Weekend Of Sin And Excess

I just dropped Maggie off at the airport. This will be the second weekend in a row that she’ll be away. Last weekend she was in Iowa , and this weekend she’ll be at the Contraceptive Technology conference in San Francisco. She has named the event appropriately on our shared Google Calendar—”M to San Francisco for Conference and Binge-drinking”.

In response, I have added my own calendar item—”Jeff’s weekend of sin and excess”—from Wednesday to Saturday, with some additional Sunday reminders—wash out stripper scent from clothes, return empty keg to liquor store, repair trashed house.
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Successful Vacationing

Even though I started out my Christmas break with a plague that literally stopped me in my tracks–I had to delay my trip by one day–this vacation was awesome for a reason that seems so stupid, it’s almost difficult to say.

I actually vacationed.

It seems so simple, but historically I’ve had a hard time actually vacationing unless forced to (i.e. I had no internet access or I didn’t bring my laptop). If I have my laptop with me, which I usually do, I’ll often default to tinkering with work stuff in my free time, which effectively negates any attempted vacationing. Pointless, right?
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Waiting In Lines

Living in New York City required patience. I waited in endless lines, often for multiple hours. At the grocery store, at the post office, at restaurants—if you wanted something that other people wanted, chances are you’d have to wait in line. The two years I lived there beefed up my patience for good, and for that, I am grateful. Unfortunately, the type of patient line waiter that I somehow became is a rare breed.

On Friday, I waited in a 2 hour line for a new iPhone 3GS. I usually avoid release-day-lines, as experience has told me that waiting a day can save hours, but this time I didn’t. Upon arriving, an Apple store employee informed me that it would be a two, or two and a half hour wait. By the looks of it, I thought that estimate was way off, so I was planning on waiting for a while, seeing how fast the line moved, and bailing if it took too long. But after waiting with the crowd for a while, I became captivated by humanity.
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What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

I’ve been slowly going through some boxes of files I’ve been holding onto for more than a decade. The things my former-self chose to keep are mostly pointless: assignments, notes, tests… from as far back as the seventh-grade. I’m sure I didn’t keep everything, either, but the mound of paperwork I did keep is still overwhelming.

And that’s only in print. My digital collection of files extends back even further (all the way back to 1987, I believe) and in some ways, the digital problem is much worse. Need that conversation we had about CoCo Puffs in 1999? I probably have it, somewhere.

Before you start calling me a pathetic packrat, allow me to say that I am aware of the problem, and have identified it even further—”sentimental pack rat” is the term, I believe. The hardest part of resolving this issue is behind me–admitting that I have a problem. Now comes the hard work of eliminating the trail of my past that I’ve kept in two or three bankers boxes for most of my life.

While most of the things I’ve kept are completely useless and shouldn’t have been kept in the first place, there are a few gems.

Here’s one of them, from 8th grade: Read the full post »

I Lack Blur: The 2008 Summary

I certainly don’t lack focus. If anything, I’ve got too much focus. Why haven’t I updated my blog in years? Because I’ve been focused on other things, and lost sight of the importance of documenting my every move in verbose detail. (That sounded sarcastic, but I actually meant it. If this blog can’t be an extension of my own memory, what good is it?). And what happens when I finally get my shit together, and whip out a blog post? I write a list.

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Recruiters

Recruiters already have a bad wrap, I’ll admit. I’m not covering new ground here when I say that I have been consistently disappointed with my recruiter experiences. To bring you up to speed, here’s a short list of recruiter offenses I have experienced.

Claiming to be “Technical”, but technically not knowing anything
If they claim to be a technical recruiter, they shouldn’t say a Java position is a “perfect match” for me, because I had JavaScript listed on my resume.

Not knowing anything about the job.
“I’ve got a great opportunity for you at a company here in town. You need to know PHP, SQL, CSS, HTML, and it looks like you have those qualifications” I’m not sure if they expect me to say “Oh great! Sounds like my dream job!” from that much, but 9 times out of 10 when asking “What does the company do?”, they can’t tell me anything. “Software”, one said.

Pretending we had a conversation, when we didn’t “Hey Jeff, sorry I didn’t call you back sooner, but this is…”, or “Hey Jeff, this is Phil from XYZ Recruiters, we talked last week”. That’s low.

Calling after successfully matching you with a job, to see if you want to change jobs.
Now that their commission has processed, and they’re not bound by a contract with the company they hooked you up with, why not try to get another commission out of you? Loyalty.

Not respecting my calling preferences. The last time I was job hunting, I listed my resume on monster, and had loads (5+ a day) of recruiters call me as early as 7am. It became annoying to have the same conversation with them over and over, especially since I listed clearly that I only wanted to be contacted via email. Which brings me to the reason for this post: When I ask to be removed from your call list, respect that.
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Now Blogging From Texas

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged I barely know where to begin.

The big news is that since you last heard from me, I moved out of New York. This didn’t really work out as smoothly as I had hoped, but I trust in several years I’ll look back on it as a great character building experience.

Here are some decisions we made, what we thought, and what actually happened.

Instead of taking a Penske Truck and driving all of our stuff to Texas, we decided to sell most of our furniture, and ship the rest.

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Craigslist Conversation Via Text Message

December 20th, 2007

[9:47AM]

Guy: R u sellin a tv
Me: Yes
Guy: How much??
Me: $50? You want it?
Guy: Yea
Me: Ok, hang on a sec
Guy: Aite
Me: When can you pick it up? I’m at 109 and Broadway
Guy: What size is the TV
Me: Didn’t you see the craigslist ad? Do I know you? 27 inches Read the full post »

Our Next Move

We’ve decided to move to Austin, Texas at the end of this year. While it may seem to an outsider that I’m falling in to Roger’s master plan (to have the entire family live within a block from each other for all eternity), this is not so.

Maggie is finished with school in December, and will be able to take her boards a couple of months after she graduates (and then will finally be able to write you all those prescriptions you’ve been asking about). I’m planning (again) on attending grad school in a not-yet-determined location (so far the possibilities include Madison, Minneapolis, Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle), next fall. We’re both tired of our jobs, and ready for a change, so we’ve decided to grab the opportunity to live in a different part of the country while we’re still young and reckless, even if it may end up moving again in less than a year. We’ve gone back and forth about doing this for months, and we’re finally pushing all of our chips in; we’re going.
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No, I Will Not Have Lunch With You

One of my biggest pet peeves in the work place is unnecessary meetings, or really, unnecessary communication in general. For instance, an email sent one minute, and arriving my office the next to check if the email had arrived yet. “It arrived! Email is amazing!”

There are similar problems in my department, but more along the lines of scheduling unnecessary meetings, and then talking about the meetings in the hours preceding and following said meeting. For instance:

9:15 – “There’s a meeting at 9:30, are you available?”
9:25 – “You’re all set for the meeting in 5 minutes?” (Sometimes at this point, a sheet of paper is handed out with topics that will be talked about in the meeting).
9:30 – Three of us in a meeting. Yes, three.
9:45 – Meeting over. Last bit of the meeting is talking about how great the meeting was.
11:00 – Boss strolls into office, “So, that was a good meeting. What did you think?”

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