Month: September 2005

The big ass reset at work is finally over with. All that’s left is hoping all of the new items I sent into corporate get downloaded. I have been just relaxing yesterday and today because I put in another 60 hour week last week for this reset. It wasn’t a hard job whatsoever; just extremely time consuming on my part. Although a full set of tags were ordered for the reset, there was some sort of problem and quite a few tags didn’t make it and I wound up having to batch and print them. When I say quite a few, I mean over 1,200 of them. The good news was that I was commended on how well I kept up with all of the tags that were missing. Every morning I would go out and check for hand written tags and batch and print them because that was my job, that and I was making time and a half after Wednesday. It’s very nice to get an extra $200 in one week and I really wish I could make that much every week. Of course next week I will be back to the normal grind where all I am doing is my normal job and there will be no room for overtime whatsoever. Isn’t it wonderful?

My new printer arrived on Wednesday. I had gone into work at 3am on Wednesday and I left work around 3pm and went and picked up my new printer at the store. It was around 4:30pm when I finally got home and got everything hooked up so I could start using my printer. I flipped the television on for the hell of it while I hooked up the printer because the instruction manual said not to turn on your computer until told to. Well I flipped on the weather channel because I wanted to see where the hurricane was heading for this time. Well as soon as I turned it on I see the scroll along the bottom of the screen saying we were under a severe thunderstorm watch until 10pm. After a quick inspection of the sky I figured they were full of shit. There were some storms that were over St. Cloud in Minnesota but that’s a good two hours away from here so I had nothing to worry about. I proceeded to hook up my printer and I turned on the computer and tested it out. It printed very nicely, and the colors are awesome, even on pictures. So I’m playing around printing stuff up and I hear what sounds like thunder; which should be impossible since there was only a few little clouds in the sky 20 minutes ago when I looked outside. Apparently the old saying “a storms a brewing” was true that night; not to mention in record time. When I went to the window this time there were dark black clouds north of us and the whole sky was pretty dark as well. I shut my computer and new printer off and turned the TV back on to watch some more weather since now it was going to be affecting us. Within five minutes we were under a severe thunderstorm warning, and the shit hit hard and fast. The wind started whipping and the rain was coming down so fast and a lot of it was horizontal. I thought holy shit this is bad, especially considering that all of the storms in Minnesota were becoming tornadic. Next step up of course was the hail. When I say hail, I’m not talking this little marble sized bullshit that you’re thinking off, I’m talking about baseball size hail. You know, the kind of hail that could fucking kill you if you got hit by it. I had my police scanner on and I got to hear about all of the damage going on, from the police cars having their windshields busted out from the hail to the streets flooding up to waist deep in some locations. It was the weirdest fucking Wednesday I’d had in a long time. Had I mentioned that I had been up since 1:30 in the morning so I could get to work at 3? Let’s just say that I was fucking tired come Thursday morning.

Well, apparently since I worked all of that overtime last week I figured I could buy something for my troubles. What else do you save up for right? I decided to take the plunge and buy a new printer. I think I may have mentioned this before but I will mention it again. Printers and I do not get along very well; especially those ink jet fuckers. When I started using computers way back in the days, I used a dot matrix printer with my trusty Commodore 64. That is probably the longest I’ve ever owned a printer. When I finally retired the C64 and moved to the Tandy, I got a new dot matrix printer to go along with that. Sure laser printers were starting to show up around those days but who had money for something like that, hell they cost more than the fucking computer which back then were close to $2,000. So I stuck with my shitty little dot matrix… until. The glory of ink jet printers started around that time, or at least became affordable. My first ink jet printer was a Canon. It was also only had black ink, there was no color abilities for this printer whatsoever unlike what you damn kids have these days. I think the ink cartridge lasted longer than the damn printer did. Actually I don’t remember what the problem was aside from a lot of leaking and the fact that color printers started coming onto the market. I had to have a color printer, so I got one. I don’t think that one lasted very long either for some reason. All I know is that I have on average had two printers for every computer I’ve owned so far. Let’s fast forward to today. I have an inkjet printer from HP that I got in a bundle with a digital camera and I also have an HP laserjet that I got from work for free and have bought a new cartridge for. I’ve already got a taker for the laser printer and as for the inkjet, that little fucker can sit by the curb.

As far as sites go, I haven’t even started thinking of a new design for my sites so the blog will probably be Plain Jane for a little while longer. I really want to spruce up the 3rd Bass site now too and I’m not sure which one is going to take precedence. Speaking of the 3rd Bass site I now have it mentioned on the number one Beastie Boy’s fan site at http://www.beastiemania.com under relevant links to 3rd Bass.

Tomorrow is back to work time for me and it is also the second week of the reset. I don’t really give a shit if I get to help with it anymore since the HBC portion is done. I didn’t like a few of the things that were happening there so I put my two cents in and had those changed up a little. My whole week will be involved with scanning out all of the shit not making it into the new sets so we can send it to other stores and making tags… lots of tags. The one good thing with making tags now is I can print an entire vendor’s file with the click of about three buttons, much easier than batching everything and then trying to print them. Speaking of my wonderful job… I better get my ass to bed.

This is basically just a fucked off entry to test out this new 3.2 version of Movable type. If it works well then I will probably upgrade Lisa’s blog too. Of course the pain in the ass time I had doing my own makes me not want to upgrade hers, although I’m sure I will eventually. I think that this new version is pretty cool from what I’ve seen so far with it. There is a lot more potential with this version than there has been with past versions. The only thing I don’t really like is the templates for it. That is why if you’re reading this right now you’ll notice that the blog looks pretty sad. Not sad like a dog that’s left home, but sad like plain and simple.

Oh well, I’ve been here before with my blog, back to square one, and I’m sure that I will be able to make the site even better than before in due time. In fact my main plan is to make the blog the main page over at the main site and all other pages on my main site will link from the blog. It will be cool and it will mean my main site will always have new content on it, well at least whenever I take the time to write something down here that is.

Well, I’m officially up to 50 hours as of today; with tomorrow to go. Wednesday I ended up working from 3am until past 4pm. I can’t wait to see the check, although I have a bad feeling that the government is going to jack me for most of it anyway. Hell I will probably make less than I would if I just worked a normal week. It’s been an interesting week to say the least. I’ve helped do the reset, scanned out product to send to another store (the poor bastards) and even got to call some of the shots as far as where we should move stuff. I even got them to change their mind on a few different things as far as where they would be putting stuff. The one good thing is that tomorrow is Friday and I can rest tomorrow with two days off in a row coming up. Yesterday I came home with a headache and I didn’t even turn my computer on. I just came home and took it easy and couldn’t wait until it was time to go to sleep.

That’s the funny thing about a headache, at least for me… when I wake up in the morning or even three hours later it feels like the greatest day of my life if that headache is gone. I wake up and it’s like oh right, I felt like shit last night and now I don’t. Life is grand isn’t it?

By the way, with the way this week is going… I’m totally burned out.

Yeah, it looks that way. In case you’re hip hop illiterate I’ll school you. MC Serch is 1/3 of the rap group 3rd Bass (Prime Minister Pete Nice being the other mic man and Daddy Rich being the DJ). Of course if you’ve been paying attention you’d know that the other website I run is a fan site all about 3rd Bass. Is this big? Yeah, it sure the fuck is… bigger than words can express… so I digress.
I went to the urgent care last week because I was having stomach problems. I guess it was just a pulled muscle because I’m fine now, but when I was there the doctor I happened to see that day mentioned that I was way overdue for a full physical including a cholesterol test and a diabetes test. Well, that ended up being today. I now remember why I have put off a physical for so long. It’s not the drawing of blood, I can deal with that. It’s not even the doctor holding my nuts and making me cough. It’s the finger up the ass checking my prostate health. You have no idea how glad I am that I’m not a woman. He was only up there for about 30 seconds tops and I couldn’t take it. Imagine if I had another hole to look into; it’s times like this I’m glad I have a penis.

Well, next week begins hell week at work, in fact it’s two weeks of hell. We are going to have a total store reset. The bad part is the first reset they drew up was pretty extravagant and it involved moving almost everything in the store to places it actually made sense. For instance they were going to move all of the bottled water and sport drinks down the same aisle as the pop. Well now they aren’t going to. Why you ask, because the other way would have made more sense and apparently we don’t like doing shit like that. They are going to totally butcher the HBC department still. Honestly it’s about time because it’s sat like it is now since I did my resets way back in the day. It still pisses me off that they showed us this awesome reset that made a lot of sense and then they come back and give us this reset that at best I’d call lazy. It’s like someone telling you they’re going to give you a Harley, then they come back and go… here’s your Huffy. Bastards.

So our gas has gone up 40¢ within the last week. It had been $2.74 sometime last week and as of tonight it’s up to $3.19. Wow, another person bitching about gas prices you’re thinking? Nope, not tonight. I don’t like to pay this much money to fill my car up but what are you going to do? Gas at $3.19 a gallon is crazy, but you know what? A loaf of bread for $4.29 is fucking outrageous. The only place I really drive is to and from work and I do put about 40 miles a day on when I drive. It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass but like I said… what are you going to do? People will just have to tighten up their pocket books a little bit. Maybe cut back on the cigarettes you’re buying, give up alcohol for a little while, buy the shitty bread that only costs 99¢. There are other options out there. This hurricane fucked up a lot of stuff and it did hurt the oil business. Shit when you see their rigs that are supposed to be out in the middle of the ocean sitting on the beach or stuck to a bridge, you know some shit is up. As far as I’m concerned if the only damage I’m going to suffer from Hurricane Katrina is higher gas prices… I consider myself pretty fucking lucky.

Watching this shit on the news is weird. It’s the whole tsunami all over again. I’m hoping we don’t get to that level of dead people, but if they don’t do something down there pretty soon it could rise even higher. There are still people stranded and we are going on almost a week here. People are starving and they will begin to rely on their animal instincts soon enough to try and survive.
Speaking of the tsunami that happened last Christmas I have a question. Where are all of the foreign countries that should be stepping up to the plate to donate money to us for this natural disaster? I seem to remember quite well that the United States pledged to donate 35 million dollars to the tsunami victims and we were called cheapskates so we bumped it up to 350 million dollars. I don’t seem to recall in the last few days any country giving us 350 million dollars. Shit, I don’t seem to recall any country giving us 35 million dollars now that I think of it. It’s always nice to know that we are expected to be the welfare wagon to the whole world but when we have a problem everyone just looks the other way.

Since we’re on the subject of looking the other way, I was watching MSNBC tonight checking out what’s going on in the hurricane aftermath and there was some show on with Rita Cosby. I’ve never seen her do a show before but apparently she’s been on Fox News before and now she’s on MSNBC. She annoys the hell out of me. I put the lockout function on MSNBC so I never have to watch her again. She’s interviewing all of these hurricane victims and other people involved in the rescue efforts with the same charisma you’d want if you were interviewing someone who just won a national pig calling contest. How the hell did she get her own show anyway? I wasn’t even watching her I was just listening to her and I thought, well maybe she’s related to Bill Cosby. Then I looked and she was white so it’s obviously not that. I never thought Fox News would look attractive to me.