The R_M Report
Feb. 26th, 2009 02:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterI notice that I haven't really done much in the way of LiveJournalling in the last few weeks (though my Twitters have been dutifully updated daily—but since I keep them behind a cut, I don't know how many of you have actually kept up with that. Not that it could really tell you much more than how I'm feeling at the moment anyway.)
Looking at my life lately, it feels like I've somehow ended up with one of Janet Kagan's Hellspark's proverbial pins of High Change. There have been a lot of changes in my life since the bone break in October—a lot of bad, but there's also been some good to come out of it. Here's the mix.
So, let's see. On February 12th, I was laid off from my tech writing job with a local logistics firm. I can't really say I was surprised. The company's revenues had fallen by a whopping 30% in January—not from losing business, but from their customers' own businesses tightening up. Our company's revenues were based on how much money they saved their customers—so the less money the customers spent on shipping, the less they saved, and the less our company earned. It was at the point where, days before I left, all overtime companywide was disallowed until further notice, and we were even being told to turn our computers off overnight where before they had been having us leave them on.
The writing was on the wall. And to make matters worse, there wasn't really anything left for me to do. I tried to find ways to keep myself busy, but productive ones were hard to come across. So, it came as a shock but not an unexpected one when my supe and her supe called me into his office and told me that they had eliminated my position and there weren't any other openings elsewhere in the company to which I could move. Out went me.
We parted as close to amicably as is possible under such a situation, and they went above and beyond to make sure I got a fair deal—they even made sure all my insurance benefits were paid up through the end of March, before I start on COBRA to extend my insurance further. (Why G.I. Joe could never be bothered to help people with their health insurance, I'll never know.) And my COBRA costs are going to be remarkably low—adding in the premium costs of my non-COBRA coverage, they will only run me about $300 a month.
So I've applied for unemployment and food stamps, and am on track to be approved for both, and life is going on. And the dark cloud is not without a silver lining. My friend Sandy is working for a local advertising agency helping to run a project they're doing called Culturewaves. And he's gotten me an interview for a position there!
Culturewaves is a sort of sociological trend tracker: they clip and collate articles from the Internet, organizing them into sets of "waves." A "wave" is a sort of a broad trend showing one direction in which our culture is heading, as defined by the sorts of things consumers want or need and ordered by hierarchy on Maslow's pyramid. Then, they compile these into quarterly reports and send them to their client companies, as well as updating them on their website. The clients can then use this information in deciding how to invest or what kinds of products to develop. (Here's an article about them.)
I've had one interview there already, and will be going back on Friday. My job would be as a sort of freelance article clipper, or "farmer" as they call it—I would be classifying articles from the Internet and entering them into their content tracking system so they could be collated and processed to mark out those trends. It would not be an hourly salary, but a pay-per-clipping salary—so once I got good at it, I could earn more daily than the old job was paying me, and be happier besides. Also, I could work from home. It's the closest to my lifelong dream of being paid to surf the Internet that I think I'm ever going to get—or, as Maslow would put it, we're talking some serious "self-actualization" here.
The materials they gave me to read at that first interview have really opened my eyes. I've always been interested in sociological trends, and from that point of view the whole thing is really fascinating. Salary aside, I'd like to work there just to learn more about what the trends they uncover portend—not for any possible profit-making on my part, but just for the sake of the knowledge. Arthur Dent once said he had the feeling that "something was going on in the world" but nobody would ever tell him what it was. This way, I get to find out.
But besides the silver lining, there are also some storm clouds on the horizon. A bit of turmoil and a lot of pain is soon to enter my life—and the lives of my relatives.
Sometime in coming weeks, I will be going into the hospital in Columbia, Missouri to have my leg cut open, my bone sawed through again, and a medieval torture device by the name of a Taylor spatial frame installed. This will consist of six pins driven into my bones to either side of the break, and an adjustable frame to hold everything in place while the separated bone regrows.
It's going to make it hard to take a bath or shower and get comfortable in bed, it's going to mean a lot of wearing of shorts and one-legged pants, and it's going to be my bestest, closest friend for six months. I'm not thrilled about that, but it's necessary because of the way my bone has healed crooked. I'm now slightly bow-legged on the left side. To reduce the arthritis risk, I've got to get things, ahem, straightened out as soon as possible.
And that's not all. For the first couple of weeks after the installation, while I heal, I'm going to be living down home with my parents again, as I was from October to January. Then, once I'm stabilized or whatever, I'll be heading back up to Columbia to stay a month in the home of my Aunt Cammy and Uncle Jim, so I can be close enough to the hospital for the weekly visits they'll want me to make in the first month or so after the operation, and so my Dad won't have to keep losing an entire day to get me there and back.
I'm really hoping that my aunt and uncle and I manage not to drive one another mutually crazy.
I'll probably end up missing the April GAME Day that my friends in SpringfieldGAME are going to be putting on April 11th. I'd been looking forward to that. And there will be a lot of pain (and painkillers) from the operation, and I'll be knocked right back to the beginning in terms of physical therapy, I just know it.
But on the bright side, at least it will be a change of scenery, and a chance to visit with relatives I haven't seen in forever, and it will be much easier for my friend![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tbutler to visit me in Columbia than down here. And, on the shallower side, the aunt and uncle have wireless Internet and a big-screen TV.
In more recent and less weighty news, today a 250 gig OEM SATA Western Digital hard drive arrived by UPS. My brother Alex had ordered and sent it because I was out of space on my 160 gig drive…which meant I couldn't install and play Dystopia or the Day of Defeat: Source game that he sent me through Steam. The drive, being OEM, did not include a SATA cable…so I had to make a trek down to Best Buy by bus, and walk a half mile each way from the bus stop to get there and back, to spend $20 on a cable. (Annoyingly, if I could just find the box my original hard drive came in when I built this computer, I'm just sure there would be a spare cable there. But I couldn't, so I had to go shop.)
Tomorrow, I get to put the new drive in, disconnect my old Windows drive, and reinstall Windows from scratch. It was getting to be about time I did that anyway; I somehow managed to screw up my ethernet port drivers so I'm having to connect to my home network by the wireless card I usually use for away from home.
Then I get the joy of tracking down driver disks and installation programs and reinstalling all my favorite apps, copying everything I need from the 160 to the 250, and then reformatting the 160. It's going to take at least all of tomorrow, and possibly longer.
But hey. It's not as if I have a job to take up all my time right now anyway…
So that's how my life has been going lately. Now, I think I need to go get in bed.
Looking at my life lately, it feels like I've somehow ended up with one of Janet Kagan's Hellspark's proverbial pins of High Change. There have been a lot of changes in my life since the bone break in October—a lot of bad, but there's also been some good to come out of it. Here's the mix.
So, let's see. On February 12th, I was laid off from my tech writing job with a local logistics firm. I can't really say I was surprised. The company's revenues had fallen by a whopping 30% in January—not from losing business, but from their customers' own businesses tightening up. Our company's revenues were based on how much money they saved their customers—so the less money the customers spent on shipping, the less they saved, and the less our company earned. It was at the point where, days before I left, all overtime companywide was disallowed until further notice, and we were even being told to turn our computers off overnight where before they had been having us leave them on.
The writing was on the wall. And to make matters worse, there wasn't really anything left for me to do. I tried to find ways to keep myself busy, but productive ones were hard to come across. So, it came as a shock but not an unexpected one when my supe and her supe called me into his office and told me that they had eliminated my position and there weren't any other openings elsewhere in the company to which I could move. Out went me.
We parted as close to amicably as is possible under such a situation, and they went above and beyond to make sure I got a fair deal—they even made sure all my insurance benefits were paid up through the end of March, before I start on COBRA to extend my insurance further. (Why G.I. Joe could never be bothered to help people with their health insurance, I'll never know.) And my COBRA costs are going to be remarkably low—adding in the premium costs of my non-COBRA coverage, they will only run me about $300 a month.
So I've applied for unemployment and food stamps, and am on track to be approved for both, and life is going on. And the dark cloud is not without a silver lining. My friend Sandy is working for a local advertising agency helping to run a project they're doing called Culturewaves. And he's gotten me an interview for a position there!
Culturewaves is a sort of sociological trend tracker: they clip and collate articles from the Internet, organizing them into sets of "waves." A "wave" is a sort of a broad trend showing one direction in which our culture is heading, as defined by the sorts of things consumers want or need and ordered by hierarchy on Maslow's pyramid. Then, they compile these into quarterly reports and send them to their client companies, as well as updating them on their website. The clients can then use this information in deciding how to invest or what kinds of products to develop. (Here's an article about them.)
I've had one interview there already, and will be going back on Friday. My job would be as a sort of freelance article clipper, or "farmer" as they call it—I would be classifying articles from the Internet and entering them into their content tracking system so they could be collated and processed to mark out those trends. It would not be an hourly salary, but a pay-per-clipping salary—so once I got good at it, I could earn more daily than the old job was paying me, and be happier besides. Also, I could work from home. It's the closest to my lifelong dream of being paid to surf the Internet that I think I'm ever going to get—or, as Maslow would put it, we're talking some serious "self-actualization" here.
The materials they gave me to read at that first interview have really opened my eyes. I've always been interested in sociological trends, and from that point of view the whole thing is really fascinating. Salary aside, I'd like to work there just to learn more about what the trends they uncover portend—not for any possible profit-making on my part, but just for the sake of the knowledge. Arthur Dent once said he had the feeling that "something was going on in the world" but nobody would ever tell him what it was. This way, I get to find out.
But besides the silver lining, there are also some storm clouds on the horizon. A bit of turmoil and a lot of pain is soon to enter my life—and the lives of my relatives.
Sometime in coming weeks, I will be going into the hospital in Columbia, Missouri to have my leg cut open, my bone sawed through again, and a medieval torture device by the name of a Taylor spatial frame installed. This will consist of six pins driven into my bones to either side of the break, and an adjustable frame to hold everything in place while the separated bone regrows.
It's going to make it hard to take a bath or shower and get comfortable in bed, it's going to mean a lot of wearing of shorts and one-legged pants, and it's going to be my bestest, closest friend for six months. I'm not thrilled about that, but it's necessary because of the way my bone has healed crooked. I'm now slightly bow-legged on the left side. To reduce the arthritis risk, I've got to get things, ahem, straightened out as soon as possible.
And that's not all. For the first couple of weeks after the installation, while I heal, I'm going to be living down home with my parents again, as I was from October to January. Then, once I'm stabilized or whatever, I'll be heading back up to Columbia to stay a month in the home of my Aunt Cammy and Uncle Jim, so I can be close enough to the hospital for the weekly visits they'll want me to make in the first month or so after the operation, and so my Dad won't have to keep losing an entire day to get me there and back.
I'm really hoping that my aunt and uncle and I manage not to drive one another mutually crazy.
I'll probably end up missing the April GAME Day that my friends in SpringfieldGAME are going to be putting on April 11th. I'd been looking forward to that. And there will be a lot of pain (and painkillers) from the operation, and I'll be knocked right back to the beginning in terms of physical therapy, I just know it.
But on the bright side, at least it will be a change of scenery, and a chance to visit with relatives I haven't seen in forever, and it will be much easier for my friend
tbutler to visit me in Columbia than down here. And, on the shallower side, the aunt and uncle have wireless Internet and a big-screen TV.In more recent and less weighty news, today a 250 gig OEM SATA Western Digital hard drive arrived by UPS. My brother Alex had ordered and sent it because I was out of space on my 160 gig drive…which meant I couldn't install and play Dystopia or the Day of Defeat: Source game that he sent me through Steam. The drive, being OEM, did not include a SATA cable…so I had to make a trek down to Best Buy by bus, and walk a half mile each way from the bus stop to get there and back, to spend $20 on a cable. (Annoyingly, if I could just find the box my original hard drive came in when I built this computer, I'm just sure there would be a spare cable there. But I couldn't, so I had to go shop.)
Tomorrow, I get to put the new drive in, disconnect my old Windows drive, and reinstall Windows from scratch. It was getting to be about time I did that anyway; I somehow managed to screw up my ethernet port drivers so I'm having to connect to my home network by the wireless card I usually use for away from home.
Then I get the joy of tracking down driver disks and installation programs and reinstalling all my favorite apps, copying everything I need from the 160 to the 250, and then reformatting the 160. It's going to take at least all of tomorrow, and possibly longer.
But hey. It's not as if I have a job to take up all my time right now anyway…
So that's how my life has been going lately. Now, I think I need to go get in bed.
