The office: Chatter about your job

I worked the door at a bar for most of a year, and I can say that was the shittiest job I ever had. It even beat out the lumberyard; sure, I was chucking bales of lumber around in 40-degree rain, but I'd rather do that than babysit a bunch of 40 year old adolescents for minimum wage.

Example of the fun and excitement: Once, I had this huge (by huge, I mean 6'6", 250 lbs) side of grizzled biker beef walk in wearing a Bowie knife big enough to fence with. I politely informed him that he couldn't wear it in the bar, state laws being what they were. He cocked his bushy Gandalf-eyebrows, leaned over me and intoned, "I don't take my knife off for nobody."

I stood my ground, even though I really didn't want to. I mean, sure I was in the right and only doing my job, but when it came to enforcement, I was about six inches and eighty pounds (not to mention two decades) short when it came to measuring up to this man. In the end, he left the bar without incident, but it was this kind of thing that led me to not be too sad when I was laid off.

Last job I had was working a restaurant on its "cold-opening" day. I was the only dishwasher at the start. by noon we had served 250 people. Come the end I had to call in a buddy and we stole a waitress. 600 people by the end of the day. That was fun.

Something is making people want fast food more than usual lately. These past several days have been busy beyond belief. Very tired.

On the bright side, my boss's boss thought I was doing a good job. She gave me a free movie certificate after I unknowingly took her order in the drive-thru.

@Inverurie Jones: the university I work at is in the middle of what was once called South Central LA. Not exactly the safest place on earth. There are also about 18k students and about 25k employees, so a lot of people.

Seven thousand more staff than students? Wow, talk about 'top heavy'!

I was half asleep when I wrote that and gave the wrong figures. 36K students, about 20K faculty and staff, though it goes higher if you consider contractors whose employment is due to contracts with the university.

Okay, confirmed, I am now an official cart collector for Home Depot.

There are worse jobs; at least it's exercise.

Well, my job for the moment is doing my Ph D.

I enjoy it: the pay is not huge, but it is more than enough for my needs, and I basically get paid to study interesting stuff and to occasionally submit my results to the attention of interesting people. Oh, and for grading homeworks, which is kind of annoying, but all things considered I cannot complain.

Except that, of course, I will now proceed to do exactly that. A few weeks ago, my supervisor asked me whether I could have a look at a certain problem, and I spent a week of work doing exactly that. And I don't mean to brag, but I found the answer, and my proof was actually pretty cool looking. And today, while looking for some related stuff, I stumbled over an article from the nineties which answered precisely the same problem, albeit using a completely different method.

Serves me right to start writing theorems on a subject I know relatively little about without first doing a bit of literature research, but still...

Oh well, at least the proof method that I devised looks like it could possibly be applied to something else, eventually - who knows.

edited 5th Apr '11 2:08:58 PM by Carciofus

Well, I only spent five years in college to get my degree and eight hours taking the EIT, so it's not like I'm not qualified.

The chair came into my class Tuesday to do my annual evaluation. He notified me in advance and of course, selected a lecture day rather than one of the chaos in the classroom days. Those days are way more fun, but OK.

The scheduled lecture was on romanticism and realism. I am a complete history geek, I like to ground people in the era so that the art makes sense. I made some tweaks and then just had my usual class.

My students were fucking awesome. I asked them for stuff and told them to look in their notes and they delivered. I asked questions and they responded. All at once and all over the place, I had to make them take turns. It was a fun class even after he left.

I got home and told Mr. b that I either nailed it or am so completely clueless that I shouldn't teach at all. So, now I meet with the guy next week. We shall see.

At work, we live under the backgroudn reality that if just one of the High Explosive warheads goes off, all of us will be having a closed-casket funeral.

And crappy Navy coffee. Black, no sugar. I've gotten used to it after a decade here.

And our PA system is teh suck. I've been pestering them for a proper phone, but seeing as that we're on those stupid continuing resolutions 9and now this shut-down) there's no money for stuff besides the basic day-to-day stuff.

Oh, and Automated processing systems... arent. We're calling it the Manual process system now, as you need to fix, adjust, massage or tweak the freaking database every five minutes to keep the Production guys busy.

Now in the last coast-down of my week on-call at work. We basically have one of six of us wear that hat, rotating each week. The lucky recipient gets to handle all the "Oh crap, something's broken" calls 24 hours a day, though others help during the daytime. It sucks, but it's good on the old overtime thing.

Runs 9am Monday through the same time a week later.

Hasn't been too bad; the only really big blowup was Blackboard yesterday, and that was bad enough that I had to call the guys that handle that exclusively, and they fixed it. The user session reaping script went crazy, it turns out.

You mean the Blackboard system that a lot of universities use?

First week of work went really well. My co-workers can be a bit quirky but that's not a bad thing necessarily.

Getting permissions to various network locations suck, but this is normal for a new job.

Got treated to a free lunch at a local Mexican restaurant on day 1 as a "welcome new peeps" thing (another guy started the same day as me). Also got a free happy hour on day 5 as about half the group decided an entire day full of meetings required some moderate afternoon drinking on the companies tab.

Current laptop is kinda slow and I had to salvage old computer (well, like 5-10 year old) parts to get a full office set up. Though a newer computer with Windows 7 is on the way with a 24" LCD monitor that possibly shoots rainbows and unicorns or something.

All and all, a very promising first week with a place that's hoping I go permanent in a few months.

Okay, got my orientation out of the way, now just have to go in for several days of training. To collect carts. But whatever.

On Thursday, a patron who was accompanied by two male friends came in to return three books one of them checked out using her account. I personally didn't handle it because student workers aren't allowed to operate the register and I was pretty out of it anyway. The bill came back as thirty bucks. My supervisor almost felt sorry for her and could have waived the fines, but didn't because she thought it was an important lesson. About twenty minutes later, they came back and the girl made damn sure the guy used his own account.

Anybody in the physical labour end of things? Trades or general construction?

I've learned a while ago that while I can vegetate in front of a computer all week, actually WORKING at a desk drives me batty. I need to be moving, one way or another, while earning my pay. So I went for manual labour jobs.

Was a plumbing apprentice for a while, but got laid off and was unemployed for a while. Back as a labourer now, but considering going for a Carpentry apprenticeship.

Not that any of this is what I really want to do, (My real dream jobs being writer of some sort, or voice actor) but you do what you've gotta to pay the bills.

Sometimes find it amusing that I'll spend my days lugging pipes, digging trenches, and using power tools, and then go home and geek out.

My evaluation was good and today's class sucked. Figures.

Going into training in sixish hours, need to sleep.

I get to do lots of physical labor nowadays.

After being in banking for nine years, I now find myself working in a print shop. I was hired to slowly replace the owner's father as the company accountant (one day I will make fancy business cards for myself that read "Chief Staff Accountant" so I can inflate my importance), but for the first month and a half I was stuck on unskilled labor. The owner's a little batshit crazy and took on a lot more jobs than we're really staffed for (there's only six people who work here). When Wal*Mart comes to you for a job because no one else can get it done in the time they want and offers you gobs of money... you make it work.

I'm finally learning part of the job I was hired for, though. It's enjoyable acquiring a skill that will be useful even if this job doesn't work out in the end. Finally I will be an accountant with practical experience.

This is so much more awesome than banking. I actually have some muscle now. I like that.

edited 14th Apr '11 10:54:16 AM by Bur

Sounds like a good thing, Bur!

Okay, there's far more training for the cart collecting job than I would have thought.

Well, I'm done for the week I guess. I was scheduled for thirty six hours of training that I got done in 8-9 hours and the manager is somewhere else until Monday.

Still looking for an engineering job, applied to one that pays thirty five dollars an hour more than I make right now. And one in San Fransisco. I feel dirty now.

FUUUUUUUUUUCK, I forgot to bring sunscreen, now I'm all sunburned and shit.