Author: Mark Alexander

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And Then the Tornadoes Came

At least in a dream last night.

Work, work, work. It’s always about work.

I was at the office, and one of those dark, ominous storms was moving in. “This is not good,” I thought as I kept glancing out the window. I looked up and saw the clouds swirling in a circular motion and saw the funnel forming.

Apparently others had too, because the office manager came over the intercom and instructed everyone to go downstairs to the inner hallways as we’d done a so many times before in drills. “Not without my laptop,” I thought as I grabbed it, shoved it in its case and then into my backpack, and joined the procession downstairs.

The twister came and went. Our building was spared any real damage, but the adjacent structure had windows blown out.

The all clear was given, and the next thing I know I was walking down the street towards a non-existent (in real life) cafe. The clouds were dissipating and the sun was peeking out. Everything was a mess. As I was walking, another band of dark clouds started to move in, and I hurried my pace. (Where my car was in all of this, I haven’t a clue. Maybe I took public transit to work that day.) I arrived at the cafe and stood transfixed in front of the television, watching reports of the devastation around Denver. I looked outside and saw the band of clouds heading northwest, where Ben was (at his old school). I took out my phone to warn him, and saw he’d been frantically texting me, trying to warn me of the approaching storms. I tied to text back but it wasn’t working.

Suddenly it was night. Nothing came of the second storm, so I left the cafe and started walking to the train station. The wind picked up and suddenly there was another twister in the distance. Buildings exploded as it touched them, causing fires to spiral up into the sky.

Somehow having managed to escape that, the next thing I remember was being in my car, with the sun brightly shining, driving west down Colfax Avenue, noting all the destruction that lined the street. I had finally made contact with Ben and he was all right. We were both heading back home to survey the damage. I worried about what shape our place would be in, but simultaneously thought, “Well, if we’ve lost everything we have insurance; we’ll start fresh in the new apartment.”

And that is when I woke up.

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One Of The Most Bizarre Houses…

…I ever designed.

It was literally a “dream” house, a residence that popped up in a dream sometime in 1999 and so obsessed me for the next few days that I had to commit it to paper (or at least bytes). In the dream it was built on the east side of Twin Peaks in San Francisco, facing downtown.

You entered at street level. Living, dining, and kitchen were all on this level:

On the upper floor was a guest room and sitting area open to the living/dining area below. Not very practical, I know, but it has the advantage of not letting guests get too comfortable:

Downstairs was the master bedroom that I chose to call the “retreat.” The bed fit in the area between the deck and the low bookcase running between the two support columns. Since there are no other bedrooms, this house was obviously designed for a single person or couple.

There wasn’t much to the exterior; a simple stucco finish that relied more on the masses of the house than decoration to make a statement:

I showed these to my boss at the time and she was blown away that I’d do this “just for fun.” I miss those guys. Too bad the company crashed and burned…

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This is Cool

Here’s a thermal photo of a 13″ Macbook Air that pretty much confirms my own experience with the laptop. Warmest parts are the upper center of the keyboard, directly under the CPU and at the top left above the thermal exhaust port:

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I Will Answer Any Questions…


…except those related to abortion.

And Todd Akin.

And my years at Bain.

Also I will not be answering any questions about my family, my residences or my term as governor of Massachusetts.

Questions about my religion or my taxes are also off-limits, as are all questions about my vice presidential nominee’s positions, my Party’s  platform and the entire Bush Administration.

Also no questions about droughts.

Source.

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It’s Not Worth Having a Stroke Over

Assume you’re the overworked, underpaid, and totally disrespected I.T. guy at your company for a minute. Someone has just told you:

“Brandon needs a new phone number in the 801 area code for his cell phone.”

What would you do?

I called Verizon and, using the automated system changed his number. This was to happen two days later at the beginning of the billing cycle.

I let Brandon know this was happening, as well as the new number assigned to his device. So far, so good.

Two days later I arrived at work to find five emails (the first one timestamped 5:45 am), and several panicked voicemails from Brandon. His phone is dead. He’s heading to the airport in 45 minutes to meet one of our directors, and she has no way of getting in touch with him.

It turns out that he needed to do the *228 thing for his phone to be reprogrammed with the new phone—a little bit of information that the Verizon automated system failed to give me.

Once he did that all was well.

The following day, I got an email from Brandon asking if I could have his old number forwarded to the new one. “I’ve had that number for the last ten years and all my contacts know it.”

Of course, when dialing that number now all they got was, “This number has been disconnected.”

I told him I didn’t think that could be done. We gave up that number when we transferred it.

Bzzzzzzt! WRONG answer!

In other words, “I don’t understand the meaning of the word No,” which has pretty much been the attitude of anyone in management regarding technology since I started doing this support crap.

Well, Brandon rattled some cages and soon the CEO’s admin assistant was standing at my cube telling me she knew how to do it. “I used to do it at the law firm all the time.”

Against my better judgment—because I had other fires burning just as hotly that needed attending to—I let her take care of it.

The day went from bad to worse. The admin assistant brought me back into the process at several times because she didn’t have the authority to make changes on the account, and the moment I heard the Verizon rep say “deactivate white iPhone” I knew we were in trouble.  I told the rep to stop the process and that we would be back in touch once everything was sorted out. Short version: the admin managed to get the CFO’s brand new iPhone disconnected (which I had just delivered that morning) and Barry’s old number reassigned to the CFO’s old Blackberry.

We have 20 cell phone lines on our account. All of them are in use. What the admin assistant couldn’t understand was that in order to reactivate the old number (and retain the new one) one of those other phones would have to be disconnected—which we couldn’t do. “They put the old number back on the account. We just have to go down to the Verizon store and get a new sim card, right?”

I got on the phone with Verizon several minutes later, this time speaking to someone for whom English wasn’t her second language, and explained the situation. She told me she could get the now-disconnected iPhone reconnected back to its original number and would then disconnect Brandon’s original number.

The bottom line was the company needed to add a line in order to have Brandon’s old number automatically forward to his new one.

Jeezus.

The Verizon rep told me it would take about 30 minutes to get this sorted out, and since I was already on overtime and at this point wanted to go home and get as far away from this bullshit as possible, I told her to just take care of it overnight and leave me a voicemail when it’s sorted. I emailed all the interested parties in this drama and told them it would be fixed by morning.

Two fatal errors occurred in this process, one that I refuse to own, and one I will take responsibility for:

1. No one bothered to tell me that his old number needed to remain active. If they had, I could’ve advised them that we needed to add another line.

2. I should never have let the admin assistant get involved.

I arrived at work this morning to find a voicemail from Verizon saying that everything had been sorted out.  The white iPhone had its original number restored, and that Brandon’s old number had once again been disconnected. I checked the iPhone and it was working fine. I returned it to a very happy CFO as soon as she got into the office and even provided a little Apple training while I was there.

After receiving approval from the COO to add another line to our account, I called Verizon sales and—after explaining this whole sordid mess—added the line and arranged to have Brandon’s old number assigned to it.  We paired it with the CFO’s old Blackberry that the iPhone had replaced—correctly this time—and it worked. I set up call forwarding, tested it, and all was right in the world again.

Or, apparently not.

I got called into my boss’s office this afternoon and was told I had “an attitude problem” whilst trying to get this resolved. I’ll admit I was flustered, and more than a little pissed off that the admin assistant had so totally screwed things up, but somehow it was all my fault that that this happened because I (as the CEO told my boss) hadn’t considered the “business consequences” and the “potential loss of thousands of dollars” because the number had been changed without anything being put in place in regards to the old number.

Please. “Thousands of dollars?” Dude have you been smoking? Never mind. This is Colorado. I already know the answer.

I’m sorry. I’m not a mind reader. I did what I was told: “Brandon needs a new phone number in the 801 area code for his cell phone.”

I was so angry when I left work today I could feel my heart beating in my chest. I’m calmed down now (lots of hugs and snuggles from my Bubba when I got home helped), but one thing is abundantly clear: I know is that this job and the petty egos there are not worth having a stroke over.

After we get moved, I’m looking for a new job—in earnest. I’ve had enough of this batshit and am ready to be done with it. For all the complaining I did about my last job in Phoenix, it was never this bad, and now I can easily understand why my former boss at my current company walked last April.

It’s funny, but with all the preparations for moving, I realized the other day that in the past whenever I’ve moved to a new city, my initial living arrangement—and initial job—seldom lasted more than a year. The upside to that is the second of each of those two items have always turned out great.

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How to Destroy Your Organization's Reason for Existence in a Single Sentence

“Because you believe something is wrong, doesn’t mean you make it illegal.” ~ Brian Brown @ 47:55

After watching this, I am convinced Bryan Brown, Maggie Gallagher and the rest of these “protector of traditional marriage” buffoons will never move out of the 16th Century, no matter how many facts are presented to them.

And y’know, I kind of feel sorry for them, living out their pathetic little lives locked in such a rigid mindset, totally unable or unwilling to admit they’re wrong.

Sad, really.

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