Happy Happy Joy Joy!!!

I received the happiest news I’ve received in quite some time last Monday! I was accepted for the promotion and won’t be unemployed come December! This is excellent news on so many levels.

-I won’t be out scavenging for jobs with like 10% of America.

-I get more responsibility in a job I already love. Well, love is an exaggeration because it’s not like I would rather be at work than at home or anything but as a means of bringing home bacon while doing something that is interesting and challenging and where I don’t have to deal with the public, who can often be crazy or angry or both, I like my job A LOT!

-I will continue to be able to go to school and receive tuition reimbursement.

-The extra money is going to make life a lot easier and less stressful.

-It really re-invigorates my work ethic, which had been lacking lately after the layoff blues.

While this week has been overwhelmingly positive, it has also been a very uncomfortable one at work. I’ll admit when I was called in to see my manager after about 5 consecutive people who had just come out of there red-faced with either rage or tears, I put my chances of getting the job about as high as my chances of being offered a swimsuit model contract. Therefore, I whispered quietly to my co-workers “My turn.” When I was informed that I was being offered the position it was all I could do to stay in my chair. Of course I was told to keep this confidential- an absolute impossibility. I had two choices; lie or give their stock BS answer of “I don’t feel comfortable talking about it,” which is exactly the same as saying “Yes, I got the position but I’m going to awkwardly avoid the topic.” I chose option #2 so I could sleep at night.

It was a relief when they finally announced the results. They are kind of shocking. About half the positions they are filling with external people. I am also one of only 4 band 25s to survive. Even three of the band 30s didn’t make the cut. Making matters worse, there is some serious controversy going around the office because two of the people who got it are young, attractive women just out of high school. I know these two people very little so I can’t comment on their qualifications but I can understand people being upset. I’m obviously not going to detail some of the jokes going around about why they got the job as I’m sure you can imagine what people are saying. I’m pretty sure none of it’s true and the hiring leaders simply saw a certain attitude and drive in them that they were impressed by but it’s gonna be an ugly 2 and a half months of raw emotions until all the laid off employees’ last day.

A lot has happened since I last wrote in my blog. Some good, some bad, plenty of ugly. I supposed the biggest news is that I received layoff notice last month. Really the majority of our department received did so it’s not like I was singled out. My position will be dissolved December 18. As much as that sucks I have to be thankful for the huge amount of notice. I’ve never heard of that much notice before and I can be appreciative of that. There are also other things to be hopeful for. There are quite a few positions that are replacing those that have been eliminated, which I have applied and interviewed for. I should be finding out if I will be getting one of those within the next couple weeks. It would mean a promotion if I did. If I get it, things are looking quite bright. If I don’t, some dark days might be ahead.

This summer has been punctuated with some strange occurrences. Hamlet swallowed a fish hook in the Uintas. A driver on a rampage forced another driver on the road into a telephone pole nearby, destroying it and taking out our power for several hours. Keaton finally got fixed at a mobile spay/neuter clinic. Cindy and I hung out with a drunk Mark Kobel and Shauna Lake at a gay night club. I could go on and these are all stories worthy of a good blog entry so I might have to go into more detail later.

For now, I’ve got another piece of news— I’m starting school today! I’m doing something which I should have been doing a while ago and taking advantage of my company’s significant tuition reimbursement to go for my Masters. Despite the layoff notice, Amex is at least honoring the reimbursement for this semester. That’s why it’s a lot more riding on this job I applied for than just money, it’s my education as well. Anyways, I’m taking two classes this semester; a computer class and a math class. The first should be cake. The second scares me a bit. It’s got kind of an intimidating name, Quantitative Analysis, and I’m going into it as a person who had gotten my math generals over as quickly as possible so that I could go on with my English classes and never have to think about another math problem again. Well, times have changed and now I’m determined to get an Accounting Master’s to balance out my education (employers aren’t exactly throwing gobs of money at English majors) and it’s gonna be a hell of a lot of math. And my math skills are rusty. And by rusty I mean a 100 year old bright orange nail in some wrecked ship at the bottom of the ocean rusty. I was hoping to never have to think about parabolas again.

It’s gonna be a long long road to a Masters (I’ve got 14 classes to take BEFORE I even get into graduate school) and I’ve never tried the going to school while having a full-time job thing so I’m sure life is going to be hectic, but I’m very serious about getting there.

Laffy Taffy

I have decided what my dream job would be. I would love to write jokes for Laffy Taffy. I really think I would be good at it too. I don’t think this because I consider myself good at coming up with jokes. I think this because apparently no one good at coming up with jokes works for Laffy Taffy. Someone brought a bunch of Laffy Taffy to work today and we’ve been laughing alright but only at how horrible these jokes are. Here’s a small sample of jokes that have been appearing on my wrappers:

Why did the witch fly her broom? Because her vacuum was too heavy.

When is homework not homework? When it is turned in.

And my all time favorite: What is yellow and has a mask? A Lone Lemon.

Huh?

The Break Room Lady Who Isn't Vindictive

I met a very irritating woman a few minutes ago. I went into the break room to heat up my lunch. Someone else was just getting their food out of the microwave. I looked around the room for a couple seconds to see if anyone was waiting for the microwave but everyone is just sitting at tables so I put my food in. I put the timer on 1 minute. I stand back and after about 15 seconds, some woman probably about my age sitting at a table says “You’re lucky I’m not a vindictive person or else I would stab you with my fork.” I glance over at her and notice she is looking at me and I am completely confused about what is going on until she adds “I was in front of you waiting for the microwave.”

My food was getting close to done now but to be polite, I ask her if she would like to put her food in. Then she gives me a sarcastic “No no.” I argue that she would have been less vindictive if she just went ahead and stabbed me with her fork instead of sitting there glaring at me for the next 30 seconds until my food was done. So anyways, I have probably made a permanent break room enemy but at least she’s not vindictive.

I have recently spent my lunches perusing some of the most hilarious online reading material since Chuck Norris Facts. All two people that read this blog need to go check out www.the-editing-room.com. It has all of these movie scripts that sarcastically trash everything that comes out and makes you see movies in a whole new light. You gotta see it for yourself to know what I mean!

The greatest time of the year!

I decided that if it was possible to freeze the weather of one day to use over and over forever, that day would have been yesterday. Just a few small puffy clouds in the sky to admire. The temperature was cool yet not too cool to wear a t-shirt. No strong winds. Great sunshine to breeze ratio to keep your body completely comfortable. I’m not nearly as outdoorsy as some people but not to be outdoors yesterday evening would be a total waste!

It’s sad how short that perfect transition between Utah’s freezing cold winters and blistering summers are. The next 4 months might as well be named “hot,” “hotter,” “hottest,” and “no seriously it gets even hotter than that.”

I’ve had the strange urge to surf lately. I’ve never surfed in my life and have never been that crazy about beaches yet now I want to go live in a summer home by the beach and surf all day every day all summer long. I think I’ll do that. Oh wait… I live hundreds of miles from any beach and have a wife, three furry children, a job and a mortgage. My summer plan is foiled!

Blockbuster Time!

I’m a big fan of midnight premiers for huge releases. There’s just something about the energy in a crowd of superfans that makes you enjoy the movie, even if it isn’t very good. I was going to midnight premiers even in the days when it was a pain in the ass and you had to wait in line for hours and hours followed by a sometimes nasty rush for decent seats with jerks trying to save large rows of seats by themselves.

Now, reserved seating makes it about 10 times more convenient to go to premiers because you can show up whenever you want. It’s so nice to show up at the theater 15 minutes before the show rather than like 5 hours. Lack of seat reservations is the main reason that I think Century 16 sucks aside from more uncomfortable seating and crappier screen resolution and Megaplex is the way to go. Unfortunately Megaplex is far away and Century is literally a couple blocks away.

The last two times I’ve been to Megaplex were for very uncrowded shows and there have been people sitting in the seats we reserved. Something about this is extremely aggravating to me so maybe I don’t have road rage but I have theater rage. It would have been very silly to kick them out of the seats since most of the theater was empty but seriously, they reserved their seats before us and obviously selected different seats so are they just going out of their way to be a-holes or what? I wouldn’t be surpised with teenagers the way they are these days. I’d be willing to bet 10 bucks right now that our reserved seats will be occupied for the next show we go to on Friday and I’m getting to the point that I don’t care whether all the seats around them are empty, those people are getting out of our seats because someone needs to take a stand! It’s out of control and you don’t see it happening at classier theatres like Capitol and Pioneer.

Anyways, it seems like it’s been a long time since a movie came out that was big enough to get me excited. But now it’s getting close to summertime again and it’s blockbuster time! Wolverine, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Transformers 2, G.I. Joe, there’s just too many big movies coming to name and I plan on seeing lots of premiers this summer. I’ve already bought tickets for Wolverine and IMAX Star Trek, oh yeah!

It's a conspiracy!

I’ve been obsessed with this movie for a couple days now. It all started a few years ago when I saw in the news that the actor playing Andre the Giant in his biopic, Matthew McGrory, died during filming. So this project seemed pretty much cursed from the beginning but I wanted to see it because I’ve read about Andre the Giant’s life and it is pretty fascinating and would make an interesting movie. Then I heard they cast a new lead actor who is like 7 foot 7 named Daniel Gilchrist and resumed production. I just recalled the other day that this movie ought to be finished by now so I checked IMDB and, sure enough, it came out last October.

But here’s where the mystery begins- it seems no one that has seen it has lived to tell of it. I’ve googled it extensively and there are no reviews and not even a single legitimate claim that anyone has watched it. There is more mystery surrounding this thing then Roswell. Netflix has the movie in their database but it can’t be rented. The trailer for the movie can be found all over the place, including YouTube, yet no one is actually able to verify the full film’s existence. This is a full-fledged conspiracy! I have a few theories of what the explanation could be:

1- The movie is so horrendously bad that all viewers died of disgust in the theatres and the government had to step in and plan a huge cover-up operation to protect those related to the movie and their families from a bloodthirsty public.

2- Everyone who had seen the movie was secretly killed by hit men hired by the movie’s producer in order to keep them from spreading the word of this horrendous movie and ruining his reputation.

3- The movie was so horrendously bad that all theatres refused to offend their patrons by showing it.

4- It’s an enormous hoax that managed to fool film websites all over the internet.

I just don’t know, but someday I vow to uncover the truth behind Andre: Heart of the Giant!