KeepingYouAwake

I was recently hired on after a 4 month contract-to-hire at the coolest place I’ve ever worked. Hooray!!!  I’m sure one day I’ll move along, but until then I’m remembering the steps along the way, and the things I’ve learned.

My first job was at a call center, telling old folks why I interrupted their dinner (around 4pm) to talk to them about long distance. They were always so happy to talk to me. I’d call them sir or madam. They’d call me dickhead or asshole… God, old people are sweet.

What I Learned: Some old people really are paying way too much for long distance because the rates weren’t competitive back when they signed up.  Oh, and they don’t give a fuck.

I switched to a job working for a friend’s mom, but when I decided to start fudging my hours, that was short lived.

What I Learned: If you’re going to say you were at work, maybe going out to eat during those hours where your coworkers may be is a bad idea. Consider picking up Taco Bell.

Wendy’s hired me to be the back room bitch. Peel onions, take out the trash, mop the floors and wash the dishes.

What I Learned: The chili is made from yesterday’s hamburger patties that didn’t sell (they are stored in a drawer throughout the day) and the “frostys” aren’t made of ice cream, but some weird liquid in a bag.

In a fairly small town, the big news was the new Super Wal-Mart. I started in layaway, which was a sweet gig. We would hide out in the storage, occasionally do weird crap like try out pepper spray as a floor cleaner or race the scissorlift. Strictly professional, of course.  Before I got fed up and quit, they made me a cashier.

What I Learned: When you delete stuff from your layaway, the staff rarely bothers to remove it from your box, so you still get it without paying for it.  Within a limited range, the cashiers can just okay a price difference.  Some are just bitchy.  You can make your own coupons by scanning the barcodes from  real coupons and photoshopping your own.

For a short time, I delivered pizzas.  In a nutshell, I learned that you can make some pretty decent money, but you might get held up for it later that night (not me, but it happened a lot).

When I first moved to Indianapolis, I went to work for Great Expections cold calling people and making them feel like losers for being alone.  I didn’t stick around long…

What I Learned: Places like this make you bring a credit card as proof of ID, then run it to see how much you can spend on it and charge you accordingly.

I’m sure there are plenty more bits of knowledge to pass on, but I’ll save that for another day.

What have you learned from a previous job?

I love movies more than you.  No, I don’t mean that I love movies more than I love you.  I also don’t mean I love you…  I mean, like, in a everything-is-one-with-the-universe way I do, but I think of us as much less awkward friends.  Or awkward friends.  It just depends.  Am I rambling?  The point is that I love movies more than you love movies.

Sure that’s a strong statement to make.  I mean, what if you love movies so much that you married them, PeeWee Herman style?  If that’s the case, I’m sorry to tell you it’s a loveless marriage compared to how I feel about movies.  You can stay together for the kids, but we all know it’s a ruse.

In my single life I went to a lot of movies alone.  I don’t like to talk during the movie, except once in a while to share a comment on something.  I really enjoyed going without the slightest clue what the movie was about.  This has gone well and terribly for me in the past.

I thought The Truman Show was some sort of comedy about Harry S. Truman, and when the stage light fell and the radio called it aircraft debris I called bullshit.  It was an incredible movie because of this, because I learned along with Truman.  When I went to see Wag the Dog I was so let down that I left really early on.  You see, I thought it was a cute movie about a talking dog and I needed an emotional boost.  Instead it was political satire.  Gag.

Sometimes I know what a movie is about and it really reaches me, like when I went to see AI (Artificial Intelligence) and left feeling like the world was artificial and that young android was more full of love than most humans.  Then there was the time when I went to see Penelope and decided that everyone’s too superficial and that Penelope was totally hot.  Nevermind the fact that Christina Ricci is on my list.   Rrowr.  Don’t hate.

Anyway, I don’t get to see many movies nowadays because I have to spend a bunch of my money on this baby thing and on the bills and stuff.  Pretty lame, right?  I know.  God.  It’s fucking tragic.  I did get to see some lately and first of all, I want to say:

Avatar is the best movie ever made.

Argue with me.  I dare you.  You’ll waste your time because I won’t listen to reason.  I’m like that about movies.  I can’t give anything away because I want you to go see it too.  Go now.

I’ll write the rest of this post assuming you might read it when you get back or not at all.  Seriously, it was a really great movie.  I wanted to fight, I wanted to run, I wanted to cry feel hit something and then pound my chest.

I also watched Paranormal Activity a few days ago.  The Mrs and I watched it before bed, in much anticipation as all I’d heard was that nobody who’d seen it could sleep the following night. Holy effing shit.  The scariest thing that happened is that I wasted an hour and a half waiting for someone to kill the the douchebag boyfriend.  Shit.

What’s your favorite movie?

I love tech gadgets, like my new phone, but I know that technology is allowing me to become dumber and dumber.

From an  early age, I decided learning complex math was ridiculous.  Calculators are everywhere and cheap to buy.  So I didn’t need to worry about crap like this.  Complex math could be done with simple tools on the computer, so once that was all available on the web (as the web became more available) I gave up on that garbage too.  I’m pretty bad at math now.  I don’t really care about this.  I always say that if I’m in a situation that requires complex math and there is not a computer anywhere to be found, there are bigger problems to solve.

Later, I got my first cell phone and subsequently started forgetting phone numbers.  I didn’t have to remember them anymore because my phone kept all that for me.  This worked out well, until my phone died and I didn’t even know the Mrs phone number.  Shit.

Browsers started offering to remember passwords for me, and I started forgetting passwords.  There are still accounts I can’t pay because I’m locked out and if I’m going to call them, I’d just as well pay on the phone and move on.  The same goes with email addresses.  I’m hard pressed to think up some emails, because I just start to type a name “Phil” and Google offers back “dial1forgeniusmofo@yahho.com” and I’m set.

Last year, I got a GPS device for my birthday which prevented me from having to learn my way around the new area we’d moved into just a month prior.  I didn’t have to remember any directions, just punch it in (off a note or a text message) and just try to pay attention long enough to get where I’m going.  This resulted in missed turns when I didn’t pay attention…  That’s just sad.  I also keep addresses in that, so I still can’t say what specific town some people live in.

This year I received a smart phone for my birthday.  Now all of my modern conveniences are in one place.  This one device keeps me from having to know your phone number, or even the proper spelling of your name.  I don’t have to spell my messages correctly, or know where you live to get to your house.  On top of all that, it keeps me logged into most sites so I never have to re-login and it saves the info, just in case.

I’m also terrible at remembering names.  If we meet somewhere and I forget your name, please don’t take it personal.  I really do like you and shit.  I just can’t keep names straight, ever. Now what I need is face recognition on my phone and an excuse to hold up my phone to someone before saying hi.

Does anyone else suffer from this, or am I the only one letting tech take my brains?

The lovely minxes over at Toywithme.com are running my guest article today!  I don’t need to tell you how excited I am.

Head on over to read, and while you’re at it click around a bit.  You’ll find some more great articles by RedheadWriting [blog], Mommy Wants Vodka [blog] and Miss Spoken [blog] to name just a few.

Click here to read the post at ToyWithMe.com

I really try to post something every day.  Not even just something, but something interesting.  I really hate when I hit a blog that I love and I find “Hey, I couldn’t think of anything to say today, so here’s a picture of a bunny with a waffle on it’s head.  Actually…  I do enjoy that…  But I didn’t post anything yesterday and, even though I’m busy I wanted to post something even if at the last moment

Tonight I want to share with you, my love for ambigrams.  I bought a book called Wordplay from an artist named John Langdon.  I really liked the idea and bought it just to look through, at first.  One day I took my sketchbook on a mini-hike through a big park and stopped on the trail to doodle something.  The bag I was carrying said “fancy” on the side, and as I stared blankly at that word, it occurred to me that you could flip it pretty easy.  I drew up a rough draft, then scanned and traced it and reworked it in Illustrator.

fancy

Later, with one of these under my belt I decided to try a name.  That’s that people like, right?  Something fancy done with their very own special one-of-a-kind snowflake name?  So I set out to make one for my friend Lauren.  I started with a base of the Shoebop font from Veer.  After a lot of alterations and perfections, I came up with this.

Lauren

I really liked how this one came out and decided I needed one too.  Something darker.  Something tattoo-worthy even though I’d never get my own name tattooed on my body.  I forget what blackletter type I used as a base, but I wanted to add something special.  I made it all emo and deep by making one side day and the other night.  Yeah…  I’m that much of a loser.  Shut up give me back my lunch money, ya bully.

my name...

It might be hard to read.  It’s easier if you know what it should say…  I don’t know… This one’s not a total win, but I was happy with it.

Not all words/phrases/names are suited for flipping/reversing/mirroring.  Sometimes you just get close.  Eh…  Excuses.  I’m sorry.  There, are you happy.  Shit.

This has been a while.  I probably did all three of these a couple years ago.  I drew more then.  I wish I did more now… *tear*  So recently, I decided to make a new one for a friend.  His name is Roger.

Roger

This one has some more depth, which allows me to show you the same image flipped.  So there’s the dealio.

I think what I’ve shared here is that I’m a complete geek.  Thank God most of you guys don’t know where I live and can’t come here to give me wedgies and push me down.

I’m dying to know, do you draw or design?