Archive for February, 2007

Since everyone else is doing it

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007

Here's what I ate today. Can you not tell I work with an office full of snackers? (Although it was easy to turn down the second/third/fourth cookie, the Tim Hortons snack-run and the McDonalds lunch run when my excuse was “I have to write down what I'm eating to show my friends online!”)

  • Single serving of strawberry yogurt
  • Tim Hortons white chocolate/macadamias nut cookie
  • Bottle of water (08:40am)
  • Bottle of water (10:40am)
  • Black Forest Ham Sammich using 12grain bread
  • Bottle of water (12:50pm)
  • Single serving peach yogurt
  • One cup of grapes
  • Chicken (drumstick + thigh) shake'n'bake style
  • Large bowl of fried rice
  • Handful of Pitted Dates
  • Large glass of milk (1/2 chocolate + 1/2 1% white)
(Original forum unavailable, sorry)*

That’s more than enough for today.

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007

Well now that I’ve blogged enough to cover the vast amount of food that I’ve eaten today, I figured I should post what it is I ate.  I’m doing this because so many of my friends are, I thought I’d jump onto the bandwagon.

  • Single serving of strawberry yogurt
  • Tim Hortons white chocolate/macimadia nut cookie
  • Bottle of water (08:40am)
  • Bottle of water (10:40am)
  • Black Forest Ham Sammich using 12grain bread
  • Bottle of water (12:50pm)
  • Single serving peach yogurt
  • One cup of grapes
  • Chicken (drumstick + thigh) shake’n’bake style
  • Large bowl of fried rice
  • Handful of Pitted Dates
  • Large glass of milk (1/2 chocolate + 1/2 1% white)

And that’s my day!

I thought I broke my computer

Tuesday, February 27th, 2007

but only the network is wonky. Meh. It gave me a great excuse to go to yoga. Yoga was bendy. No breakie though, as per Filipe's suggestion. After giving in and accepting that I may never be able to do a proper backbend or camel pose, my very next class I was able to accomplish both. I continue. Now my vice is my runners lunges, to build the strength in myself to keep from dropping out of the pose early.

Can’t believe the non-customer service

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

Sometimes I can’t believe the non-customer service we are told to provide the customers of the company I work for.  I know I complain a lot about my work, what can I say?  It’s a popular topic considering it is about 1/3 of my life, and 1/3 of my life I am not conscious, it’s a major part of my every day.

Anyways, this situation is partly the customer and partly us.

Buddy calls, irritated as shit, and wanting to talk to my supervisor.  And she obviously knows why he’s calling and wants me to avoid passing the call to her.  So his question/rant is where is the truck with his order.   So I told him I’d find out and call him back.  I find out his delivery should be dropped around 3:30pm that particular day.  That’s apperently not good enough.  He starts getting really agitated in general (but towards me since I’m the one on the phone) about how he was told his order would be packed up at 12:30 and arrive an hour after, which he thought meant 1:30 pm.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that they start packing at 12:30 doesn’t mean they finish immediately.

But from his standpoint I see his reasons for anger.  He’s had his people sitting there waiting to unload this truck for the past two hours.  They’re getting paid, probably a lot for what they do, and they’re not doing it.  And he starts going on about how the other companies all come in the morning like they promise, where we don’t.

Well, we have the monopoly on the product we sell, problem being, we can be jerks and no one can do anything about it.  We’re the only game in town.

But yea.  Some companies have “cut-off times” when they can continually add to their orders until said time and then they can’t for the day.  Most people the cut-off time is 12 noon, for their orders to be delivered before 11am the next morning.  At noon, the orders are processed and the back starts picking them.

This company’s cut-off time is 3pm.  Why I don’t know.  But that means he can continually change his order until 3pm.  Meaning it won’t get packed up until the morning.  Meaning there’s no real way it can get to his location in the morning if the trucks are on their second run at that point.  But this guy just didn’t see it that way.

But his totally valid complaint, came from when he needs something picked up.  It shouldn’t take 3 or 4 hours for every single order.  Some I can see, if it’s lots of weird random stuff in small quantities, but to tell someone it takes 4 hours to pick one box, is just stupidity.  And sometimes we have these drivers here waiting for over an hour while we deal with their paperwork.  And that’s just … wasting their time and money.

And… I couldn’t help but feel for this guy.  He was obviously irritated.  He ended up getting to talk to my supervisor, who is normally a calm person and got her shouting back at him, probably because he was making her go deaf (I was holding the phone pretty far from my ear and could hear quite clearly)

I dislike companies that have monopolies over a product/service.  They always take advantage.

Lottery? Easy money or tax the stupid?

Sunday, February 25th, 2007

So at my work there’s lots of people and there’s lottery pools GALORE. Everyone that wants to there’s a general pool, then there’s one-off pools. Then there’s the “private” pools between two or three closer-knit co-workers.

And I’m sitting back most of the time wondering how people afford all these lotterys. I’ve joined in on a few of the one-off’s when it was a big gigantic lottery for shits and giggles. And I joined in on the Princess Margret lottery that’s $100/ticket with a limited number sold and where you know exactly which charity the money goes to.

But I listen to people sometimes. and it baffles my mind.

A few people at my work are talking about how much money they spend per week, or per month on lottery tickets, both the picking-numbers ones and the scratch cards. And… that’s crazy. I can understand some fun in buying one ticket a week. Or even two tickets a week when it’s a twice-weekly draw. That’s 4 bucks a week, 16 bucks a month (thereabouts) That I can understand.

But buying into multiple draws, at 2-3 bucks per ticket, every week, plus cards, and spending nearly $50 on tickets? To win…. not a whole lot? Generally… more tickets? I would honestly rather keep my 50 bucks a month (that’s $600/year!! more than I make in one week!) and do something else.

Like the Millionaire for Life draw that’s at the end of the month. For 20 bucks you get 7 unique lines where 1 could land you winning one million bucks a year for 25 years. And I was debating, should I spend my 20 bucks on 7 lines of this lottery? Or a bottle of vodka?

I bought the vodka. At least I *KNEW* I was going to get something out of it.

At the same time, I hold no jealousy over people who DO win the big jackpots. I’ve seen some people win jackpots. I don’t like what they turn into.

I think this all stems from my highschool economics class. Where my teacher actually said that the easiest way to get more money out of the general public for the government was by creating a new lottery. Because the lottery is taxing the stupid. I think that forever changed me.

Lotterys are fun, but when you’re spending that much money I think it can be classified as a gambling addiction.