Max, the talking dog

At 1:30 this morning, my dog began talking to me.
Max hasn’t talked to me before, but as I trudged from the bedroom carrying my pillow into the living room, he looked at me in disgust and said “Really? You are the master of this house, but you get kicked out of bed by the smallest one in the house? I’ve lost all respect for you.”

Molly is only 5 months old, and is still nursing. When she wakes up at night, my sweetheart will often bring Molly to bed with her, so that she can still get some sleep too. But Molly likes to kick daddy when he is in ‘her spot’, so I go sleep on the couch.

This happens a couple of times a week, and it really isn’t a big deal, but apparently Max thinks it’s pathetic.

Eleven Wonderful Years

I probably should have written this a year ago. After all, Ten seems to be a more significant number than eleven. Maybe it’s because I am a programmer, and as such I start all lists with zero instead of one. Maybe it’s because this marriage is so awesome that it “Goes all the way to eleven”. Whatever the reason, I find myself reflecting on the fact that as of tomorrow I have been married to my best friend for eleven years.

It all started almost twelve years ago, when she became a roommate of another of my best friends, DeNiece. I was terminally single, having three strikes against me: I was [1] a divorced father [2] living in Provo [3] trying to hide from who I had become inside bottles and empty cigarette boxes. I dated a lot, but most often to people who were more dysfunctional and carried more emotional baggage than myself (and that was saying a lot).

DeNiece was accustomed to me being interested romantically with her roommates over the years, even though I had not succeeded in getting a single one of them to date me. I think she even found it amusing at times. Then Amy moved in with DeNiece.

I found Amy to be very cute, & I loved talking to her. We began to hang out closer and closer in our group of mutual friends. DeNiece was not pleased with this. She was worried about Amy, worried that she would end up just one more name on my long list of romantic failures. More than a few times, she counseled me to be careful, and to not hurt Amy.

I can’t say what Amy saw in me at that time. I was definitely a project. We kept this up for a few weeks, until I was leaving on a long trip. At the time I was leaving, I was happy to think that I was for the first time in years coming back to… something. Maybe even a relationship.

While I was gone, a rival struck. Another guy who Amy had known for a long time took advantage of my absence, & by the time I returned, they were an item. I didn’t take it well, & returned to that prison of my own making. A couple of months later, Amy & the other guy ended their brief relationship, and she was again available. Some of the flirting started again, but she was hesitant. It wasn’t hard to understand why. Here she was, a BYU graduate working in an actual career and going places, while I was stuck in at a dead-end in my job, living in an apartment with roommates I hated, hiding from my problems behind a haze of chemical refreshments.

She deserved better. Much better.

I had mostly stopped drinking, and decided to remove the “mostly” and make that decision final. My last drink was in October of 1997. I also stopped smoking, with my last cigarette in November 1997. I started to go to church with friends. I needed to be a better man if I wanted a shot at her. In the meantime, the flirting with Amy continued, but there was another guy trying to make his move. I didn’t put up much resistance, especially after hearing Amy tell DeNiece around the start of December 1997 “I am SO done with guys! I don’t even want to think about dating someone for A LONG TIME!”

I still needed to be a better man.

In the week leading up to Christmas, Amy asked me out on a date. I was shocked! I told her “I thought you were done with guys for a long time!” She said “I was. Now I’m just tired of waiting for you to ask me out!”

As they say, “the rest is history”. We overcame a number of challenges & got married almost a year later, & sealed together a year and a half after that. Amy helped me try to be a good influence on my son, and we have added 4 wonderful kids to our family. We have a house, a dog, and what I consider to be a wonderful (if hectic) life. She has stuck with me through challenging career changes. She puts up with the stupid things I do, with the dorky jokes I make, with the endless projects I start and not finish. She puts up with my multiple time consuming jobs, church callings & coaching duties, which make her feel like a single parent at times.

I still think she deserves a better man, so each day I try just a little more to be the man she deserves.

I hate you Comcast!

As a very opinionated person, I dislike a lot of things. The key word there is dislike. I hate relatively few things. My one reader will note that I have already declared my public hatred of spiders in this very blog. Other things I hate include: people who drive slower than traffic in the left lane on the freeway, HSBC, telemarketers cold calling at dinnertime, men who don't lift the lid before peeing all over the seat, my neighbor's dogs, door-to-door salesmen who ignore my 'no soliciting' sign and mosquitoes.

Comcast was a long time resident on my hate list because of the horrible, rotten & abominable service we got from them while we were customers and because of "The Mountian" - the abortion of a sports network created by the Mountain West Conference and Comcast for the sole purpose of getting all BYU & Utah football & basketball fans to drop their satellite dishes and come running back to the cold, cold embrace of cable. Those of us who refused found our ability to watch the games we love held hostage to evil corporate overlords, and many of us just didn't watch football for two years.

Comcast came off the list last year more out of apathy than any rational decision. They came to an agreement with DirecTV, and I could once again watch my beloved Cougar Football.

Aaaaannnnd they're back.

Comcast also owns a channel called "Versus". Aside from broadcasting hockey, hunting shows & infomercials, they have contracts to broadcast some pretty major college football games. Including an upcoming game between BYU and Florida State.
Comcast has once again gotten into a disagreement with DirecTV over just how much end customers should be gouged for the privilege of watching shows about Archery Deer Hunting at 3 in the morning, with the predictable result being Versus is no longer available on DirecTV.

Just like that, I am again looking at not being able to see what will probably be the best game of the season, all because of the corporate greed mongers at Comcast. And it is almost worse that eventually Comcast will concede & charge a reasonable price, and Versus will be back, albeit far too late for me to enjoy my game.



I hate you, Comcast!

Carp Golf & the Rubber Raft

The summer between my junior and senior years of high school was packed with adventure. Although we were all working, my friends & I spent countless days doing things that were on the far side of reckless. Among things for which the statute of limitations have run out are playing golf from a moving vehicle (shattering a car window in the process), sneaking into golf courses to collect golf balls we could then lose in the daytime, 4 wheeling on the beaches of Utah Lake whilst avoiding the park rangers, riding off road vehicles all over southwest Provo (mostly my unlicensed motorcycle), and many incidents involving my million candlepower spotlight and people in remote parking lots engaged in various activities while in states of undress. As you may have noticed, many of our activities involved golf. Josh had inherited a set of golf clubs from his dad, and we incorporated them into our adventures wherever possible.
One of those activities was a creation called "Carp Golf".*(See note below about animal rights)
While many of our peers went "gigging carp", we wanted something more challenging. So we would take golf irons out into the shallows of the lake & hunt the carp. It was very challenging, because you often had to run to catch the carp, then swing hard enough to hit them.
We also played golf around the neighborhood, substituting a tennis ball for the golf balls. Nothing like calling the "hole" to be a birdhouse directly over a car parked in the driveway.
These memories were brought back into focus for me because my Dad recently came across an old rubber raft we used extensively that summer. He had purchased it used from the raft rental place near Flaming Gorge, which rents rafts to float the Green River just below the dam. We put that raft in more bodies of water than I can count. Dad had offered to let us take it for our weekend getaway at Yuba Lake. Surprisingly, it is still in really good shape. We inflated it, and my sons spent hours rowing that thing around.







Hopefully my sons can have some similar memories, although maybe they should try something other than carp golf.

*Animal Rights Concerns: Now before I get a bunch of people upset about the profligate and senseless violence towards helpless creatures, I need to point out something about Carp. Carp are a non-native species of fish introduced illegally to Utah Lake many decades ago. These fish have crowded out the natural species of fish, threatening one in particular to near extinction. They also destroy the natural habitat for many wildlife and plant species by constantly churning the bottom of the lake, creating the murky conditions present today. The problem is so bad that the federal government has contracted with commercial fishermen to remove over 1 million pounds of carp each year for the next 7 years from the lake. Since there was no viable commercial use for these fish, they will be trucked off to the desert and buried. That being said, do I feel a little bad about the amount of violence involved in this 'sport'? Yes. Do I have any long standing regret about this past activity? No. At the time of these activities, "Carp Gigging" was an accepted sport which involved stabbing carp with a long spear.

How Source Control Drove Me Insane

I'll be right up front about it, this is a geek post. I'll try to explain in regular english as much as possible, but some things you just have to have a deep understanding of computers to appreciate.

For the last two and a half weeks, I have been in the middle of a conflict taking place on my work laptop between development tools and their corresponding features which allow access to the central repository for all of the code we develop. This central repository is called a 'source control' system and allows large projects to keep track of who is working on what, and allegedly ensures that what one developer writes does not get deleted or otherwise broken by another developer.
There are many source control tools out there, but prior to working for GE, I had only used CVS and Subversion. GE only uses one source control tool, and it is called ClearCase. ClearCase is a tool from a company named Rational, which was purchased by IBM not too long ago. The old saying goes "no one was ever fired for buying IBM", and so the thinking goes at GE.

My problem has its roots in my abilites to develop in multiple languages. I can comfortably write code in Java and C#. Java is the open-source darling which is very popular right now. Anyone can download freely available tools, write code in Java, and (also allegedly) run that code on any operating system which supports Java, which at this point includes the major operating systems (Windows, Mac, and Linux). C# is a 'Java-like' language from Microsoft, with excellent (albeit expensive) tools to develop with, and a deeper native relationship with Microsoft Windows.
There are many advantages and disadvantages to both languages, far too many to go into a debate in this post.

My employer, GE Healthcare, uses both in the project which I am working on. On the surface, this makes people such as myself who can write comfortably in either language even more valuable. (Although people can make the switch between them pretty easily - I compare it to learning local slang and accents. The underlying principals are very similar.) However, I have had to set up development environments for both on my work laptop. The real problem is when both of those environments attempt to utilize the source control system, ClearCase. There are some deep 'under-the-hood' conflicts between them which have made me completely unable to develop and compile Java code for the last couple of weeks. I have tried uninstalling & reinstalling everything, using different tools for Java, changing the way my account accesses ClearCase, nothing works. I have been absolutely useless for the last two and a half weeks.

Today I got to my wit's end. I am currenly waiting for my laptop to be returned after having it completely re-imaged. (That means that they erase everything and return it to a state as if it had just been delivered to me) This will cause me to be very busy reinstalling all of my necessary applications for the next couple of days, but it's better than the alternatives of going up to the roof and throwing my laptop as far as I can and/or looking for a new job.

Infrequent posting problem

I realized today that I haven't posted anything of consequence in quite a while. This isn't because I haven't been writing. On the contrary, I have been writing quite a bit. However, I had started writing stories about adventures I had with my best friends as teenagers. That path led me to the dilemma of whether or not to publish stories that may end up being seen as implicit permission for my own sons and the children of my friends to imitate, replicate, or impersonate the remarkable, often dangerous and just as often illegal adventures I had as a teen-age idiot.

As such, I sadly inform my one reader that I have decided not to post stories such as "Carp Golf", "4 Wheeling and Pop-Tarts", "Night-ops Golf", and "Spotlighting". Maybe when my kids have gotten past the 'immortal' stage of adolescence I can share those often humorous stories with a larger audience.

Tazed and Confused

The whole Tazer controversy has been building for some time, and came to a head this week when the son of a prominent newsman died after being Tazed. I find myself being asked by many who know me what I think of the situation.

I think it is as much a travesty as a tragedy.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the Tazer is an indispensable tool to police officers which has saved many more lives than it has taken. However, some officers have begun to reach for it as the first option in their arsenal.

I'm sure there will be officers out there critical of me for speaking out & crossing the blue line, but I've never been a big fan of the blue line anyway. Incidents like these are a black eye for anyone with a badge, and an ever larger number of people are taking notice at just how often they take place.

I may be a bit skewed in my assessment of this last event because I have received vastly greater amounts of training on dealing with mental illness, both in and out of a law enforcement perspective, than most officers will ever get. The responding officers to the above referenced incident likely have never dealt with someone truly mentally ill, and were far out of their depth.

In my opinion, the problem goes back to police training, or in some cases a lack thereof.
When I went through the academies, both corrections and police, there was a great deal of emphasis placed on the Force Continuum, which dictates the use of force. I learned the "one plus" theory: in a given situation, you use up to the level of force one step higher than the subject is using. In order to do that, you have to learn the Force Continuum:

• Verbal Action
• Physical Action
• Less than Lethal Weapons:
• Pepper Spray
• Tazer
• Baton/Asp
• Lethal Weapons/Deadly Force

So you can see, that if someone is verbally refusing to comply with lawful commands, under the "one plus" theory you can use physical action (i,e; arrest control tactics) to gain compliance. If the person is physically resisting, you may utilize the Less than Lethal Weapons. It does not say you must use them, and you are supposed to consider the ramifications prior to the use of such weapons. Different agencies have different priorities for the order in which those weapons can be used, but regardless of the priority, you must make a decision to use a weapon that has been determined to possibly cause serious injury and/or death. I'm not advocating that officers sit around and try all day to talk someone into compliance. But I am advocating that officers use their weapons out of real need instead of convenience.

From a cop's perspective, he (or she) has his own priority tree to follow:

1. I (and all the members of my team) go home uninjured at the end of this shift.
2. Anyone else's safety.
3. Anyone else's property.

So for a lot of cops, the easy thing to do is yank the Tazer and go to work when there is the slightest chance they might get their uniform dirty. It gains compliance faster and with much less risk of injury to the officer (and believe it or not the subject) than any other method. It also offends me that so many incidents take place with little to no attempt to solve the situation without someone taking a ride on the Tazer Rodeo.

In the above referenced situation, obviously the rural cops had little to no experience in dealing with someone having a mental health incident. A man running and screaming butt naked down the highway is probably more than a little disconcerting for an officer who doesn't see something like that often. In addition, the Tazer is completely safe (although painful) on the overwhelming majority of healthy people. Nearly every instance of someone dying after being Tazed involves a prior health condition on the part of the arrested. However, if those officers had had better training in dealing with a person in mental crisis, or if they had had better verbal skills, a young family would probably not be without a father and husband today.

I also wonder if it shouldn't be a requirement for all new officers to work for 6 months in a correctional or mental health facility. I know from personal experience from working on the Maximum Security Forensics Unit of the Utah State Hospital that having to go in and talk down a 6'4" 300 pound naked man who thinks he is Jesus without any weapons does wonders for both your verbal communication skills and your physical control skills. In those situations, you gain a respect for the ability to verbally gain compliance in the vast majority of incidents, and the confidence in your physical abilities to successfully take care of the situation physically without any weapons in the few times verbal skills don't work.

The Tazer is a fantastic tool available in situations where the other alternative without it would be the likely use of deadly force. There are a large number of people alive today thanks to the fact that officers who cannot gain control of the situation with lesser uses of force have an option short of pulling their gun and ending a life. I for one hope that officers learn, and learn soon, that they should use those other skills and tools before falling back on the Tazer, before legislative action takes that otherwise life-saving tool away from them.

Beefcake

Despite the title of this post, it is not about muscular men without shirts.
It is in fact about a real Beef Cake.
One was presented to me by friends at a previous job on my last day there.
It was actually made of meatloaf, with mashed potatos colored for the 'frosting'.
It was quite delicious.
I've told this story lots of time, but people have a hard time believing it, so here is photographic proof:





I decided to take out some of my pent up frustrations on the cake:








One of the people responsible was Kyle (on the right):





The person primarily responsible, Brandon (on the left):





One of the other responsible parties, Sarah (along with a real cake):

Amusing things at work

I had two things happen last night that were mildly amusing.

  First, when I was working up in Alpine, a very affluent community in north Utah County, I had parked my truck across the street from a house I needed to visit. Usually, I leave the truck running on stops because I am only out of the truck for 2-3 minutes, and I feel like the wear on the starting motor caused by using it 30+ times an evening is much worse than just idling for a few minutes.

  As I was approaching the door of the house, two guys were walking down the street on the other side, next to my truck. One of them called out to me "Hey! I'm going to steal your truck because you left it running! That makes it legal, right?" I responded "If you want to take your chances, go ahead!" (I left off the other part that went through my mind: "If you think you can outrun a bullet...") He called back "You shouldn't trust a guy walking down the street with a gallon of liquor!" while holding up his gallon jug of what looked like water.

  I turned around to face them so they could see my uniform and replied "You shouldn't ever threaten to steal a cop's truck!" I could see both of them turn pale from all the way across the street, and they hurried off without another word.


  The second thing was right at the end of the night, on my last stop.
I pulled up to a house, and again I found myself parking across the street from the house I needed to visit. I noticed some people in the house I had just parked in front of glancing out the window as I got out. Next thing I know there are people in EVERY window watching me. To put it delicately, they appeared to be afraid I was with the border patrol. I had to spend a few minutes across the street talking to the person I had come to reach, and the whole time, up to 10 people would come out on the porch, go out & watch over the fence from the back yard, or peek out between blinds in the windows. They were very afraid.
As I got back in my truck to leave, I briefly considered yelling out "INS! INS!", but even I'm not that big of a jackass.

April Snow

Here in Utah, we often get small amounts of snow in April. Usually just enough to stick to the lawns, and it melts within hours.
Here is what I woke up to this morning:

From 4-16-09 Snowstorm

From 4-16-09 Snowstorm

Happy Spring Break!

I'm rethinking my whole stance on guns

I've always been someone who has a pretty conservative stance on guns and gun rights.
I'm a firm believer in the second amendment, and in the view that additional gun laws are for the most part not needed for two reasons: 1 - if existing laws were enforced, most current problems with guns in society would be solved and 2 - restrictive gun laws only affect law abiding people. By definition, criminal elements are already violating laws, so telling the guy who is already committing a robbery or murder that he is also breaking the law by carrying a gun will have no effect whatsoever. I mean, no one is going to go "Let's see. I'm going to rob Goliath National Bank today, but oh wait! That new gun law makes it illegal for me to take my gun. I'll just take the knife instead. Whew! Glad I remembered that!"

However, I also find myself astounded by some aspects of Utah's Concealed Firearms permit.

First, I absolutely disagree with the practice of issuing permits to non-residents that never set foot in the state. Utah's permit is more widely recognized than any other state permit, so it has become the de facto 'national' permit since the average citizen cannot get a federal permit.
However, the current law allows an out of state instructor to sign off on the certification, allowing people who have never been to Utah and have no plans to come to Utah to have a permit issued by the State of Utah. This uses up resources paid for by the taxpayers of Utah, and allows some less than scrupulous instructors to get away with rubber stamping applications instead of ensuring that the applicants have a thorough understanding of Utah law regarding firearms & the ability to handle weapons properly.

Secondly, I would like to see Utah set some standardized curriculum and weapons qualification criteria. Under the current law, the instruction an applicant receives is entirely dictated by the instructor, and the quality of the education varies greatly.

The need for these changes is strongly illustrated by not just one, but two recent incidents where a concealed firearms permit holder accidentally discharged a firearm in a restaurant here in Utah.

In the first incident, the permit holder was using the restroom at a Carl's Jr. when his pistol slipped out of the holster and discharged when it hit the floor. The round blew up the toilet he was sitting on, cutting him, but other than that there were no casualties. Except the toilet itself, which Carl's Jr held a funeral for a few days later.
If this idiot had been carrying a proper weapon, this wouldn't have happened. I've been telling anyone who will listen for at least a month that if it had been a SIG or Glock, the accidental discharge couldn't have happened. Those guns have a firing pin intercept that will not allow the firing pin to contact the round unless the trigger is actually moved, even if the gun is dropped.

Now, just today, a new idiot was at the Olive Garden in Provo eating lunch when he reached down to 'adjust something' on his gun, and it discharged. In this case, the gun in question was actually a SIG, and appears to be a SIG P228. I have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a SIG P228, and there is NO WAY that it could have discharged without the trigger being pulled. Period. This guy was just a freaking idiot.

I am finding myself in favor of enhanced training for people who desire the privilege of carrying a firearm concealed in public. The current standards are too low.

My suggestions:
- Standardized training curricula and qualification. Instructors should be teaching from a state produced manual, and should extensively cover safety procedures, safe behaviors, and proficiency tests.
- Expanded curricula. Currently, instructors are required to give four hours of instruction. It doesn't say what needs to be instructed. I think that the minimum should follow along the lines of the Hunter Safety program which if I remember correctly runs closer to 16 hours of classroom instruction. That should be the bare minimum. It should not be more difficult to get a big game hunting license than a concealed firearms permit. (It is currently much more difficult to get a big game hunting license than a concealed firearms permit)
- In State Certification. I believe that if someone wants to take an approved course out of state, fine. But I think that applicants should be required to travel to Utah to take both written and practical tests.
- Enhanced fees for out of state applicants. The state currently subsidizes these permits, meaning that the fees charged don't cover all the costs associated with the program. I feel that this is okay for residents who are paying taxes, but I think that out of state applicants should be charged fees representative of the actual costs to the state. We already do this with hunting & fishing licenses, school tuition, and other benefits. This is a no brainer.

These suggestions may not have prevented the accidental discharges which happened in the last two months, but I do believe that it would pare down the numbers of people who get a permit and just don't take the responsibilities of carrying a loaded gun seriously. That can do nothing but help keep these wing-nuts from doing stupid things - or at the very least make them hear the safety messages a few more times.

Who would have thought that Conservative Ted would have such liberal ideas!

Two remotes are better than one

From what I understand, one major flashpoint in some marriages is the television remote control.
My wife and I have never really had any fights over it, but I can imagine some people getting worked up over it. Since we almost exclusively watch things we have recorded on our TiVo, our only conflict with it occurs when the person who has the remote in their hand when a commercial break forgets to fast forward in a timely manner.

We inadvertently found a solution to this problem.

We've had our TiVo for almost 4 years, and have had the same remote all this time.
Lately, it has developed a problem where when you press the power button, it sends the command twice; if you wanted to turn the TV on, it will do so, then immediately turn it back off. If you want to turn the TV off, the inverse happens.

I ordered a new remote from TiVo, but some of the buttons have just a bit different functionality, and so the old remote ended up laying around instead of being tossed in the garbage bin.

And then it happened - one night, while watching a show, Amy had the new remote in her hand, and had forgotten to start fast forwarding the commercials. I grabbed the old remote off our end table and began to fast forward myself. Amy jumped, realizing that she had the remote in her hand, and yet the TV had begun fast forwarding seemingly on its own. Then she realized I had the old remote, and we have had television watching bliss ever since. (Except when I am watching "How its Made" or "Mythbusters". She hates those shows...)

Inaccessable :(

While I am very happy to have a new job, and I like what I'm doing and the people I work with, I am somewhat less thrilled with one of GE's policies: I can no longer access personal e-mail and chat at work.

My New York JP Morgan colleagues can sympathize, because they are in the same situation, at least with e-mail. GMail is totally blocked, as are the other webmail services.

Since I don't have GE e-mail access yet, it looks like if you want to reach me during the day, you will have to call me. I still check

I hope to have other options available next week.

The New Job

You are now reading the blog of a Test Engineer for GE Healthcare & Intermountain Healthcare.
I accepted a position with GE/IHC today, and tomorrow morning I will be working directly at the new IHC Medical Center in Murray. This is fantastic news, but it has been very stressful for me because I had already accepted a job offer from Sorenson Communications and was scheduled to start work for them on Monday.

So I've just had to make a couple of tough phone calls, to my recruiter at ConsultNet who got me the job with Sorenson (and did a fantastic job of getting me a job quickly), and then to the manager at Sorenson who had hired me. But I couldn't turn down a job offer for 20% more pay than I would be making at Sorenson.

Thus ends Ted's whiney job search saga.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled mindless drivel...

Job updates soon

Since being laid of on January 8th, I feel like I have been working three times as much. I've been working nearly full time trying to find a new job, dealing with 4 different recruiters and having 8 job interviews. This is on top of working nearly full time hours for Utah County, and taking care of Henry during the day so he only goes to daycare part time.
This is all on top of my being newly called as the Ward Clerk in our ward, and having to take care of all the year end stuff for my ward by myself. (I was already the financial clerk, and had a ton of stuff to do - the additional stuff for Membership just about swamped me...)

At any rate, I am still working on things that I can't put out in the public yet, but suffice it to say that I should be employed by someone very soon, and I will probably get a raise out of it.

Good luck to me!

Kids say the darndest things...

I have been spending a lot of time working for the Constable's office lately, and tonight I had something unexpected happen.
While serving a woman an order to appear before the court, her kids were hanging right behind her to see what was happening. They were pre-teens, a boy about 12 and a girl about 10, and they both looked like the kind of kids who are getting in trouble (inasmuch as you can tell that type of thing from a first glance...)

I explained the order to the woman, and really didn't do anything differently than usual. The unexpected came when I had finished, before the woman shut the door.

The girl suddenly called from behind her mother "You're the nicest cop I've ever met!"

After the week I've had, I'll take that.

Anybody need a .NET engineer?

So they finally got around to laying off myself and another engineer at Rastar.
They lost our biggest account, and had to make drastic cuts.

And I couldn't be happier.

That place was sucking the soul right out of me.
I stuck around long enough to get a severance package, which is a lot more than I would have gotten if I had just quit like I nearly did several times within the last month.
For the time being, I'll be working exclusively for the Constable's Office, and looking for another programming job.

So ends the drama...

Pins and Needles doesn't cut it anymore... How about Walking on Eggshells

Well, I'm into Day 3. They didn't lay anybody off yesterday, but they didn't tell anybody else that they were off the chopping block either. I'd think that as soon as they are done with the axe, they'd tell everybody.
My boss was too busy yesterday with finishing and demonstrating a project for a client too do much of anything, so we'll probably see some movement today.

Morale is shot, along with productivity. Even the guys who were told they were safe are preoccupied with this.

What a way to run a railroad.

Pins and Needles - Day 2

Well, I didn't get the axe yesterday. That just means that my agony is prolonged. They've called in some people and told them that they are safe, but most of us are still just wondering.
The people who've gotten the axe so far includes two people from my department, including my boss's boss, the CTO.

I took a Xanax last night, and it helped me feel much better. I was going to take one this morning before I came in, but I forgot when I was rushing out of the house, and now I'm sitting here all jumpy and nervous.

Good Times.

Pins and Needles

Yesterday, my bosses called a 'team meeting' to let us know about upcoming layoffs. We've had a couple of rounds of layoffs at my company in the last few months, but in those rounds the programming department was spared. Apparently that is not the case this time around. So the told us that there would be layoffs from our department, but not how many, nor how soon.

There are only 11 of us, so any layoff is significant. No one feels safe. And now the HR director is in the building, meeting with the division VP.

It is so stressful that I find myself wanting to just gather my things and leave. It wouldn't be all that bad to work full time for the Constable's Office for a while, certainly better than this...

UPDATE: It's now 10 minutes after 5pm, and it seems like they're done for the day. So far, I've heard of 8 people from our division being let go, including one from my department, but I've also heard that they're letting go 24 people in our division, which means that there are 16 more to go. I don't know if I can handle another day like this one.
All this secrecy is bullshit. The rumors and misconceptions that run amok during a time like this have decimated any remaining morale. There's work to be done, deadlines to meet, but no one can concentrate enough to get anything done.
I'm inching closer and closer to just packing my crap and leaving...

A Series of Unfortunate Events

This story is embarrassing enough that I have debated posting it for quite some time now.
However, after the "Fat Guy, Little Bike" post, I've decided that I'll take one for the team in the name of humor.

I've often had a few unfortunate events coincide with each other, creating a 'Bad Day'. A couple of years back, I had enough unfortunate events collide to make it a Very Bad Day. I was home from work with a sinus infection. I felt like someone had put my head in a vise and clamped it there.

Sinus infections seem to be common for my wife and I, and our doctor always prescribes the same thing: a nasal lavage, or as he calls it -'the nose hose'. This involves mixing a bit of baking soda, salt, and some warm water in a cup, and using it with a syringe (without the needle) to rinse out your sinuses. Our doctor recommends doing this while taking a warm shower because the steam & warm water loosens things up, and because it is so messy. We even have a specific plastic cup that is often used to prepare the mixture.

On this particular day, I had started to feel better in the late morning. I felt like if I took a good shower, & got my sinuses cleared, I could still go into work for a half day. When I went to prepare the solution,the usual cup was dirty. In fact, all of our plastic cups were dirty. Instead I grabbed a small porcelain mug, and prepared the solution as usual. I should have sensed danger at this point, but I was blissfully unaware of the peril I was in.

I proceeded to the bathroom, where I disrobed and began my shower. The first unfortunate event came as I was finishing 'the nose hose', the porcelain cup slipped and dropped to the bathtub floor, immediately pulverizing on contact. I bent over to pick up the pieces, and the very first piece I grabbed sliced a large part of my finger open. Being covered in baking soda and salt, it burned very badly. I gingerly got out of the shower, bandaged my finger, and cleaned all the shards of the cup from the bathtub.

At this point, I've been out of the shower for 5 minutes, and of course I didn't dry off, so I am standing there freezing, wet, and naked. I get right back into the shower and enjoy the warm water.

It now becomes necessary for you, dear reader, to understand how my bathroom is arranged so you can properly visualize the events as they took place. Here is a masterpiece of art, created entirely with MS Paint, showing the layout of my bathroom:



I continued about my business, when tragedy struck. I was facing the soap dish mounted on the wall, bent over washing my feet. I washed my left foot, and then while standing on that left foot, I washed my right foot. While in this awkward position, bent over holding my right foot in the air washing it, balancing on my left foot, some of the soap worked its way under my left foot. My left foot slipped forward, smashing against the side of the tub. I began falling backward, right through the shower curtain, striking the toilet before landing on the floor with a crash. As I was hitting the floor, my left foot shot upwards with the leverage of my legs hitting the other side of the tub, with the tub wall being the fulcrum launching my left foot into the soap dish mounted on the far wall.

It all happened so fast that before I knew it, my body was laying on top of the shower curtain, which had been ripped from the wall & was laying on the floor, with my legs still in the tub, and water cascading all over the place. The list of my injuries now included a sliced open finger, a bruise all across the left side of my back from smashing into the toilet, a bump on the back of my head from hitting the floor, and what feels like a broken toe from my foot hitting the soap dish, all in addition to the splitting headache which had returned from the sinus infection which had kept me home in the first place.

I decided that it was safer for all of humanity if I just stayed home the rest of the day...