great. You should see them if you can. I bought their EP and then got 7 of the 8 members of the band to sign it, which was cool. The one that evaded me was the blonde one who looks somewhat like Randy Harrison, except not as hot. (Duh.) Too bad.

Anywho, I’m going with Eric and Jason to see Ben Gibbard and others in SF tomorrow night. It’s a tsunami benefit, which is great. And I’ve never seen Ben sans Chris Walla, etc., so it should be a lot of fun. Then on Saturday, Eric gets his Christmas present when I accompany him to see Lewis Black at the Warfield.

I’m really glad to hear that Google is going to do something about blogspam. I just spent an hour deleting 2500 spam comments from my blog. YIKES! I knew there’d be a lot, but I had NO IDEA it had gotten that bad. I’ll be adorning my comment anchors with rel=nofollow in short order.

And lastly, I’ve got a new Song of the Week up. As I’ve been so terribly busy, I haven’t spent much time on the SOW; I’m sorry. But I’m posting good shit as I hear it, so don’t you worry about that. I’ll see if I can’t listen to a little more MBE this week. :-P

This is a little bit late, but I thought I’d let those of you who read this know that I’ve decided to go with the System Configuration job. I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be starting, but it will likely be in early June. Details to follow.

I have been asked to decide between two sure things, iChat QA and Safari QA, with the System Configuration group wanting a few more interviews before they commit one way or the other.

I believe this deserves a hearty “FUCK YEAH!!”

The iChat team asked me this one:

You have 10 balls, 5 black and 5 green. There are two sacks into which all the balls must be placed. You place the balls in the sacks (snigger), and then a ball is chosen from a sack at random.

How can you arrange the balls in the sacks to provide the best probability that a black ball will be chosen?

Well, the interviews are done. I’m returning to SLO tonight. Apparently, I’ll find out over the next week if I got the job(s).

Thanks to everyone for wishing me well!

(As a sidenote, I’ve been a bit lax in updating the Song of the Week lately. I’ve got the next two picked out, I just need to add them to the page. I’ll do that sometime in the next day. Stay tuned!)

I’ve applied for three positions at everyone’s favorite fruit company, and I’m several weeks along in the process. Next step: a bevy of in-person interviews. I’m leaving here Thursday night and starting the process on Friday morning at 9am.

I knew I’d be interviewing, but I didn’t really have any idea of the scale of interviews until this morning. I’m going to be talking with 28 different people over two days (Friday and Monday)! Most of them are in groups of two, but still. That’s a lot of time with a lot of important people.

Here’s hoping something comes of this!

/me crosses his fingers

Girl: “How do you think I could have gotten the virus?”
Me: “Well, have you been sleeping around?”

I meant to say something about her computer sleeping around, but that’s not what came out. :-)

Fortunately, she wasn’t offended. And yes, we were able to fix her virus problem.

So, it finally happened. It had happened in other jobs, so I knew I wasn’t going to be able to avoid it. I got a call from an asshole today.

Fortunately I didn’t have to talk to him for very long, or I’m sure it would have been much worse than it was. But he called up wanting to see if he could get someone’s password changed. Not his own; this person is retiring. He said her name is “Dotty Monroe” but that she’s in our ph database as Dorothy.

I was on another call when he called me, and I put the other (much nicer!) user on the phone to speak with him. I don’t remember exactly what he asked me, but he was speaking very fast and wasn’t making any sense. He had very little idea what he was asking for, but he thought he knew. He kept saying he wanted Dotty to be able to log into the “port hole” instead of the “portal.” Finally he said something along the lines of “is this where I go for that.” (It wasn’t quite that; I took whatever it was as meaning that he was looking at a webpage and wanted to know if it was the right one.)

I waited for him to finish what he was saying, because it sounded like he wasn’t done. When he didn’t say anything for a minute, I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re asking me.”

So then HE says: “You know, I think I had you before. Son, you’re not very good at answering questions.”

I was floored. First of all, I’d (thankfully) never spoken to this jerk before. But secondly, where does he get off telling me I can’t tell him what he can’t ask for??

He’s lucky I didn’t hang up the phone right then. That was my first instinct, but then I decided that that was very unprofessional and I’d probably get a talking-to. So instead I said, “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t appreciate being spoken to that way.”

At this point, I try to double check with him that the spelling of the woman’s name is correct, Dotty Monroe, because I can’t find any mention of her in ph. He tells me he doesn’t know how to spell her last name. (See: “doesn’t know what he’s asking for” above.) I can’t find anything under “Monroe.”

Since I can’t find any mention of this woman, I tell him he needs to speak to Terri, my boss. She isn’t in, so he says he’ll call back Monday.

No major tragedy, but damn if I want to talk to that asshole again. EVER.

sigh

On the plus side, I stuck around and talked with Brett and Jim (a coworker and my other boss) tonight after I was done with work. It was fun; they’re both really nice people with some interesting ideas. And now I’m tired. Bed is calling...

I’ve been trying to get a job for the last month. Unfortunately, the sort of job I’d be competent at, a technical support or programming position, is not the sort of job that’s easy to get around these parts. :-/

But on Friday, I finally secured a position. I’m going to be working for another arm of the ITS support staff.

It’s time for a pros and cons list.