I thought I liked teaching people, but I find training dim people very very irritating

"And let me tell you, God is not so infinite as the Catholics assert. He is about six hundred meters in diameter, and even then is weak towards the edges."

Wow, three weeks since I last posted. I wish I had lots of interesting stuff that I could report, but sadly that's just not the case. Just been busy.

After training my weekday graveyard guy, Yumpin' Yiminy, I got to train my weekend day shift person. And Yumpin' Yiminy again.

He still didn't get it even after the second training day, and frankly I'm not certain that he even remembers where he's been, nevermind where he has to go.

Weekend day shift guard was pretty good. She's been here three months from Morocco and seems to be quite the quiet keener, although I'm going to lose her towards the summer at the latest, as she's pregnant. Ah well.

That weekend, I was still short one person so I split the extra shifts between the two new people. A little extra scratch never hurts, and they were agreeable.

The logs of what they did and where they went were... disheartening. Although I found it amusing that the Moroccan guard, with her three-month-old english, wrote my name down as the colour with which it rhymes. I've been called worse.

The following week my Moroccan guard called in sick for the weekend (on a Monday!) and Valium Wailer was starting his two week vacation. So despite having just trained two people, I had nobody to do the weekend!

So on Tuesday I trained a guy to do Valium Wailer's shifts. He showed up smelling like he'd been drinking during an explosion at a tobacco farm, but I saw him swigging from a cough syrup bottle so I let it pass. He wasn't staggering, at least.

It turns out that he was a supervisor for the guards keeping the Grey Cup block party stuff safe, and that he had met Yumpin' Yiminy there. And he told me what two others and my own observations had already determined: he's a good guy but needs supervision.

Isn't it great that the office sends me such a person for a graveyard shift where he can't be supervised? Best guy in the world may be exactly that, but you don't want him performing meatball surgery. :P

I still needed someone to cover the Moroccan guard's shifts, so the office sent me someone on Thursday. They guy seemed okay, and I pegged him as in his mid forties. I was wrong.

While taking him through the server room, I was explaining what various things do (so he'd understand what the various alarms and alerts were that he might have to respond to), and he seemed to be ahead of me somewhat. I asked him about it, and he said he had a computer background.

We talked computers for a bit, and it came out that he used to work for IBM. I mentioned that my dad also used to work for them, and he named my dad on the spot.

It seems that when the office gave him my name as his contact, it was bothering him because it sounded familiar. This guy is 63 and remembers getting piss drunk with my dad on lots of occasions. He went on talking about that for a bit, then finally asked how my dad was doing.

Of course, he drank himself into irreparable damage and finally succumbed to cancer years later. Party behavior catches up with you.

This guy has quit all that. His three daughters are lucky.

Anyway, I had everybody trained. All was good.

The next day, Friday, about half an hour before I was going to head to work, I got a call from the office.

Office: "I have bad news for you."

Me: "Are you sure it's bad news? It might be good news. You should double check."

Office: "Oh, it's bad news. Bad bad bad bad bad news. Baaaad news."

Me: "Ah, now you've overhyped the badness of the news. I just plain don't believe you now."

Office: "Well, it's news. You can decide if it's bad or good."

Me: "Fair enough. What have you got for me?"

Office: "I've got your name all over the schedule for this weekend."

Me: "What?! I just trained two people for that this week!"

Office: "Yeah, the one you trained yesterday we moved to a different site that had a particular profile that he fit. So you're working two twelves."

Me: "You suck!"

Office: "I told you it was bad news! But look at it this way, I'm working all weekend too."

Me: "Oh, well that changes everything."

So I worked the weekend. It was dull. Meh.

Since then I've trained another guard who will relieve the Moroccan on weekend afternoons, but it transpires that he's a Zoroastrian that hates all things Islamic. Morrocan is Muslim. Happy happy joy joy.

I saw Capote. It neatly reinforced pretty much everything I'd thought about Truman Capote, although I didn't expect the voice, since I'd never actually heard the guy speak before. Not a bad film, but I'm not recommending you rush out and see it.

That same night, I found out my mom had creationist leanings. I didn't know that before, but I'm going to get her a copy of the complete biblical apocrypha so she can read some things she may not have known about. Eve is Adam's third wife, after all. No to mention all of the divine beings that came down to dally with the hot daughters of Mankind and teach them magic, herbology, and cosmetics. I probably won't throw in the reinterpretation of some of the Psalms. Talk about erotic poetry! Pant pant pant

Two clips, for anybody who hasn't seem them yet:

One is the Leroy Jenkins one. Leroy has transcended into gaming parlance now with surprising speed. Calling someone a Leroy, or describing someone as going Leroy both are immediately understandable and accepted phrases. See where it all started here.

The other one is something I may have been guilty of on occasion. One of my many ex's once told me (about ten years ago) that the guy she went out with next (and ultimately married) was forbidden to play games at all, all because of me. See if you're mirrored in here, when you watch it.

All I want to do is steal a frikkin' cartoon!

Just a quick comment, then back to regular-style Rimmy posts. I went to my usual p2p program to get the latest episode of Family Guy. Here were the results:

Find: family guy patriot games

Results:

Family Guy - Season 5 Episode 7 - Patriot games.avi
Family Guy -510 - Patriot Games.avi
sisters in shower.asx
woman has sex with the milkman.asx
seductive catholic girl nails black dude.asx
sister lesbian love.asx
family action CRAZY.asx
TAG TEAM ACTION.asx
sister sex.wmv
sister and daughter playfight.wmv
sisters go to public swim at local pool.wmv
mormon sex - is this even legal.asx
Twister game gets frisky!.wmv
daughter sex.wmv
*naked* family guy patriot games.zip

At least this was nowhere as bad as when I was composing a cd for Valium Wailer and tried to get Teenage Barnacle by The Enigmas. You take your life into your own hands when you deliberately drop the word "teenage" into the mix.

Yumping Yiminy!

Let's rehearse what we know about who we are. We are primates, very closely related to chimps and other great apes. Our ancestors speciated from the other apes about five million years ago, and evolved in parallel lines and overlapping subspecies, emerging more clearly as hominids about two million years ago.

East Africa in this period was getting drier and drier. The forest was giving way to grassland savannahs dotted with scattered groves of trees. We evolved to adapt to that landscape: the hairlessness, the upright posture, the sweat glands, and other physical features. They all made us capable of running long distances in the open sun near the equator. We ran for a living and covered broad areas. We used to run game down by following it until it tired out, sometimes days later.

In that basically stable mode of living the generations passed, and during the many millennia that followed, the size of the hominid brains evolved from about three hundred cubic millimeters to about nine hundred cubic millimeters. This is a strange fact, because everything else remained relatively stable. The implication is that the way we lived then was tremendously stimulating to the growth of the brain. Almost every aspect of hominid life has been proposed as the main driver of this growth, everything from the calculation of accurate rock throwing to the ability to dream, but certainly among the most important must have been language and social life. We talked, we got along; it's a difficult process, requiring lots of though. Because reprodution is curcial to any definition of evolutionary success, getting along with the group and with the opposite sex is fundamentally adaptive, and so it must be a big driver of increasing brain size. We grew so fast we can hardly fit through the birth canal these days. All that growth from trying to understand other people, the other sex, and look where we are.

In checking the logs from the weekend, the client was initially astonished at the length of the generated report when it was printed. Going through it, we had the usual okay (Valium Wailer) to piss-poor (The Sleeper) performance, until we got to Sunday. It took about a second for the client to detect my standard frequency, and he quickly wrote "This is YOU, Mr. Rimmy!" on it.

Clearly I have to become more erratic. Next thing you know, people will start depending on me. I'll have to discourage that. :P

I got to train my new weekly graveyard guy yesterday. Of course, the office didn't tell me that ahead of time, and when I got to work the guy had been waiting there already for an hour.

He's okay, he's a fifty-two year old Czech who's worked for us for some seven months, and never done an indoor job. And it shows, because he sometimes walks right past doors without checking them or looking inside. I'm wondering if the sheer volume of things inside the site is throwing him. He's used to walking around parking lots or building exteriors rather than having a globular awareness.

Ah well, I trained him for eight hours. We managed three patrols. Barely.

I'm also a bit alarmed that his wife called him three times, when she knew it was his first day at a new site and he was being trained.

I should probably mention that I'm not a big fan of guards even carrying personal phones when they're on duty, as if you're talking on a phone you're not paying attention to what's going on around you (no you're not, even if you think you are) and that's not a safe thing to be doing when you're the one responsible for security.

Towards the end of the shift, I had to do a more-or-less final full patrol and lock down the place after the cleaners (they were late - usually I do that much sooner), and since the new guy would have slowed me down, I gave him the checklist I'd written up and told him to wander the site and get a feel for it without me. And off I went on my patrol.

As I went around, I looked through the various windows into the atrium from different levels and directions, but never saw him. Finally when I hit the main floor, I saw him. All he'd done was wander around the cafeteria looking at the pictures on the walls. His entry on his report for that hour? "Reading post orders"

Uh, it's one page. It's a checklist. I know, I wrote it.

I hope this guy doesn't suck ass.

And, waiting for me when I got home, The Ultimate Showdown. Thanks, Fictional. ;)