Hit Coffee is the story of Will Truman, a southern
transplant that has been moving around from one part of the country to the
next. This site is a collection of reflections
on the goings-on in his life and in the world around him. You will probably
be relieved to know that he does not generally refer to himself in the
third-person except when he's writing short bios on his web page.
Greetings from Callie, Arapaho, an unassuming town in the mountain west
where the population increase of two might just be considered statistically
significant.
Nothing written on this site should be taken as strictly true, though
if the author were making it all up rest assured the main character
and his life would be a lot less unremarkable.
This website is maintained by Guy "Web" Webster,
aka WebGuy, who also contributes from time to time.
Web hails from the midwest and currently lives
in Truman's home city of Colosse, Delosa. He works as a utility IT person at
Southern Tech University, their alma mater.
Also contributing is Sheila Tone (stone) a West Coaster, breeder, and lawyer
who has probably hooked up with some loser just like you and sees through
your whole pathetic little act.
You can meet some really interesting people smoking at airports. I’m told that Amtrak (which at least used to have smoking cabins) has the same benefit.
Of course, the last time that I lit up at an airport, it was a bad thing because it was at the beginning of a trip that I had designated “non-smoking” that became smoking starting with that light.
But that temptation will now start being a bit removed because lighters will be banned past the security checkpoints at airports. That leaves matches, which I suck at lightning, and apparently even those may be banned as well.
I don’t really know how to feel about this. On one hand, I want a demonstrable threat before our lives are inconvenienced by the government. I don’t mean planes have to blow up first, but I do need it explained to me what danger the lighters pose when not used in conjunction with something that isn’t already banned. I remember that Richard Reid dork tried to do something with fire (matches, I believe), but I can’t remember what.
But yeah, on the other hand, I don’t want a plane to explode (or worse yet, run in to something again) just so that I am not a little inconvenienced.
Interestingly, with the ban in place for lighters in checked luggage, if both lighters and matches are banned from carry-ons, it could make things more than just a little inconvenient for frequent fliers. Having to buy and discard lighters and matches in every town gone through.
Okay, so we’re talking about a whopping 99 cents for people like me that don’t lose lighters with startling regularity.
Yeah, we smokers can be a petty bunch.
And, of course, part of me wonders if this isn’t just another attempt to marginalize smokers. Not that there aren’t security concerns, mind you, but that possible objections were dismissed because “They’re just smokers and they should quit anyway.”
Yeah, we smokers can be a paranoid bunch.
On a last note, Apparently Texas (the source and focus of the article) has more stringent anti-smoking regulations at airports than does Deseret. As Gazelem International Airport in the state’s capital city, they have indoor smoking areas that are closed off (it’s like a fishbowl!). In Houston’s airports, they don’t allow any smoking indoors whatsoever.
The Reports Department at FalStaff has a relatively high turnover rate. By the time I was six months in, I was already in the upper-rung of seniority.
The problem is that while our job is largely a thankless and monotonous one, it’s also a rather important one. Reports that we make go to the IRS, EEOC, and government agencies of local, regional, and national levels. They are contracts dictating the terms of employment and unemployment. Small mistakes can have a pretty significant impact, even if they’re just in the employee handbook. And the longer we do this, the better we become at it and the less errors occur. But then people move on and someone new takes over and makes the same mistakes all over again.
The company has been rightfully concerned about mistakes being made. Concerned enough to supply training? Well, not exactly. But honestly this really is a learn-as-you-go kind of job. Concerned enough to pay us more than $9.50 an hour? Honestly, you could pay someone $19.50 an hour, but if they have a college degree with training in XHTML, VB, C-language, and SQL (as many here, including myself, have), they’re going to go absolutely nuts doing nothing but report generation day in and day out and eventually quit.
Don’t get me wrong, giving us more than 4x2′ desks in 4x4′ cubicles with a bump in pay and a little more respect would help, but the ultimate problem of turnover would exist.
That leaves the company only a couple of options. They can keep their employees by offering them a ticket out of Reports or they can keep them there so that they have more experienced people making the docs. In the case of the former, they lose the experience. In the case of the latter, they’ll still lose the experience, albeit not quite as quickly. Additionally, in the case of the latter, you lose knowledge that would be helpful in higher up positions.
It really is a catch-22. So far the company’s response is to continue to hire rookies, get irate when they make rookie mistakes, and push them out the door for the next set.
I use FalStaff as an example, but it honestly applies to a lot of different employers. CMG, a contracting company that handled tech support for a large satellite company, accepted the fact that most people can only take getting yelled at by customers day in and day out before they burn out. So they pay just enough to get them in the door and automate the process as much as possible. But the same problem exists. You either take them off the phones or they’ll eventually leave the phones and the company on their own accord.
Weimarcorp, another former employer, made an art of the turnover rate. Benefits kicked in at 4 months and the average turnover was 3.5. They’d overstaff the entry-level with overqualified individuals. Those that made it nine months looking at blinking lights in the middle of the night would then get moved out. But they had the process so automated that someone new could do the job in their sleep. They lost very little whenever they had to replace employees and they were able to seperate out the employees that would literally do anything for a paycheck, so it worked out extremely well for them. And it lead to boredom that would make just about any employee quit, which meant they never had to pay out benefits.
But for the most part, there are a lot of unpleasant jobs out there that you can’t pay people enough to do. With that reality, unless you can automate it to the degree that Weimarcorp did, I’m not sure much of anything can be done. You have to accept a lot of mistakes and, to a degree, you have to accept a customer screaming in your ear cause a rookie made a rookie error.
Which FalStaff has. Except that they reserve the right to chew us out whenever that happens.
I haven’t had this mobile phone for particularly long and I haven’t come close to figuring it out. I can’t find the manual and besides, as a man, I’m duty-bound not to read the directions anyway.
But the phone is kind of cute in a little way. To avoid waking Clancy up I’ve taken to using the moby for an alarm. It’s soft enough not to disturb her but loud enough for it to wake me up. (on a side note, the alarm sound is basically a ring. Some day someone is going to call early in the morning and I’m going to hang up on them cause I think it’s the alarm.)
But some days the moby puts a little coffee icon on the upper bar. I have no idea why or what it means. Except that it seems to only show up on days where it takes me longer to get myself out of bed and the phone has to go off a few times before I get moving.
I haven’t really dug in to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints all that much yet, though there’s certainly more to come. I don’t view the Church is being particularly evil or anything of that sort, but some of the resentment and frustration I do have is summed up pretty well in this article from the Washington Monthly:
Until I attended one, I didn’t fully realize that [the] public schools are essentially an extension of the LDS church. All junior high and high schools in the state […] are arranged so that there is a Mormon seminary building either right next door or across the street. Grade-school kids don’t go to seminary, but they do go to “primary,” a similar after-school program. Mormon students are allowed to take religious classes as part of their public education in these buildings.
There’s been a great deal of litigation over this school set-up, dating as far back as the 1930s, but so long as the seminaries are on private land, there’s nothing illegal about it. Allowing kids out for religious education during the school day has a pernicious effect on public-school life. So many kids leave for these classes that it automatically singles out the few non-Mormons who don’t participate. For one year, I attended a public high school and frequently found myself abandoned in class along with a few Hispanic kids while everyone else trekked over to seminary.
The church stretched into public school life in other ways, too. In high school, I had Mormon bishops as teachers who never missed an opportunity to bring the church into class lectures. Prayers before every event were common and coaches often blessed athletes before sporting events. My swim team would collapse into a crisis if we were expected to compete in meets in [bordering states] on a Sunday. Many of the Mormon kids on my team honestly believed that if they swam on Sunday, the devil would create an undertow that would drown them. Graduation ceremonies were held in Mormon tabernacles, and school choirs sang Mormon religious songs.
Until fairly recently, many public schools annually celebrated “Missionary Week,” when Mormon kids were supposed to come to school dressed up in the uniform of the LDS missionary—which they were all aspiring to be. Non-Mormons might as well have put big signs on their heads that read, “Convert Me.”
The author accurately describes the area as “Unspeakably beautiful.” Driving around today reminded me of that. Clancy is a real nature lover and it’s not hard to see why she fell in love with this place (if not its people). It’s also, by all accounts, an outstanding place to raise a family… if you’re LDS.
When residency is up, we won’t be staying in Deseret. It’s not because we dislike the Mormons or even because of some of the states policies (some of which do an extraordinary job of helping folks walk the straight-and-narrow). We don’t have access to a number of “public” parks because they’re private parks for public use and we’re not the public they have in mind. I we have kids here, they won’t be able to play little league. They’ll be on the team, but they won’t play. Once it becomes obvious that they aren’t going to convert (assuming they wouldn’t), they’ll also disappear from social circles. There was a “super-Christian” social circle back in Delosa, but out here it’s so much more far reaching.
It’s not cause they’re jerks. Almost all of my coworkers are LDS to one degree or another and we get along fine. So are our landlords. But their social life is built around a club that we’re not a part of. The social norms and laws are set up for believers of a faith that is not ours. This state was founded by Mormons and for Mormons. We’re just tourists.
We knew that, of course, before we came here. And we’re happy here. But maybe you just have to see the snowcapped mountains and green fields to understand what a tragedy it is that we’ve no stake to claim here personally, culturally, or religiously.
The rebellion has come to an end. For those of you that have forgotten, the Smoker’s revolution was borne when LeeAnn came on to the company, bringing along a helper and convincing Rosa (who had just given notice) to go ahead and just start smoking at work instead of going to her car and smoking there.
Today is Rosa’s last day at FalStaff. This is unfortunate for me because she and I have been getting along extremely well in recent weeks, talking as we smoke.
I don’t get along as well with LeeAnn, largely due to the language barrier. It’s strange being able to talk to someone (she reads lips) who can’t talk back. I can pick up some responses (nodding, smiling, etc.) and some of the more obvious signs, but that’s about it.
Today she told me that she plans to quit smoking as soon as she finishes her current pack. I’m not sure whether or not it’ll take, but I hope it does for a few reasons. Other than her health, I’ve been a bit worried that she wasn’t aware the damage she may be doing to her future at this highly LDS company by being tagged a smoker.
But this company has a delightfully short memory and if she does quit they’ll forget she ever smoked.
And that actually leaves me out there smoking alone again, which I think I prefer anyway.
Me: Does anyone want this piece of cake on my plate right here?
Herman: No, thanks.
Geoff: That’s okay.
Marcel: Wait, is that your third piece?
Me: No. I had a piece and then half a piece of another cause whoever took it wasn’t thorough.
Marcel: So you’ve had one-and-a-half?
Me: No, just one. The half was someone else’s. They just weren’t thorough. And if you’re having a birthday party for a coworker and get a piece but aren’t thorough by that, you forfeit the rights to the rest of the piece and whoever assumes the rest of the piece is not debited for as much taken during the transaction.
Jarvis: You’ve been working on legal documents a little too much lately, Will.
Me: I know.
—
Marcel: I think Simon should get a second piece cause it’s his birthday.
Jarvis: Why? It’s not like he chipped in or anything…
I wrote a comment on an April Fool post talking about loves past and present. Both her post and the comments are worth reading.
The subject got me thinking about one of the women I was going to spend the rest of my life with… and the one that I eventually managed.
All things considered, my ex Evangeline and I dated for way too long. Shortly after we got together one of her exes re-entered the picture. Things got messy when she left me for him, he left her for someone else, and I took her back. They never recovered. We rapidly found the locus of power in our relationship to be firmly on her shoulders. That made me feel powerless and her feel burdened. I was always mad and she was always aloof.
The biggest issue was that she stood me up over and over again. I eventually started keeping a spreadsheet. I can tell you with a reasonable degree of accuracy that in the last six months of the affair she showed up on time 12% of the time, 8% of the time she was within an hour, and 13% of the time she was within two hours. When she wasn’t within two hours, 7% of the time she actually showed, 41% of the time she did not show up but called to let me know she wouldn’t, and 52% of the time she did not show up, did not call, and most of that time (I don’t have stats for this) she would avoid me for a few days.
I’m not trying to demonize her. She was going through a lot herself. My behavior was not helping a thing. On one hand it was obvious that I was completely devoted to her. On the other hand I kept telling her that I couldn’t take it anymore. She said that she might start being more reliable if she wasn’t so worried about making me angry. I said I might stop getting angry if she’d stop standing me up.
So why did we both stick around? Because we loved each other. To this day I believe we did.
Flash forward a couple of years and I meet my now-wife Clancy at a Christmas party. It was a long distance relationship, but we made it work. The most amazing thing wasn’t how much I felt as quickly as I did - and I felt a lot, very quickly - but how easy it was. How she would come down on weekends when she said she would and she was able. How I wasn’t mad at all when she had to cancel. How problems were brought up and remediated quickly.
That’s not to say we never had disagreements. We still do. It’s also not to say we’ve always been perfect to one another. We haven’t. There were a couple times when we almost parted ways. The issues we dealt with were sometimes very difficult, but the relationship itself never has been.
What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that relationships are not just about whether you love someone or how much you do. It’s about how you love that person. It’s about what that love motivates you to do. It’s about who it motivates you to be.
Within weeks of meeting Clancy, I realized that she made me want to be perfect. Or at the least as good a man as I could possibly be. From the moment I realized that to the day of our wedding day was a long, winding technicality.
FalStaff’s new COO hasn’t taken up work residence yet, but his ideas are already being seen on every entrance to the building.
I was actually taken aback by the lack of security when I first arrived. My previous two employers were borderline maniacal. But FalStaff is a small company in a town that only appears in small print on maps (if at all). Someone would have to go pretty out of their way to target us for corporate espionage.
But nonetheless they have these lame signs now on every door saying that visitors need to sign in and all convenient doors are now locked. But the biggest joke is that we got an email telling us to “alert” them to any suspicious activity or any people walking around that shouldn’t be.
Given the high turnover rate, someone could probably pretend to work here for weeks before anyone had any idea that they weren’t actually hired. I see a new face at least once a week. The staff of this company has grown by about 5% a month even discounting turnover.
Not that I care.
I just shudder to think what his Internet policies are going to be. Willard is going to see if we can start getting IM privileges. I think we’ll be lucky to still have email privies.
When Greyskull Industries did their presentation on their pyramid scheme, I thought I might send out a joke email assuring them that I am not at all interested in (a) buying scented soap on a monthly basis or (b) pursuing a business opportunity that is built on convincing others to do the same.
I thought that instead of doing that I would remain gainfully employed by not alienating the company that let those pricks in.
One week and fifteen solicitations later, I wish I would have just sent out the email.
Now that Simon has moved to QA and I have not, the cubicle by the window is now open. My boss Willard set up a competition which we would get ten minutes to explain in 1000 words or less why we are deserving of the cubicle. Honest to gawd, the following was my submission (only the names changed):
Willard,
Once upon a time, I saw a sign on the street. It said, “Office furniture and ‘cubicles’ for sale. I couldn’t help but notice that they put the word “cubicle” in quotation marks and I asked myself why they did so. Has the word ‘cubicle’ not really not entered our collective consciousness to the degree that we still need to put quotation marks around it? Is there a reason that we should doubt the terminology involved? Is this a euphemism for darker things? But what could “cubicle” be a euphemism for? The dark hole in which one spends his days? And yet I can’t help but feel that a cubicle is a cubicle is a cubicle. Not that they’re all the same mind you – I relate all of this to you in a campaign in order to achieve the High Cubicle By The Window after all – but a cubicle is generally defined as three or four walls in a desk. I’m not sure why it’s called a cubicle when it’s actually square, unless you count the third dimension, but if you’re counting height off the ground then my head is actually above the cubicle and therefore either I extend slightly beyond the size of my “cube” or I am hitting my head without realizing it.
But yet the term is strange. Am I to doubt the cubicleness of the place we work? If it is in fact a cube, aren’t height, width, and physical height supposed to be the same? I don’t have time to get out a tape measure for ours, but it might be 4x4x4’ and thus fit the definition completely. And yet other cubicles in this office do not share all three dimensions of the same size. Is there such a thing as rectangubal? I knew I should have paid more attention in geometry class instead of passing notes with my new-fangled (at the time) graphing calculator.
But by virtue of the fact that I put so much thought into things involving cubicles, and by virtue of the fact that I want it, and by virtue of the fact that Marcel is the only other full-time employee with more experience and he has conceded to my desire for the cube, and by virtue of the fact that Edgar thinks I should have it, and by virtue of the fact that I want it, and by virtue of the fact that I need the leg room (let us forget for a moment that the leg room is the same), I should get it.
Clancy and I live in a little basement apartment in a bedroom community just outside of town. The rent is fantastic and our landlords are great. The only problem is that the washer/dryer is located in the basement so whenever it has to be done, they come down.
It also means, as it did this weekend, when I’m revving up to do laundry, the claim can be staked by someone else. In this case it was the Cranstons’ youngest daughter, Becki.
Becki is a pleasant enough person, though it’s obvious from the get-go that she spends an inordinate amount of time on her appearance. So much so that she has an artificial, plastic-like appearance. She’s going into cosmetology at Beck State. A good choice, most likely.
She is also something of a provocative dresser, which is not as unusual in Mormonland as one might think.
Anyhow, her clothes were sitting in the washer when I got up. I checked from driveway and didn’t see her car, so I decided to go ahead and push them through so that I could get to our stuff.
Having no sisters of my own and having a wife who is not very much interested in girly attire, I’ve never handled girly clothes before.
Now, the word “clothing” is derived from the word cloth, but is used more generally to convey anything that we wear in order to conceal and/or to keep warm. Her wardrobe fails at both of these tasks.
There comes a point in the size of underwear that it becomes small enough to become functionally useless. Hers were about half that size. Then there were spaghetti tops and t-shirts that I swear wouldn’t have fit me when I was eight. Becki is thin, but not that thin (though, gauging by the couple of bras that I handled, thinner than she might like in some areas). Part of me wonders how she fits into them. Snugly, I’d guess, and snugly by design.
Last night I had a dream. I was at the hospital looking into that room where all the babies are. My little girl was particularly beautiful. So much so that all the nurses kept telling me how beautiful she was - and not just in a polite kind of way.
The joy of my pretty little girl was replaced by sheer horror at the prospect of her teenage years, looking as pretty as Becki, just as fake, and terrifyingly with a similar wardrobe.
The newhire and member of The Rebellion is a deaf girl named LeeAnn. It was actually she and her job placement specialist (came and helped her settle in) that convinced Rosa to join me out there for her last week with the company.
In any case, LeeAnn set out a company-wide email informing us that this building used to be the Mocum School for the Deaf and Blind before they closed it down and that she always wanted to go to that school and was glad to be working in the same building.
In a flash of brilliance (and amnesia, he forgot that she was deaf), my coworker Geoff decided to send a company-wide response to the effect of: “But if you’re deaf and blind, it probably doesn’t matter where you work!”
Mindy, the office manager living in fear of having to replace another member of the McDepartment, went into a panic. She contacted the IT guy and got the message deleted before LeeAnn got back to her computer.
Meanwhile, nearly every department sent an emissary to Geoff’s desk to let him know that she was deaf and his comment could have come off very offensively. He went from shrugging it off to being worried to being quite annoyed (by the sixth or seventh person to approach him).
I guess you had to be there, but my coworkers and I were laughing our heads off. Not at LeeAnn, to be sure, but at Geoff, his dumb sense of humor, and the mess he found himself in.
Then another coworker - equally unaware of LeeAnn’s impairment - sent another company-wide email making fun of another coworker by equating his mature age with senility (and senility with deafness).
And everything flew into a frenzy again.
By the time this was all finished, the lawyers crafted an Official Response, our entire email system was shut down to prevent further catastrophe.
LeeAnn, meanwhile, did in fact get both emails on her PDA. She shrugged it off, saying that she was used to it.
That’s good for Geoff, good for the Legal Department… but not really a good thing.
There’s an old joke about two men in the woods that are confronted with a gator. When the gator starts charging, one the the gents starts tying his shoes. The other fellow says “You honestly can’t expect to out run a gator, can you?”
To which the first fellow says, “I don’t have to outrun the gator. Just have to outrun you.”
Whatever comes of the promotion opportunity, the good news is that I was a candidate. This is important because Edgar, my neighbor to the right, has been here a whole two days less than I have. While I technically have seniority over Edgar, for appearance sake it would have been better to have all four of us in there in case two of us declined (viewed strongly by management as a possibility, part of the reason they sweetened the pot). The fact that he wasn’t was significant.
I’ve been worried about not making enough progress fast enough. I’ve been worried about being pulled into a meeting or, even worse, let go. Not that these worries have any merit exactly, but once I was paranoid and they really were out to get me, so I am not quick to disregard such thoughts.
But I don’t have to outrun the hand of unemployment. Right now, I just have to outrun Edgar.
Barry of Inn of the Last Home is not too sympathetic to parents that skipped out on a meeting with school and law enforcement officials regarding the truency of their children:
But the point is that when a child has 10 or more unexcused absences, that’s when inquiries need to be made and actions taken. If the child is legitimately ill, then there shouldn’t be a problem getting the absences excused. If the parent or guardian neglected to follow through with explaining the absence, then it’s their own fault and they have nothing to complain about.
The problem I have is that the whole attendance/truancy issue is a crock. If a kid is skipping school then the parents need to be informed, but I’m not sure the parents should have to defend themselves on this one. As long as the work is getting done, it’s a family matter.
To me, the issue comes down to two things:
Money
Control
How much money a school gets from the government is based in part on attendance. Back east, the “official attendance” was taken at 11:00am. The school would honestly nod and wink at you just as long as you were there at that time. When our school made the state championship in basketball or football, they’d even say “Let’s wish our boys/girls luck on the field this weekend. If anyone is going to have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, we strongly suggest that they have it after lunch. That would leave plenty of time to make it to Capitol City in time for the game. Theoretically.”
Okay, so they weren’t quite that obvious about it, but the message came through loud and clear: be here before lunch.
When I was in junior high, I would have these coughing spells. They’d send me to the nurse right up until 11:30… then they’d send me home. Never, ever before.
The second issue, control, is also a big factor. But as far as the school is concerned, the public school system exerts a lot of control over the lives of children. And they want to keep it that way. That’s one of the reasons that they’ve made homeschooling nearly impossible in some areas (Nevada and I think California), why they oppose vouchers, and why we have compulsory attendance and truancy laws to begin with.
I’m not one to argue that there is some conspiracy to brainwash our young. In most cases, it’s lead by good intentions (though money is a factor, too). They honestly believe that they are trained professionals that ought to be given the reigns to educate the next generation. In some ways they are. But the degree of resistence to alternatives is also built around making themselves indispensable.
Theoretically, they should have no problem with kids coming in on test day and taking care of the studying parts on their own. But even outside financial reasons, the more parents do that, the less essential teachers become. Through truancy laws and compulsory attendance, they have both job security and the mandate to do what they were trained to do.
I’m not trying to knock teachers and school administrators. I am a product of the public school system and my future kids will be too. They’re underpaid and underappreciated. And while they are admirable on an individual level, the establishment they collectively embody has its own agenda.
There were three of us offered the promotion, but they told us that all three could take it if we wanted to and that it was not absolutely required that two of us accept.
Simon accepted almost immediately. He’s building a house and needs the extra money. Marcel and I spent the whole day glaring at one another, basically each deciding that “I will be the second if you don’t want to.” So it was an impasse of sorts.
Today Marcel broke the impasse and has decided to go ahead and take the promotion.
So this is the best of every possible world for me.
First, I was offered the chance to go to QA. They honestly didn’t have to extend to me the offer. The other two have been here twice as long as me and they could have made sure that one of them didn’t want it before moving down to me. So I am honored to make that cut. It makes me feel a bit more secure in my job.
Second, with the two slots they wanted to fill now filled, I am not under any pressure to accept. With Marcel deciding to do it, I’m leaning against. But I’ll mull it over for another day or so.
Simon, Marcel, and I all shared four basic concerns:
Hilton Wilde is in charge of the QA department, and none of us are quite sure about him. Since taking over QA he’s made our life a lot more difficult. He’s not a particularly friendly person and our current boss, Willard, is the most friendly person I have ever met.
Right now we are creating things. What do we do? We make reports! There is a sense of accomplishments. All QA does is make sure that docs that are created are correct. It’s like being on the offensive line: the only time you’re noticed is when you screw up.
Theoretically, with some procedural changes, our current job is poised to get a lot easier. Things will get a little easier for QA, but not nearly as much so.
This company has a short memory. Several months ago they cancelled quarterly bonuses in favor of a “performance-based system”… that hasn’t been put in to place yet. That will probably never be put in to place. For good and for ill, this company has a problem following through with its plans.
Then I had a fifth one: Last week I decided that it was time to look for work elsewhere. Ironically, that was because I couldn’t take the position that I was in anymore. Except that I spent most of Monday worried that I might get transferred out to a less desirable position. But the long and short of it is that if I need to miss work for a job interview, I can do it where I’m at. Under Hilton, that might be more difficult.
On the upshot:
More money.
Bigger cubicle.
A step up the ladder.
All roads out of Reports go through QA. If I don’t go to QA, I’ll not be going anywhere else, either (may not be an issue because by the time I were to get promoted out of QA I won’t be living in Deseret anymore).
The raise being offered now may not be offered later. They might bring out the stick instead of the carrot.
As much of a Pain in the Butt as Hilton is, we’ve butted heads with him being active in the defense and advancement of his department. He’s probably a lot better to work under than he is to work against.
So I was offered a promotion today at work. Thoughts on that to come, but I stumbled on some thoughts while cogitating the possible promotion.
One of the least pleasent aspects of my current position is the cubicle. It’s 4x2′ and chairs are inevitably knocked any time someone needs to pass you. It’s so bad that OSHA actually had to get involved at one point (a post for another time). For a job that deals with generating paperwork, it’s counterproductive.
The cubes at the position I would be moving to, on the other hand, are pretty spacious. Unnecessarily spacious, actually. I’d have room for all of my paperwork and as many pet rocks as I desire. Maybe even a pet cow. And my mouth salivates at the prospect.
I’ve been talking a lot to the other two candidates about the pros and cons of the transfer. We also talked about medicine, diet, and computer games. We talk a lot at work. What we’re doing doesn’t require our whole concentration and… we’re all packed so close together.
It reminds me a little of our old apartment complex. When my wife Clancy and I first moved out west, we stayed in this little spithole of an apartment. The rent was unbelievably cheap, but we were extraordinarily cramped and our neighbors a bunch of vagabonds and druggies.
But because we were so packed in, we got to know all of our neighbors despite an extremely high turnover rate. the lack of space inside encouraged us to spend a lot of time outside. The lack of space outside meant that we were spending that outside time together. I knew more neighbors from that apartment complex than I had known from any prior. I got to know people I never would have thought to talk to otherwise.
Being tightwads, we figured that we would be able to take it as it came, but we weren’t. Now we live in a basement apartment in the sleepy suburbs to our sleepy bedroom town. We’ve got a lot of room and unlike at the aforementioned complex, we feel safe there. At the same time, we both lament that we haven’t made any friends out here.
In the past I’ve lamented not making friends at work. While I don’t know if I’d call my current coworkers “friends,” it’s close enough. We talk on a daily basis. I know them all pretty well and they know me pretty well. It’s enough that my introverted soul is usually happy to find the quiet solace of home once I get there.
But I move, everything changes. I’m sure I’ll be on friendly enough terms with my new coworkers. But I won’t have as much reason to talk to them. In fact, the only reason I’ll have to talk to a lot of people (including the people I currently work with) is to tell them that they’ve done something wrong. But a lot of it is just that we won’t be sardines in a can.
I like my space, both literal and figurative. One of the many ways that my wife and I get along is that we’re both that way. But one of the reasons that we’re so isolated, despite religious differences and her demanding job, is because we don’t go out and seek people. As miserable as our current cubes are at work - and as rough as the old apartment was - it forced us not to isolate ourselves.
Even though we’re both particularly introverted, even our extroverted society is affected. Many people start off in apartments and get houses. One of the reasons they get houses is because it gives them (and their kids) more space, both inside and outside. The larger the house, the larger the yard, the better. I guess the person that dies living in a house furthest from his nearest neighbor wins.
The same is true at work. Only pitiful underlings get the kind of cubes that we deal with. Work hard enough and you get a bigger cube, and less contact. Work harder still and you get an office with a door that you can close to the outside world.
Willard: A lot of the interviewees are talking about when they’re going to graduate.
Marcel: Why?
Willard: I think that’s there way of telling us that they want a promotion of they’re going to try to get a job elsewhere. I mean who wants to work in Reports with a CIS degree and a minor in business.
Me: Hey wait a minute…
Willard: What?
Me:I have a degree in CIS and a minor in business.
