Giving raises, firing folks.

So as of Thursday of last week when I dropped my boss off at the airport for his long awaited cruise, I am the acting dude in charge for Med IT Associates. I called Charlie as soon as I left the airport to alert him that the day was now in honor of me and we getting paid time off.

As far as the job goes, things are just about like normal. Charlie calls me more now because I'm the one he asks if there are anymore assignments to be taken care of during the day. I also have gotten more (but not a LOT more) phone calls from just random client locations because a computer isn't working very fast, or a connection is down, or what have you. These are the calls I was worried about, because I just don't take a lot of these calls, and usually Alex will get them and decide who needs to go out and fix it or just do it remotely from his office. Now I have to decide these things. And a lot of these extraneous locations I don't know much about so I end up driving to them just so I can seem more on top of it than if I try to remote in, even if I don't understand the problem.

That being said, there haven't been any problems I couldn't take care of yet. I'm pretty happy about that. There haven't been any problems where some MR/CT tech calls me and starts using medical terminology I can't understand. Those are the ones I was worried about. And right now I'm just making phone calls and getting lots of phone calls. Alex left me with a short list of projects that he wanted me to finish up while he was away. I'm about halfway through the last one. Woo!

And also seeing as how I have a key to his house and he'd rather the place not get ransacked, he's given me the right to hang out over here if I want .. use the hot tub, TV, house in general while he's gone. He'd do that anyway, but he thought it'd be nice if people saw the lights on at night while he was away. You know, to scare away the boogie man.

I'm also a part time highly paid housekeeper. I'm having to feed the fish and water the plants on a semi regular basis. I figure as long as the fish appears to be alive when they get back, that's good enough for me. The plants I can fake as well. I mean, I'm watering them, but who knows why this one is looking so peek-ed. Oh, and he didn't say anything about this, but I decided to check the mailbox and see if he put a stop on that while he was gone. And the answer is no. That thing was totally stuffed. Good thing I decided to look. Oooh, bills.

I've gotten about 4 calls from numbers I didn't recognize while typing this. Gotta love it.

Can you say "skinflint"?

No, I'm not calling anyone a skinflint, I really am seeing if people can say or do say or even KNOW this word.

It started about a week ago. I don't know what the context was, but I used the word "skinflint" in a sentence and Lacey was like, "A what?" "A skinflint. You know?" No, in fact she did not.

So I mention in an email to Annette the other day that I need to get some music for her wedding, and I'm not a skinflint, but I just need to know if I should buy it or her. What do I get back? "A skin what?"

OK, seriously, I am NOT the only person who's heard of this. So I'm at RCA (one of our clients) this morning, so I just go through all the office personel and ask them "Do you know what a skinflint is?" These ladies are all older than me and have families. If it was a generational barrier, then this should take care of it. "A skinflint? Is that something sexual?"

Lame.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinflint -- Educate yourselves.

What can I say? Blogs are suckin...

Yes, that's the news of the day. I haven't posted in over a month (I think? I didn't even look at the date on my last blog post but it was a long time ago) and I'm just going to post about how no one is posting anything. And this is the first time I've checked ANYONE'S blog in a long time.

So I guess the blogging craze in our time and in our group has finally died down. I remember the good old days (I guess they were good). Back when you checked Annette's blog multiple times a day because sometimes she would go crazy and do a 3-update day. And you'd always be waiting to see what game Kerr was now playing or how much he got beat up on the ice that day, or what he decided to cut down in the middle of the night.

Or what about that month where my roommate Charlie Nasworthy started a blog, wrote like his life depended on it, and then just about dropped it a month later? Or everytime you went to a church function and hung out with all those uber cool folks that we love, and then went back home after the weekend and refreshed the blogs all day and for the rest of the week waiting for the updates to see if they would write about what you guys all went out to do?

I'm not advocating a new insurgence of blog posting. It's past that time. We're in a world of myspace'ing and facebook'ing. A world where you can type "Hi! How are you!?" on someone's wall for the world to see. It's boring and it sucks, but it's lazy and that's how we like it. We also enjoy Superpoking each other, except now I hate it because they added the built in timer, so now when I want to try to level up and get new actions (50 POKES TO GET NEW ACTIONS!? WHAT IN THE WORLD), it tells you, "You Superpoke'd too soon ;)" Get off my screen with your stupid smiley, facebook. And take your lame pokes, too.

One day I got an email from my cousin David (the Moluffin), and he was talking about revisiting old blog posts, and he sent me a link and said, "Check out this gold." Turns out it was my blog post about the road trip to Montana. So I read through it again. And it was gold. Those were the days. The days when we cared enough and were bored enough to write our entire lives out on the computer and post it on the internet. And for some reason everyone read it (I'm sorry for all of you). But now it's all about posting 1,001 pictures of our latest road trip and just saying, "Here are pictures of my road trip!" Or joining a lame-o facebook group called "People that have caring attitudes but don't really give up the time they need to the widows and orphans and also eat with their left hands while they type on facebook with their right LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!" Did I already mention lame-o? Doing it again is ok, too.

Where am I going with this? No idea. I didn't really even have anything to talk about. Life goes along the same as always. You go to work, and when you get home you're glad you're not at work, and you really don't feel like TALKING about work, much less typing the whole crappy day up. And I think that's where we've all come to. Desiree just recently posted about what was probably the worst day she'd had in a long time ... but then she didn't describe it. You know why? Because why would you want to rehash the worst day of your life ... in type? And now I'm starting to wonder why we EVER used to do that.

What about blog posts where you cut/paste an IM conversation snippet that you thought was funny? Well, I don't do that anymore because I never chat online anymore. Seeing the trend here? I don't know when it happened, but the computer is less and less the place that I spend any of my time. I don't hate it. Then again, I work on broken computers day in and day out and the idea of spending all the rest of my life on them isn't too appealing.

And Youtube. Oh, youtube. How I hate you. Sure, there are plenty of videos out there that I've watched and been like "wow, that was pretty cool," but for the most part it is SUCH a waste of time. I can't recall the number of times you'll talk to someone who's been on the computer for a while, and you ask what they're up to and they're "Youtube'ing". Like, just following one link to another link to another link through masses of videos. I mean, how many loud baby burps do you need to see? Music videos? Videos made by random people set to music? Video blogs? AMAZING VIDEOS!!?!?!!!??! Home videos? When did we get to this point? It's like 3 minutes of television over and over and over. We can't even concentrate on a 30 minute sitcom anymore. Seriously, WHAT HAPPENED!?

And when I say that, I also wonder what happened to me. Because not too long ago, I would have been that guy that sat there for hours and hours playing games online, or surfing the web for absolutely no reason. Now I check my email and www.ocremix.org for interesting music talk (which I rarely find these days) and that's it. I wonder what's changed. I'm not really sure. But I know I'm glad. Even when I'm bored with nothing to do, I know that at least I won't be glued to the computer for hours on end.

David had a great new ideology not too long ago. He was talking about how when you sit around all evening and watch TV or play video games, it's almost because that's what you "default" to. Sure, sometimes there is a show that you really enjoy so you make the time to see it, or there's a game you just bought that you really want to play through. But the rest of the time, you usually end up thinking, "Hey, what am I going to do tonight?" And after some slow deliberation, you decide that you're lazy and that sitting on the couch watching an entire evening on Must See TV is the thing to do. Even if you don't really enjoy the shows, or the shows aren't very wholesome (which shows are?), or what have you. But what are your goals? They don't have to be longterm, end-of-life goals. Short term goals work just fine. What is it that you want in your life? Sometimes the goal is, I don't know ... finishing college. But is that all? So when you finish your homework for the evening, you've really sorta reached your "finishing college" goal for that day, and it's off to the couch?

Just as an example, say you've been thinking about your friends ... church friends maybe, in particular. And you think, "Hey, I haven't talked to them for a while, and I want to keep our friendship close and I really care about them." So then, what can you do? Sit down and write them a long email telling them what's going on and how much you care about them? Give them a call and lend them an ear? What about your spiritual life? Do you yearn for the Kingdom? It's hard to do as a young person, I feel, and sometimes it seems way off. But God's promises always are fulfilled no matter when they happen. There are plenty of examples in the Bible where someone prays for something at it happens instantly. Elijah and the fire from heaven, Jesus healing the sick right when they asked, etc. But there are plenty of things where God promises that something will happen (Abraham's heir, the rulership of kings in a dynasty for a certain number of generations, Jezebel & Ahab, etc) that doesn't happen instantly, but somewhere down the line it ALWAYS happens when it's a promise from God. But sometimes we get bogged down and forget that the Kingdom is on its way because time has been moving on and on for a long time. Days, weeks, months, years come and go without the fulfilling of His promise ... but it WILL be fulfilled. How much do we believe that? Is it enough that we want to do more to understand Him, to read the Bible and study His truth, pray and meditate? Is the Kingdom of God one of YOUR goals? Or is Must See TV your main goal?

The whole point is: there is always something that can be done to better yourself, and it's not always something you won't enjoy doing either ... but it's so much easier just to say, "well, I just feel like sitting on the couch and vegetating. And you know what, I NEED this. It's been a long day, and I just want to do nothing." I think that's a sad excuse. Take a nap if you're that screwed up. Don't fill your brain with garbage. Figure out what your goals are in life and do everything you can to achieve it. There isn't much time left to decide that you'll get around to it tomorrow!

Again, this whole post took a turn I didn't expect. But it really just kept to the core aspect that I started off with. There isn't a whole lot going on on the internet anymore with the old group of bloggers. And I call this "a good thing". Get out there and live your lives, and do it the right way.