Friday, February 29, 2008

The Ebb and Flow of Employment

I am employed as a Quality Assurance Engineer. Validating systems in high-pressure release cycles is what I do.

On a good day.

My boss recently stopped by my office and asked if I had time. I minimized the paperwork I was reviewing and exclaimed, "Yes, I do!"

He asked me to label two cluster racks in the basement to mark them as "in use" for a certain project.

"I am on it RIGHT THIS SECOND," I told him as I stood, grabbing some labels and a Sharpie.

I strode downstairs with deliberate purpose and labeled the two racks, careful to keep my writing decisive and legible. I double-checked my work, and triple-checked that I had applied the labels to the correct racks.

I walked back upstairs and found my boss. "I TOTALLY LABELED those two cluster racks!"

He laughed and said, "Well that's good."

"Let me know if you've got any more LABELING NEEDS!"

"I will, thanks," he said.

"Or ANY other work at all!"

"Okay," he said.

I walked back to my cube and sat down.

I'm looking forward to the next high-pressure release cycle.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Let's get this started right

2008 Passport:


1997 Passport:


My what a difference ten years make!

Something Old, Something New

Six years ago I created a LiveJournal to chronicle all the ways in which I am a moron. It was intended to be a sounding board for the various ridiculous thoughts that filtered through my brain on a daily basis, dressed up and packaged as entertaining reads. This was eventually broadened to encompass anything humorous that transpired in my life that merited retelling.

I documented a weekend's worth of elevator stories. I documented a farting man with a tiny erection at my gym. I documented accidentally brushing my teeth with the cat vomit brush. And, in what some would consider to be that journal's crowning moment, I documented the time I plugged up a date's toilet with no plunger in sight.

Enough.

Stories of the awkward and humiliating moments in my life only take things so far. They still happen and they will continue to be written about but I have other things to say now.

Broadening the scope of my existing LiveJournal to encompass these new topics didn't seem appropriate. It was created by a different version of me in a different place in his life with different goals and interests; suddenly shoving in political essays between the vulgar bathroom stories hardly seemed appropriate. Additionally, I grew tired of the LiveJournal format itself, as I increasingly felt I was trying to shoehorn a would-be humor column into a public diary.

Enough.

It is time to write about everything in a place where people aren't almost exclusively writing about nothing.

This is, of course, pretty self-serious talk from a guy who still can't resist a good dick joke.