work

Being employed keeps me out of trouble. Keep me employed

/ from outside / , , , , ,

“This is the beginning of the end,” Yoo said last week. “It’s already just a midsize business in San Antonio. This is not a company that’s on a trajectory of growth. They’re on a trajectory of death. It will not be around.”

Source: Rackspace ‘on trajectory of death,’ founder Richard Yoo says

I work at a small datacenter. We’re… having some issues with customer retention and customer acquisition cos everyone wants that cloud hotness, even if they’re going to pay through the nose for it. What are we to do??? If Rackspace, one of the first names you think of when you need colocation, what is a small datacenter business in Minnesota to do?

A lot of people keep saying to avoid the cloud and whatnot, but then they end up going with aws, google cloud, or azure. That’s not putting your money where your mouth is.

If they get hacked, you get hacked. This is proven. All of these platforms, in their efforts to make it easy to get onboarded make it super easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot with insecure defaults.

Right now they’re making money, sure… But what happens when they don’t? Looking at you, google. But the others aren’t that much better. Do your part and support small and local businesses that can, and will, lend you their expertise.

/ local / , , , ,

We’ve been avoiding thinking about work for the past two weeks. Why? Cos we had a jerb interview! Codename hrJerb.

Glorified receptionist but gets us out of the IT sector. We’d be able to get some actual experience working outside of the crypt.

IT Crowd - Hello IT

This would be a full time job. That’s in addition to sysadminJerb, itself a full-time job; and hostJerb, which is a part-time job. We’d have no time for ourselves other than basic system (human) maintenance. We’d be working an average of 85 hours per week— I checked. But we’ll take it if we have to. There is no path forward but pain.

It all came about cos when we got off work today I hit up Inbound Brewing, chatted with a couple friends, and on the way to Nightingale two songs came on just as a decision erupted from my subconscious.

This first one hit hard:

It played just as I was thinking about all the effort I’ve put into hostJerb only to be told “we don’t need your help” when management are clearly underequipped, underprepared, and clearly overtaken by the job.

We’ve tried chasing this kind of thing in the past and it never ends well. We learned.

And just as we were about to feel sorry for ourselves for… Coming up short for people that don’t appreciate us, this song played.

Sure it’s a love song but right there and then it felt like a balm. Like… “oh wow, other workplaces can actually be nice? I don’t have to chase people around?” and “huh we do love ourselves” and “we love this one beer and it’s not her fault the people who make her suck at their jobs”.

It’s Celia Cruz too so that helps.

All we need do is wait. Play capilalists off against one another; one set know what they can do but they don’t want to own up to it, the other coming in blind with cash and benefits. And extra seasoning! Cos all the people at hostJerb who can challenge what hrJerb might offer are out of town, and they are competing with people who are known to not care about their employees. In a competition like this everyone loses.

Then there’s also the fact we’re addicted to this fucken industry.

For shame! For shame!

/ rucksack / ,

Well guess what, here’s an actual blog post. For the past few years we’ve been putting stuff on twitter cos it’s easier to get stuff off the cuff, y’know? But we’ve realize that for a lot of things we want to do a bit more thought. Hence the following.

We’d noticed over the past couple weeks a coworker was downright hostile to us. Earlier we finally got the chance to ask her:

“Hey, is there anything we did to make you angry or annoyed?”

Yes

You don’t listen to anyone
You do whatever you feel like
And you drink too much at work

Which, fair.

  1. We listen to people who can actually impinge on our tasks, i.e. management or shift leads. If you want me to go clean tables cos you’d rather get hit on by the hot guy at the bar then no.
  2. We do whatever needs doing right then and there. Food needs doing and you’re busy getting hit on? We’ll run food. Guests in line and you’re busy chatting up a table of men? We’ll ring those guests right up. I’m not at your beck and call. I’m at the business’ beck and call. We’ve told the GM to fuck off cos we’re busy doing things they’d rather not do. We’ve told the fucken CEO off. You’re a mere peon just like me.
  3. This one actually threw us for a loop. We’re currently averaging .9 beers per hour, while the KM is doing about 2 beers/hour, the sous chef is doing 1 weed joint/hour. We believe the issue you have with our drinking is that we start making conversation with the men hitting on you, which means you then have to go and do actual work.

Now, we only found out cos we asked. She wasn’t going to let us know she had a problem, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let management know there was a problem cos then they’ll look at her work performance.

(Management loves us, by the way. They can find no fault with our work, which is how we like it.)

But it is annoying. When they say that it’s hard to make friends in Minnesota they didn’t say anything about people who can’t deal with their own emotions in a healthy way.

A week of self-discovery

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  • We went from three jobs down to two jobs back in March and somehow… our schedule got worse? Perhaps the kitchen job at hostJerb should be counted as a third job, honestly. We’ve been telling people we work like an elemental demon to live like a mortal peasant. No one gets it :(

  • It’s becoming almost impossible to sleep at home. All the neighbors are working on their yards, their cars, their houses. There’s a bit more traffic than at the old apartment. The landlord company are working on the house. The light is bad enough, but the uneven noise is really messing our already chaotic sleep schedule even more.

  • Purchased a Nintendo Switch. I’m not buying any video games until I’ve exhausted Link’s Awakening. Love this game. Trying to figure out how to get an online membership for it without giving Nintendo any more personal data— or our credit card number.

    Screen capture from The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

  • Decided to schedule gym sessions. It’s easier than just going there on a lark. It helps with keeping full awareness of our schedule too. We need to find a good resource for guided gym workouts.

  • The biggest change of the summer? Definitely our biking around. We decided calories are cheap and that’s really helped in getting us out of bed as long as we can get 6 hours or more of sleep between jobs. I’m not going out to party or mingle, sleep is far more important! But we’re making more of an effort to bike around instead of using rideshares or the bus, particularly at night.

    Gotta take advantage of the weather while we can. Once winter is here getting around is going to be that much harder.

Now, to find something to eat…

It’s done, thank Chaos

/ rucksack / , , ,

This past week was truly a week from fucken hell. Six nights in row at sysadmin jerb, three doubles in a row , then another two doubles in a row.

I’m fucken tired but with the fucken pigs doing curfews in Minneapolis and firing off emergency alerts at all hours of the day it hasn’t been easy to actually get any fucken sleep after they killed a Black guy in Brooklin Center and protests started.

Google Calendar from April 4 until April 17

I think I only survived thanks to the free coffee I get at my barista job and napping at my sysadmin job— which we try not to do because then we’re groggy the rest of the night and when the job is thinking that leads to problems.

I’m going to bed in an occupied territory. Fuck the police.

For Third Night After Daunte Wright’s Killing, Protesters And Law Enforcement Clash Outside Brooklyn Center Police HQ

I’d like to not stress about money kthx

/ local / , , ,

I started working at SysadminJerb about… six months ago or so. I’m looking to pickup a second job hosting at a finer restaurant since I’d like to be able to talk to more people on a regular basis; Working by yourself in a datacenter is not conducive to long conversations in person.

So why is it that I’m having a hell of a time budgeting my money? I’m realizing I’m spending more than I really want to and right now I’m not sure… why. This isn’t a problem I had to face when I was working in a restaurant full time, so now I’m just spinning my wheels trying to figure out why this is happening, and more importantly, how.

I think I’ve got the why figured out: Since I have loads more free time than I ever did before, I now have that much more time available to spend the money I’m making even when I don’t mean to be spending that money.

The how it’s a bit harder but I think that, over the past few months, the average amount of money I spend in small transactions has gone up along with the amount of transactions that I do during a pay period, which follows the fact I have more time to be out and about than I did before.

So now I’m on the search for a budgeting tool that will help me with this. I’ve tried using Mint before but… at this point in time they haven’t added any new features in a while and I’ve had a devil of a time connecting it to my auto-pay accounts, so it let’s me track only some things instead of everything. I’ll try it again since it’s free but if it doesn’t work out I’ll just let it go and never look back.

I’m also looking at other tools like You Need a Budget and Financial Gym. Right now I’m thinking those are nice but… they’re paid and I would prefer to not add more pressure to my wallet.

So as a first step I’ll try Mint, then if that doesn’t work look around for a spreadsheet I can use on google sheets, then if that doesn’t work I’ll try YNAB and the rest. I don’t have a need to track everything but it would be nice to have a better overview than the stuff my bank has for me.

Right, this all reminds me: I can actually use these tools because my income is more or less stable now compared to what it was before: I can count on a solid 40 hour work-week month after month, and before I had to actively fight for working hours. So that’s a big change.

I probably just need to cut a few services here and there that I have not been using to their full potential, or ramp them up so I do use their full potential.

Going to be habit changing, to say the least…

Start of daytime week

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Bit of a status update.

Typing this at Bachelor Farmer Cafe. Expensive but there’s good wifi and the chairs are comfy. It’s becoming a bit of a habit after a shift at SysadminJerb but somehow the vibe here lets me think, which is nice. I can then go home and sleep and still feel productive about my night at work.

It’s getting cold. Got me a cool leather jacket but I will definitely need more heavy winter gear.

Still working at merBOHjob… which makes for long shifts when there are days when I have to work at both places at once. Staying up 30 hours or more is now a common occurrence and it would seem my psyche has stabilized enough to be able to do this and not feel like I’m losing myself anymore.

Chuckling as I type this cos one of the barists totally looks like she doesn’t want to be here, and she looks like the old GM at 112 that is a… colorful character, to me.

Oh right, I got kicked out of 112 this past Sunday. First time I’ve been kicked out of a restaurant. Just walked out, didn’t fight it. At least now I know for sure they don’t want my business, nor any business I might send their way. Guess I could send people to bFOHjob but I’m pretty sure they also fucken hate me.

Guess I’ll have to send people to Bachelor Farmer.

I can has sleep?

/ local / ,

I seriously thought I’d be done working more than 12 hours in a single 24 hour period… but sadly I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Back into the aether

/ local / ,

Well, I just done and got me an IT job again. To actually keep it I:

  • Quit at tKitchenJob.
  • Ended up walking out at pbFOHjob. This place is a shithole and I don’t think I’ll ever see a paycheck from it; in the event I do I will probably never see my actual tips.
  • Reducing hours at merBOHjob. They don’t like it but what’cha gonna do? You can’t pay me.

I think I’ll call this IT job… honeyJerb. Jen would be proud.

Dark liminality

/ local, rucksack / , , , , , ,

Well, here we are again. Another week from hell done:

  • Walked out on bFOHjob; I make the GM nervous.
  • Reduced my hours at tKitchenJob because I’m starting at…
  • merBOHjob, doing the same thing as tKitchenJob but at a higher wage.
  • Going to try and give it a week before starting to look for another FOH job.

Lost the job, lost the girl, and I’m pretty sure I’ll get an eviction notice tomorrow Monday because… why not? It’s how the universe seems to work for me.

Anyway, as I now seem to have plenty of free time on the calendar I’ll try to make better use of it and spending re-learning how to code as I never have learned to do it properly. Or so I’m saying right now. But before I do that I’m going to get some reading material on personal finance and learn how to do forecasting; merely having a budget doesn’t cut it for me.

Hopefully I’ll also be able to sleep better tonight. Last night I was caught between being too tired to sleep and a mind racing to figure out a path forward.

GM was very good at telling me I did not belong

/ rucksack /

Over time I was told a few things at the last job I had:

  1. “You’re an intense person. You may have trouble here.” This happened right during my hiring interview.
  2. “Maybe you just don’t fit in.”
  3. “You’re perceived as a dishonest person.”
  4. “I think you’re insubordinate as an employee because you don’t talk.”

Given those circumstances I thought it best to leave. I should have timed it better cos now I’m going to have a hell of a time actually making rent.

/ rucksack /

Ugh, doubles. My personal scourge.

Due to scheduling vagaries at my two jobs I end up working doubles three times a week at the least. And not just regular doubles, but “clopenings”; that is, when you close the night and then open the next day. Never any fun to be had during those days… Specially in the weekends.

I work brunch.

FML.

Sooo I guess I’m back on my bullshit

/ local /

I just picked up another full-time job at a kitchen in downtown. Went and staged today and by the end of it got offered the job. I took it.

That means I now have FOHjob, in which I’m just a wait assistant with nary a chance of moving up the chain; and BOHjob, in which I’m supposed to show up at ungodly hours of the morning and… Do kitchen stuff? I’m not even sure what I’m going to be doing yet.

loud sigh

My issue is going to be scheduling. Oftentimes I end up closing at FOHjob, which will cut into my sleeping time and increases the risk I’ll be late to BOHjob. It’s not a nice feeling…

Never grow up, kids. It leads to situations like these.

Only scratching the surface, here.

/ rucksack /

I fucking hate my job now.

It was okay for a long, long while. Certainly less stressful than working at the biting squad but it certainly had its share of trouble.

But now all of the low lying brush-fires that consume the company are threatening my very sanity. I dread going to work so much I try to sleep as much as possible, which is the opposite of me staying up until 0300 on teh twitter derp corn or playing videogames.

Hopefully something good will pop-up soon because THIS IS SO, SO BAD.

How bad, you ask? We have clients who are literal nazi sympathizers. I asked my Pa about it and he says that technically makes me a nazi collaborator. The kicker? The boss is Jewish.

Hopefully next job I’ll actually be given a chance to move up? Either way, I’m over this place.

A path ahead

/ local /

I’m stuck in a rut. I thought it would take me longer to get to this point, but looks like that is not the case. I realized this fact after reading this article.

I have two jobs and both of them share

Started writing this, then I got fired from one of them. They would rather keep a bad white employee than a good brown one. You do you, Bite Squad.

I’ll tell you all stories of my adventures there.

Loopdedoop

/ local /

Now that I’m actually working at two separate “office” jobs, I’ve noticed one thing.

Nobody wants to train you anymore, for anything at all. No matter how easy or complicated the job is, no matter how many issues might be prevented by spending an extra few hours of learning (and this goes for both employees and customers), no one wants to do it.

This is why you see jobs with insane requirements like:

  • Fresh off school
  • 4 year college degree
  • 8 years of direct experience related to the job
  • To live and die by the company

They want people who already know how to do the job so they don’t have to spend money training them.

That’s before we even bring out non-legal issues like transportation, demeanor, clothing… and legal ones, like religion, race, and country of origin. Yes, companies will _never_ admit it but sometimes they don’t hire someone because they happen to be the wrong skin color for the company, whatever the reason

So on the training front it usually becomes the issue of having someone formally take charge of the training process. A lot of companies don’t do this. If there is a knowledge base that new employees can refer to, sure, but if the knowledge is locked away inside of people’s brains or in documents they won’t have access to.

This is what I’m dealing with now, and it sucks. It leaves everyone in a bad place. A lot of people have ideas on how to fix it, but until the actual company decision-makers actually change nothing will come of it.

After a while you just figure out how to do the job, this is forgotten, then the cycle starts over elsewhere.

Annoyances

/ local /

“Can I get someone who speaks English?”
I do believe I am speaking in English. What can I do for you?

Just because you’re calling customer service doesn’t mean I’m outside the US.

“I want to speak with a manager”
Sure thing. Can I have your order so I can tell my manager what you’re calling about?
“No I want a manager now because I don’t want to talk to you”
Unless I obtain this information I cannot transfer you to a manager. Anything else?

Give me something so I can help you. Otherwise I’ll tell you to fuck off.

“I want a cut”
We all want things. Do one more order and you’ll get your cut.
“NO I WANT A CUT NOW”
You already accepted the order. Finish it and you get cut. Otherwise you get written up.

These people are the ones doing the work, but really, most of them are idiots.

“Your menu is out of date and all the prices are wrong”
I can fix the prices on this order, have you sent your menu in?
“WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THAT”
Do. Not. Yell. At. Me.

There’s a reason why people don’t order from you anymore, dear restaurant owner.

Not getting paid enough for this

/ local /

At work we use the G Suite for most everything and it works okay — for the most part. The problem is that we’re starting to have so much documentation that is just frozen in a spreadsheet or document that is just… out of sight, where no one pays it attention ever again.

I’m having a devil of a time convincing someone, anyone that having something other than the mess of documents we have shared between all of us is something worth having. Our current system simply doesn’t allow for detailed notes to be kept on all the parties involved for what we do: The sellers, the customers, the employees, so we end up just having the knowledge be stored on someone’s mind, where it can’t be efficiently shared.

And when that person leaves the knowledge is lost.

So now I’m wracking my brains to figure something out that we can all share because what we currently have is simply not working. A wiki is starting to look like the best idea but I can’t simply go and run it off a server somewhere. I want it to be at least be allowed, because I don’t want to lose my job trying to improve the company. It is confidential information, after all.

I’ve seen people lose their jobs for less than that.

My job is managing being interrupted

/ local /

Last year I turned off all my notifications. I stopped booking meetings. I started living asynchronously.

Source: Live asynchronously.

My job (and that of my coworkers) is being constantly stopped from finishing the task we are working on. I’m told that I’m really, really good at it, but I only got that way by working in the kitchen, where the job is, again, being interrupted.

But the cognitive load is immense, and intense. I often get home feeling more tired from working at the office job for 6 hours than from working in the kitchen for 12 hours.

And no, I don’t get breaks at either job unless it’s slow.

Hold strong against the waves

/ local / ,

Shifts on the phone just… wear you down, humans. They wear you down, hard, no matter how fit you think you can take the damage.

You never see the person. You usually never even know what they look like (we have social media for that nowadays) but they sure wear you down, call after call.

Doesn’t matter if you’re apologizing to someone or if you’re apologizing for someone. The mere fact that you have to talk to someone is enough to grate on you.

This is why there is so much turnover at call centers. Talking to other humans is just hard. Because no matter what you’re calling about or why you’re calling about, they usually resent it.

The internet has not made this better. It has made this worse.

A computer conversation

/ local / , ,

There was a tweet from @findchaos that made me remember a conversation I had with a coworker at my kitchen job a few days ago.

The gist of it was “I’m looking for a new computer that’s good for everything and has lots of gigs to do what I want because I don’t want to spend a grand on an apple laptop“. Cue the questions regarding use (“Are you going to use for facebook? Youtube? Are you going to play on it?”) and connectivity (“Do you have WiFi at home? No? Are you going to use a hotspot from your phone then? No? So how are you going to get online???”)

This guy is from a poor part of Mexico. Whenever I ask specifics I just get grunts or non-answers, because he gets embarrassed. He knows he’s in over his head on these matters and I am understanding, but there’s so much I can do without kissing his ass which I will not do.

So with that said, I recommended a few models from the Dell XPS line, the Lenovo Thinkpad line and a couple of Samsung laptops I saw for cheap on Amazon. The guy was quite insistent that he wanted a “Sony laptop” if he couldn’t get a cheap Apple laptop. It didn’t matter what the sub-brand was since Sony has a few, most of them with the esoteric model names so favored by this manufacturer. I kept asking if he wanted a Vaio, but he just answered “I want a Sony laptop if I can’t get a cheap Apple laptop”.

After a while of circular arguments on his part I eventually ended the conversation with “If you don’t want to pay over a grand for a computer from Apple and you don’t like what Sony or Dell or Lenovo or Samsung or anyone else has to offer then I can’t help you. You have to decide what you want and all of it costs over 500 dollars from what you say you want.”

That shut him up.

From this I get a few things:

  • Apple is quite uncaring of people like my fellow cook. I’ve seen their support and as they’ll help you as long as you give them money, which most in his position don’t have, otherwise you’re on your own. For them, an Apple device is a status symbol.
  • Other computer manufacturers should try to fill in this gap. Even though these people are mostly illiterate they are already online through facebook and whatsapp. They are quite willing to spend the funds, it’s just that they don’t even have brand awareness of others because no one has even tried beyond a few ads in the most popular telenovela.
  • I think more efforts to promote Chromebooks would help as these people pretty much only use facebook, youtube, whatsapp and a few others. Particularly now that Google is working on having chromebooks have the capacity to run Android apps and even use the Google Play Store itself.
  • People like him want to know more but the classes available are designed for people with 9 to 5 schedules. The vast majority of Hispanic immigrants do not have that schedule and if governments want to better integrate them into US society at large more efforts should be made to allow for schedules where people have free time in the morning and work in the evenings.
  • I should probably start a side business giving people like him advice on what to buy and for a commission, buy it for them through Amazon. Offer training for an additional charge.

In writing this I forgot the original point of the post, but that’s okay. At least this is now out there since it happens somewhat often. People ask me something, I try to obtain more information to provide better advice, then they clam up because they realize they don’t even know what they want or what the person that wants the thing wants.

I’ll just go along with it.

There are a few things that I have to make clear, though, as the entire conversation was conducted in Spanish:

  1. “Lots of gigs” is a valid unit of measure for people like him. I don’t know whether they refer to RAM or to storage capacity, but I go along since they usually mean a bit of both. The actual phrase was “hartos gigas”.
  2. Apple is the same whether they are talking about an iPhone (“Un telefono Apple”) or a computer (“una laptop Apple”) regardless of whether the computer is a desktop or a laptop. The only difference is whether it is a mobile device or not.

No, I’ve never gone canoeing drunk at night in one of the lakes. I was probably working

/ local / ,

So knowing to disclose deeply personal information about yourself—the best stories are not necessarily why you want to be a banker at Goldman Sachs, but how you reached the summit of Mount Everest—knowing that’s what interviewers value creates a disadvantage for individuals who don’t have those types of stories, or don’t know how to tell them.

Source: Recruitment, Resumes, Interviews: How the Hiring Process Favors Elites – The Atlantic

This is me. I don’t have stories about crazy adventures while young — I much preferred to be alone. I don’t have epic tales of surviving an extremely busy shift in the kitchen — at the end of those days usually you just want to go home and pass out.

While I am fortunate enough to know how to tell these stories when pressed, the fact is most of these stories are not something the interviewer would appreciate listening to, nor appreciate if they have no way to identify with me given my employment history: car washer/valet, cybercafe attendant, call center rep, sysadmin, barista, cook, server. If they’ve never been one of these it will be almost impossible to imagine the situations you live.

Meritocracy is a myth and it is high time people realize this.

It’s slow at work

/ local /

I’m tired of cleaning. Can someone else clean for a change? I’m always the one who cleans for everyone else cos they don’t really care.

’tis the season in 2015

/ local / ,

This year I’m conflicted about the holiday season.

I have two families with which I’ll happily spend time with alongside the Jägerin. Problem is both of us are working a hell of a lot and having a hard time finding time to see each other.

Oh, I have a girlfriend now. Catch up.

More work

/ local /

Why oh why do I work so much? It’s not like I truly need the funds.

Part of me thinks I just do it for the company. Otherwise I’d see no one at all, since I do tend to stay at home sleeping or reading.

On the upside, since I have to wake up early there won’t be any more late night drinks after work. Saves more money.

If only I were working in IT instead of food service… then I’d be making real money.