Life proceeds apace
Apr. 6th, 2018 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterSo, it's me again.
As a quick follow-up to yesterday's post, after research and consultation with friends, I think I'm going to end up going with this refurbished Dell Latitude from Discount Electronics. It'll probably cost between $200 and $250 once I've added Windows 10 Home and bumped the memory and a few other things. So, I'm not going to be able to get it today (unless someone wanted to be nice and PayPal me a couple hundred bucks out of the goodness of their heart—hey, I can dream, can't I?). But maybe when my next paycheck arrives in two more weeks. If they're out of stock by then, I'm sure they'll have something roughly equivalent in the same price range.
I've been putting in an extra hour of overtime every day this week; if I'm able to do the same next week, my next paycheck will have just about enough extra money on it to buy me that laptop. Even if they don't need my overtime next week, it'll still be a nice bump.
It's been really busy, the last couple of weeks. The thing about being in a call center that's staffed largely with temps is that the temps are inclined to jump ship as soon as an offer for a better job comes in. So we've been losing people gradually through attrition, until suddenly we're back-to-back calls for most of the day. We've got more people in training ready to hop on soon.
Personally, I'm happy to be on permanently. I could wish the pay grade was a little better, but it's at least a regular salary, I got a nice bonus and slight pay bump earlier this year, I've got great benefits, and I've even been able to put in some overtime. And there's always the chance I might be able to move over to a better permanent position within once I've been here for a whole year—which date is coming up surprisingly quickly. At the end of May, I'll be able to start scoping out internal job postings and seeing if anything suits my fancy better. Though I'm actually doing surprisingly well at this job, so I have the luxury of being able to pick and choose.
Getting back to the computer, the main reason I want it is because my brother was kind enough to pass along to me a still-functional bigscreen TV that a neighbor didn't want anymore. It's an older model, without a great breadth of viewing angles, but it's still got a pretty good picture when I'm viewing it dead on. I've got a Chromecast, so I can broadcast from various video services to the TV, but I want to be able to hook a computer up to it and use it for the Rabb.it shared viewing sessions that make up the majority of my video viewing usage—and hook up my USB Blu-ray drive to it for some disc-movie watching as well. That's where the computer comes in.
I'd thought to be able to use my old MSi laptop for it, at least until I could afford something better, but when I took it up to the computer repair guy yesterday, he gave it the hairy eyeball and suggested that it's so beaten up and battered that it's time to see about a new one. Which is why I started getting interested in looking for a new one yesterday. I'll see what the repair guy says about that old laptop and whether he can get it working again inexpensively. If so, I can maybe limp by with it for a while. But if not, then I'll see if he wants to keep it for parts and that will be that. It's not like I have anything important on it at this point; it hasn't even worked for months.
Suppose I should close this entry out and get ready for work. Got another hour of overtime plus an eight hour shift ahead of me today, after all.
As a quick follow-up to yesterday's post, after research and consultation with friends, I think I'm going to end up going with this refurbished Dell Latitude from Discount Electronics. It'll probably cost between $200 and $250 once I've added Windows 10 Home and bumped the memory and a few other things. So, I'm not going to be able to get it today (unless someone wanted to be nice and PayPal me a couple hundred bucks out of the goodness of their heart—hey, I can dream, can't I?). But maybe when my next paycheck arrives in two more weeks. If they're out of stock by then, I'm sure they'll have something roughly equivalent in the same price range.
I've been putting in an extra hour of overtime every day this week; if I'm able to do the same next week, my next paycheck will have just about enough extra money on it to buy me that laptop. Even if they don't need my overtime next week, it'll still be a nice bump.
It's been really busy, the last couple of weeks. The thing about being in a call center that's staffed largely with temps is that the temps are inclined to jump ship as soon as an offer for a better job comes in. So we've been losing people gradually through attrition, until suddenly we're back-to-back calls for most of the day. We've got more people in training ready to hop on soon.
Personally, I'm happy to be on permanently. I could wish the pay grade was a little better, but it's at least a regular salary, I got a nice bonus and slight pay bump earlier this year, I've got great benefits, and I've even been able to put in some overtime. And there's always the chance I might be able to move over to a better permanent position within once I've been here for a whole year—which date is coming up surprisingly quickly. At the end of May, I'll be able to start scoping out internal job postings and seeing if anything suits my fancy better. Though I'm actually doing surprisingly well at this job, so I have the luxury of being able to pick and choose.
Getting back to the computer, the main reason I want it is because my brother was kind enough to pass along to me a still-functional bigscreen TV that a neighbor didn't want anymore. It's an older model, without a great breadth of viewing angles, but it's still got a pretty good picture when I'm viewing it dead on. I've got a Chromecast, so I can broadcast from various video services to the TV, but I want to be able to hook a computer up to it and use it for the Rabb.it shared viewing sessions that make up the majority of my video viewing usage—and hook up my USB Blu-ray drive to it for some disc-movie watching as well. That's where the computer comes in.
I'd thought to be able to use my old MSi laptop for it, at least until I could afford something better, but when I took it up to the computer repair guy yesterday, he gave it the hairy eyeball and suggested that it's so beaten up and battered that it's time to see about a new one. Which is why I started getting interested in looking for a new one yesterday. I'll see what the repair guy says about that old laptop and whether he can get it working again inexpensively. If so, I can maybe limp by with it for a while. But if not, then I'll see if he wants to keep it for parts and that will be that. It's not like I have anything important on it at this point; it hasn't even worked for months.
Suppose I should close this entry out and get ready for work. Got another hour of overtime plus an eight hour shift ahead of me today, after all.
