Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Lazy Blogger!

C&P from email is kinda cheating, isn’t it? Ah well, it’s been a long day. 

From: a family friend
Subject: The Idiot Chimp Strikes Again

Update: It would appear this is a hoax.  I admit I was fooled!  That it’s so totally plausible is hardly comforting, however… (Thanks, Jess!)

NEWSWEEK reports that President Bush, appearing before a right-to-life rally in Tampa, Florida on June 17, stated: “We must always remember that all human beings begin life as a feces. A Feces is a living being in the eyes of God, who has endowed that feces with all of the rights and God-given blessings of any other human being.” The audience listened in disbelief as the President repeated his error at least a dozen times, before realizing that he had used the word ‘feces’ when he meant to say “fetus.”

Can you friggin’ believe this jackoff???

From: OB
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2004 8:22 AM
To: [my peeps]
Subject: More political humor

Funny, yet frightening! Dubya’s living proof that in America even a moron can rise to great heights (provided said moron is propped up by powerful family and friends). I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a President who can beat me in a spelling bee… or who knows the difference between a developing human and a pile of crap! No wonder the rest of the world is busy laughing at us or hating our guts; our public “face” is that of a slack-jawed lackwit who can’t speak English despite being American-born.

This is totally hilarious:

He’s a liberal wiener. He’s a right-wing nut job. See John Kerry and George Bush square off and trade insults in this can’t-miss campaign spoof of “This Land is Your Land.”

Enjoy!

P.S. Here’s hoping Jesse Ventura runs in 2008… at least “The Body” has a functioning BRAIN!

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Which America-Hating Minority Are You?

I am a Hippy

Which America Hating Minority Are You?

Take More Robert & Tim Quizzes
Watch Robert & Tim Cartoons

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

“You should write a book!”

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that sentence whenever I’ve talked about some small part of my family’s decidedly checkered past, I’d probably have nearly enough money to live off of while I holed up and did the deed. For 30 years or more I’ve been countering with, “Not until the Matriarch goes to the Great Beyond...” But hell, I might just start a first draft; and with any luck at all I can get a few nuggets of truth, or at least a first-hand perspective of how things were in the early 20th century… in my hometown, in the world, in society.  And if I can’t get the REAL story about some of the more interesting turns of events in the family history, then I’ll just make them up, dammit!  Wonder how that’ll go over?  Heh!

Y’know, I’ve spent a good portion of my life crafting personae for one reason or another, and it may be time for one of them to get her fifteen minutes of fame.  Hell, I’ll even give up the fame if I can still have the fortune.  I’ve made other people lots of money for many years now… why shouldn’t I finally have a chance at the wealth myself?

This entry inspired by Les, who’s ruminating on some of the same issues I have been for quite a while now.

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Damn, I need a vacation

I spent a couple days in the perfect place for one, but it’s hard to “relax” when your heart’s just not in it… or more accurately, when your brain simply refuses to disengage from those thoughts that weigh heavily, because they’re “unresolved issues.” Coming from as large a family as I do, issues are legion; the usual internal ones that are directly related to me and my daily life, and those that are created for me simply by being issues for people I love.

Nearly every problem in my family could be resolved with nothing more complicated than the simple, unvarnished truth.  The whole fucking clan needs to take a tab of E (the original version, used in therapy) and get gabbing.  The past is what it is, everyone did what they had to do to survive… and not a friggin’ one of us gets through life without making foolish decisions or mistakes.  Who CARES?  I’ve done many things in my life I’m not proud of, but I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to perpetuate a web of lies to cover them up.  Jesus, we’re all a product of whatever choices we made in life up until this moment.  If my fuckups can serve as a lesson that’ll keep anyone else (most especially loved ones) from making the same mistakes and save someone a heartache, I’ll be the first to point out the ugly consequences of some of my choices.  I’ll take the chance that someone might be shocked or offended; it’s infinitely preferable to being thought a liar… or worse, being seen as some sort of paragon of virtue while aggressively guarding as secrets the less stellar moments of my life.  Too much pressure.

Life up ‘til now created Obnoxious Bitch, and the lack of truth and communication in my family is probably the largest influence.  Repression there makes expression here a must.  Or my fucking head will explode.

Monday, July 05, 2004

“There will be consequences…”

Not sure exactly what they’ll be, but I’ll face them as the adult I am, since they’re the fruits of my fuck-up.

And boy, I fucked up HARD.  Not only did I make a ridiculously stupid mistake, but I violated a policy and the mistake took down our biggest site for the better part of a night and day.  For lack of a slash (you’d think I’d have learned that lesson by now).

A combination of things contributed to my fuck-up: Way too much work to do, wanting to finish something that had been requested almost a month earlier, copying and pasting code someone else wrote without going over it with a fine tooth comb, and the final, fatal mistake was staging the updated file without making sure it worked… on a Friday at 5PM no less, which is a violation of our policy.  Worse yet, the changes I made weren’t even critical to the site; total low-priority updates to SEO text.  I’m pretty sure I looked at the page after staging the changes, but even if I did, there’s a good chance the file I looked at was still a working, but CACHED, version.  In truth, there’s no excuse for my violating the no-staging-after-2-on-Fridays policy, other than that I stupidly took for granted that these three lines of code (a simple NOSCRIPT entry that feeds the SE spiders) were likely to be just as valid as the other code I’d just put on 10 other pages.  Except this code wasn’t right; the tag wasn’t closed and it caused nothing but a blank page to be served.  Shoot me now.

So my manager called me in on Friday to tell me about the situation, asked me how it happened and whether or not there was anything else I had to say that might somehow exonerate me or place blame somewhere other than on me.  However, since I’m the friggin’ moron who staged the file, I had nothing to say for myself other than, “I screwed the pooch.  It’s totally my fault, I’m sorry and I’ll take my lumps.” Since facing a firing squad isn’t an option, and I don’t think the infraction is so bad that I’ll lose my job, whatever punishment awaits me can’t be anything so bad I won’t be able to live through it, learn from my mistake and move on.

However, between my fucking up and being told I fucked up, we had a company Town Hall meeting; and I stood up and voiced my concerns about there having been so many new hires in the departments that bring work IN, while there were none in those that put work OUT.  Several people from the rank-and-file came by after the meeting and lauded me for having the guts to stand up and say something that desperately needed to be said.  However, I don’t think the higher-ups appreciated either the comments I made, the question I posed or the way any of it came out.  I probably should just have sat in my seat and cried (which was the only other option - and unacceptable - and therefore the reason I chose to speak out instead).  I can only hope that the consequences for my grievous error in judgment in staging a broken file aren’t ratcheted up as result of my voicing my opinion in a public forum.  Especially a forum that’s mostly meant as a pep rally, despite management’s encouragement to send in suggestions or bring up issues that need addressing.  They ask for it, but they really don’t want to hear it.  Dem’s da breaks in Corporate America.

Morale is at an all-time low, and no matter how hard I try to just do as much work as I can and not let getting behind upset me, the fact is that it DOES.  It doesn’t matter that there’s more work to be done than one person can possibly do; if that work has been tasked to me, I do my damnedest to do it right and do it quickly, and hopefully at the end of each day there’s nothing left undone.  When that’s not the case, I take it as a personal failure and beat myself up over not being up to the challenge.  Due to a large project that required reassigning two people from my group (of THREE) that usually help out, my workload has increased significantly and is now to the point that I simply cannot finish everything unless I stay late every night - which I’m not willing to do.  A night or two here and there is one thing, but I refuse to fall into the mindset that I live to work.  I don’t.  I work to LIVE, and as much as I’d like to leave every night with a cleared plate, I’m not going to sacrifice time with my family to achieve that goal.  Unfortunately, my resolve to have a life outside work doesn’t overcome my sense of failure when I don’t reach the unrealistic goals I’ve set for myself.

The flogging will continue until morale improves!