I finally got myself a new job to fill the time. A real job that is. I've been doing odd jobs and working in a bar as a barback and such for the last 3 months since I was fired at FedEx and it's been a hard time searching for a good new job. I couldn't handle another job out of my field of abilities or anything that involves me asking people if they want a side or anything. Or a job where they could eat anything I work with.

What's my new job? I'm an intern. Initially I thought the word intern was nearly the same as bitch, but it turns out interns are fairly interesting. At least if your in the I.T. field. I think I'm very lucky to have found an information technology intern position having just been appliying for office jobs, not anything technical. Well the jobs great, I have my own office, with a big window. I can dress casual on fridays, and I don't have to wear the uniforms the other interns wear. Wait, let me restate that.

I work in a political office. In fact, I work at the house of representatives. First off, I hate politics, I didn't even vote in the election this year. I figured it was a waste of my time. Now I'm working in a place where politics are everything, and who you know is whats important. Little did I know, each state has it's own house of representatives. That's where I work. There are 4 I.T. people including me. So thus, I was immediatly promoted from what typical is a "Page" position where your a bitch and do all the odd jobs, to intern. Which is a higher ranking job and gets much better pay (11.50 to 14.50). Now at this pay level, I wouldn't care if they made me wear my old Wendys uniform. The pages have to wear what look like catholic school uniforms, navy blazer, stripped tie, kakais.. Even the women wear the same thing. So having me come in and immediately, I'm allowed to wear just about anything I want. Today I wore jeans and a t-shirt that says "100% trouble".

I mostly spend my time answering phone calls from people like "why can't i see my emails" "should i download this file from the fbi telling me i need to install something" "my monitor won't turn on when i pick up my phone" typical stupid questions people have. I solve about 75% of my calls with the following answers "Is it plugged in?" "is it turned on?" "are you looking at the right screen/computer?". The other ones generally involve me visiting their office. These are the calls I like.

It turns out since in politics knowing people is key, that people have learned I.T. people are great to know. They found out there's a new I.T. guy and immediatly I was getting calls today from people just so they could convince me to come say hi to him and meet them. Which I happily did. Each time, they would give me candy, pop, or some sort of item that might convince me to come back for more. The trick is, they try and figure out what you like. They actually have a list I found out. Kathy likes kitkats, Ron likes reeses, and Dusten likes M&M's. So they have these stocked in their office. Ron drinks coffee, so they always have the coffee made for him, kathy likes bottled water, and dusten tends to just enjoy people who laugh at his jokes. So what did I go for? What was the trick for them to make me want to come help them first and solve future problems? I didn't give away any answer yet. I just kept taking everything I was given. My plan is to take everything the same so as to keep a variety. I'd had to get sick of one type of candy or such.

Anyways, my job consists of answering the phones for support, and administering the networks, user accounts, and general tech support for hardware and software issues. Todays main task was to replace some old computers with new ones. LCD's for their huge CRT's... I was a very welcome sight for most of the employee's who continued to feed me random assortments of candy and pop. I didn't sleep much last night since I work in the bar still thursday nights and friday nights, but I'm so wired from all the caffeine I had all day, that It's to the point where I just don't care. I'll go into work, drink a few dozen jaegerbombs and life will be good.

I just wanted to give an initial post to let you all know about my job in the political government sector. I already have quite a few stories from this week that I'll post later.

that job sounds fairly bad ass.

i don't like cookies, candy, or soda. you think they would hook a brotha up with some trail mix?

You are so sweet .
I hope it all works out for you .
and you get a pension .

How 'bout some big crack rocks?

you have to get a job at the DEA for that.

dude, where do i sign up? i want a job like that

I could never work a tech support job; I'd get too annoyed and end up telling everyone that calls to read the fucking manual.

it's really not a bad job so far. The problems seem to be very basic and annoying, but the people calling for help are always so nice. There's an unspoken law to always be super nice to the IT department I found out. Much like the whole, they always have the candy thing. I found out there's actually a basket in the IT department full of little candies, mostly chocolate. Between this and the frequent trips to caribou and starbucks downstairs you really couldn't ask for a better work atmosphere. They give me a cell phone to forward all the helpdesk calls to, so if for some reason at any time I want to go downstairs and get a coffee and some food, I just take the phone with me and head on down.

it seems to work,
that if you are nice to people they are usually nice back:
from the book of universal truths ,volume 563


.........................but maybe some one has found this to be, not true?



you may quote me .

That's so freaking wrong! All this time I thought my coworkers liked me for who I am! Not even close...the bastards are just buttering me up for when they wipe the system out because they picked up a nasty virus and need someone to help cover it up.

I hate working with "political" ass kissers...

..ah ,you are looking for depth in a work relationship.
nice is ice and on the top .
who believes ANYTHING at work ?
Its the survival of the fattist.

it's not so bad having them kiss your ass all the time. hell i got a raise because they all like how nice i treat them. pretty much, tech guys are always assholes. it'a general law i suppose. we have the know how, and the ability to fix and repair any stupid thing some user can do to a machine. this makes us a bit more of pricks to people since we get sick of seeing people with bonzai buddy playing catch with weather bug while gator media loader is spitting popups all over to them both each with it's own "my search toolbar" stamped into their IE window. In other words, they click every friggin popup online to get as much crap as possible that's free that is technically something they don't want.

being nice to them really isn't so hard, you just need a sense of humor. when ever i see a simple problem, i laugh a little and have a fun time fixing it. yeah it's annoying to have to walk up 3 flights of stairs at work to some crappy cubicle just to show them by clicking the "play now" button next to a link on a website it will start the live feed of the video, but really, without that meaningful walk through the building i'd just sit around reading websites the whole time with nothing else to do.

which leads me to a great new topic idea.......

I don't even get to see the machines...it's all over the phone...so it's pretty much guesswork...
I deal with the occasional irate customer ok...it's the people that actually work in the same building who, for some reason, seem to think that this entitles them to be an asshole every single time they call that get under my skin...

Well i got a new job now, so the humor behind how easy this last job was is a bit funny... I already have a new problem at my new job.

See, as my full time job I run web design and a bunch of servers and such for some companies and yada yada... If you've ever messed with FTP programs you know how it goes. Pick a server, login, transfer the files. Well I write a lot of my own scripts for file transfers and FTP crap. This makes my job pretty much all automated so I can do other work instead of sitting around keeping track of my uploads. This is where it gets bad.

I haven't had to add a new server to my system in maybe 8 months now. I've had my standard web servers, my local servers, school servers, and work servers. Easy to manage. Until however the other day when I switched jobs, added the new work servers, then had to add a new server for my Grad school stuff. For the next day and a half things went fine. Till suddenly I was getting some weird "denied access" to my Grad school server. Well I didn't really understand, so when I got to work I tried to login, everything was fine. I went to my other job, was able to login fine. Went to class, was able log directly into the local network and machines there fine. Only from home was I denied. I couldn't figure it out. So I sent an email to the guy in charge of the network asking why it appears I've been blocked from FTP for my server....

For the past week or so now, my personal webcam has been accidently uploading to my Grad school server. This wouldn't be such a problem, except it's been transfering some 100kb image every 10 seconds for around 7 days or so. Needless to say, this did not make them happy. So they banned me for a week.

Obviously this is quite a situation to laugh about. Even more so since everyone at my new work found out since we work in the same building as the grad school. Teach me to double check which server is my default server in the future =P

I'm such a loser... I quit that job as a researcher for internet2. I figured i'd take a few months off so i could maybe finish school. The idea was to just do some freelance small website work and odds and ends jobs for people to pay rent and the bills. It worked out great for the past 4 weeks (2 of them while I still had my job just to make sure i could handle this). Soon as I quit the job I go on a week vacation, come home, and I've already gotten tons of new job offers.

I noticed I have an addiction to working. My mom always gave me a hard time when I was growing up about needing to have a job all the time and always be working so I think this is part of why I'm always looking for a job and feel I need one. Not even just 1 job. I'll get 2...3 .... sometimes 4 jobs at a time. Then I'll see an ad on the side of a building saying they are hiring, and I'm in there filling out an application. Half the jobs I apply for either are dream jobs or so crappy I shouldn't even waste my time.

So now a friend of mine kept bugging me for the past week to come to his work and just check it out and see if I'd like to work there. I go in for an interview today just for the heck of it, clueless what I'm even applying for, next thing I know I'm shaking hands and agreed to start work monday. Some good job I did at taking time off working to do school, a whole week off.

my jobs are at different times ,how do you manage that ?

time for an update;

I absolutely love my current job. I'm also working back at the internet2 reasearch center, they took me on as a contract employee developing user interfaces. Seems they were short handed and when my entire group quit they had limited options.

As for my current job, I've been developing web applications and user interfaces for a very large company which I'm going to avoid naming for the sake of any spiders that might grab it and get me in trouble. Even more so, I just was transfered today to a new department in which I will be developing the new website look and feels for the company. The perks are amazing, the facility is a paradise, and the cafeteria used to sell bawls until i drank the entire supply they had and now they only care mountain dew and assorted other drinks which don't compare.

It's actually a very great company to work for, and is currently dieing for more engineers, programmers, IT people... It's funny how much people complain about the "lack of jobs" in the country when I can't even get myself to stay unemployed for a week let alone find a job where I'm not offered tripple overtime to make up for the fact that 3 departments are short 2-4 people.

Also on the side I'm still working at the bar 3 days a week, and doing contract work for not only internet2, but some other smaller web start ups and such... Speaking of which, I'm developing a Pr0n website with a guy that directs and films all this stuff. If your interested in that job of writing reviews for these videos still Bert I'll gladdly let you have entire creative freedom with this stuff. I haven't even found the time yet to revamp the guys site and develop it out professionaly for him yet.

"It's funny how much people complain about the "lack of jobs" in the country when I can't even get myself to stay unemployed for a week let alone find a job where I'm not offered tripple overtime to make up for the fact that 3 departments are short 2-4 people."

If Everyone had your skill sets, and enjoyed what you did as much as you enjoy doing it, and/or had the resources to become capable of doing either or both of those things, you'd probably be singing a different tune. Thankfully for you, that isn't the case, to an extent.

ohbravenewworldthathassuchpeopleinit.

Just cashed in Geo's pension fund that was shi-it because of crap fund managers giving themselves bonus's. and blown it while still walking.

Planning an old age of senile crime ,steaming with a sawn-off and having alzheimers in gaol rather than some care home.