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April 15, 2002
A symptom of the times
I'm sure someone has noticed that my production lately has dropped off rather severely. Sorry. I'm not sure how it can be helped.
The basic deal is that work is getting busier and due to the nature of it -- I work on billable hours -- if I'm futzing around at work, I'm not generating revenue. If I finish what work I have, I'm supposed to find more instead of slacking off for the rest of the day. So, therefore, I haven't really be posting from work.
For that matter, I haven't really been reading blogs from work either, though that is more due to my reluctance to have my web surfing monitored than time. Yeah, they started filtering our email here and, knowing the products that they're using to do it -- after all, we sell the same products to our clients -- I know that they are capable of monitoring all sorts of Internet traffic. So, not much blogging input or output at work. That leaves after hours.
After hours are mostly taken up with me doing stuff. I'm doing a decent job of keeping my New Year's resolution to "Get out more," to the chagrin of my pocketbook. It's getting warmer now, so I can thankfully bump off to do things that don't cost as much money, like spending all of a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in Central Park on inline skates. Mind you, any benefit from that was mitigated by raiding Smith & Wollensky Grill for a big slab of prime rib.
Today was just as beautiful as yesterday, if not moreso. Alas, I'm indoors, but I suppose that's not an entirely bad thing. Dropped off my NJ State taxes at the post office and will have to wait to see if the IRS and NY State accept my e-filings later tonight when I get home. Here's hoping everything is fine and I can just send in my signatures and W-2's and be done with it.
This brings back an interesting memory. Filing taxes last year was a rather unique experience for me. I filed them in Cleveland, all of them, printed out on paper and slapped into envelopes. I was working in Cleveland then and didn't have a chance to file them on the scant pieces of weekends when I was home in the NY metro area, so I had to tote them out to Cleveland with me and find a post office to send them in and get that all important postmark. I hopped a cab to the post office and there, standing out in the cold non-70's and 80's weather of New York, were a bunch of postal workers picking up tax returns on the street as cars passed by. I was thoroughly amused. Drive-through tax filing. Hah!
There aren't many benefits from living in NY metro and commuting to Cleveland for work. I was there for the better part of ten months, starting with two or three days a week and eventually reaching five days a week between November 2000 and late spring 2001. One of the few benefits was that I racked up a few points on my corporate AMEX card. With nothing better to do with them, I cashed in 50,000 points for $500 in gift cards at Brooks Brothers. Daddy wanted a brand new suit. I picked it out sometime in late March and picked it up today at lunch. I'm pretty happy with it. Got it on sale at $399 and had some alterations done that brought the total to just $0.97 shy of $500. What really shocked me was the original price of the suit. I caught a glimpse of it while they were ripping the tag off the sleeve: $1898. Nineteen hundred dollars for a suit? Isn't that a little ridiculous? Maybe it's one of those ludicrous MSRPs that no one ever pays attention to so that they can claim that their prices are 50% off despite the fact that no one's ever sold the suit for more than $999 anyway. Says a lot about markup if they can sell a suit for 79% off the original price. Either that or they took inventory and they're selling a suit for any money they can get back having already had to count the thing as sold.
Wishing I had a PS2 and VF4. Okay, really more wishing I had VF4. I don't care what platform it's on.
Poking fun at MTV, here's something I found on their site regarding Nickelback, a Canadian band:
With all the attention and contention surrounding the Canadian skating and hockey teams at the Winter Olympics, we thought we'd take the opportunity in this week's chart and sales analysis to lavish a little intercontinental praise on Nickelback."So when did Canada get booted off of North America? Methinks some MTV news hack needs to learn the difference between the prefices "inter" and "intra."
That's it for now. In parting, I will leave you with this thought:
"I'm Ozzy Osborne! I'm the Prince of Fucking Darkness! I can't have bubbles!"
Posted by KinCross at April 15, 2002 11:56 AM