a little more me in my monitor...
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Dan Johnson" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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11:28 pm
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Leftovers
Kristina is the entirety of my friends page right now. I am certainly not blameless, but I'm disappointed to see that the Live Journal Renaissance was so short-lived.
I'm not going to make an effort to construct an omnibus of my last few weeks; it would be an insult to you, to me, and to the last few weeks. I will, however, upload pictures from Kristina's delightful Food Party and post them here.
I would also like to say, for the record, that the party was much more fun than this picture makes it look.
Anyhow, that was fun. New Years went delightfully as well, thanks to the Harris' gracious hosting. Someone might mention to them that I'll be needing a place for the Tax Return Barbecue as well.
My boss told me today, near the beginning of my shift, that given my stunning inability to sell the things they're paying me to sell, they would be firing me soon, unless I'd prefer to resign. The difference being, beyond the comforting semantics, that I'd be eligible to apply to a customer service position when they post for it sometime in the next month or so. That's a comforting light at the end of the unemployment tunnel.
I'm pretty confident, in the meantime, that I should be on the short list of candidates for a job I applied for earlier this week, one that would place me in the exciting and fast-paced world of solid waste management, and thereby, organized crime.
The point, dear Internet, is that I don't have to work this Saturday, and if anyone would like to see me Friday night, they should tell me so sometime between now and then.
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03:31 pm
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"Mr. Feinberg, you've been the highlight of my day."
The food party was awesome, but until I get my camera back from Jim and Kristina's house, an update about it would be lacking in substance.
I got tapped to guest host Triviasco yesterday. None of you showed up, but you don't need to feel bad, because literally no one else did, either. Around 10:30, the manager told me that he'd cover my drinks thus far and I was free to go. The substitute bar tender does not make as good an old fashioned as the normal Wednesday night guy.
I'm at work. The decision to have us work on Christmas Eve seems questionable, but since the man responsible for the decision is far, far away from here, presumably gettin' his wassail on with friends and loved ones, there's no turning back now. The customers to whom I've spoken today express little empathy for my having to work, though they describe the fact that we're calling today as "just awful," "ridiculous," and "retarded." The one exception, noted above in the update title, seemed more than happy to discuss his accounts at length.
My drive to work today was spent listening to the MPR meteorologist telling listeners that any travel today would be best completed by 3pm. I'm off work in an hour with about 90 minutes of driving ahead.
On Dasher, on Dancer...
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11:12 pm
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Time to settle.
I've been at my job a month now, and I've been seated at four different desks. I've also had to print a document four times and, by coincidence, each time was at a different computer, requiring four separate installations of a network printer, which, for reasons clear only to people that chose their college majors much more wisely than me, is a ridiculous ordeal at my new workplace.
I seem to be settled, finally, at my current desk. Settled, at least, if my inscrutable inability to convince people to purchase credit and deposit products evaporates, soon. Otherwise, I'll return to being "settled" at the desk in my parents' basement where I'm sitting at the moment. It's comforting to note that the other new banker from my training class is trailing my record of two sales in about two weeks by a margin of two sales. Our supervisor told us that we should make an effort to reach out to the bankers around us for help, though she did this the same day that she moved both of our desks to a corner of the cubicle row largely sequestered from the other bankers.
The other guy from my training class is, as mentioned earlier, a mumbly young man, so he's not the best of company between calls. I've noticed that, presumably to compensate for his low volume, he makes a wide variety of bizarre hand motions while he's talking, many of which don't mean what he seems to think they do. One wonders if perhaps he's from St. Cloud.
He paused between calls today to remark that the woman to whom he had just spoken seemed to have a remarkable amount of money for someone who listed their occupation as "none."
I suggested that perhaps she was married to a rich guy and didn't have to work. He responded by flailing the ruler he keeps at his desk above his head in a threatening manner and said, "No, not 'none'..." I realized quickly from the gesture what he meant, despite his failure to simply spell the word, "...occupation: nun!"
St. Cloud, maybe. Catholic for sure.
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01:00 am
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If you want to impress your boss, you go in there, and you do mediocre work. Half-heartedly.
I did the math today and realized that I've been averaging an intake of about 1200 calories on days that I work. Now, it's also assuredly worth noting that, aside from trudging up and down an icy hill between work and my car, the greatest physical exertion of my workday comes from the sticky space bar on my keyboard. It's further worth noting that no part of my job seems to require the space bar.
Starting my workday at 12:30pm, even with a commute that, to be safe, begins at 11:30, makes for a weird day. There doesn't seem to be any real usable time between when I wake up and when I have to leave for work, but there doesn't seem to be any after work either. The reality, of course, is that there are few, if any productive things I would be doing after work that didn't involve me sitting at my computer like I am now, but the illusion of a difference is impressive.
I've spent a few hours the past week or so working on my cookbook with various sitcoms NetFlixing in the background. I guess that's as productive as anything else I could be doing. I should probably go to sleep now, since I have only one day left to shift my sleep schedule from waking up between 10 and 11 every day and having to be up around 7:30am on Saturday.
I'm not that impressed with this entry. Instead of commenting on it, tell me what I should make and bring to Kristina's Food Party on Tuesday. Keep in mind that I have a fair to adequate budget, but mad skills, and the whole day off of work.
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11:27 am
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Stopping for Donuts.
Ian invited us to Haiku Jim's birthday party on Friday. I say "us" because it seems like Ian lobbed the invitation in the general direction of everyone I know, so I operated under the assumption that it extended to everyone with whom I would normally have been with at Mortimer's that night. The party turned out to be high on the list of the most fun things I've ever done in Robinsdale.
I was chosen to be the driver for the night's excursion, owing no doubt to both the fact that my car both runs and holds four people, and the fact that I had some vague idea of where Robinsdale is. I picked up Noah, then Kristina, then Stevie. Those of you with some basic knowledge of geography might question that order, particularly given that my starting point Friday night was my job in South St. Paul.
As it happens, Stevie was at work until 9, but Kristina prefers to be out of the house for the evening by 8pm, if at all. Both Kristina and Noah enjoy a car ride as much as a pair of Springer Spaniels, so, with the promise to Kristina that we could stop at the gas station for a doughnut, they accompanied me for the drive to Apple Valley.
It turned out that Kristina wanted the option of a doughnut more than an actual doughnut, so my stop at the gas station was just to take out money and shake my fist at the "Out of Order" sign on the men's room door. We made it to Stevie's without incident and thankfully found the rest room there to be in working order.
Haiku Jim has a lovely home. There's something about first ring suburbs that, as a child of the third ring and a young adult of the city proper, has always made me uneasy, but both home and hood seem very pleasant. The snowbanks along the sidewalk were lined with grainbelt bottles when we walked up, greatly allaying my fears about Noah getting the address correct.
Having never attended one of H-Jim's b-days before, I hadn't realized that the celebration serves the same function in relation to Christmas that Jill's birthday always served to Thanksgiving. The house was filled with yuletide cheer in the form of decorations and all manner of subpar animation. That girl whose name I can never remember brought a cake garnished with airplane booze. It was delicious. The cake moreso than the ounce of Windsor, but I've never been one to look a gift bottle in the label.
Around 1, Ian felt that the party was beginning to stale slightly following recent departures and announced that he was leading a trip to the VFW a few blocks away. Or, at least, he was leading a trip to my car which would then be directed to the VFW. It's good to have a car that seats six again, even if it takes a severe cold snap to make it a good idea.
We arrived at the VFW to find the door locked. The woman inside told Ian that they closed at 1 and his haggling did nothing to change her mind. The VFW is, however, right next door to a place called The St. Petersburg Vodka Bar, no doubt the source of the persistent rumors of the Robinsdale VFW being a hangout for Russian organized crime. I saw no concrete evidence that any of the native Russian speakers present were criminals, organized or otherwise, but the language has a certain phonoaesthetic tone that makes its speakers seem like secretive ne'er-do-wells. It seems unfair, but the Germans and the Klingons undoubtedly have it worse.
Ian laid down a generous tab for the brave few who ventured upstairs with him (despite yet another door sign listing closing time at 1am), and proceeded to fund a round of White Russians (being the only winter-appropriate drink we could think of that's vodka-based.) We left at last call, though few of the patrons that were present when we arrived appeared to do so. It seems as though, since the place was ostensibly closed when we arrived, "last call" was more or less their way of asking us to leave.
We returned to Jim's, but it wasn't too much later that Kristina's interest in remaining awake began to wane, and both Stevie and Noah's ability to do so was draining away pretty rapidly as well.
Stevie and I were up a bit before noon, and still managed to eat two meals before our 4pm dinner resveration at the Elk's Lodge in Brooklyn Park. We met my sister and grandma for a lutefisk and meatball buffet. We were seated at a table with an elderly couple and an aging queen from Minneapolis. They were, one and all, delightful company. Lutefisk, with apologies to my heritage, not far from what you've heard. The taste is actually pretty pleasant, but the texture is more than a little confusing, if not entirely offputting. It, like most foods, is improved with cream sauce and melted butter, though it seems to absorb the flavor of both salt and pepper at a rate that makes me seriously question the chemistry at work.
The meatballs were delicious, and the meal came with a daunting tray of cookies at the end. Worth every penny, even if I'm not actually sure what The Elks are going to spend my money doing. I hope it's cookie-related.
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02:38 pm
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Sonic Economics
Apparently they're letting meout of work early today. I say "letting," but the reality of the situation is that they're kicking me out at 7. Evidently "we have to maintain consistency and bankers only work 38 hours a week." I pointed out that I worked 40 last week, and was told that's "the norm for training." I felt it undiplomatic to point out that I was still training on Monday, that training was three weeks long, and that I only received one 40-hour check.
I don't mind leaving early (though having to take my half-hour unpaid lunchbreak an hour from the end of my six hour day seems inconvenient.) My only actual objection is that it seems arbitrary. I have a lifelong crusade against underexplained rules. Now, however, is not the time. My luck hasn't been good enough to make any actual complaints about the source of a steady paycheck.
I realized this week, one of the things that makes this job seem strange, is that, unlike any other call center where I've worked, there's no music. No radios at desks, no piped in KS95, no corporate satellite holiday elevator music (literally, not even on the elevator.)
It's a little disconcerting by itself, but it's made moreso by my brain filling the silence with a loop of Pink Floyd's "Money" for eight hours a day.
I wish I had a giant, unwieldy adding machine at my desk.
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11:30 pm
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Let it tow, let it tow, let it tow.
We lost at trivia again. The team of Redhead and Boring Guy seems to be an unstoppable trivia machine. Though, to be fair, we circled the wrong category as our bonus and lost by one point as a result, so it's possible that we're just off our game. Or else, since trivia is on payday, I've made peace with the idea that sometimes beer costs money.
There were only three teams, owing no doubt to the awful weather. I parked directly in front of Luce, which, it turns out, is a snow emergency route. When that fact was pointed out to me, I suppose I could have moved my car, but since both Ian and the Nadeaus had parked on the street as well, we discussed the matter and decided that we'd sit by the window. Joe Mahon spent his night unbespectabled and periodically peaking over the artificial plant in the window sill to shout indignant admonitions to whatever passing vehicle looked vaguely like a tow-truck at any given moment. Ian briefly adjourned his trivia duties at one point in the second round to lead a charge out the door to find two tow trucks outside. It turned out that one was laden with unfortunate vehicles ruined by the icy grip of inertia and the other was driven by a guy who wanted pizza and didn't care about the snow emergency, so we went back inside. All in all, the nightlong game of Red Hands against municipal parking enforcement proved to be more exciting than trivia has been for some months. Also, the Tuna Caliente noodle salad is delicious.
I was reminded today that, while I've worked in various phone sales jobs for a combined six or seven years, I am a bizarrely ineffective salesman. I already sold a credit card my first day, and I have a callback tomorrow that's almost certainly going to be another. That's better than a lot of people in my training class are doing, but it's worth noting that my learning curve is steeper than the average temp agency ne'er-do-well, so I might have reached my sub-par peak already. I have high hopes, but I'm not canceling my weekly CareerBuilder e-mail either.
Tonight's NBC lineup went four for four toward yuletide cheer instead of snide cynicism. On behalf of everyone who's had a rough couple of weeks, I applaud them for it.
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05:55 pm
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Don't talk to me about the cruelest month.
This is a silly place to live a lot of the time. It took me almost an hour to get home from work last night, which actually isn't that bad when you consider that, under the best of circumstances, it takes a shade over 40 minutes. Just the same, the drive was unpleasant enough to make up for its comparative brevity. I know it's trite to insist that everyone forgets how to drive in the snow, and that's why the first snow storm is always terrible. I'm going to assume, instead, that no one ever learns how to drive in the snow, and that later in the season, everyone just values their own lives less, so we just don't notice the terrible driving. If winter in Minnesota lasted a month longer, we'd all be driving everywhere at top speed with our eyes closed, just hoping the inevitable fiery wreck would be warm for a little while.
I wore by boots to work today, having, in a rare moment of responsible foresight, brought them in from the trunk of my car last night, for the first time since moving back to Champlin. The new Regular Shoes I bought online hadn't yet arrived, and I have every confidence that my Chucks would have meant my demise trying to get up the hill to work.
I've noticed that the view from my desk is one of the nicest in my entire employment history. Being Hennepin County born and raised, I've always considered the St. Paul skyline to be unremarkable at best when compared to its taller, better dressed twin. It occurred to me that I only ever notice it from the north, though. From the south end of the Robert Street bridge, however, it's really an impressive expanse of grimy cold war era brutalism. Wikipedia that if you think I'm making up words to make fun of architecture.
I got paid today. Ordinarily, I'd make a Facebook post saying that we should go to Trivia. I don't actually care what we do, as it happens, and Facebook is blocked at work, so I guess I'll just say that you should call me around 9.
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01:31 pm
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Clopen
Today was my last day of having to be to work at 10:30. Barring, of course, Saturdays, when I'll have to be to work by 9am. I'm looking forward to spending my Friday nights catching up on a week's worth of TV. That's about three hours of TV-watching, which leaves just enough time for a meal and seven hours of sleep between Friday work and Saturday work.
"Steve"'s quote of the day:
Trainer: What are some examples of what you could do with the money from an unsecured loan of $5000?
Trainee #1: Buy a used car?
Trainee #2: Remodel your house?
"Steve": Make it rain!
I just realized today that this is the first job I've ever had that doesn't seem to employ a token hippy or two. That kind of bums me out. Maybe if I get moved to customer service someday, there will be some hiding there.
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12:34 pm
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At the tone, please state your name, then press pound.
To be on the safe side, I'm going to refrain from using people's real names until I actually get hired on full time. I'm avoiding even mentioning the name of the company, though I will tell you that it's a Bank, and it's in the U.S. So, anyway, let's label, categorize and caricature some co-workers.
Good Guys
"Steve": He's the first guy who seemed promising. On our second day of training, he told me on our lunch break that it seemed like a good time for a "leisurely poop." He spent most of the time before logging into the conference call this morning sitting at his desk drawing some sort of monsters and quietly singing the themesong from "Pinky and the Brain."
Mumbly Jones: He lives in Uptown and sits next to me during training. He's the only one in the training class who's going to the same manager team as me. He seems pretty smart and said his favorite bar is Mortimer's. I will never go there with him, because he talks too quietly to be heard in a quiet office, so I assume a trip to Mortimer's would render him a non-entity.
E-Ore: I sat with him for an hour of "mentoring" earlier this week. He seems good at his job, but makes calls with a staggering lack of energy and animation. Between calls, he was reading Fmylife.com. He said that he finished reading Wikipedia the week before.
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
"Tanya": She's brought up working at the Renaissance Festival at least ten times per week. She said that the people who work at the beer stand are the cool kids at the Fest. I told her that seems like sort of a "King of the Shitpile" situation, but she took that in stride. And then spent five minutes talking about "the goddess I choose to worship." The first week, "Steve" seemed to like her, mostly because she talks a lot and he seems drawn to noise and movement.
Old Man Storytime: He's one of four or five people in the training class who's over 40. He has a wealth of experience and wisdom to share about every godforsaken thing anyone says. "Steve" sits behind him and has taken to wildly flailing his arms in protest every time he hears the start of another story about Storytime wearing an onion on his belt.
"Chet": I sat with him for mentoring my first week. He talked really fast, but in a "superficially friendly date rapist" kind of way. Apparently he had one of the highest sales scores in the building. He kind of reminded me of an evil Corey Betland. Like, if Corey liked money instead of hockey. He got fired this week.
Non-Player Characters
My manager is a no-nonsense, humorless Barb. Just the same, she seems like she doesn't care too much what anyone does, as long as they're doing their job, too.
The trainer is a cheerful woman who's telecommuting from Portland to teach our class. She's lived in Oregon for years, but retains the accent from her childhood in Wisconsin (not Milwaukee), which is pleasant enough to listen to all day.
Other promising extras include a handful of Young Dudes who majored in Finance and realized they missed their chance for that to be a good move. They seem like they know how to party, but not where. There's also, as expected, two hoodrats, the designated Smoove Guy, and a sassy black lesbian.
Seems like a decent gig, overall. Cross your fingers for me.
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01:41 pm
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Chuckwagon
I've discussed before, I think, how depressed I am by office birthday sheetcake. In spite of this, I am unapologetically in love with the Chuckwagon sandwich available in the vending machine of every fluorescent-lit workplace in the country. My new job features a snack carousel maintained by the good people at Aramark which, strangely enough, offers no Chuckwagon sandwich. I was at first, as you can imagine, devastated, until I noticed an item called the Ranchwagon. It is identical to the Chuckwagon in every way, except that it lacks the frustrating patina of poppyseeds that have always marred my otherwise delicious lunch hour friend. Why it comes with a packet of ketchup instead of mayo is a matter for angry letters, not Live Journal updates, however. Just the same. Sandwiches.
The Karr's Sweet 'N Salty Mix™, besides its questionable punctuation choices, always seemed like a healthier alternative, until I noticed that the first ingredient is something called "confectionary coating," which I assume is an industry term for frosting.
I bought new shoes on the internet this morning, after checking my bank balance and seeing that my direct deposit had arrived safely. They're superficially identical to the last pair I bought (and termed "regular shoes"), except that these cost $50 and are made by a company I've heard of. The old ones were $20 and made by what I have to assume was an Aldi subsidiary, Mr. Walky-Time Extra Thick Sock Covers, Inc., or some such. They disintegrated rather abruptly about five months after buying them.
Ordinarily, new shoes wouldn't have been a priority, but since the cheap parking at my new job involves scrambling up the dirt path that goes up the embankment under the Robert Street bridge, it only took a couple tumbles down the hill to convince me that more traction would be required than my two-year-old chucks were prepared to offer.
List of ridiculous co-workers to follow soon, just like with every previous new job. See you then, internet.
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11:49 pm
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Climbing up the muddy hill.
It's my last week of training for my new job as a banker. I realized recently that, even though it's a longer commute and the money's not quite as good, the new job does have at least that over the job at SHPS. When people ask what I do, I can tell them I'm a banker and they'll know what that is. Monique has offered to make me a sack with a dollar sign on it to lend some credibility to my new station. Nice of her.
So, obviously, I'm not going to do that meme. It wouldn't be any new information. Just the same, let me say that you've all done a beautiful job with them and you're to be applauded.
I realized the other day that in spite of how long it took to land this new job, it wasn't actually difficult. Since getting a job at Fingerhut in high school, every subsequent phone bank job has come on the merits of my long experience working in a phone bank. And I've never really been that happy about them, notwithstanding my months at General Mills. It seems like most of my friends who share my shaky employment history have a similar story. One job you don't really like qualifies you for the next, forming a chain that leads to your grave. That being said, it's a big company, and there seems to be plenty of opportunity to move, both occupationally and geographically, so I'm just as happy to have gotten this job instead of the customer service job at the fancy bed store.
Moreover, banking seems like the perfect job for a guy with bad credit to fix that problem. I should probably buy a house at some point, given my run of luck with roommates and landlords. That will probably have to wait until I can stop being unemployed for months at a time every so often.
My point in all of this is that I haven't had much luck writing lately, and there's a school of thought that says the best way to fix that is to write.
Starting tomorrow.
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12:28 pm
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Pumpkin Latte
Reasonably speaking, it would take me about 15 minutes to clean my room to the point that it could be considered a living space instead of a corner of the basement into which a portion of my worldly belongings have been exiled. I've been here since August, and unemployed for some considerable portion of that time, and have nonetheless failed to spend that 15 minutes.
Similarly, my AIM and Gmail Chat contact lists are littered with names of people I no longer talk to. Yes, by "people" I mean "girls who turned out to be mental" and yes, I could easily delete these names instead of thinking, "Man, it's going to be awkward when I accidentally click the wrong name in that list and have to talk to her again," every time I see them.
There's been a dime on the floor in the downstairs bathroom of my parents' house for years. Literally, like, twelve years. I have clear memories of looking at it while taking a deuce-break from writing papers in high school.
I own at least two or three useful devices that I never use because the batteries are dead. There's a new pack of batteries in the kitchen.
You get the idea. I'm gonna go carpe some laundry at least.
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11:31 pm
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Sex and Parties: One Hundred Dollars
Well, I've been nudged. I'm going to try to give a succinct list of the things that have happened in recent months and gone unmentioned in my journal since I began epically falling down on the job.
These are going to seem out of order, because I'll be listing things that have happened to people who also don't blog properly.
Harris bought a house. It's pretty sweet, I guess. If nothing else, he lives closer to Minneapolis than he ever has. That, combined with the unseasonable warmth of late has made his yard an excellent choice for a dude of few funds these past weeks. That, and the fact that the run-up to him getting a house meant I had barely seen him for several months prior. Newlywed. Pssh.
Noah, likewise, has made a homecoming of sorts, now residing closer to what can properly be called The Heart of Uptown than anyone has in memory. Monique has apparently forbidden the amount of porch-loitering that would normally accompany so fine a location and so fine a porch, at least inasmuch as she has forbidden the requisite porch couch. She claims deference to to the pleasant gentlemen smoking outside the halfway house(s) across the street, but I suspect she just doesn't like scumbags lurking about her living space at all hours. We don't fault Kristina for that kind of footfall, so I suppose we'll just be happy to have them back within the Hipster's Quadrangle and call it a win for the home team.
I'm starting a new job a week from today. It requires a commute to St. Paul, somewhere near the intersection of Godforsaken and Whatthehell. The shift is from 12:30 to 9pm four days a week and every Saturday from 9am to 3pm. All of those ending times seem like auspicious hours for me to be driving back through Minneapolis. Just the same, I think I should get back to trying to download some books on tape if I'm going to have that much car time in my future.
The job itself seems like it should provide fodder for new journal entries. My first three weeks will be taken up by a training class. I can't imagine how it's going to take that long to learn the job, but it should provide me an opportunity to catalog the various douchebags, hoodrats and weirdsters that inevitable compose a corporate call center.
I've really been trying to update more, but it turns out that almost all my stories are about the middle-aged woman and the two-year-old with whom I spend most of my time. One of them already has a blog, and I'm not going to start telling cute baby stories in this once proud archive of Things Jim Has Tippped Over.
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11:13 pm
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Attention, some animals bite. Most are awesome.
I went to the zoo with an assortment of my female relatives on Monday. Schopenhauer said that the worst of all possible worlds would be one that allowed the largest number of creatures to suffer for the longest amount of time, and theorized that, since this world supports a lot of life, and none of it is without suffering, this might be that worst possible world.
I theorize that, if that's the case, the best possible world would be one small room containing a two-year-old watching two otters.
I catch a lot of flack for having no particular preference for The Good Zoo in Apple Valley over The Sad Zoo in St. Paul. I guess the good zoo is bigger and has more animals, and for sure more exotic, but honestly, I don't see orangutans any more often than I see red pandas, so when I do, they're both pretty awesome.
A brief word on awesomeness: Some animals aren't even trying. The Komodo Dragon has to know that it's severely endangered or whatever. Someone has to have told it. But it still does absolutely nothing to endear itself to the money-donating, cause-supporting public. Raccoons are goddamn everywhere, to the point that having them at the zoo at all (even on the Minnesota trail) is kind of a joke, but at least those little jerks put on a show. And they do it just down the hallway from the otters, knowing full well, no one's going to find their antics amusing after they see some damn otters, all frolicking and what not. The Komodo Dragon's adjacent competition (now that the admittedly-pretty-sweet sun bear is gone) is some fat, lazy mountain pig, and something called a binturong, which looks like it would be all cute as hell, but instead just lays there by the tapir's ass, impersonating a discarded puppet and smelling like buttered popcorn.
I'm saying, learn a lesson from raccoons. And, for that matter, squirrels. They're total jerks and they're everywhere, but they've got a schtick and they've got it down cold, which keeps us from putting a bounty on the little pop-tart-thieving sons of bitches and wiping them from the face of the earth.
The temp agency says they should have something for me if I call back around the end of the week.
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09:52 pm
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Holding the door
With both Kristina and Jessica doing their part to support Live Journal, I suppose the guy with a degree in journalism and no place to be for the foreseeable future has little to no excuse to not be laying down the odd paragraph when it's convenient, huh?
I did security for Friday's Drinking With Ian taping. One of the guests was the Villification Tennis kids from Ye Olde Renaissance Faire. I've seen them lay their thing down dozens of times, and I've always found it enjoyable, but man, they are a barely tolerable lot when they're crammed into a green room. And, under no circumstances should you, while listening to them rehearse, start a sentence with, "It's funnier if you..." I guess that room is, as often as not, full of erstwhile or occasional standup comedians, so it's probably a lateral move. I'm not sure where Kristina was spending her time between trays of thimble-sized shots, but I didn't see the alternating waves of panic and devastating eye-rolling from her spot on the couch that I've grown so used to.
Stevie, as those of you on her Facebook friends list were made aware, and those of you present already approached me to discuss, was in rare form. Apparently, after co-worker happy hour, no dinner, and a taping's worth of cocktails, she either genuinely enjoys the Drinking With Ian experience, or else decides that the most appropriate form of derision is to act like she loves the show in a mocking way that's indistinguishable from genuine through the veil of Maker's Mark. And fall down a lot.
Spending more time with Missy and Stevie is getting Matt Lodge a lot more practice at driving than he gets normally. A handful of us adjourned to his house after the taping where Stevie broke his closet door, ate two cans of Spam and ruthlessly cuddled a passed-out Noah until it was time to come back "home" to Champlin. She also ate Missy's bagel. It was unforgivable.
I spent today setting up Halloween decorations. We chose today to accommodate Monique WHO DID NOT SHOW UP TO HELP. I'm not that upset, really; I didn't actually expect her to show up last year when she did, and the plan for her to lend a hand was made before we knew that today would be spent cutting an antique Ford into bite-sized chunks. (Hail Fairlane, full of grease, blessed art though among sedans. Requiescat in pacem, domine domine, etc, etc.)
Seriously, some one get me a job.
But not tomorrow. Tomorrow, I'm going to the zoo.
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11:51 pm
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See the blue, not the poo!
I mean that as a good slogan for toilet cleaner tablets, not as a rumination on the benefits of focusing on depression instead of the misfortune that caused it.
I have a whole thing I was going to say, but the point is, I would still buy them if all they did was turn the water blue, and also, I wish I had a job. But, like they say, wish in one hand and shit in the other, and you probably won't be able to get a job, because you've got poop on your hand.
Today marked one full week of unemployment. Living it, not getting it. I mean "unemployment" as in complaining about how there's nothing on TV during the day, not "unemployment" as in someone sends me a check for sitting on Craigslist for a couple hours a day. The sucky kind.
On the other hand, since I'm already living in my parents' basement, this really just means that the illiterate girl who asks me ridiculous questions all day is under three feet tall and shares my interest in stacking up leggos after lunch.
It's weird how often I'm unemployed this time of year, come to think of it. I have a folder of pictures on my hard drive labeled "Halloween/Unemployment." I guess I've got time to build more monsters out of chicken wire to put in the yard.
I actually started this update over 24 hours ago, and I was recently told that Noah's moving van is booked from 8am to 2pm tomorrow, so I should, in good conscience, get to bed.
It's nice to have a reason to wake up other than a 2-year-old yelling at me to do so.
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11:48 pm
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138 hours.
Let me start by saying that I applaud Kristina's recent efforts to hold back Facebook's ferocious siege against long form blogging. I had every intention of doing the same, but I find myself spending a lot of the extra free time gained by living half an hour from everything fun in no more productive pursuits than applying for jobs and napping.
I saw Marcy Playground on Saturday, marking the first time I'd ever A)attended a concert with my sister, B)been to the FineLine, and C)gone to a show that cost that much. I was convinced that the crowd at a Marcy Playground show in 2009 would be something of an oddity, but it turns out that Marcy Playground fans are, by and large, pretty much the same people I would have pictured as "people that go to the FineLine." It was weird to be in a room full of people who were excited to hear Secret Squirrel.
I also expected John Wozniak (the lead singer, for those of you less schooled in Marcy Playground, by which I mean everyone but me, my sister, and John Wozniak's mom) to be more of a bitter shell of a man at having been irrelevant to popular music for some 15 years, but to his credit, dude clearly knows what he is. The penultimate song before the encore was Sex and Candy, introduced as "our new single." As expected, no more people sang along to that one than to Sherry Fraser. All told, it was a lovely evening, and many thanks to my sister for buying the tickets (and what I assume was a horrifically overpriced cocktail.)
I've applied for several dozen more jobs, and gotten as far as an interview only once in the past couple of weeks. It was a customer service job with ScanTron, which I've now been made aware is a relatively small subsidiary of a large holding company and I suspect just a dummy corporation propping up the #2 pencil industry. I got a callback on Wednesday, had my interview on Thursday, and got my rejection e-mail on Friday. I didn't get the job, but I still can't help but feel that I'd enjoy the process of looking for employment a great deal more if all my efforts' dispositions were so efficient.
There's been a lot of turnover at the paper shredding appointment mines of late. They've let go two of the recent call center hires and two of the salesmen in the past few weeks. The call center reps are replaced within a week or so. Phone bank experience is desirable, but not so much that the market isn't flooded with us as much as with nearly every other imaginable skill set. The parade of trashy blandsters has been impressive, though by its nature, not really worth writing about. It's sort of like seeing a flood, I think. Once you tell people you saw the flood, there's not much else to say. I mean, there's a lot of it, but it's just water.
I'm sending a threatening letter to my former landlady tomorrow, if I don't get word about my damage deposit. Wish me luck with that.
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12:20 pm
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"You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded."
I applied for a whole mess of pretty promising jobs last night. Stevie has been spending her free time scouring the internet for work since she's newly re-employed. The timing, as it turns out, couldn't be better. I've only set one appointment at work this week, and there's no apparent reason for my underperformance.
The thing is, this has happened at almost every telemarketing job I've ever had. I do reasonably well the first few weeks, then at some point, around the time I get comfortable with the calling script, my numbers start to slide. The best theory I can come up with is that no one likes people who sound articulate and educated calling them on the phone.
The upside, like I said, is that I got a confirmation back from my application at Sister Nadeau's dog store job, and I just sent in a pretty sweet response to a Craigslist ad Stevie found looking for an "Author Coordinator" at a publishing company in the warehouse district.
APPLICATION PROCESS:
*You must write a cover letter that has some spunk, character, and humor in it (If it contains cheeesy resume buzz words, it is unlikely we will respond)
*You must attach a resume or put it in the body of the email (If your resume contains an objective, it is unlikely we will respond. We know your objective -- to get a job).
*You must be okay with the starting salary. This is an entry level job. If you get this job, the chances of you moving up in our company are high.
*Quirky, interesting, pop-culture junkies are encouraged to apply.
Accounts vary on whether my cover letter might have over-shot the mark on "quirky, interesting and humorous."
Objective: I'd like to find a woman who understands me. I mean really understands me.
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12:12 pm
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Two weeks out.
There was a meeting at work this morning in which D-Bag told us that the entire call center has been severely under-performing. He said the quality of appointments (meaning the likelihood that each appointment will result in closed sale) has been high, but that the overall number of appointments has been low. He suggested that we stop filtering our call lists looking for "good appointments" and just try to make as many calls as possible.
I've met my goal for attempted contacts already today, and I've set two appointments, one at one of those shady check-cashing places in North Minneapolis. This isn't a direct attempt to affect the new policy, just letter-of-the-law acceptance of it. I'm not going to be a jerk about this until I get another job lined up.
Someone remind me when Jill and Stu are getting in to town.
Anyone who wants to stop by this weekend and help me pack or move boxes would be more than welcome to do so. Every time I move, it becomes very clear to me that all I actually need in a living space is a huge kitchen with a bed in the corner somewhere. A bathroom would be nice, but ultimately optional, given my longstanding love of shitting in inappropriate places.
Daily optimism; more good things about living in Champlin:
- A geometrically useable, if less than delightful bathroom.
- The hallmark of middle-class suburban opulence, "ice in the door."
- A relatively reliable supply of non-spoiled vegetables.
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