Fucking census police!
I'm sitting down to a game, sans pants, and there's an unlikely knock on my door. Since I'm in an apartment and don't really know any of my neighbours, I figured it was the landlady and, after acquiring and installing a pants upgrade, answered the door.
Instead was a guy with a clipboard, clearly from the building, asking if I'd sent in my census material and if not, had I planned to do so?
I wish I could tell you that I didn't participate in the national census for a reason, like the one sent to me by Kibilz showing how the software that allows you to complete the census online was written and is processed in the US, meaning all of that information is available to the US government under the Patriot Act. But not.
I just forgot. Although I'm pretty sure I didn't throw the thing out. Pretty sure.
Ah well, it prompted me to blog, and that's a good thing.
I had, at last count, five blog windows open. I have this habit of starting blogs, and then thinking "I'll get back to this", but never do. Which is all fine and dandy, since I will eventually get back to them. Unfortunately, you install one teensy little update that requires a reboot, and unthinkingly (look, a bunch of browser windows open! I'm sure it's nothing important) proceed, and that ends your droning and slightly hostile prose. Meh.
For the entry that should have been May 4, the Filipin-Pho did a piss poor job (even for him) the night that I told him he couldn't go home early even if he showed up for work earlier than scheduled. So I confronted him about it, and he did the usual evasions that I've become so used to from the rest of the motley crew of "guards" that have sieved through my site.
"I patrolled fully!"
"No you didn't."
"I went into all of those rooms!"
"No you didn't. I have an electronic record of everywhere you went. If you got access, and you're not a ninja, it's recorded."
"I went in all those places, I don't know why it's not on the record. The record must be wrong."
"The record recorded the full staff complement that day and the day before, got all of my entries right, seemed to pretty much nail everybody accurately... except for you. Would you care to hazard a guess as to why? Not to mention your apparent invisibility to cameras."
This went on for a bit, as tediously as the bit recounted above, until the light finally dawns in his eyes, just like it does for all of the other people I've had this discussion with: the results are all timestamped. Some diehards will continue to argue once they realize this, remembering how their parents must surely be too stupid to understand what's really going, but not the Filipin-Pho. He switched to a different approach:
"I know that nobody came in the building, so it's okay that I didn't patrol as much as you wanted."
"If you don't patrol, how can you know that nobody came in? Your lack of patrolling doesn't indicate any particular awareness of the status of the site."
"Nothing ever happens unexpected here."
"Yes, and we'd prefer it stays that way. But because something didn't happen yesterday, or the day before, or for the previous ten years, doesn't have any bearing on tonight. The client has requested, and is paying for, patrols in the manner and frequency which I trained you for. Bottom line."
He softened briefy at this point, and then tried (with what I assume was some sort of "you know how it is" attitude) this gambit: "I get tired of unlocking and locking doors."
Jesus, Jethro, and Homer Christ.
Of course this went on for a bit, and he got sullen. Every excuse he made was exactly that - an excuse. I've got a site to attend to that has requirements by the client and our own company, and that's that. Any attempt to alter that by him is met with what it deserves: a swiftly delivered and detailed "Nuh uh!".
He accused me of trying to be a Cookie Monster, that I was being hard on him because I was trying to get promoted to senior management. He told me that I was doing it exactly right for that.
As though it's some sort of slap to administer, or even be promoted for that matter. Clearly he was running out of material.
The previous night, during the Can't-Go-Home-Gate scandal, he mentioned that he'd finish out the month and then leave. I brought this up during this conversation and told him that if he was unwilling or unable to abide by the site orders, I'd be happy to mention it to Scheduling so he could get a site more to his liking, since I could probably get through to them faster than he himself could.
That remark came back to haunt me later, as he started telling me that I wanted to get rid of him because I mentioned talking to Scheduling. Bah.
Upon mentioning the site orders, he said that he noticed the "official" site orders and the working site orders were markedly different. He said that I had written them (I did) and that it was just want I wanted the guards to do, not the client. He said that it was his discretion what he did and didn't do while he was on site, and that it was none of my business.
He was grasping. The official site orders (I told him, as I had told him previously) were obsolete before I started there, and that the client and our company both had approved everything in my revised version (true).
After that, he stopped talking to me. For the rest of his stay on my site.
Ah well, it seemed that he actually improved markedly. Both electronic records and the employees who saw him seem to agree on this point. Good for him for giving in to the inevitable. Some stubborn fools would argue with a tidal wave.
-----
For one of the weekends in May, I was informed (by dint of a guy showing up on my site for training) that Moroccan Girl wasn't going to be available, so Scheduling had moved Hospital Guy's shift from afternoons to mornings, and I was training a new guy to do the afternoon shifts, but just for this weekend. Meh, whatever.
So a little after eight in the morning on Saturday, I got calls from both Valium Wailer and Operations. Hospital Guy didn't show up for his new shift.
Even though I had just worked eight hour before, and had maybe got three or four hours of sleep, I bit the bullet and went in to relieve Valium Wailer. He was tired and hungry and not willing to stay for even an additional half shift. I don't blame him.
En route, I found that nobody had bothered to tell Hospital Guy about the change in his shift, and he couldn't show up for it. But he said that he could definitely do the new shift for the following day. Fine, a brief snafu but it's fixed.
Ha. That's right, ha.
The morning passes, and I get relieved in the afternoon. I head home, kind of zonked from the lack of sleep and lack of stimulation both, but I stay up so that I can sleep during the night. Until... the call.
It was Operations, telling me that Hospital Guy had just called them and said that he couldn't and wouldn't come in tomorrow (Sunday) morning, due to "religious obligations".
Now, the day that I trained Mr. Hospital, he went on and on about how he was Moslem and why it was so great (also great was that he'd seen everything - things I couldn't handle if I was there, things like the fifteen grand he'd spent on the interior of his car, etc). Now, spank my ass and call me Charlie if I'm wrong, but Sunday holds no particular obligation on a Moslem. Not to mention that he'd already said he could do it.
I told Operations to hold on while I made some calls. Ops is already pissed at him.
So I called up the new guy I'd trained and asked if he'd be willing to slide from the afternoon shift to morning. He was. In fact, that worked out better for him. He wished he'd had the morning shift on Saturday as well, leaving me to wonder why in the hell Scheduling had shifted everything around instead of just filling the hole in the first place.
Then I called up Hospital Guy. He went off for a while about how his shifts had been moved, and "They can't just do that, can they?". Finally I told him that I'd moved things around and his normally scheduled shift was back to being available, the one he went to every other weekend, could he be there for it?
"Sorry man, I have terrible stomach flu. I've got diarrhea and I haven't eaten all day."
"I... see."
"Well, I'm sure that [our company] can provide someone to fill the shift."
"It's a trained position. It'll be me that has to fill in for you on my day off."
Pause.
"Sorry man, if there was any way I could do it I would. Tell you what, any day you want to take off - I'll cover your shift."
"You're not trained for my shift, you're only trained for weekends."
"Oh. Well, I'm sorry for this. I'll make it up to you."
"If you're not coming in, you're not coming in. Bye."
And I called back Operations. Neither of us was surprised to learn that Hospital Guy mentioned nothing about his religious obligations to me, and nothing about his terrible stomach flu to Ops. I guess he hasn't learned that the trick about lying is consistancy. Removed from the site.
Ops asked for suggestions on how to fill the site, and I told them to try to get hold of Filipin-Pho (yeah, he was a dick but I'm still supposed to try to use the lower-paid people before I use myself) to start his shift four hours early, and stretch out the morning guy's shift by four hours. Two twelve hour shifts and the day is covered.
Ops said (and I should have known better) that they'd do it, and to assume it's already done.
Of course, it wasn't and I ended up with ticket in hand for a movie being called to go in. Sigh.
I ended up giving the new guy the afternoon shifts on weekends (his request), and I trained a really grumpy and strange lady for the weekend mornings (as our pregnant Moroccan left). Problem solved!
Until the long weekend, that is.
The new guy, I'm going to call him Heap of Flowers for some reason, pulled my personal number out of the contact list in the site cell phone, and called me for the week and a half leading up to the long weekend. He wanted it off.
I told him that it was way too short notice for me to do anything about it, so he'd have to work it out with Scheduling. I had no problem with him taking it off if there was someone to fill his shift.
Even though he seemed to understand that (every time), he still kept calling me to ask if he could have it off, and that Scheduling wasn't calling him back. Same answer every time.
Finally he talked to Scheduling, and got told that the schedule was full and he couldn't have it off. So he asked what would happen if he just didn't show up (warning sign number one). I told him he'd be off the site and probably suspended, depending on the trouble it caused (long weekends don't leave us with a lot of spare bodies). He then asked if his friend could cover his shift for him. No, his friend isn't a guard, isn't licensed, and doesn't work for us. He couldn't understand why I nixed this idea, saying "Nobody would know!" (warning sign number two). Dumbass.
He outlined that he had a church outting to Kamloops that he'll have to pay for even if he doesn't go, and that he'll make less money during the long weekend than the cost of the outting. I told him that he should have scheduled the time off in advance, that lots of people want to take long weekends off, and that vacation time is scheduled three months in advance.
Of course, he didn't show up for his shifts. Subsequent calls indicated that he'd gone to Kamloops. I'd anticipated this, and decided I didn't want to go into work for a change.
So I lied.
I told Ops that I was already in the Okanagan, several hundred kilometers away, and couldn't possibly return in time to help anything. ;)
Grumpy old woman's shift we stretched out a few hours, and my Field Manager came and babysat the site for the remainder of the empty shift. He didn't patrol though, so that sucks. The following day the grumpy old woman trained (trained?! This was her first or second weekend there - she's not qualified to train! Arrrrrgh!) some dude and he did the missing shift.
I tried calling him in the middle of his shift, and he didn't respond. After a few tries, I had Ops radio him and he didn't respond. They told me they'd get him to call me when they got him. His excuse for not responding when he finally called me? "I must have been in the elevator."
For twenty minutes? Nice try.
He'd been sleeping - I found the hole in the records. I even found the record of my missed calls in the cell phone's log.
The bed in the first aid room had been disturbed.
Ah well, the weekend passed.
-----
In other news, I finally delivered the Christmas present that my folks had been waiting for for quite some time. I know, I'm a jerk for taking five months to do something that would have taken up a weekend at the outside, but that's what I did.
They have a new computer. I've had the parts for a long time, but I just didn't get around to throwing Winblows on and doing the updates. It's an easy thing to put off, but I really shouldn't have. Still, they've got it now and, since their old one had died the week previously, it was fortuitous timing.
Oddly, the biggest hit was the card reader that came with the dvd bundle. They have a digital camera, but had never pulled the 200+ pics off before. Even though I front mounted the USB ports, the card reader is even easier to use. Yay for random fate!
Kibilz and Kami, and their little elf came to town. We saw X-Men 3. I think we all wish we hadn't. We thought it blew some significant chunks. The mutant-power-using scenes were short and/or not that good for the most part, the story was edited badly, and it just didn't give a viscerally satisfied feeling afterwards. The review from Mr. Cranky (four bombs!) tells more:
X-Men: The Last Stand
If you want to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hollywood is a cesspool of whoredom and back-door deal-making, just look at the credits of the writers responsible for this monstrous piece of crap.
Between them, Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn have written "XXX: State of the Union," "Elektra" and "Inspector Gadget." Now admittedly, screenwriting is a profession where one has very little control over the final product, but just how much talent does it take to write lines like "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" (unless you're William Congreve) and "take cover!" There are also two uses of the word "bitch" that I found offensive, but more than that, I found them lazy. They're unnecessary and pointless, and that in itself is profane.
Maybe there was simply a hack reunion going on while the movie was being made because the producers also brought in director Brett ("Rush Hour 2") Ratner, who has about as much talent as an avocado pit. He's replacing Bryan Singer and it's obvious that any personal connection to the material is now completely gone. "X-Men 3" is utterly witless, soulless and utilizes the kind of music that, were it played in an elevator, would inspire riders to shatter their skulls against the walls to seek relief. Seriously, I could easily do my whole review about the music. Imagine Barbie from the sorority down the street jamming her iPod buds into your ears and blasting the entire "American Idol" repertoire at a volume of "11" until the battery runs out and you get some idea of the kind of torture I'm talking about.
Ratner and the writers churn through their character development like starving squirrels discovering a secret stash of nuts. This edition begins with the government announcing that scientists have developed a cure for the mutant X gene. This sends Magneto (Ian McKellen) into a paranoid fit and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) into defensive mode. Meanwhile, all the mutants, including Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), are trying to figure out what to make of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who's come back from the dead and has incredible new superpowers, including one that allows her to stand around and stare off into space while doing absolutely nothing for seemingly hours on end. Seriously, Janssen has this look on her face throughout the entire movie that screams "Help me. I'm in a really bad movie and I know it."
Internet chatter about the film has been dominated by curiosity about Angel (Ben Foster), a winged mutant whose ability to fly seems to stem from the fact that he'd easily get his ass kicked if he landed in one place for too long. Sadly, you could cut out every scene the character is in and the film would lose nothing, except maybe some audible groaning.
Hopefully, I made my last stand during an X-Men movie when I got up to leave the theater.
-----
To be fair, some of my friends say they enjoyed it. It probably didn't hurt that Vinnie Jones was cast as Juggernaut. ;) Although I honestly thought that Angel was played by Dawson from Dawson's Creek. Ah well, since I watched that show less than a handful of times, I was more familiar with the actor when he was in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
I got me a haircut the following week by this cute young Australian girl. She was really into caressing me, even when she wasn't cutting. I couldn't decide if she was flirting with me or if it was just what she did. Reminded me of when I would molest this other femme that used to cut my hair.
Shut me down in conversation, though. I let her lead (I normally hate talking to someone cutting my hair, as I like it done as fast as possible), and she mentioned Chernobyl. She'd got into reading about it a few months back and we talked about it for a while. I mentioned that the year or so after the sunsets here were notably coloured, due to the volume of dust that had been kicked straight up and trapped in the northern hemisphere. I suppose we're almost due for a plague of cancer related to that. Anyway, I asked if the sunsets in Australia had been coloured differently as a result.
She said "Well, I don't remember. I was three."
Sure, rub in my age. :P Still, it was an okay haircut, so I can't complain.
Riding the SkyTrain home one night, I got to talking to an attendant that I've seen for a couple of years. He asked if I was coming home from work, and asked what I did. Upon hearing I did security, he asked if I'd ever considered working for SkyTrain. Since the Canada line will be done before too long (that's the arm that's going to run from Vancouver Community College up Cambie), they'll need more attendants.
But for infant CPR, I have the qualifications apparently, and if you're working full time it's four ten-hour days per week. Starting pay is $50000/year.
Granted, you need four days per week for that and at the start they only guarantee you two, but if you can get that third day you're styling, and there's always lots of "can you fill in?" work apparently.
When the site is running stable (laugh if you will, I just mean that I have some trained monkeys there) I think I'll hit St. John's and pick up that course, and toss my name in the hat.
It's not exactly awesome work, but it's roughly the same as what I'm doing now but with more pay.
That same week, on Friday, I trained the guy who was to replace Filipin-Pho. He showed up after having already worked that morning, and he was somewhat tired. I noticed that as the shift dragged on he was lagging more and more, and was finally just shuffling behind me, not even looking around.
He's diabetic, and hadn't eaten the entire shift. Silly bugger!
I gave him some candy, but I found out the following week that he'd forgotten everything I'd showed him and only did what was on the site orders I'd written, which are a guide, not a walk-through. I'm going to have to break down and write a massively complete set of orders, I suppose, and get new guards to sign them. Ah well, later.
That weekend (yay, my blog is catching up!) I again caught up with Kibilz, Kami, and micro-elf to go to the Natural History Museum up at UBC. We got there after the guided tour had already set off, but that was probably just as well since the squirt probably enjoyed the unstructured time more than she would have a slowly-moving group of people trying to listen to a guide.
There is some good stuff there, and I may very well go back and take the tour to get more background on the pieces than the plaques (when there are plaques) can provide. I was greatly amused, however, when we went through some heavy doors into a nicely climate-controlled visiting gallery of ceramic pieces from around the world. Everything was behind heavy glass, there were mini-spotlights highlighting things, and classical music being piped in for background ambience. Micro-elf was very quiet in there at first, being very well behaved normally anyway, and clearly feeling the weighty atmosphere. As she slowly crept around a corner, she turned back to us and said "Look, a bench!" and proceeded to climb aboard. That, to her, was more interesting than a bunch of old steins. ;)
For that matter, I remember her at the aquarium a couple of years back, also entranced by the attactions a bench had to offer her. It's certainly a unique fetish in my experience, and it will be interesting to see if she still loves benches as an adult. Take THAT, Dr. Freud!
Did I mention that the guy who bailed during the long weekend is back at my site? Apparently since there were no complaints about his work, he was deemed fit to return to duty. Yay. His first day back (same day we were at the museum) he managed to lock the keys in a bathroom. I love my crew.
I've rambled enough. Have some links:
The Oozinator Delights Children
Will Wright talking at the GDC about the upcoming Maxis game "Spore". I'm almost certainly going to pick this up.
And finally, if you haven't already seen it: Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
Instead was a guy with a clipboard, clearly from the building, asking if I'd sent in my census material and if not, had I planned to do so?
I wish I could tell you that I didn't participate in the national census for a reason, like the one sent to me by Kibilz showing how the software that allows you to complete the census online was written and is processed in the US, meaning all of that information is available to the US government under the Patriot Act. But not.
I just forgot. Although I'm pretty sure I didn't throw the thing out. Pretty sure.
Ah well, it prompted me to blog, and that's a good thing.
I had, at last count, five blog windows open. I have this habit of starting blogs, and then thinking "I'll get back to this", but never do. Which is all fine and dandy, since I will eventually get back to them. Unfortunately, you install one teensy little update that requires a reboot, and unthinkingly (look, a bunch of browser windows open! I'm sure it's nothing important) proceed, and that ends your droning and slightly hostile prose. Meh.
For the entry that should have been May 4, the Filipin-Pho did a piss poor job (even for him) the night that I told him he couldn't go home early even if he showed up for work earlier than scheduled. So I confronted him about it, and he did the usual evasions that I've become so used to from the rest of the motley crew of "guards" that have sieved through my site.
"I patrolled fully!"
"No you didn't."
"I went into all of those rooms!"
"No you didn't. I have an electronic record of everywhere you went. If you got access, and you're not a ninja, it's recorded."
"I went in all those places, I don't know why it's not on the record. The record must be wrong."
"The record recorded the full staff complement that day and the day before, got all of my entries right, seemed to pretty much nail everybody accurately... except for you. Would you care to hazard a guess as to why? Not to mention your apparent invisibility to cameras."
This went on for a bit, as tediously as the bit recounted above, until the light finally dawns in his eyes, just like it does for all of the other people I've had this discussion with: the results are all timestamped. Some diehards will continue to argue once they realize this, remembering how their parents must surely be too stupid to understand what's really going, but not the Filipin-Pho. He switched to a different approach:
"I know that nobody came in the building, so it's okay that I didn't patrol as much as you wanted."
"If you don't patrol, how can you know that nobody came in? Your lack of patrolling doesn't indicate any particular awareness of the status of the site."
"Nothing ever happens unexpected here."
"Yes, and we'd prefer it stays that way. But because something didn't happen yesterday, or the day before, or for the previous ten years, doesn't have any bearing on tonight. The client has requested, and is paying for, patrols in the manner and frequency which I trained you for. Bottom line."
He softened briefy at this point, and then tried (with what I assume was some sort of "you know how it is" attitude) this gambit: "I get tired of unlocking and locking doors."
Jesus, Jethro, and Homer Christ.
Of course this went on for a bit, and he got sullen. Every excuse he made was exactly that - an excuse. I've got a site to attend to that has requirements by the client and our own company, and that's that. Any attempt to alter that by him is met with what it deserves: a swiftly delivered and detailed "Nuh uh!".
He accused me of trying to be a Cookie Monster, that I was being hard on him because I was trying to get promoted to senior management. He told me that I was doing it exactly right for that.
As though it's some sort of slap to administer, or even be promoted for that matter. Clearly he was running out of material.
The previous night, during the Can't-Go-Home-Gate scandal, he mentioned that he'd finish out the month and then leave. I brought this up during this conversation and told him that if he was unwilling or unable to abide by the site orders, I'd be happy to mention it to Scheduling so he could get a site more to his liking, since I could probably get through to them faster than he himself could.
That remark came back to haunt me later, as he started telling me that I wanted to get rid of him because I mentioned talking to Scheduling. Bah.
Upon mentioning the site orders, he said that he noticed the "official" site orders and the working site orders were markedly different. He said that I had written them (I did) and that it was just want I wanted the guards to do, not the client. He said that it was his discretion what he did and didn't do while he was on site, and that it was none of my business.
He was grasping. The official site orders (I told him, as I had told him previously) were obsolete before I started there, and that the client and our company both had approved everything in my revised version (true).
After that, he stopped talking to me. For the rest of his stay on my site.
Ah well, it seemed that he actually improved markedly. Both electronic records and the employees who saw him seem to agree on this point. Good for him for giving in to the inevitable. Some stubborn fools would argue with a tidal wave.
-----
For one of the weekends in May, I was informed (by dint of a guy showing up on my site for training) that Moroccan Girl wasn't going to be available, so Scheduling had moved Hospital Guy's shift from afternoons to mornings, and I was training a new guy to do the afternoon shifts, but just for this weekend. Meh, whatever.
So a little after eight in the morning on Saturday, I got calls from both Valium Wailer and Operations. Hospital Guy didn't show up for his new shift.
Even though I had just worked eight hour before, and had maybe got three or four hours of sleep, I bit the bullet and went in to relieve Valium Wailer. He was tired and hungry and not willing to stay for even an additional half shift. I don't blame him.
En route, I found that nobody had bothered to tell Hospital Guy about the change in his shift, and he couldn't show up for it. But he said that he could definitely do the new shift for the following day. Fine, a brief snafu but it's fixed.
Ha. That's right, ha.
The morning passes, and I get relieved in the afternoon. I head home, kind of zonked from the lack of sleep and lack of stimulation both, but I stay up so that I can sleep during the night. Until... the call.
It was Operations, telling me that Hospital Guy had just called them and said that he couldn't and wouldn't come in tomorrow (Sunday) morning, due to "religious obligations".
Now, the day that I trained Mr. Hospital, he went on and on about how he was Moslem and why it was so great (also great was that he'd seen everything - things I couldn't handle if I was there, things like the fifteen grand he'd spent on the interior of his car, etc). Now, spank my ass and call me Charlie if I'm wrong, but Sunday holds no particular obligation on a Moslem. Not to mention that he'd already said he could do it.
I told Operations to hold on while I made some calls. Ops is already pissed at him.
So I called up the new guy I'd trained and asked if he'd be willing to slide from the afternoon shift to morning. He was. In fact, that worked out better for him. He wished he'd had the morning shift on Saturday as well, leaving me to wonder why in the hell Scheduling had shifted everything around instead of just filling the hole in the first place.
Then I called up Hospital Guy. He went off for a while about how his shifts had been moved, and "They can't just do that, can they?". Finally I told him that I'd moved things around and his normally scheduled shift was back to being available, the one he went to every other weekend, could he be there for it?
"Sorry man, I have terrible stomach flu. I've got diarrhea and I haven't eaten all day."
"I... see."
"Well, I'm sure that [our company] can provide someone to fill the shift."
"It's a trained position. It'll be me that has to fill in for you on my day off."
Pause.
"Sorry man, if there was any way I could do it I would. Tell you what, any day you want to take off - I'll cover your shift."
"You're not trained for my shift, you're only trained for weekends."
"Oh. Well, I'm sorry for this. I'll make it up to you."
"If you're not coming in, you're not coming in. Bye."
And I called back Operations. Neither of us was surprised to learn that Hospital Guy mentioned nothing about his religious obligations to me, and nothing about his terrible stomach flu to Ops. I guess he hasn't learned that the trick about lying is consistancy. Removed from the site.
Ops asked for suggestions on how to fill the site, and I told them to try to get hold of Filipin-Pho (yeah, he was a dick but I'm still supposed to try to use the lower-paid people before I use myself) to start his shift four hours early, and stretch out the morning guy's shift by four hours. Two twelve hour shifts and the day is covered.
Ops said (and I should have known better) that they'd do it, and to assume it's already done.
Of course, it wasn't and I ended up with ticket in hand for a movie being called to go in. Sigh.
I ended up giving the new guy the afternoon shifts on weekends (his request), and I trained a really grumpy and strange lady for the weekend mornings (as our pregnant Moroccan left). Problem solved!
Until the long weekend, that is.
The new guy, I'm going to call him Heap of Flowers for some reason, pulled my personal number out of the contact list in the site cell phone, and called me for the week and a half leading up to the long weekend. He wanted it off.
I told him that it was way too short notice for me to do anything about it, so he'd have to work it out with Scheduling. I had no problem with him taking it off if there was someone to fill his shift.
Even though he seemed to understand that (every time), he still kept calling me to ask if he could have it off, and that Scheduling wasn't calling him back. Same answer every time.
Finally he talked to Scheduling, and got told that the schedule was full and he couldn't have it off. So he asked what would happen if he just didn't show up (warning sign number one). I told him he'd be off the site and probably suspended, depending on the trouble it caused (long weekends don't leave us with a lot of spare bodies). He then asked if his friend could cover his shift for him. No, his friend isn't a guard, isn't licensed, and doesn't work for us. He couldn't understand why I nixed this idea, saying "Nobody would know!" (warning sign number two). Dumbass.
He outlined that he had a church outting to Kamloops that he'll have to pay for even if he doesn't go, and that he'll make less money during the long weekend than the cost of the outting. I told him that he should have scheduled the time off in advance, that lots of people want to take long weekends off, and that vacation time is scheduled three months in advance.
Of course, he didn't show up for his shifts. Subsequent calls indicated that he'd gone to Kamloops. I'd anticipated this, and decided I didn't want to go into work for a change.
So I lied.
I told Ops that I was already in the Okanagan, several hundred kilometers away, and couldn't possibly return in time to help anything. ;)
Grumpy old woman's shift we stretched out a few hours, and my Field Manager came and babysat the site for the remainder of the empty shift. He didn't patrol though, so that sucks. The following day the grumpy old woman trained (trained?! This was her first or second weekend there - she's not qualified to train! Arrrrrgh!) some dude and he did the missing shift.
I tried calling him in the middle of his shift, and he didn't respond. After a few tries, I had Ops radio him and he didn't respond. They told me they'd get him to call me when they got him. His excuse for not responding when he finally called me? "I must have been in the elevator."
For twenty minutes? Nice try.
He'd been sleeping - I found the hole in the records. I even found the record of my missed calls in the cell phone's log.
The bed in the first aid room had been disturbed.
Ah well, the weekend passed.
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In other news, I finally delivered the Christmas present that my folks had been waiting for for quite some time. I know, I'm a jerk for taking five months to do something that would have taken up a weekend at the outside, but that's what I did.
They have a new computer. I've had the parts for a long time, but I just didn't get around to throwing Winblows on and doing the updates. It's an easy thing to put off, but I really shouldn't have. Still, they've got it now and, since their old one had died the week previously, it was fortuitous timing.
Oddly, the biggest hit was the card reader that came with the dvd bundle. They have a digital camera, but had never pulled the 200+ pics off before. Even though I front mounted the USB ports, the card reader is even easier to use. Yay for random fate!
Kibilz and Kami, and their little elf came to town. We saw X-Men 3. I think we all wish we hadn't. We thought it blew some significant chunks. The mutant-power-using scenes were short and/or not that good for the most part, the story was edited badly, and it just didn't give a viscerally satisfied feeling afterwards. The review from Mr. Cranky (four bombs!) tells more:
X-Men: The Last Stand
If you want to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hollywood is a cesspool of whoredom and back-door deal-making, just look at the credits of the writers responsible for this monstrous piece of crap.
Between them, Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn have written "XXX: State of the Union," "Elektra" and "Inspector Gadget." Now admittedly, screenwriting is a profession where one has very little control over the final product, but just how much talent does it take to write lines like "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" (unless you're William Congreve) and "take cover!" There are also two uses of the word "bitch" that I found offensive, but more than that, I found them lazy. They're unnecessary and pointless, and that in itself is profane.
Maybe there was simply a hack reunion going on while the movie was being made because the producers also brought in director Brett ("Rush Hour 2") Ratner, who has about as much talent as an avocado pit. He's replacing Bryan Singer and it's obvious that any personal connection to the material is now completely gone. "X-Men 3" is utterly witless, soulless and utilizes the kind of music that, were it played in an elevator, would inspire riders to shatter their skulls against the walls to seek relief. Seriously, I could easily do my whole review about the music. Imagine Barbie from the sorority down the street jamming her iPod buds into your ears and blasting the entire "American Idol" repertoire at a volume of "11" until the battery runs out and you get some idea of the kind of torture I'm talking about.
Ratner and the writers churn through their character development like starving squirrels discovering a secret stash of nuts. This edition begins with the government announcing that scientists have developed a cure for the mutant X gene. This sends Magneto (Ian McKellen) into a paranoid fit and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) into defensive mode. Meanwhile, all the mutants, including Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), are trying to figure out what to make of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who's come back from the dead and has incredible new superpowers, including one that allows her to stand around and stare off into space while doing absolutely nothing for seemingly hours on end. Seriously, Janssen has this look on her face throughout the entire movie that screams "Help me. I'm in a really bad movie and I know it."
Internet chatter about the film has been dominated by curiosity about Angel (Ben Foster), a winged mutant whose ability to fly seems to stem from the fact that he'd easily get his ass kicked if he landed in one place for too long. Sadly, you could cut out every scene the character is in and the film would lose nothing, except maybe some audible groaning.
Hopefully, I made my last stand during an X-Men movie when I got up to leave the theater.
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To be fair, some of my friends say they enjoyed it. It probably didn't hurt that Vinnie Jones was cast as Juggernaut. ;) Although I honestly thought that Angel was played by Dawson from Dawson's Creek. Ah well, since I watched that show less than a handful of times, I was more familiar with the actor when he was in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
I got me a haircut the following week by this cute young Australian girl. She was really into caressing me, even when she wasn't cutting. I couldn't decide if she was flirting with me or if it was just what she did. Reminded me of when I would molest this other femme that used to cut my hair.
Shut me down in conversation, though. I let her lead (I normally hate talking to someone cutting my hair, as I like it done as fast as possible), and she mentioned Chernobyl. She'd got into reading about it a few months back and we talked about it for a while. I mentioned that the year or so after the sunsets here were notably coloured, due to the volume of dust that had been kicked straight up and trapped in the northern hemisphere. I suppose we're almost due for a plague of cancer related to that. Anyway, I asked if the sunsets in Australia had been coloured differently as a result.
She said "Well, I don't remember. I was three."
Sure, rub in my age. :P Still, it was an okay haircut, so I can't complain.
Riding the SkyTrain home one night, I got to talking to an attendant that I've seen for a couple of years. He asked if I was coming home from work, and asked what I did. Upon hearing I did security, he asked if I'd ever considered working for SkyTrain. Since the Canada line will be done before too long (that's the arm that's going to run from Vancouver Community College up Cambie), they'll need more attendants.
But for infant CPR, I have the qualifications apparently, and if you're working full time it's four ten-hour days per week. Starting pay is $50000/year.
Granted, you need four days per week for that and at the start they only guarantee you two, but if you can get that third day you're styling, and there's always lots of "can you fill in?" work apparently.
When the site is running stable (laugh if you will, I just mean that I have some trained monkeys there) I think I'll hit St. John's and pick up that course, and toss my name in the hat.
It's not exactly awesome work, but it's roughly the same as what I'm doing now but with more pay.
That same week, on Friday, I trained the guy who was to replace Filipin-Pho. He showed up after having already worked that morning, and he was somewhat tired. I noticed that as the shift dragged on he was lagging more and more, and was finally just shuffling behind me, not even looking around.
He's diabetic, and hadn't eaten the entire shift. Silly bugger!
I gave him some candy, but I found out the following week that he'd forgotten everything I'd showed him and only did what was on the site orders I'd written, which are a guide, not a walk-through. I'm going to have to break down and write a massively complete set of orders, I suppose, and get new guards to sign them. Ah well, later.
That weekend (yay, my blog is catching up!) I again caught up with Kibilz, Kami, and micro-elf to go to the Natural History Museum up at UBC. We got there after the guided tour had already set off, but that was probably just as well since the squirt probably enjoyed the unstructured time more than she would have a slowly-moving group of people trying to listen to a guide.
There is some good stuff there, and I may very well go back and take the tour to get more background on the pieces than the plaques (when there are plaques) can provide. I was greatly amused, however, when we went through some heavy doors into a nicely climate-controlled visiting gallery of ceramic pieces from around the world. Everything was behind heavy glass, there were mini-spotlights highlighting things, and classical music being piped in for background ambience. Micro-elf was very quiet in there at first, being very well behaved normally anyway, and clearly feeling the weighty atmosphere. As she slowly crept around a corner, she turned back to us and said "Look, a bench!" and proceeded to climb aboard. That, to her, was more interesting than a bunch of old steins. ;)
For that matter, I remember her at the aquarium a couple of years back, also entranced by the attactions a bench had to offer her. It's certainly a unique fetish in my experience, and it will be interesting to see if she still loves benches as an adult. Take THAT, Dr. Freud!
Did I mention that the guy who bailed during the long weekend is back at my site? Apparently since there were no complaints about his work, he was deemed fit to return to duty. Yay. His first day back (same day we were at the museum) he managed to lock the keys in a bathroom. I love my crew.
I've rambled enough. Have some links:
The Oozinator Delights Children
Will Wright talking at the GDC about the upcoming Maxis game "Spore". I'm almost certainly going to pick this up.
And finally, if you haven't already seen it: Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
posted by Rimmy at 18:31
1 Comments:
Hello Gordon, Its Good to see you!
heh...verrrry interesting stuff...now I'll always feel safe where ever I go. Go for that other job chum.
Duh DWEEEEEEEEE Duh Duh Duh DWEEEEEEE DOOOWW!!!
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