Yes, Willie, It's Funny How Time Slips Away

First things first, kudos to Ryan, Matt, and Tuscaloosa Johnny for cashing in the ME. I would imagine that it's a very bittersweet feeling to play your ass off for days and to suddenly be done, but you made it farther than 99.9% of us schmucks likely ever will, so thumbs up to that.

Last week or so has pretty much been a blur of non-stop busyness. I'm actually looking forward to going into the office tomorrow (*gasp, horror*), as far as having a legitimate excuse for sitting on my ass for eight hours. Again, I knew the score when signing up for the buy another house gig, especially this month as I scrambled around trying to get both houses into decent shape, but it's kicking my ass a bit at the moment. This week should be better, though, as most of my work at the new place has been prep work, ripping out carpet and trim, sanding down trim, puttying and priming, etc., and I should actually start making some visible headway this week, refinishing floors and painting the living room and master bedroom.

I used to think the hardest thing about working as a freelance writer was getting gigs. And then I got old and wise and realized that the hardest thing about working as a freelance writer is getting paid for gigs.

Words fail me to express just how bad some of the play at Titan is, especially at the NL tables. I used to think Scott was hepped up on goofballs and relying on a chipcount from a talking avocado to tell him how much money he was up while playing at Titan, but now I'm starting to see the light. I've been playing for an hour or two late at night, to unwind after assorted toils and labors, and have managed to run a fairly piddling sum of money left in my account into a not so piddling sum of money, doing little more than playing ABC poker. Last night I turned $200 into a little shy of $1,400 at the $1/2 tables in about 45 minutes, doubling up twice with slowplayed nut flushes when assorted opponents decided to shove all-in on the river with J high and third pair, respectively.

Life at HyperMegaGlobalCorp has been pretty priceless lately. On the one hand, my brain literally liquifies and runs out my ears when I go there, as my "work" has devolved to the point of putting on protective headgear and randomly bashing out keystrokes with my forehead, as we've given up all hopes of maintaining any sort of quality in the content we crank out, so it's now just a collective exercise in futilely and furiously doing things, badly, in the most rushed and half-assed fashion entirely, so that we can point to the fact, at the end of the quarter, that we at least did lots of things.

That might have offended me a few years back, when I actually worked hard and slightly cared about at least the quality of my individual work, but not so much these days. The beautiful irony of the slacker, cube farm mentality that you see bandied about in movies and fiction is that all other things being equal, most people would actually choose to care about their work, and to work reasonably hard. It's so much easier to get through the day when you do. It's only when you install many Bill Lumberghs into positions of power and absolutely bludgeon the spirit out of otherwise motivated people that you cultivate such a rich atmosphere of absolutely not giving a fuck whatsoever.

We just got the results back from our Winning Culture Survey (translation: Employee Satisfaction Survey) and they were pretty bad, especially for our local group. They're pretty much fallen off a cliff ever since we were acquired but they've only recently bottomed out in red flag territory. Pretty much universal unhappiness across the board, no faith in senior management, yada yada yada.

So of course we have to have a company-wide meeting about it, which mostly entails our completely useless president basically saying, over and over, that we need to Assume a Culture of Leadership and Winning (translation: You grumpy jackasses need to start answering the surveys correctly like the rest of HyperMegaGlobalCorp does, because my ass is getting chewed out and it's reflecting badly on me and new catamarans don't buy themselves, bitches), and that it's up to each of us to make ourselves happy. But, never fear, we're going to "projectize" some meetings to fix this wh9ole unhappinesss thing, so expect to see that "calendarized" in the near future, and remember, we're not a slow-moving ship like the Titanic, but instead are like an "armada of jet skis", so the future is very bright.

(It would almost be worth possibly getting fired to make a bunch of t-shirts that say "My other car is an armada of jet skis." and to hand them out to fellow disgruntled monkey workers.)

My own wee little work group has reorganized twice in the last six months, which has muddied the waters to the point that I doubt my boss even knows when I'm supposed to be in the office. On top of that, we're currently in the midst of completely overhauling the database/interface we use to publish and maintain content, spending millions of dollars to completely break what was previously functioning fine. The old homegrown system, though, wasn't able to automate a lot of the data collection that we manually do at the moment, so it was necessary and crucial to take a few steps backwards in order to soldier forward, so that we'll have an automated system that will allow all of us editor types to focus on adding insight instead of getting bogged down in data entry (translation: So that we can fire all of your asses so fast it'll make your head spin.)

It's actually been pretty amusing to see it all transpire, though, especially since I'm lucky enough to not be left in too horrible a lurch if the gravy train came crashing down tomorrow. Whee...