Today has so far been wholely uneventful in the office. Quiet as a mouse. So here is a picture of the vitamin water I’ve been drinking:
The Office Is Slow Today
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Category Archives: Work
I'm Failing At NaNoWriMo
This is the start of the second week of NaNoWriMo, and to date I have written a total of 0 words for the event. Time to make excuses:
- Pressed & Bound went nuts last week. I lost the .com (be sure to check your email for expiration notices!) and had to change everything over to .net. That took a good couple of days to wrangle together. It also helped make Episode 56 not get uploaded yet, although we’ve done Episode 57 already. Maybe Episode 56 will be our “floor 13″: you know it’s supposed to be there, but it’s disappeared.
- There are an exorbitant amount of games that I
have to/needwant to play. Currently I’m waste deep into Fable II, slaughtering hundreds of hobbes and buying up real estate in Bloodstone. Also, Wrath of the Lich King comes out in less than a week, so last week I’ve been gearing up – figuratively and literally – for the game. My guy is a total badass, and I’m sorry Other WoW Nerds, but, no, I do not play Combat-Swords. I like playing Subtlety, get over it. I know I don’t do as much DPS, but I really don’t care; it’s more fun my way. Shadowstep ftw. Additionally, there’s Gears of War 2 to worry about and Left 4 Dead and Rock Band 2. Seriously, there are too many games. - Anathem.
- Work. I think I’d be more productive if I only had to go to work for maybe 4 hours a day. And I say that because every day I don’t do 8 hours of work. If it was concentrated I’d have more reason to get stuff done in that period of time. But that’s all an aside that’s not for this time and place.
So there you have it. A few excuses for me not having written anything yet. Had I been writing the average daily wordage you need to complete 50,000 words in a month, I’d be up to about 11.5k. As it stands now, if I want to start today, I will need to knock out 2,173 words per day to finish on time. That’s not horribly out of the question, but we’ll see how it goes. I might just submit the novelette I wrote a few years ago, but that would be cheating because I definitely didn’t write that in an month.
Life Is A Highway; I'm Going To Drive It ALL NIGHT LONG
It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and wrote from the heart what has been going on in my life. Turns out I’ve been busy.
It’s been nearly one full month since I’ve last posted, here is the rundown:
- I got a new job. Yeah, it turns out that I was wrong about my last job; I really did hate it and so I scooted. Ironically enough, my current position is back with the university that I left not some seven or eight months ago. I work in a different position now, however, which makes things a lot better. At 5pm we close up and I’m OUT. No more worrying about what is going on at night if I happen to leave (which brought on a lot of trepidation in the previous position). Really what I like best is that I can freaking stand up and walk around if I want. I have a work computer, but I also bring my laptop so I can work on auxiliary things meaningful to the position (and I found an old monitor in the closet; I’m rocking a sweet tri monitor set up). I have a WINDOW and SUNLIGHT comes through it because I work during THE DAY. It’s awesome. Plus the school will pay for school; I might get another bachelor’s. We’ll see.
- Outside of work, the condo I live in now is not too shabby. One of the things I complained a lot about at my old apartment is that it was freaking loud; all the time. If it wasn’t the pigeons being loud as hell it would be the grounds keeping mowing and leaf blowing from 8am-5pm. Of course, then I was working nights so the results of the noise was that I could never get a good night’s sleep. Since then I’ve moved to a less snooty place and have been pretty happy with the result. Not only is the rent cheaper, but it’s also waaaay quieter. It’s extremely surprising. When I learned that the condo was labeled with a letter instead of a number I could only think that I was about to enter slumtown and Mel Gibson from Mad Max would roll by in front of the window. Such is not the case. Given, the residence is older, but there are no pigeons and I’m at work when grounds keeping comes by during the week. The loudest thing, honestly, is my cat, who has decided to meow all waking hour because she likes to go outside and watch the birds and other animals that run around. Sometimes I want to punch her face with my fists, but I know she gets kinda bored during the day when everyone is gone, so I don’t.
- On the show front, I just grabbed a new theme for Pressed & Bound and added Google Analytics to the site to help track visitors. I’m hoping to add some new things to the site to drive some traffic. We’ll see; I haven’t fully figured out what needs to be done, but something does. I think we have a good thing going and just need some tweaks to get more eyeballs on the site and the show. I don’t care if we ever make a cent, but if we can get some people to pick up more novels I’d call it a success.
- Speaking of novels, I just signed up for the National Novel Writing Month challenge. Basically you take November to attempt to write a 50,000 word novel. If you succeed, the site will give you a .pdf certificate that certifies your awesomeness. If you don’t, no worries, you’re not out anything. You just happened to not finish a novel. 50k is about 1,666 words per day. If anyone wants to join me on this challenge, please say so. Once you sign up, you can add writing buddies to keep track of friends’ progress. I’m trying to get a friendly challenge going with the guys at P&B, so we’ll see how that goes.
So that’s really about the gist of everything that’s happened in the last month. I’ve been trying to get all settled for the most part with the apartment and work so it’s been kind of slow, but hopefully everything will continue to go better.
Angerpockets
It turns out that I pretty much hate the feelings I have towards my current job. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I like it. It’s not a matter of being incapable of doing it; I just don’t really have any desire to do it. I always told myself that I didn’t want to be stuck in a job for all of my life that I didn’t like. And while this can be the start of a “career,” so to speak, I just can’t think of any reason to stick around when I spend ten hours of the day disliking everything about what I’m doing. I realize that this is in stark contrast to what the previous post ended up accomplishing (a realization that it could be ok in the end), but after another week on the job, I just can’t bring myself to want to be there, even though I do help little old ladies sometimes.
Trepidation, Reservations, and Obligations
So I did my full share of work this week on my new overnight shift. I just finished the work week about 45 minutes ago. Currently my schedule is 8pm to 6:45am, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Of course, we know that last weekend I made preparations for the overnight shift, and all was well. Monday was an interesting day. Seven weeks had transpired since I first walked into the doors as an employee. After the first night of the new shift, though, I was feeling a might uneasy about everything. Would all of that knowledge be for naught? And how does it all feel one week in?
Training Is Over: Week 7 Wrap-Up
It’s been a long two months, but I will – as of Monday – finally be on my regular shift. I’m sure it’s been mentioned before, but I will be starting out working nights. It should be pretty interesting. I’ve obviously been working during the day for the past couple of months, and now my body has been reprogrammed from staying up all night usually to waking up at six a.m. This weekend I have been trying to turn that back around. So far I’ve stayed up all night on Friday, and tonight I will be trying to do the same. I have to finish one novel and I have two newish video games to play in addition to a multitude of cleaning that needs to take place in my apartment. Since I have to stay up all night tonight, I’m going to make a new post in a few minutes to chronicle my exploits (and potential failure of staying up) every hour or so. It’s going to be totally awesome*.
Work and Play
I pretty much seem to only be writing about work lately, and while there will be a little here about that, I will also deviate as well. So gird your loins, because here we go:
- I’ve started week six of training for my job. Things are getting “easier,” but I still am cautious of exactly everything that I’m allowed to do. There’s a very thin line for information that you can give out to certain people, and I’m always wary about what I say, making sure not to give out anything that I shouldn’t. Luckily, to alleviate a lot of the stress, last Friday I happen to win two tickets to the local hockey spectacle on Sunday.
- Before the Sunday night Hockeython rolled around, a tiny game came out that probably not too many people have heard of. That game would be Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Myself and my nerd buddies went out at midnight to pick up the game, and since then I’ve been trying to unlock a lot of characters and things. Yep, super nerd time all around.
- And lastly, the hockey game was a neat little diversion to my normal Sunday. Usually, I’d be laying around in my underwear playing video games (which I did for a little bit because of Smash Bros.), but this Sunday was different. The tickets I won happened to be associated with the box suite that my company owns at our local building-that-houses-sporting-events. So I took a friend and went to see what was the scoop. It was pretty fun being all high and mighty in the little box, looking down at all the people who didn’t have a couch to sit on. Our team ended up losing hard (1-5), but it was an enjoyable experience. I had never been to a hockey game previously, but I’d go back to one. They’re definitely more interesting than baseball games, and last half as long. That’s no slight against baseball, but baseball usually has really boring moments. Hockey, at least, has movement throughout.
So that was my weekend. Right now I’m about to hit up the video games and then go to bed at around 9pm because I’m tired as hell. Have a good one.
Week 5
I’m pretty much in the thick of it. Since last Monday, when I wrote before, I’ve been doing the job every day for at least half a day. Well, I take that back; yesterday we learned how to take care of property claims, which was interesting and easier than auto claims. If I could switch to only doing property claims I would; less people are angry with those.
So after nearly two weeks of taking claim after claim, how is the job? It’s pretty stressful, to be honest. I’ve never done this whole “speaking on the phone while inputting information” thing, but it’s coming easier and easier each time. I’m not totally secure with the system yet either, so that makes it a little more difficult. Many states having special considerations is no fun either. California and Texas have some crazy laws that you have to make sure to take into consideration. But once I get used to all of that, I’m sure I’ll be fine. Today was actually a pretty good day. The only thing that I don’t necessarily like to do is tell those who are not insured with us that they have to wait to get their repairs. They’re usually not too happy about that, but that’s just how it works. They usually don’t understand that we’re not going to give out money on our insured’s policy without speaking to the insured first. It’s fairly common sense if you think about it. But work is fun, and there are some good people there.
As far as outside of work is concerned, I’m still getting used to waking up at 6am. I hate that. It’s been at least four years since I had to do that on any regular basis. I hated it then, and I hate it now. I’m pretty excited to work nights because not only will there be less calls coming in, but I won’t have to wake up early. I’ll actually be sleeping all day, which is cool and something that I like to do anyway, so it will be totally awesome.
I’m only in training for another two weeks after this one, so it’s getting close to zero hour. I have about twelve work days to make sure I’m set and ready, but I’m sure everything will be fine.