Tag: work

Its all about the ties

Ah, my work is great some times.
Let me give you an exam­ple.
Ties.
We are giv­en nice bright read ties. They are 100% poly­ester. Which means they get dirty, and there ain’t noth­ing you can use at home to clean them. I tried, I put one through the wash… when I got all the oth­er clothes out the tie was­n’t even wet!
Now, at work, we have a draw with ties in, for any­one to use, most­ly old dirty ones, so I bun­dled them all up and took them off to the dry-clean­er and got them cleaned and then hung them back up at work, for every­one to use as nec­es­sary. So these aren’t MY ties where talk­ing about, they are the SHOP’s so I paid for it with pet­ty cash. Which every­one thought would be okay.
It was­n’t. Orders from above. NEVER USE PETTY CASH FOR DRY CLEANING TIES. Um… okay… so how do when clean the gen­er­al use ties? They did­n’t know, some­thing about pay­ing for it our­selves. But on the flip-side, we can order in brand new fresh ties with­out any­one get­ting even slight­ly annoyed.
I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out how that can pos­si­bly make sense… but I guess it looks good in Nav, and some­how shows as a prof­it.

Another nail in the coffin of life

Well, today my busi­ness cards arrived! This marks two things, the first being the first time ever I’ve had a job that the com­pa­ny both­ered to print up busi­ness cards for me, the sec­ond being anoth­er step down the path to this McJob dom­i­nat­ing my life.
I’ve got­ten to the point of automa­tion, just get up, get dressed, get on the bus, try not to fall back asleep on the way to work, remem­ber to eat break­fast, gulp down a cof­fee or three, man­age to some­how stay awake and alert at work for lots of hours, get home, realise I have no time or ener­gy to do the things I want to do, go to bed, try to sleep.

Trapped

With the arrival of a box today, my fate feels like it has been sealed.
My uni­form arrived, my accep­tance into this McJob is now com­plete.
What’s that? You don’t think my job qual­i­fies as a McJob? I have to wear a uni­form, I get paid less than I ever have for any oth­er job I’ve ever had, I have to put in extra hours cause I “care about the busi­ness and see­ing the com­pa­ny do well”, I don’t have time to take breaks…

And todays “worst customer” award goes too…

The bitch on the phone that want­ed to return soft­ware that she bought a year ago and get the new ver­sion instead. After ring­ing around to the sup­plies and man­u­fac­tures and find­ing out that she had left it way too late she was unhap­py with that answer and want­ed to know what I could do for her, because she had spent “large amounts” with the store in the past (here is a tip, spend­ing $3000 at a com­put­er shop does not count as a large amount). Fur­ther she is now going to take her busi­ness else­where, cause I did­n’t do enough for her.
Why does every­one assume that the rules can be bent in there spe­cial case?

Apple changes the world (again)

So Apple has done it again, changed the world. And in clas­sic Apple style they’ve changed the world in the “here is some kewl new stuff that no body else does very well, now watch as our com­peti­tors scram­ble to make cheap copies and pre­tend they came up with the idea first” kind of way.
In is not insignif­i­cant that the new hard­ware intro­duced yes­ter­day is tar­get­ed at the low bud­get user. It is also inter­est­ing to remem­ber that a week ago Apple announced lots of new stuff for the enter­prise mar­ket two, so they are show­ing that they care for and cater to both ends of the spec­trum, with lots of there oth­er com­put­ers in-between for every­one else.
iPod shuf­fle
At this price this thing is a good deal if you only ever used it as a mem­o­ry stick. The fact that it can play music to just sweet­ens it. In my ‘favorites’ playlist there are about 500 songs, so put any 120 of those on an iPod shuf­fle and it don’t mat­ter to me what order there played it. I think Apple has real­ly hit the mark on this one and in a way stuck its aqua fin­ger up at the rest of the flash MP3 play­er mar­ket by say­ing “you only need to be able to select which track to lis­ten to when you have LOTS of music with you”.
My rat­ing: 5 stars
Esti­mat­ed demand: more pop­u­lar than sex at the annu­al con­ven­tion where the nympho­ma­ni­acs and fire­men acci­den­tal­ly booked into the same hotel and some­one spiked the drinks with via­gra.
Mac mini
Can we say “cube, but bet­ter”, or how about “enter­tain­ment com­put­er”, or maybe “PC killer” or even “home serv­er”. This thing is the cheap­est Mac­in­tosh ever. Actu­al­ly, it is the cheap­est Apple com­put­er ever. And it still packs a punch. Let me put it this way, its still bet­ter than the com­put­er I’m using.
Four and a half years ago Apple released the Cube, it was hailed as all as being a mar­vel, just a tad to expen­sive for any­one to actu­al­ly buy one. The Cube mys­te­ri­ous­ly still has the same resell val­ue as its orig­i­nal price tag due sim­ply to how well engi­neered it was. But now in many ways and with many improve­ments the cube is back, just a lit­tle short­er, and a hell of a lot cheap­er.
PC users that already have a screen, key­board, mouse, print­er and all the oth­er bits need­ed for mod­ern com­put­er lifestyle can now actu­al­ly just throw the tow­er away and put a lit­tle mac in instead.
The Mac mini can con­nect with a TV, great for watch­ing your DVD’s, play­ing your itunes, run­ning games, check­ing your email and all that stuff, and if your tel­ly is any good then it’ll still look okay.
And as for me, I think a Mac mini would plug in nice­ly to my net­work and run as a lit­tle serv­er for the house.
My rat­ing: 5 stars
Esti­mat­ed demand: will be a slow starter, but give it a month and every­one will have one.
iLife ’05
A year ago when Apple moved from call­ing this prod­uct iLife 2 to iLife ’04 they paint­ed them­selves into a cor­ner. Sure they could have gone down the Microsoft path and just not both­ered to update iLife for ages, skip straight from 04 to 07 or some­thing, but no one real­ly thought Apple would do they. The entire suite gets an over­haul with this update, and for each up it is a decent and wor­thy amount of improve­ments, mix­ing the bound­ary between the con­sumer apps and the pro­fes­sion­als ones a lit­tle more (don’t wor­ry, the pro apps are still light years ahead of there lit­tle broth­ers).
iTunes only gets a small upgrade, but then its the free one and is upgrad­ed all the time any­way and I doubt they could think of some­thing big enough to get away with call­ing it iTunes 5.
As for the oth­er four apps, iPho­to, iMovie, iDVD and Garage­Band, they are each well worth the new price tag of $119, but you get all four for that, so very kewl.
My rat­ing: 5 stars
Esti­mat­ed demand: not that much, but as it’ll be on all the new com­put­ers sold from now on there will end up being a lot of copies out there.
iWork
Apple last updat­ed Apple­Works in 2000, and it has long since been lack­ing the aqua/brush met­al look, so it is about time Apple got to this. How­ev­er this does not replace all the func­tion­al­i­ty of the old Apple­Works, but what it does it does with amaz­ing style.
Pages alone is worth the price tag, a sim­ple, fast, ele­gant, pow­er­ful and styl­ish word processing/page lay­out pro­gram.
And Keynote makes Pow­er­Point look like the 90’s prog it is.
My rat­ing: 5 stars
Esti­mat­ed demand: it will take off once peo­ple get just how kewl it real­ly is.

1 r0x0r

Had a lap­top come in, key-lime iBook infact, brought back found mem­o­ries. Run­ning an old sys­tem, and to make things more fun, it was run­ning it in Japan­ese.
Now, my japan­ese extends as far as being able to say ‘Moshi moshi’ when answer­ing the phone.
But did that stop me? Nope, fixed the com­put­er any­way.

Visit of a Techno-Muppet

So there I was doing my thing, sell­ing stuff to peo­ple, and a guy comes in and buys some­thing. He asks if it is easy to use because he says he is a bit of a mup­pet. I raise an eye­brow and ques­tion him about this and he goes on to describe him­self as a Tech­no-Mup­pet.

And down goes the internet…

So… the tech guys (and I use that term as loose­ly as pos­si­ble) at work realised we had unre­strict­ed inter­net access… and turned on there big bad fil­ter thingy, which is now fil­ter­ing out actu­al­ly impor­tant stuff that we use at work… for work!!!
Way to go guys.
I have always hat­ed these sorts of restric­tive fil­ter­ing sys­tems in prin­ci­ple, but now I hate them in prac­tice too!

For the Princely sum of $8.40

I did some cal­cu­la­tions, and was a lit­tle scared by the results.
Fac­tor­ing in the amount of time I am actu­al­ly at work, I’m cur­rent­ly earn­ing $8.40 an hour before tax!!!
I have nev­er worked for so lit­tle… nev­er!
And after two months I’ve realised I’m not the worlds great­est sales­man, but I knew that before I start­ed.

No web at work?

Well here is one to amaze you all.
I work in the com­put­er indus­try, almost always have, know a shit load about com­put­ers, and lease this knowl­edge to the com­pa­ny I work for for a ridicu­lous­ly cheap price (con­sid­er­ing I free­lance at $100 — $150 an hour).
My employ­er wants me to con­tin­ue to keep my knowl­edge up-to-date, which means read­ing all the press-releas­es and brows­ing all the tech-savvy web sites. How­ev­er, to make this more fun my employ­er has decid­ed I should be using work time to keep up to speed, cause the net at work is not for brows­ing or some such bull shit, instead I’m expect­ed to pay for my own net access at home, and use my home time to keep informed on infor­ma­tion for work. At my own expense.
Bah! If I treat­ed my cus­tomers the way they treat their staff then I would­n’t have any cus­tomers. This all smells very hyp­o­crit­i­cal to me.