Moments - Chilling and Otherwise

My first week of work away from DHFS is finally over. I must admit that it was certainly not bad. In fact, it was rather interesting. Monday started with an explanation from my manager of what happened. Most of you probably know that state jobs are acquired by knowing someone or being in a particular manager's favor. By law, however, the jobs must be posted and a recruitment process followed. Thusly people pretty much ignore the official job postings – people such as my manager. Instead he relied on an email from the state regarding my former position. The way he explained it to me was that he ignored the posting instead relying on the email and this particular email did not include the time that resumes must be received by to be considered. And so my resume made it to Mother DOA at about 3:20 the day of the deadline and, unbeknownst to my manager, the deadline was at 2:00 precisely. Hence, I (and Steve) lost my job. With that and a tour of the office, I was sent downstairs to meet Robbie and Bulimia, my fellow PC techs working the bench. They showed me the ropes and I started working on some computers that needed fixing. By Tuesday two things had become glaringly obvious:

1) IBM NetVistas are a complete fucking pain in the ass to disassemble. My fingers are way too thick and long to be prying around inside their cases. No wonder they're put together by some of the more diminutive members of our species. Adroit as we are, we big, burly white men just can't reach inside there without scraping our hands and getting blood everywhere.

2) It is boring work. It's not so bad running to clients' sites but most of what I've been doing is replacing power supplies & motherboards and paperwork.

On Tuesday I went out to Dean on the Beltline to return some aforementioned NetVistas and grab some more that were broken. It was a delightful surprise to see Otto amble up to me as I walked in the door. I hadn't seen him since he was let go from DHFS back in June. So we chatted and caught up with one another's lives. He likes it over at Dean but is also looking for a new challenge. He remarked that, although he wants to change positions, one benefit to the job is that he gets to visit various clinics in the area and meet all the hottie nurses. I also did the same routine out at Promega in Fitchburg (a close suburb of Madison). I discovered that, although my street map of Madison is only a couple years old, it is woefully out of date as it was a bloody odyssey getting there. While it didn't take me 10 years, it did take me an extra 15 minutes to find the joint as well as a few extra miles worth of gas. My maps says to take Fish Hatchery Drive. There is no Fish Hatchery Drive! Instead the proper street to look for is East Cheryl. I was relieved when I finally saw the Promega sign. I pulled in and moseyed into the lobby. The middle-aged women there sympathetically told me that I wanted the other Promega building across the street. By "across the street" she meant across a 40-acre field and then across the street. And so I drive over. Entering lobby #2, I felt like I was in the office of that evil company in Robocop. I don't know why – the joint just had this slightly creepy feeling to it. There was this life-sized statue of a samurai by the window and it just had this weird ambience.

On Wednesday, I was told by my manager that I was being given a new job – that as goodwill ambassador. He was sending me back to DHFS for one (1) day as a "goodwill gesture" for having messed up the contract. When I awoke Thursday morning, I was rather looking forward to seeing my old co-workers and giving Pete shit about his gyros addiction. It was nice to have so many people smile and say it was nice to see me again so I felt bad revealing that it was just for the day. I went upstairs and saw Jason and he invited me out to lunch with some friends of his who work at the DNR, my probable next placement. We went over to the GEF 2 building and met up with five guys from the IT department there. There was Pete, Brian, and three others whose names I cannot recall. It was chilly that day – in the mid-50s – and two of the guys were wearing shorts. One had hair halfway down his back which was unrestrained. I would learn later that he's a manager of some kind. The web server gentleman ordered a salad because he has gout. Another guy had 2 wide-gauge earrings in each ear which contrasted with his dress shirt and Dockers. Although married, he started a never-ending stream of remarks about the waitresses and their breasts. One hottie's tits were sort of oddly shaped – they were just oddly angular – and so a lengthy conversation about why they should be so ensued with theories being bandied about pertaining to various types of push-up bras and her frilly blouse. Jason had told me that, although I'd be interviewed by a guy named Phil, Brian would probably sit in on the interview. I told Brian about my impending interview and he said to make sure to mention that I like Seinfeld and the conversation took a turn towards the TV show. A couple "Do you remember the episode where" comments and a few insults later, I found that they had accepted me as one of their own. The conversation improbably then meandered to men's deodorant and they're various scents. After lunch, I went outside for a smoky treat with the big guy who sat opposite me. We chatted and he said, among other things, that I'd fit in well and that he'd teach me to do some programming. Having met some goofballs there and gotten along with them very well and having Jason put a good word in for me, I have no doubt that I'll get the gig at the DNR should I be put up for it.

Today I went back out to Dean and worked on the never-ending stream of PCs that intermittently power down of their own accord. Plus I got to meet Pete. Pete is a system engineer which means he maintains servers. He and Robbie are friends so I got to meet him when he wandered over to our bench to hurl insults at my co-worker. Pete had replaced a RAID card in a server and now the stupid thing was in a boot loop. He even did a little dance yelling "I hate Windows" whilst doing these weird hand motions with a large piece of packing foam. I helped him out a bit before returning to this fucking Promega piece of junk on which Windows struggled and failed to install drivers for a plethora of devices. During our conversation, he asked who I was and how long I'd been there. I explained that I had been at DHFS until this week and he said, "So you're one of the guys who got screwed over." He also said that Marcie, one of my fellow contractors at DHFS, had chewed out my manager. I was a bit surprised by this. Marcie is a project manager type person and, although we chatted occasionally, I never knew that she had authority to chew out any type of manager. You learn something new everyday, I guess. My day ended with an all-too lengthy meeting about employee benefits. I need to fill out some paperwork now. The HR guy who did the presentation had with him the bane of modern-day life: Powerpoint presentations. (Why David Byrne seeks to make art out them is beyond me.) During the course of his explanation of the changes to our health insurance, he really emphasized the rising costs. Not so much the amount we'd be paying out of our pockets but of health care costs generally. The little graph showing the costs to the company and his explanation that the general trend is about a 10% increase each year really struck me. Ten fucking percent! Why is this? Thank you the free market. Is health care really just getting grossly more expensive each year or are some people just lining their pockets? I mean, come on! I can see why gas prices fluctuate as they do but it's not like doctor bills should be affected by a hurricane or a war in a doctor-rich country. Doctors and their services aren't traded on any kind of futures market, are they? I understand inflation but aren't the increases in health care costs just fucking ridiculous? I'm a middle class single – I can't imagine being a parent working at Wal-Marts for $7/hour trying to provide and pay for insurance for a family. I'm surprised citizens aren't borrowing money from China to pay bills like the federal government.

Outside of my day job, I did a computer job last night for a retired professor. He got a brand spanking new PC to replace his old one which still had Windows 95 on it. And so he hired me to get the new one setup and copy data over from the old one. The latter proved to be a remarkably large pain in the ass because the PC is so old and 95 has no USB support which meant that I couldn't use a thumb drive nor my external DVD drive to grab data from the hard drive. Instead I had to pull the old drive out and slap it in my external converter kit hoolie and hook it up to the new PC. But before I could do that, I had to copy the contents of about a million Zip disks to it. Holy fuck! It was like a goddamn nightmare flashback. It was so slooooooooooow. The customer needed his mail and such copied to the new PC. He swore up and down that he used Outlook Express for e-mail on his old computer but I could not find hide nor hair of any OE accounts. Then again, I haven't dicked with a 95 PC in years. As far as I know, all the OE folders are xxxxxx.mbx. So his inbox should have been inbox.mbx but it was nowhere to be found. I did find in.mbx as well as other .mbx files but they're associated with Eudora, the e-mail client given to university users. While the guy was incredibly nice, it was incredibly frustrating having to show him how to drag icons and windows around, how to click on the right mouse button, how to copy something, etc. Holy fuck! This shit is 10 years old now! Copying and pasting is no longer some new and exotic function reserved for dorks at MIT. If you have a Windows 95 box, that means you've had a right mouse button and copying & pasting at your fingertips for at least 8 years. *At least*. This guy is smart. He was a fucking law professor. And computers don't elude him totally. He's a Photoshop wiz – I mean, he can paste Britney Spears' head on any vixen's body and make it look real yet copying and pasting eludes him. And so does the hierarchical file system. There's no doubt in my mind that he could dazzle me with legal ramblings until I fall ass over teakettle onto the floor yet trying to explain digging 3 folders deep to find a setup executable was like trying to teach a quadriplegic to dance. Still, there are worse people out there. Like the woman who didn't equate my words "the clock" with the, um, clock, at the right-hand end of the Windows taskbar. You know, "clock" as in the thing that tells the time. She was expecting a round thing with hands that go in circles. Did I travel back to the 1970s when people still thought digital watches were cool or what? Then there are people who are just so afraid of computer that, when you tell them to click on something, they refuse lest the computer start on fire. The one person I won't miss at DHFS is a lawyer. (I will preface this by saying that the last time I she said a word to me, she was nice and was even smiling.) I always got stuck going up to her desk to find out what the problem was and every time it was a problem that had been ongoing for multiple months and she only called it in when she had to finish a project that was the equivalent of moving a mountain when she had 5 minutes in which to do it in. "My Word keeps doing this so I can't print and I have to print 500 pages for a meeting in 2 minutes." And so it was always with a scowl that she greeted me upon crossing the threshold into her office which I considered to be one of the circles of hell. She was like Cerberus but with only one head. I almost yelled at her once because the only words that came out of her mouth were bitching. Everytime I asked her to describe the problem she would reply, "It doesn't work."

Me: "Are you getting any error messages?"
Her: "It doesn't work."
Me: "What were you doing when you encountered the problem?"
Her: "It doesn't work."

I nearly threw my hands up in frustration. I basically told her that I can't read minds nor can I go backwards in time so she'd either have to live with the problem or answer my questions with something beyond "It doesn't work". How the fuck do people get office jobs when they’re either totally ignorant about computers and/or deathly afraid of them? One thing I have noticed is that, while people bitch about computers, I don't hear people saying that they want to go back to their old IBM Selectric typewriters. I heard that frequently at Amfam. As if they never broke. They did. I know this because I met many a typewriter repair guy as a kid.

I had this strange moment today as I was cussing about those stupid IBM NetVistas. There I was wearing my anti-static smock with my hands shuffling around inside an IBM computer. It occurred to me that I have turned into my father. My father fixed computers for IBM for 25 years. Now, I grant you that they were mainframes so it was a bit different but the same general premise. I had this vision of my dad surrounded my stacks of punch cards cussing like a sailor as he tinkered with the guts of a 3270. And there I was cussing like a sailor with my hands inside a NetVista. A chilling moment, I assure you.