Just saw a trailer for The Producers. I just thought that a movie based on a hit Broadway show based on a movie… it brings “remake” to a whole new level.
What’s next, Disney’s The Lion King in live action?
From over 600 tickets at the beginning of the week to about 230 at the end of the week. Not bad, considering that when it was all said and done, I’d clocked in 62 hours for the week.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pass out.
This has been the Week From Hell.
Note that it’s only Thursday night and I’ve said this.
The Week From Hell actually began last Friday, when my boss called a meeting of the entire company (into our “large conference room,” which can comfortably seat about, oh, eight people), to tell us that we’ve been falling behind in our ticket work. For those who aren’t familiar with ticket-based work: everything we do in our jobs is based on tickets. If somebody needs to have access to a server, they generate a ticket with the request. If a server stops responding or crashes, or the memory gets all used up, it generates a ticket. The fewer tickets we close, the less work we’re officially doing, and it reflects poorly on our contracts.
So the fact that our boss called us together to talk about this, by its very nature, is a Bad Thing, and you just know that it’s not going to bode well for us, the lowly ticket handlers. We were falling behind in our ticket closings because of a simple fact: we didn’t have enough people to handle them. We’ve had people pulled off of our team left and right over the last several months, and as a result we haven’t had enough people to handle the load. So what does this mean, exactly?
It means that–even though our boss isn’t placing blame on anybody–we have to buckle down and get huge numbers of tickets closed so we can catch up. All right, I can understand that, and I’m certainly not above putting on a little more elbow grease to accommodate that. Besides, we had assurances that it would be made worth it for doing so (like I haven’t heard that one before). So we were being asked to put in an extra hour a day for the next week to help get the ticket count down. No problem.
Skip ahead to Monday. We had another meeting on Monday morning, at which point it was noted that not only would we have to put in extra hours every day, but that we were being required to come in on Saturday for at least six hours to help get the ticket count down. Great. I put in 11.5 hours on Monday. That’s 8am straight through without a lunch break (well, I ate lunch, but I worked through that) until 7pm. For six of those hours, I was actually not handling tickets because I had been scheduled to go over to one of the datacenters and rebuild a bunch of servers (six, to be exact–which, by the way, is a pretty big number of servers to rebuild in six hours).
On Tuesday, I came into the office and shortly after getting there, received a mass email from my boss stating that only 76 tickets had been closed on Monday, and–again without placing blame on anybody–that was just unacceptable and we needed to do better.
Hold on a sec. Back the fun train up for a minute. I put in almost half a fucking day on Monday–more than that, if you count the fact that I drive an hour each way to and from work–and it wasn’t good enough? Great.
That’s pretty much how it’s been the rest of the week. I put in nine hours on Tuesday, another eleven and a half on Wednesday, and another eleven or so today. A good portion of these days were handling tickets that weren’t even mine, because one of my coworkers is completely incompetent and I have to cover for her because if I don’t, the ticket count will just skyrocket. Note that this isn’t completely altruistic, because even if they’re her tickets, I still get credit for closing them. And besides, I am helping myself by helping the team out, after all.
So as of this evening, I’ve already put in well over a standard work week–43.5 hours, to be exact. I still have two whole days to go in this week. Yay.
Now for the side effects. I’m cranky; I haven’t slept very well. Also, when I get home at 8:30pm, I have absolutely no desire, nor the time, to cook dinner. So I’ve been eating out. Which, in my post-Thanksgiving state, has made me gain about six pounds since Monday. I also really don’t have the money to be paying for dinners and lunches (which I have to buy as well, because I have no leftovers to bring for lunch since I didn’t cook the night before). And God knows that being a salaried employee, I don’t get any extra money for all these extra hours, either.
Which brings us to the final kick in the teeth for the week. All this talk about how we’re doing such a good thing for the company and that it will be made worth it, and do you know what it gets us? A comp day… at some time in 2006. Wow, an extra vacation day. That’s GREAT! Especially given that I haven’t even used up what vacation time I have now, so what good is another day that I’m not going to use? Also, at every single quarterly dinner this year, our CEO has been talking about how great we’re doing financially, and how we’re right on track for revenue and how great that’s going to be when Christmas bonuses come around. And yet, when a coworker of mine emailed our boss to see if we would be getting year-end bonuses (which, by this time last year, we already had in our bank accounts), she received a response that only had two words in it: “No idea.” If those bonuses don’t come around, I’m completely fucked. And not in the good, with-lube kind of sense. It’s not so much that I was planning on using the bonus money or anything, more that I just don’t have any way of digging myself out if I don’t get it.
So, to recap: I’m tired, cranky, fat, stressed and broke. And it’s only Thursday.
Just got back from seeing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Damn.
And I mean damn.
That’s about all I can say for the moment. Okay, I lied. There was very little about this movie that I didn’t like, despite its inevitable departures from the book. Out of the four movies, this one was absolutely the best at standing on its own. I think that people who see it but haven’t read the book will be able to carry more away from it than the previous ones.
I have to absorb this some. I will definitely go into more (and more spoilery) detail later on.
I just heard a cut from “Out Tonight” in a trailer for Rent. I have just one thing to say to Rosario Dawson:
Look, sweetie. It ain’t enough to just hit the notes. Seriously. You sound even worse than Daphne Rubin-Vega, and I didn’t think that was possible. No, I mean it. Really.
My stepsister, Elizabeth, has been accepted into the Peace Corps. I didn’t find out about it until a little more than a week ago—obviously I had known that she was trying to get in, but I hadn’t known she’d actually been accepted.
So the point that I found out she was going was just over a week ago, when I got an invitation to her going away party. So that’s nice. The only un-nice thing about it was its location, which was where my other stepsister lives, in Esperance, New York (way out there in upstate New York, about three hours from my location here in Connecticut and about two and a half from my parents’ place in Vermont). So there was a pretty hefty drive out to the party.
I went to the party in a caravan with my parents, and my sister and brother-in-law. We got out of the cars, unloaded Liz’s clothes and such, and went into the party. I happened to walk with with my brother-in-law, Dan. All in all, it was a pretty innocuous entrance. I said hello to the people that were there.
It wasn’t until later on that the strangeness started, or rather, that the news of the strangeness got to me. Apparently, Liz’s mother, who hasn’t seen me in years, saw me walking in with Dan and apparently assumed that he was my boyfriend.
I’ll repeat that, because it bears repeating.
She thought that my sister’s husband was my significant other.
I could sort of understand something like this, if it was somebody who hadn’t known me for twenty years. In fact, I’m actually quite used to people thinking that I’m gay, at least when they first meet me. It’s apparently quite common. Which, I suppose, leads me to the question that is the whole point of this entry:
Why is it that people seem to enjoy making the assumption that I’m gay?
I accept the fact that I am hardly the “typical” male. I’m not big into sports, I don’t mind talking about my feelings, I’m a performer (always a sign of the Queer), I have lots of gay friends. But the last time I checked, there’s only one thing that constitutes a gay male, and that is a desire for the same sex. And the last time I checked, I lack that qualification.
The strangest thing is that I would expect somebody who was practically family to know me the best (well, not as well as people who actually were family, but you get my point). The fact that Kathy saw me walk in with another guy and automatically made the assumption that he was my boyfriend means that she was already predisposed to thinking it. I get that this is all modern times and everything, but most people don’t think “Oh. They’re gay” when two guys walk into a room together, unless they have some reason to think so. So what is it? What is it that makes people—apparently the people that are even supposed to know me—assume that I’m batting for the other team?
I would make the suggestion that maybe this is why I haven’t had a girlfriend in forever, except for the obvious everybody-knows-this fact that women loooove gay guys.
The Christmas-themed ads have started playing on television. I can’t even begin to describe how homicidal that makes me feel.
I have a new coworker who is from England. We had a discussion about a week ago about the great game of Cricket. Being that I am American, and thus I have no clue as to what happens outside this country, I had to admit that, like most other Americans, I had no idea how the game is played.
Well, I happened to be reading my LiveJournal Friends Page tonight and happened upon an entry by a friend of mine who lives in Australia, in which he mentions that he’s got the cricket game on in the background. So I looked it up in the Holy Grail Wikipedia and, like the wealth of information that it is, it had an entry on cricket.
I can now officially say that after having read the complete rules of cricket… I still have no freaking clue on how the game is played.
What an incredibly complicated game.
I’m feeling much better now.
Does the sucky stuff still suck? Yeah, but I know that eventually I’ll figure it all out.
I guess that what’s really important for right now is to figure out what I have to do in order to fix it. That’s always been my problem, to a certain extent—and hell, is the problem with most of society—I’m really good at finding out what’s wrong with the world, but when it comes to stepping up, I take a step back instead.
But I’ll be fine, honest. Don’t you go worrying about me.
I’m really getting sick of being depressed. No money, no social life, two hours of driving to and from work a day, work/home/sleep/work/home/sleep… The routine is driving me crazy.
I just don’t know what I can do about this. It’s not so much that I feel depressed, because that’s something that comes and goes; it’s more that I just feel kind of trapped in everything. Lack of any real direction in my life is just causing me to see what’s only two feet in front of my face.