Category: bitching

A New Low

September 27, 2004 / / 0 Comments

Well, today was a new personal low for me.

The day started as usual: lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, dreading the interminable day of work that awaited me. With a heavy sigh, I crawled out of bed and took my morning shower. As I started my car to go to work, things were actually looking up. My car, which had been lurching and jerking like a Parkinson’s victim, started and ran without a hitch.

Yeah, things weren’t so bad until I got to work. Unfortunately, around 10:30, I got a call from the asset protection woman. She had been sitting in the camera room, watching the solitary customer in the store when she noticed that he had an erection and was playing with himself through his shorts. Wait: it gets better. He was in the little girls clothing section.

Well, that’s just great. And you want me to what about this, exactly? Wander by so he knows there are employees around? Yeah, thanks for calling me. Great. No, I’ll do it. Yeah, I see him. Hang on. I’ll call you back.

By the time I got off the phone, he had wandered into shoes and his erection had subsided. I’m fairly sure he heard me say “I see him,” and was less than conversational. He left, and I went back to stocking shoes.

Later that day, as I was still stocking shoes, I heard a familiar voice. “Marc?” I turned to look, and there was Errin Schlapbach, a girl I’d known from the time I was five until I was eighteen. The first girl I ever kissed on the cheek, and “married” on the playground when we were in first grade. We went all the way through school together and had no desire to stay in contact with each other in the following years.

Fuck. I knew that eventually this would happen. Someone that I knew from high school would walk into Gordman’s, and I’d have to admit that I’m working a menial, stupid job after earning a bachelor’s degree. I was hoping that at least I’d be carrying a clipboard and looking important when it happened.

We had a brief, awkward conversation, and then she walked off. I’m pretty sure that she didn’t believe me when I said that I’m starting a web design business. I’m not sure that I would have believed me. Maybe I’ll see her in another five years. I hope not. This encounter was humiliating enough. I think I’d have been less humiliated if I somehow hadn’t been wearing pants.

Just before I left for the day, I heard another interesting tidbit from the asset protection woman… the sick fuck from earlier that day had actually picked up a job application.

On the short ride home, I took off from a stoplight and heard a BOOM! followed by the sound of something metal grinding against concrete. Realistically, I knew damn well that it was my car, yet I looked around for a likely scapegoat. With a shitty looking Mazda next to me, I assumed that it had backfired while accelerating, and didn’t give it another thought. When the Mazda turned off and a carload of people passing me appeared to be laughing and staring, I accepted that the noise was coming from my car. Fine. Screw it. I’m just going to finish the drive home and deal with it then.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get that far. Thanks to a sudden bump, my car was now one muffler lighter. I looked back in time to see cars swerving to avoid hitting it. I kept right on driving.

Once I got home, I called my dad. How much for a new muffler, Dad? Oh, I don’t know. Probably about fifty bucks for a crappy one. Why a crappy one? Because a quality one would outlast the rest of the car. Great. Thanks.

A few minutes later, Pedro asked me plaintively, “Do you have any food? I don’t have any, and I don’t have any money.” Yes, fine. We’ll figure something out. Dinner eventually consisted of Stovetop stuffing mixed with corn and hot dog chunks, all prepared in the microwave. The stove has been broken for a week, and the maintenance guy seems unconcerned about fixing it. I doused the hot dog chunks with habanero sauce in an attempt to make them more palatable. It worked, to an extent. The stuffing wasn’t bad.

As we “cooked,” Jason had turned to me and said, “No one must know of the hot dog/corn/stuffing experiment. I don’t want people to know that I’m this poor.”

Yeah, well, we are that poor. And I have no problems with burdening others with that knowledge.

And now, as I sit here slowly drinking a beer because there’s nothing else to drink in the place, I heave another deep sigh. Because tomorrow I have to get up and do it all over again.

I Hate Javascript So Much

September 5, 2004 / / 0 Comments

I’m getting very frustrated and angry.

For those of you who don’t know, JavaScript is a programming language used in web pages. It can do little things like move the cursor to the next text field after you type in your credit card number, or it can do things like open new windows based on a user’s input.

Or it can be a miserable pain in the ass that won’t work no matter what you try to do.

For some reason, no one can agree on how to implement JavaScript in their browsers. Things that work fine in Internet Explorer won’t work at all in Navigator, and vice versa.

Most of the time, the browser will give me a message to the effect of: “Something is sorta wrong here, but I won’t tell you what it is. Have fun spending the next half hour searching for a missing comma, sucker.” The really fun ones don’t have messages. The browser just sits there, doing nothing and explaining nothing.

I’ve run into two of these so far today while trying to finish up my cousin’s website, and I have no idea what to do about them. A lot of the times, there isn’t anything wrong with my code! The browsers themselves are the problem! I don’t know that there is any other way to go about what I’m doing.

At this point, all I can do is stare at the damn screen, wonder what the hell is wrong, and attempt to squelch the urge to chug a bottle of whiskey.

My New Job Sucks

July 22, 2004 / / 0 Comments

I like to think of my titles as very brief executive summaries. If you don’t want to bother reading the whole blog entry, you can usually read the title and get the gist of it. This post is just going to be a lot of ranting about how my new job sucks. Feel free to skip it.

Anyway… yeah. I’m not liking my new job too much. I graduated from college in May with a BBA, and a friend and I have decided to start a web design company. I can’t really work at a real job programming or something because it would almost certainly require me to be there around 50 hours a week. (That’s the way most entry level programming positions work, I’m told.) This wouldn’t give me enough time to devote to my web design business, so I’m going to be working a crappy job for the next year at least.

So I signed on at Gordman’s. It’s a department store similar to Kohl’s, but with better prices. I’m going to be the shoe department manager. Right now, however, we’re putting the store together and it SUCKS.

I have to be there each morning at 7:00am. I have no idea why this is. It’s stupid. There’s no reason for us to need to be there at that time. Gordman’s schedules when the trucks show up, why not schedule them a bit later? Like even 8:00, maybe? Since I live an hour away, I have to get up at 5:15 to make it to my car pool on time.

The construction workers are two or three weeks behind schedule. They were supposed to be completely done by last Friday. Yeah, right. Like anyone actually expects union workers to get a damn thing done on time or under budget. They didn’t even have all of the interior walls up when I left on Monday. We’re working around them right now, and it’s a pain in the ass for everyone.

We usually have about three scheduled trucks show up each day. However, we also have about the same number each day that just appear whenever the hell they feel like it. We unload them and then later count the pieces to make sure that we have everything. Since my counts are rarely, if ever, anywhere close to what the sheet says, it’s beginning to make me doubt my ability to count. There’s nothing quite like fucking up a very simple task to make you feel like a complete idiot.

So, to sum up: when my job isn’t backbreaking and menial, it’s endlessly repetitive and mind-numbing. At the end of the day, I come home drenched in sweat, exhausted, and smelly. This job sucks.