Crime busting

Jeffrey's van was stolen a couple of weeks ago. He had pretty much resigned himself to that, but in a shock the everyone here, the police actually managed to recover it. Now for a two week inconvenience, Jeff gets to drive around in a much cooler machine, since it now has all kinds of street cred, having been involved in drug heists and getaways. A small price to pay.

In other news Brent got a new job finally, and it seems it was well worth the wait. The only downside is that he has to truck out to Kanata every day. Apparently the job will involve a fair bit of travel off to Seattle. Hopefully this company won't go out of business as quickly as all the others.

Back in the saddle

I started biking again, which is awesome after a year's hiatus in Korea. It feels good. I was down in Sandy Hill visiting tonight, and came back through downtown Ottawa in the pitch dark with only my reflective strips as protection. It really makes you feel alive staring death in the mouth like that. So my training for Eurotour2006 is now underway. Remember all those interested in balloon/cycle touring are encouraged to join in.

Other than that I have now been accepted to UBC and Calgary, but not Toronto. What a bunch of snooty bastards. So now comes the big decision.... Aalborg has yet to respond. Speaking of which, my mom is in Copenhagen this month, and apparently its the coldest and snowiest its been in a century. I blame the mass media.

--> Here's a pic I found from the time when my siblings and I had to run away and live with a bedouin family for a while. I really learned to appreciate couscous for a while there.

Pink shirts aren't enough

They gave us all pink shirts at work. Seems they ran out of the brown ones before they got to my department, so we all got lovely XXL pink "Resolve" T-shirts. I guess its part of the new "happy workers don't quit" programme. It came too late to save Nicole who quite mid shift on Tuesday. She had a big row with my supervisor who tried to change her lunch time again. She'd basically been looking for an excuse to quit now that she also works a cushy government job during the day. She got some good parting shots saying that she thought she'd left kindergarten years ago.

Fortunately the quitting, the latest in a long, long series, seems to have forced changes in management. Basically we can do whatever we like now, and they're really buttering us up with free T-shirts, an extra break, and no Saturday shifts. Unfortunately it comes too late, and I'm now bored to death at work since there's so few people to talk to any more. I'm looking into other opportunities on the Ottawa job market. Now that I'm an experienced data entry clerk I should have the pick of the litter.

Thespianism

I checked out the Hopewell Public School performance of The Heist at Highview High on Thursday. My brother was starring as a well intentioned, but misunderstood nerd who is accused of stealing the school's football trophy. The show delivered wall to wall delights and thrills, especially during the dance scene which he will find hard to live down. Being in grade 7, his dancing partner towered over him, and was probably mortified by the indignity of it all. I would recommend the show to anyone with a serious interest in the theatre.

For a quick preview, check it out:

You can't really see Jonas, but you get the gist of the number.

Crying Wolf

You can never tell how sick someone is until they pass out. That's what happened yesterday at work. One of my co-workers had been complaining a little about being sick, but no one took it too seriously since people do that all the time, especially in a situation where people have hours to talk about their tiniest foibles and twitches. Unfortunately it turned out that she had upped her pain killer dosage, and it seems to have had a bad reaction. They had to call in an ambulance and carry her out. Pretty scary stuff for a random day at work.

Other than that, they started ripping out the bathroom at my mom's house, so the whole place is covered in dust and in an uproar. Fun as that is, I have decided to move to my dad's for a while. Fortunately they have tentatively, knock on wood, sold my Dad's house, so we don't have to maintain it in an utterly meticulous way as we did in February.

Slackin'

After much negotiation we managed to have our break moved again to avoid the massed crowds. So the grumbling calmed a bit, except that they changed our seating plan, sort of like grade school, to seperate talkative friends, or people who laugh too much. Then they broke out the previously secret "big book of performance" to show who was slacking, and who wasn't. Apparently I have 24 unaccounted for minutes in my log. That means that there were 24 minutes throughout the seven hour shift during which I wasn't working or on break. I had better shape up I guess. Originally she told me 64 minutes, but then it turned out that she couldn't count.

Office Politics

I don't think I've ever worked for such a disorganized company, at least not one with an actual HR department and policy handbooks and so on. I'm not sure if its a function of the boredom of the job, but the drama involved is pretty off the scale of my experience. So far this week we've had three people leave, and its only Tuesday!!

Yesterday they decided to change our break structure, in response to our request, since we now have longer shifts. But they totally botched the implementation, because we wanted to space out the breaks more, and they moved them closer together!! Then the manager came in and basically told everyone to stop complaining because the decision had been taken "with many factors in mind" and that the change was non-negotiable. Then she slammed the smokers for complaining and said they had to tough it out and learn that the world had changed. When she left Julie just left, and told us not to tell them to see how long it would be before they noticed. (About 4 hours) Then the manager told us that we should take our breaks as we always had today, but then we told her that our usual break was already over!! Shows how much she actually knows what was going on. So then we went to the lunch room at our new time, which was supposedly moved so that there would be fewer people there, but sure enough it was a total mad house, unlike our old break which we basically had run of the room for. So, she's pretty much managed to alienate the entire department in one stroke. I wonder if they taught her that in management school?

The other strange thing is that they've hired a new guy (two, but one quit after one day) and they seem to be intentionally isolating him from the rest of the group. He has different break times, and they've forced him to sit over in the corner far from the established "veterans". So we haven't been able to talk to him in two days. The theory being that Jan, our mid level manager, doesn't want him to start talking to her "enemies" over in the main group of employees. Now it looks like at least three of us are planning on quitting at the end of this week. So much for the plan to claw back the 55,000 page backlog.

And this is a publically traded company!!

On the plus side working there is now better that 99% of today's TV, and the drama factor alone is enough to keep me coming back for more.