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Dedication:

Anyone who hasn’t figured out yet that this site is dedicated to the memory of fine friend and much missed maestro of mind boggling mental mayhem JEFF WEBB just hasn’t been paying enough attention to the important shit up to this point. Get with it, slackers!

Here it is... the Major Attitude Adjustment

BULLETIN BOARD !!

I can't make it any easier for you than this, folks.

Don't forget to check out KILL THEM ALL AND LET NEO SORT THEM OUT: The Essential Immorality of The Matrix!! If you love the movie The Matrix, you'll really want to throttle me after you read it!

Monday April 14 2003

Hello darkness my old friend

Forgive the pretentious Paul & Art caption quote. I'd originally thought it would just make an appropriate reference to this blog entry since my email abruptly went mute yesterday and has stayed quiet since... you know, 'the sounds of silence' ha ha, he's so clever... but now, it seems even more appropriate.

Since, you know, I just got fired.

'Noticed', I suppose, would be a better way to put it. Thursday will be my last day here (Friday is a City holiday, "Spring Day", because the non-Catholics will sue if they call it "Good Friday", and I don't blame them, either). I'm not being fired for cause, which is generous of my boss (not T.S.I.L.T.M., the other one) since she certainly could fire me for cause if she wanted to... one call to CIS to get my Internet logs while on City time and I'm toast. Not only have I been on pornographic websites a few times (nothing graphic, just checking my email on the Occasional Paycheck Website) but, well, they have logs not only where I've been, but when I've been there and how long I've spent there... and I certainly can't claim, like everyone else does when they get busted doing this stuff, that I only do it on my breaks and at lunch, with that level of detail in the logs.

Mind you, she didn't do that, she simply let me know that she could have. That's not her main reason for finally (months after I got caught up on my original assignment) letting me go. What she needs now is someone who can work with the woman who does Code Enforcement in our office, and they tried me out at that a few months ago, and, well, I didn't do so well at it, apparently. (No one told me I didn't do well at it and I wasn't offered any opportunity to improve, I was just told to go back to my previous task after about two weeks helping on the Code Enforcement desk.)

I mind the allegation that I did a job I was assigned to do badly, especially since no feedback was offered to me. However, the Code Enforcement job was mainly data entry and I hate data entry and would have refused to take an assignment centering around data entry if my agency had offered me one. Beyond that, I've grown to absolutely loathe my job here... who knows, once I'm gone from here, maybe I can take my weblog 'public' again.

So it's definitely a mixed bag. Being let go is never ego building, but I'm told I'm not being 'fired for cause', my assignment is simply ending, because they need someone better at data entry than me. That's fine; my agency will accept it and continue looking for work for me, and meantime, I can file for Unemployment. (The bad news is, filing for Unemployment is kind of a pain in the ass for me; Tampa is a huge city and the Unemployment office is way the hell on the other side of it. I'll check and see if I can do it online, but that would indicate a Florida State Service that is actually up to late 20th Century snuff... the mere thought of which is making me fight explosive laughter even as I type this.)

In the meantime, with what's in the bank right now, last week's check, and this week's somewhat truncated one, I should be able to eat for the rest of this month and pay rent for May. What's going to be bad, though, is if my landlord doesn't renew my lease this year and I have to find a new place to stay... instead of simply the usual monthly nut, I'll have to come up with at least two months rent to move into a new place, leaving aside the sheer hassle of moving, which, since I'm a lifelong pack rat of that specifically obsessive sort known as a 'bibliophile' (book nut to the rest of you), is always even more of a pain in the ass than non-bibliophiles think.

But there's little point in borrowing trouble. My lease will be up at the end of June, in the meantime, I may as well not worry about it, since I have no idea, at this point, if I'll be working again, or, rather, how soon I'll be working again, and where, after this Thursday.

I cannot in any way say I'm sorry to be shaking the dust of my current workplace off my shoes, though. I loathe my present (and soon to be ending) job, and my abject (if, by now, familiar) terror at suddenly having no source of steady income is very much alloyed with a wide, clear running current of pure unadulterated whoo-hooing joy at finally being emancipated from this goddam fucking piece of shit hellhole of a workplace.

I swear to God, the next time one of my email correspondents who gets to work for themselves, as a freelance journalist, or cartoonist, or writer of some sort, or consultant, or agent, starts talking shit about the cost of their health insurance or the uncertainty of their weekly income or their lack of a pension plan, I am going to track them down and take a dump n the middle of their living room carpet.

I turn my collar to the cold and damp

And I was going to note (although actually I already have) that after as busy a week of email as I've ever had (even back when Mike Norton was still speaking... well, writing... to me) my email box suddenly fell silent yesterday morning, and other than mail I've sent to myself (I'm not allowed to have a floppy in the A: drive at work any more, so I email my writing to myself at regular intervals all day long) and fucking spam (which I've started picking up a lot of; engines must be trolling the couple of weblogs I've started posting responses to lately for email addresses), I've had no activity at all since.

You'd think I wouldn't mind, since I do have this Heinlein article to finish, and I'm kind of planning to kick out a review of Hambly's Sisters of the Raven sometime soon, too (shouldn't take me long, Joe Bob Briggs doesn't like long reviews) and there's always other ways I can waste time if I really put my mind to it. And hey, it's very likely I'll get my wish and get at least a week off, after Thursday, unless I get really lucky and my agency finds me another assignment immediately. That should give me plenty of time to clear out some back writing I've wanted to do.

However, those of you who have suddenly found yourself unemployed after several years of steady work will understand how disconcerting (and scary) a feeling it is.

Which is, I suppose, off the subject, but the subject was simply 'suddenly I have no email', so, that's not much of a subject.

Now let's do the Scooby Doobie Doo ending

And here I am, at the library, killing time once more until the 5:50 bus.

Email remains resolutely quiet. I'm sure it will pick up again... okay, I'm not sure, since every time I've sent out email, I'm always in doubt as to whether that particular piece will be the one that thoroughly pisses off whoever I sent it to enough that they will never write back to me again... but still. Barring me completely alienating everyone I currently write back and forth with, I should get more email soon.

Just, apparently, not now.

I should be doing other stuff, so I think I will.

Wow! I just surfed out, found the Florida Unemployment website, and hot damn! You can file a claim over the Internet! I am SO psyched.

I'll have to do that later, after I finish up this week, since one of the things they ask for is the amount of money you made this week, and I don't know what that amount is going to be yet. (In fact, I won't know that until I get my check next Thursday... hmmmm...)

But, hey, you can file online! That's awesome!

I know this is a very short entry, and really, really boring... even more so than usual. And I apologize to whoever is reading this. As far as I know, there are only maybe four people who could be reading it, but, you never know... I may go public in a big way when I'm done with my current job, after this Thursday.

If I do, I suspect I'll change the name and look of the blog somewhat, but I imagine I'll keep this URL... might as well, it's as good as any free one is going to be.

Yes, I'm babbling. I know. Honestly, other than being told I'll soon be surplus labor today, there isn't much to write about...

Well, actually, the one woman who sits behind me has seemed kind of embarrassed and vaguely guilty whenever I mention the firing, so I have a feeling she knew it was coming, and maybe even had a hand in it. Well, I know she did... she's the one I was doing data entry work for, who must have trashed me to our supervisor without bothering to tell me I wasn't doing well. I just don't know whether she's put the knife in me any other ways... and I shouldn't put it that way. She needs someone who can do data entry well, and I hate data entry, so I can't blame her. I just find it a bit aggravating to be talked about behind my back.

When the one supervisor took me aside today to tell me Thursday would be my last day, she initially started going into a thing about how disappointed she was in me... she said she was 'extemely ::deep sigh:: disappointed', in fact... since I'd been warned before about excessive web surfing and she didn't know what I was spending all day working on but I wasn't doing my minutes very quickly and....

I said "Yeah, well, I wish I had friends and relatives I could spend half my day on personal phone calls with, but you know, since I don't, I do a little web surfing instead".

She shut up immediately, since we both know that the woman who used to sit at the desk right next to mine routinely spent half or more of her day on personal calls. Even the woman behind me, who needs a lot of help from someone good at data entry, spends a lot of time on personal phone calls. Me, I have made fewer than ten personal phone calls in the two and a half years I've worked there... well... okay... no, I haven't, but fewer than 25, I'd say. I have occasionally called my family, and I did used to have one local friend I occasionally called from work, because he was impossible to get hold of in the evenings.

Nonetheless, it seems fair to me... other employees spend a lot of time on the phone not working, I spend a lot of time on the Internet not working.

Anyway, she dropped it. She did try to go back to "I don't know what you work on all day but it's not minutes", and I said, kind of mildly, "Gail, I was caught up once, remember? It was a nightmare. And you and I had a talk about it, and you told me unofficially that you couldn't give me permission to make sure I never got caught up again, but you certainly understood if I didn't want to, and it would make it easier for everyone else if I weren't going around begging for work, too." So she dropped THAT.

After that, we just talked for about half an hour about this and that. I asked specifically why they'd been keeping me in a make work job that was pretty much caught up for almost a year after I'd got caught up, and she sighed and didnt' answer me directly... but the gist is, I've been quite correct all along... having a temp is a very effective argument that they need more full time positions, so they didn't want to just let me go, even though I had nothing to do. However, now she really needs a data entry person to work in Code Enforcement, and obviously I'm not good at that... so she's finally making a change.

I can't feel all that bad about it, obviously. As long as she doesn't fire me for cause, I should be all right. Especially now that I know I can file for Unemployment online. And who knows, I may line up something new pretty quickly... although I have to say, I wouldn't mind a week off, even without pay.

I am about to miss my bus, so, probably more tomorrow.

Bile disclaimer, yet again

Let me repeat something I said well above, in different terms: this blog is not about being politically correct, or nice, or sweet. Nor is it necessarily even about being whatever it is you may define as ‘fair’. This is my blog, where I’m going to say a lot of the things I’d like to say but can’t, for various reasons. It will be honest. You may not agree with it; you may think I’m being ridiculously self centered and childish. And that’s fine, elsewhere on this page there’s probably an email link, if you feel strongly enough about it.

Nonetheless, I repeat: this ain’t about being nice. This is about me saying what I want to say. If you don’t like it, feel free to write me and tell me why. Feel even freer not to read this stuff any more. And bear in mind, I always feel free to print anything anyone sends me about this blog on this blog, and respond any damn way I feel like. I also feel free to delete emails unread if they’re from people I know are idiots, or to read a few lines and then delete them, if they’re from people who quickly demonstrate that they’re idiots. (But in general, I won’t; I’ll print them here and then make relentless and cruel fun of them, instead.)

Is the stuff I’ve written above childish and self indulgent? No doubt. But it's my weblog and I'll whine if I wanna.

So, if you don’t like my Major Attitude Adjustments, don’t read them. Isn’t that simple?

Later.

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