Oof-dah.

It's not only Wrath of the Lich King that's been stealing my time.

First and foremost: If you're in charge of writing paperwork-- any sort of documents I have to sign to make sure X Y or Z does or does not happen-- I hate you. Yes, you, personally.
I'm in the process of moving, which means I have to deal with my lease paperwork. My lease is handled by a company, not one single person, and I fall not entirely into two categories of what is an acceptable reason to get out the lease without penalty. So, I'm getting out okay, but my filed contract has a post-it on it explaining the circumstances. A post-it.
Also related to my moving is losing my insurance, and having to find health insurance to cover me until I'm set back up.
Man, you want to see something scary? Go look up what it costs to insure yourself. When it's coming out of your paycheck bit by bit, it's easy to not think about, but Christ.
Since I'm about to lose my insurance, dental included, I got to take a happy trip to do something which probably should have happened years ago: I got my wisdom teeth out. Apparently my dental insurance actually has a set amount it will cover per year, so, we ended up billing dental for the two teeth that had broken through, and medical for the two that hadn't. Paperwork.

Admittedly, Wrath has been stealing my time, and I tanked a few instances pretty stoned up on painkillers. This next part is babbling about WoW, so if you don't play, feel free to skip. ;)
My thoughts so far: There are some quests that feel very, very epic. Culling of Stratholme needs to be *more* epic, and they need to explain why we're helping his dumb ass in the first place. I'm finally feeling some motivation to level my character in the other faction-- Past, what, 40, all the quests are the same- STV, Gadgetzan, Plaguelands-- then you hit Outland, and what quests are separate are a) minor or b) equivalenced- such as a quest for each side to blow up a certain contraption. Different NPCs, same quest. On the other hand, you have some pretty epic quests in Northrend that are only to one side, or the equivalence has to be different. I really want to know what Wrathgate looks like from the other side.
From an RP sense, it's interesting as well, since we're learning a lot about history and doing some very major things along the way, and there's plenty of chances to wonder about your character's reaction to something outside the ordinary-- would your character torture this NPC for information, or not? And do you do the quests anyway, just handwaving and saying your character refused? Or do you actually skip them?

I've got some thoughts about politics, and some things that happened over the holidays with my family, but they're for later.

-C

If you say insightful things too often, people start coming to you to talk.

In real life, I tell a lot of stories about zany adventures. My friends have commented that I live an interesting life. No, no, I say. I'm just the scribe. It's the other people who have the stories.

I have two stories today. One is from WoW, one isn't.

Story number one. I'm doing some minor housekeeping and accounting in WoW, when a girl I know asks if I could critique her characters, because they suck, she says. (I play on an RP server.) Most people, their character is an extension of their own mind in some way-- what they want to be, what they would be, what they have been (details like being a Night Elf or former Stockades inmate not withstanding). I gently advise her of this fact before pointing out that her characters are emo, mean, or incapable.
I find out later that she's asking because one of our regular RP buddies finally snapped at her. This has been boiling for months, so I'm unsurprised, but I understand how she was. We talked about friends; she asked me if we were friends-- I said not very much, but I'm not hostile to her. We talked about the psychiatric profession. I'm hoping that maybe being the third person to voice to her that she *should* talk to a counselor will tip the scales. We talked a little bit about my own chat with the psychiatrist, so I hope that will make it a little easier on her, knowing that someone she knows has done it and not had the world collapse on her.
She said, "You're a good listener, C, even if we're not really friends."
I said, "Yeah, every once in a while, I say stuff that's insightful, but if you do it too often, people stop listening to you altogether. Or they want your advice all the time."
I told her that she was handling this more maturely than the last person I had to have a similar talk with, who is still not speaking to me. (That girl is a story for another time.)


I excused myself from her, to write a note to another friend, who has been having some trouble with boys lately.

A real estate agent shows you a house. It is a beautiful house, with everything you didn't even know you wanted, well within your price range. The real estate agent tells you that she feels obligated to tell you that it did have a very minor ghost problem, but they've had priests come out and it's fine now. Do you buy the house?
You order an affordable but kindof mid-quality cut of steak. Your steak is late coming, your waitress tells you that there was a mix-up, it's going to be a bit longer on your steak because they had to cook it over- but they're upgrading it on the house to the really good cut of steak. Are you happy with the outcome?
You are on the search for the Holy Grail. You have dug through centuries of myth, theft, under-the-table sales and conspiracy theories, and you have found it! The person who has it now is well aware of what it is, you can feel the power of god radiating from it-- and he's going to *give you* the Holy Grail because it has a gem missing out of one side and he hates it. Do you gladly take it, realising this guy is a buffoon?

If you're a 20-something young man who answered yes to all of that, I have a great girl for you to meet.

She wrote a blog post about her troubles, and I sent her a note in response. I told her she is smart, mature, attractive. I told her if she needs a hug, I'm here; I told her that while I can't say I've been in her exact situation, but I can relate in tiny tiny ways. I told her I have a recording of a guy saying that "smart, attractive, a nerd, and actually likes you" is the holy grail of women.
My heart goes out to her-- she's intelligent, eloquent, mature, incredibly kind (and diplomatic when people are assholes to her), and she really is attractive. (I didn't say specifically in my note to her, not wanting to sound like a perv, but she's got great legs. She's probably the only girl I've seen who can wear those short shorts without looking skanky or horribly disproportionate. )

Too good to be true? Yeah, she hears that a lot. Usually shortly before she gets to the part of the date where, because she's painfully honest in addition to all her other good qualities, she has a talk with them that ends with her turning her head and putting her fingers on her Adam's apple.

I don't know. I almost think she shouldn't tell people till later in the relationship, but then what? They can not take the chance to get to know her, or she doesn't tell them and they get mad at her for dragging it out.

It's a good thing she can be diplomatic to assholes, because she's sure dealing with a lot.

Diplomacy and the workplace.

I was talking to a friend about some stuff happening at my job recently, and she said "C, every time you talk about work, I'm glad I don't work in [your branch of the media]."
I was talking with another friend some time ago about the same things, and he said that what I was complaining about was why he quit the media altogether.

Now, I love my job. Really. The problem is the people I work with. I'd do it for free if it showed up under my door every morning and I never had to deal with anyone else. My meager paycheck is bribing me to show up to the office itself.

One of my coworkers, we shall call her "Evil Ad Cow"(She's not really evil, but she is quick to anger and indignation), is between me and part of my job. There are a few very small tasks I can complete in the morning without her, like opening the programs and Web sites I'll be using, but then I'm stranded until she produces the specifications of what I can use where. I have a morning prep shift from 9 a.m. until 11 a.m., this sheet of specifications was not coming into my hands until 10:40. Questioning her about it revealed that she had until noon to get it to us, and she got it to us by 10 or 10:30 as "a courtesy," but she'll see if she can't get it done earlier. (She is in another department, which has apparently not been in the loop about how we're going to get more work done across the day.)
This week, the sheet is in my inbox before I even show up! I finish my work, get it all done-- and I stop by her office on my way out, to thank her and tell her that I really appreciate her getting the sheet to me early.
"Thank you, C," she chirps back, "I had some time before a meeting this morning, I'll try to keep getting it to you early."

Look! Look how easy that was!


On the other hand, we have a co-worker of mine, whom we will call Dylan (for reasons that will become apparent if I ever tell the Other Story about him). Recently, Dylan looked over a project he had not been involved in and found it to be very sub-par.
Dylan took all the e-mail addresses he could find in our department (missing some people, including a few who did not work here anymore) and sent out a long email with the subject line of" [DEPARTMENT], You really dropped the ball!"
He went on to tell us how we (I say we, but it's two people per project and this wasn't mine) made simple mistakes that could have been caught if we had any idea what this had been about, and since we clearly didn't we should have looked online, that we should have changed X (what he wanted changed was a valid thing for this type of project, even if he disagreed), and dropped an all-caps F word along the way.

I guess in training meetings where I've explained how diplomacy gets you your results so much faster, I hadn't been looking pointedly enough at him.

"Hey guys, when you're trying to get something worked out with another department, I know sometimes it's frustrating. But if you go over and say, '[Department!] You got this wrong and you need to fix it right now,' they will get defensive and not work with you. If you go over and say 'There's a problem, and these are the options for you to fix it,' they will 99% of the time fix it on short order. So apply some tact and diplomacy, it works wonders."

Dylan's complaint about other departments is, verbatim, "they get defensive and won't work with me." But he goes over and says, loudly, "You got this wrong and you need to fix it right now" whenever there's an issue.

I'm baffled at how he's never absorbed this, never absorbed that this chat about diplomacy was based on how his own words don't work, but then I remember the Other Story and say "Well, I suppose he's an egocentric nutjob misanthrope, so I shouldn't be surprised."

At any rate. As you might guess, the people who "dropped the ball" did not come forward seeking absolution, and in fact a meeting was scheduled for our immediate boss, the boss of our department of departments, and the Editor in Chief to have a happy chat about Dylan and what they wanted to do about this.

However (breaking news, I found this out as I was typing this), Dylan opted to quit the day the meeting was supposed to happen.

Ha, ha, ha. Good riddance.

Moral of the story: If you don't want the office to think you're a dickhead who's impossible to work with, don't be a dickhead who's impossible to work with.

---

Grammar of the day: Dangling modifiers.
Incorrect: "The dump will only be taking tree branches from city residents that were damaged during the storm." Residents damaged during the storm probably have more important things to worry about than who will take their tree branches.
Incorrect: "The dump will only be taking tree branches that were damaged during the storm from city residents." The city residents were not what damaged the branches during the storm.
Correct: "The dump will only be taking tree branches that were damaged during the storm, and only city residents are eligible."

Living and working in hellholes and paradise.

There's a saying about careers, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." I've got to add, "Work where you love, and every day is a vacation."

I've been on a camping trip the past week or so, followed by a few days of tooling around the city. And I loved them both.
Lucky lucky me, I work in a field where I can get a job nearly wherever the hell I want. I'm going to push to get my internship done out there, get my foot in the door for a long-term position.

I'm not one of those people who says that if you hate your job, you should just quit-- because I've had people say that to me (before my current job) and it's infuriating. While it's nice for a person to assume you have the requisite skills, it's not exactly sympathetic-- especially in the current economy and when one lacks things such as savings to fall back on.

But, I interviewed a career advisor the other day, and he told me what he says to get people to pay attention: If you work 40 years with two weeks vacation per year, that is 2,000 Mondays you will have to get up and go to work, whether you want to or not. His point is to be careful picking your major and make sure you go into something you actually like; my point is that it baffles me when someone comes home and bitches about work all day. Find something you enjoy about it, try to do something about it, pick up an other-field-you're-interested-in-for-dummies book-- don't resign yourself to another 1,950 Mondays of hating your life.

(The difference is that the unsympathetic fuckwads think you should turn in your two week's notice right now, damn the consequences, while I think you should start poking your other options.)


By the same tack, don't live somewhere you hate. Again, don't up and move with no savings or prospects, but don't resign yourself to waking up somewhere that's too hot, too cold, too liberal, too conservative, too quiet, too loud, too whatever. Right now? I like where I live, for the most part. It's reasonably liberal, has decent events, has a lot of hole-in-the-wall restaurants where you can get a pile of food for five bucks if you aren't afraid of trying something new. (How to tell your ethnic restaurant is serving authentic food: the kitchen staff the servers the owners the customers are the claimed ethnicity.) It does, however, spend six months of the year making me bitch about "What sort of crazy person lives here voluntarily?" as I languish in front of a fan or chip ice off my windshield. And I've found a place that has the attitude, events, food, and weather that I want. So I'm making my plans.

Upshot: If where you live or work makes you hate your life, then a change of venue is probably worth the effort, even if it's not advisable to move/quit right this second. Look around.

God and Politics with my brother

I hung out with my brother this weekend, spending some 5 hours with him in my little car putting between where we live and work and where my parents live and work. We butt heads a lot -- mostly over my belief that he's a major closet case -- but at least I'm not beating the snot out of him anymore.

He spends his summers working at a Christian summer camp, which he really enjoys. I'm a little jealous, because in my mind it means he gets paid to go to camp each summer, and I *mostly* enjoyed summer camp the years I went. We talked about his campers, and the activities, and the difference between the summer camp I went to in Texas ("Yay, we're all at camp! ... and we're all Christian, neat!") and the camp I went to after our family moved ("Yay, we're all Christian.... and we're outdoors!"). The camp he's working at is toward the middle ground, probably enough to make me feel uncomfortable if I were attending, but not make me feel uncomfortable about the way they're teaching others.

It came around to the fact that his roommate where he's living next year is atheist (or he assumes so, all he knows is roommate does not plan to go to church), and, while he doesn't want to hide his faith, he doesn't want to drive his roommate away, either-- because he's actually done that before and he doesn't want to be "That Guy."

We talked a lot about faith-- because he's clearly fairly devout and I left the church at 14-- and I have to say that should he reconsider entering the seminary, I'd vouch for him (as much as a heathen's opinion would count). He's a shining example, so far, of a hymn I liked way back when, the chorus of which was "They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love."

We talked about a local street preacher, who rails against everyone and everything with such regularity that a friend made bingo cards to pass out and host a game with his sermon (Gays, faith, free square, marriage, prayer! BINGO!). Apparently, last time the preacher was out, Xavier sat out with a dry erase board to quickly scribble "Ask me about God," "Ask me about that submission thing" and so forth, because the street preacher's problem is "a lack of gentleness." He told me about how, the preacher will rail about women needing to submit to their husbands, and my brother will tell the people who ask that, in context, that Bible verse is followed with an exhortation that a man should be willing to do anything to protect and care for his wife, to love his wife as Christ loved the Church.

He said that when the preacher packed up for the day, some of the hecklers waved him over to ask him what he thought of the sermon. "Well, you know... I believe, we're all on the same team, but some people just kick the ball backwards sometimes."

We talked about politics-- actually, I said to him, "Xav, you're fairly intelligent," ("Thank you, C," he says) "but... not to say you're stupid, but you're part of a religion that tends to have unintelligent opinions on this. Abortion, gay marriage. Go."

He took gay marriage first, acknowledged that he did think of marriage as a religious thing and that, by religion, it's one man and one woman. We went back and forth a little, about a secular definition and a religious definition and whose business it is, and he says that the government should be allowed to grant "togetherness" to any two consenting adults who want to sign up (for semantic purposes, he was calling this a civil union, I was calling it a marriage). And, he continued, churches and synagogues and what have you can grant togetherness to any consenting adults they want (he says marriage, i say wedding-age). However, never the twain shall meet-- a religious ceremony should have no bearing on custody, taxes, insurance, etc. If you want to get the civil ceremony and nothing else, cool. If you want to get the civil ceremony and a religious one on top, well, hey, that's cool too. If you want to get the religious ceremony with no civil ceremony, that's your prerogative, but don't expect survivor's benefits from social security or to be acknowledged in any other official instance.

Ideally, I said, it would have been like this in the first place, and then you wouldn't have churches trying to claim that they're just trying to protect themselves from being sued when they won't let gay couples wed there. "Yep," he said, with a facial expression of "too bad someone fucked it up." (except that Xav doesn't swear.)

We moved on to abortion -- Xav being who he is and me having worked with pro-reproductive-rights special interest groups.

He's big on "adoption is an option too," but he realises that it's not *always* an option. Apparently the oral Torah included the specific instruction that, up to the point a baby was halfway out, its mother's life trumped it-- being a life in action rather than a potential life. So, if the medicine available at the time could save one or the other, mother won. So, abortion for health reasons, he says he has no reason to be against. I could maybe have gotten his more specific beliefs about when it is/isn't okay if i kept going, but we got sidetracked by birth control.

Birth control he's in support of. We talked about methods, about how they work, that Plan B will actually not stop a pregnancy if the zygote's implanted, which he was surprised (and happy) to learn-- he feels he can support it now. After that, we talked about when life begins -- because he doesn't really feel comfortable trying to figure that out with no medical education, and because I feel that it's stupid to declare it at conception when more than 2/3 of pregnancies miscarry before 6 weeks. I said "God doesn't seem to think life begins before then," he countered with a Bible verse stating that "I was sinful from when I was first conceived,"-- but he still doesn't see that as foolproof evidence of life-at-conception, because, while humanity makes you sinful, does sinfulness make you human?

We talked about abstinence-only sex education, about the statistic that teens wait on average 9 months longer than tradition sex-ed students-- but then they don't use protection, either because they were never told about it, or because they were told it was ineffective. (I didn't tell him about this comic ) He said the main problem is that home and school each rely on the other to fill in the blanks, and the blanks aren't getting filled.

Upshot of the car-ride home:
Abstinence is ideal, but talk with your kid about the what-ifs.
Birth control prevents abortions. You can't say every sperm or every egg is sacred when your body will waste them anyway.
A woman's life always trumps the life of an unborn child (in the medical sense, not in the "but i won't get to go partyyyyy" sense).
Religious weddings and government-recognised togetherness should not be the same thing.
Women, obey your husbands, but husbands, love your wives.
You can preach without being acerbic, and will in fact win more hearts with gentleness.
You can practise your faith without being overbearing, because scaring away a roommate is not good PR for your religion.

Can't guarantee I'd convert, but I'd go to a church my brother preached at.


--
Today's tidbit from work:
Coworker shows up late from her attempt to get court records. Apparently, "that twat at the courthouse" tells her that she needs case numbers. Coworker told her that she's always gotten them by name before, twat snottily responded "Well, we're about to close, and it'll take a long time to find them."
Coworker relating this: "I almost blew up on her, but then I thought, 'wait, no, Things Not to Do, blow up on someone in a courthouse.'"

On the other hand...

The flip side of getting good service is being a good customer. It baffles me how people expect that yelling and screaming and claiming "the customer is always right" will somehow net them better service.

You're paying someone to do something for you, that either you can't (neuter your dog, tile your floor, make really fantastic food) or you don't want to (clean your house, make mediocre food).
Why should they serve you if you're not worth the money?

One McDonalds I worked at twice banned customers from its store and many more times told the customers that, if they abused the employees, they were not welcome there. In turn, the employees were fairly chipper, because we knew we weren't going to lose our job when someone's fish sandwich meal came to 4.01 and she started screaming at us that she didn't need to pay a penny.
Because, you know what? Your 4.01 doesn't pay for an hour of work, so why should the management cater to *you,* instead of siding with the employees who keep the not-crazy, full-price-paying customers coming back?

I play World of Warcraft, I have characters that can craft things in demand by the general player base. I'll cut you a break if you're polite, such as offering to come to you or throw in some of the materials myself. If you're a thorn in my side, I reserve the right to charge a "crafting fee" when I otherwise don't.

In my real world jobs, if you're nice, I will work with you to get the results you want. If you're a dick to me or my staff, you're going to get a hack job. Hey, I offered to work with you, you're the one who declared that it was fine the way it was. It's not fine, and I have to make it meet my boss's specifications, not yours. Your specifications are last in the equation, especially when you're unwilling to tell me what they are.

And, wouldn't you know it, friends and family in the service industry say the same thing. Be nice, get your cable hookup fee waived. Be a dick, don't. Be nice, and a few magic button pushes get you the best cell phone plan that they don't advertise. Be a dick, and you can pay 25c per text message for the next two years.

I realise I'm beating a dead horse here, that this has been said all over the internet and this is just one more post in the tubes. But surely, these asshats who demand that I check a price for them when they're standing 20 feet away from where to check it (and I'm somewhere else entirely), or say that something is wrong but refuse to suggest why or how or even what they'd like it to be, or threaten to pee in the pool if the lifeguard takes her kids out for adult swim, surely some of them must have access to computers and the web.
I'm sure they do, because they somehow access websites where they complain about the "bad service" they get, that they bring in the dead hamster and the pet store won't replace it because they bought it two years ago even when she threatened to sue them because her little girl was traumatised.

I.. I can't even think of a proper way to end this. Teaspoon of honey, people.

*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

Please call back during business hours...

I've been trying to call my dentist most of the morning. It has mostly been busy, although there have been a few times I've gotten through to the machine, which gives a recorded listing of the office's hours and suggests that I call back during regular business hours.

The hours they list in the message claim they're open while I'm calling.

Doc, I want to give you my business,(Actually, no, I don't, I'd rather that I don't have to see you at all, but since that's not an option and you're the only dentist in a 30 mile radius who takes my insurance...) but you're not making it easy on me.

You'd think they'd try to make the phone call the easiest part of paying someone to do horrible things to your mouth, but I guess not.

I'm sure this isn't deliberate on their part, but it's still less than stellar. I worked at McDonalds, bastion of ridicule as a job for lazy slackers who don't care about giving you service, and we still were required to answer the phone before the third ring.

---
Story of the day, from a coworker:

"Okay, I'm really scatterbrained today, and I'm going to preface that... preface this, with that fact. This morning, I lost my keys, and my shoes, and and the cheese I was making breakfast with. I got the cheese out, then I couldn't find it and I said, okay, I'll eat later. So I went to grab my shoes, and they weren't there, and then I look at my key rack, and no keys.
I'm sitting down, with some coffee and a cigarette, saying "Okay, this is fucking lame" when [Husband] comes up and asks me why there's cheese in the closet.
Keys in the butter dish, shoes in the freezer, cheese in the closet."