Alright, I know I’ve promised several times that I was going to fill everyone in on my Thursday night spent in Columbia, and I promise I’m still going to, eventually. I’ve got most of a rough draft on the story done, but there’s a good bit of psychological stuff in it where I analyze myself, so it’s taking a good deal of time.

Anyway, I’ve been writing a lot of code lately. My IRC bot is pretty well complete at the moment, including a “Fark Notifier”, which parses out the Fark [fark.com] RSS feed and displays a notification every time a new entry is posted in our IRC channel. Also, I’ve been reading a lot of Maddox [maddox.xmission.com] and Tucker Max [tuckermax.com] lately. They’re both incredibly funny guys with some great shit on their sites. I can’t wait for both of their books to come out!

Aside from that, it’s been pretty boring, just busy. I’m cramming knowledge about our phone system into my little brain at work. Our phone system expert, and the guy who sits across from me at work, is going to Iraq to serve as a consultant in Baghdad. It’s certainly going to be different without him there to talk to all the time. I’m going to be quite lonely sitting alone in our area, but I’m sure he’ll have a great time and that this’ll be an experience he remembers for the rest of his life. I told him to keep his ears open for any other job openings over there, and that I’d seriously consider them. If it weren’t for all the people like my Mom that would freak out, and how lost they’d be at work if they lost both of us at the same time, I’d probably eagerly drop everything and do it. I’m really pretty jealous of Michael at this point.

Everything lately (both the trip to Columbia and Michael going to Iraq) has made me take a hard look at my life and the direction I’m headed in. My Mom and I had a long discussion at lunch yesterday about school. I think she’s finally beginning to realize how much I honestly hate and despise it and how unhappy I truly am with my life in general.

We talked about Certifications vs. Associate Degree, and she told me that as long as I did my research and was sure that’s what I wanted to do, that she would support me 100%. She also said that I’d have to talk to my boss and convince him and see that he’s going to help pay for it. That’s the hard part. Everyone (and by that I mean the world at large) seems to have this plan for my life that parallels everyone else in the world. People just expect you to graduate high school and go on to college for four years, then get a full time job. Well, of course this isn’t the plan for EVERYONE, but for people of my intelligence and type, it’s expected. I don’t think anyone realizes that that’s not what I really want to be doing, and I’m sick of vainly trying to convince everyone that I have my own plan for my life and that it’s the one I really want to and should be following, not the accepted standard.

Even though I supposedly have her support, I think I’m going to stick with the Degree, simply because I’m so sick of arguing (well, not really arguing, but fighting in a metaphorical sense) with everyone about it. I’d rather just be miserable for another year and a half and finish it, even if an Associate Degree isn’t going to get me a whole lot.

That brings up another reason I hate school so much: All the useless classes you have to take (the “humanities” as they say) that have nothing to do with real world jobs in the industry. That’s why I think certifications would be a more valuable application of my time. Regardless of what people think, at least I would be able to more closely match them with my interests and obtain valuable information that actually applied to my field of study.

Oh well, woe is me. I guess I’ll just be miserable even more and eventually look back on the entirety of my teenage years with hatred, bitterness and disgust. I have decided that when I eventually have kids, I’m going to fully encourage them to go off to college. I don’t care what it takes, but this working full time and going to school online stuff has been one of the worst experiences I can remember, and I have no desire to see my children go through it as well.

Wait, when did I start thinking about having kids and the future? Maybe this is what happens when you sit next to a guy who’s still running around pretending he’s 23 when he’s actually closing in on 40 (although few know that. He tells most people he’s just passed 30).

Speaking of Michael, we had a conversation today about age and how irrelevant it really is. He’s a firm believer that the important thing is not how old you actually are, but how old you see yourself. He, of course, sees himself as being in his mid-twenties, which leads to his erratic lifestyle. I, on the other hand, can’t wait to be in my 30’s so I’m not the “freak” in my circle of friends that has the full-time job and always has money. I’d love to be wild and crazy like Maggie and Ryan and all their friends at USC, but since that’s obviously not going to happen, let’s get it over with and move on into middle age with some grace and dignity. I’ve accepted that this is going to be my life for the next (probably) 50 years, and I’m ready to get on with it.

Oi. Something else I learned today was about Jessica (she was my last real girlfriend, over a year ago, for those who didn’t know). After we “broke up” (since I just kinda stopped paying attention to her, I guess it still qualifies), she joined what’s been described as a “cult”, and married their “leader”. I’m not 100% sure, but apparently now she’s pregnant (I’ve pieced it together from various comments and such made lately), and her husband thought she was a virgin until he came along. Heh. What an idiot. He couldn’t be further off. Hell, she wasn’t a virgin when I came along.

And on to other girls. I also can’t stop thinking about Katie lately. Ever since we saw her at the oyster bar, I have been trying to get back there and see her again (now that it’s been all of an entire week). She’s just so cute and sweet, and I really miss seeing some of those people that I went to high school with. For some reason, that’s the kind of girl I see myself in a relationship with (yeah, what relationship, I know.). Maybe that’s just wishful thinking or my dream world influencing my subconscious. Blah, I dunno.

Welp, I’ve babbled on long enough now. Thank-you, thank-you! You’ve been great.

I decided I wasn’t going to go back to work this week, since I’d already made arrangements to take off when I thought I was going to have jury duty all week. What better time to relax than the present?

Since I’m being a bum, I of course slept until 1:30 today. Afterwards, the only really constructive thing I did was go to Liquid Highway. No cutie, just the typical guys. Afterwards, since it was such an incredibly nice day, I went flying down 85 all the way to 290, which is about 10 miles out of my way. The drive home was so incredibly nice…

On my way out, I noticed that there was a car I’d never seen at Jackie’s house. She better not be getting another boyfriend… At least not until she admits her true love for me… Ah well, there’s always that dream tonight…

Oh, and I called Maggie this afternoon before I left. She called back just as I was getting ready to leave. I asked her if she had plans this week, and if she wanted to go to dinner. She was incredibly excited when I told her I was going to drive down so we could go out, but I doubt she was nearly as excited as I was about getting to see her and getting out of the house at the same time.

When I got back, I wrote my own IRC bot using PHP. Well, wrote is a loose term. I adapted (very heavily) a bot tib gave me long ago in trekstuff… It’s amazing how something seems to work flawlessly at first, but when you actually dig down into it, you realize all the nitty gritty errors that actually exist.

I also finished off Quantum Leap Season 2. It was a particularly good DVD set, definitely worth a whopping $50. The last episode: M.I.A. really got to me for some odd reason. Sam leaped in and Al told him that he had to keep this woman from giving up her husband (who was in the Navy and declared MIA two years ago) and marrying a lawyer she meets. You start to get suspicious when you see Al disappear as Sam and the woman walk into the room, and when he gets incredibly passionate about Sam sticking with it, even when he points out that “God” seems to want these two to meet. It turns out that this woman was actually Al’s wife, and the only woman he ever loved (out of his 5 marriages and countless women). When he was MIA, she finally gave up on him and disappeared with her new lawyer. When Al returned, he was heartbroken. At the end of the episode, you get to see Al tell his wife goodbye (even though she can’t actually see or hear him, since he’s just a hologram). It was one of the saddest moments I’ve ever seen on TV… This was also the first episode where you DON’T see Sam jump into his next life at the end, making you wonder what’s happening in the 3rd season.

I keep thinking about Jackie for some reason. I don’t really know why. I’ve only seen her like twice in the last year, so it’s not like I could have gotten extraordinarily close to her or anything. But for some reason all I can think about any time I stop focusing on something else is her… I even had a dream about her the other night, which is incredibly unusual, because I never dream at all, much less about girls.

I did notice lately that she always seems to be home, whereas she always used to be gone, usually with her loser of a boyfriend Jake. With any luck, that means she’s single now…

Although I don’t know what that matters, since I can’t find a way to ask her out, particularly since I never see her.

Well, I think I need to start making more frequent, shorter entries about common, every day things. That’s really what I intended to do when I started this blog, but you know how it goes, particularly with me.

You know, it’s really odd when you get huge thunderstorms in the middle of winter, even if it’s been 70 multiple weeks in a row.

So for another random subject change… I’ve been watching Quantum Leap all day, at least since about noon when I got out of jury selections.

Oh, and after spending 2 and a half hours sitting in that courtroom, it turns out I wasn’t suitable for jury selection, which isn’t really a bad thing in this instance.

And now I’ve got our stinkin cat laying on my feet again… Oh, woe is me…

Last Friday, I was called over to a woman’s desk because she claimed to be having trouble with her email. When I sat down and investigated, I found that everything appeared to be working normally, but let her explain her problem in detail to me anyway.

After carefully listening to the first part of her problem, I took a joking tone that has served me quite well in the past several years, and told her that I didn’t see how it could happen. As she was explaining her second problem, me still not believing that any of it could happen, because everything I saw indicated that it was working perfectly normally and as intended, her manager walked up behind me. At one point, the woman I was helping turned and saw her and looked back at her and said (less than jovially) “he thinks I’m crazy”. I simply smiled and nodded, thinking she was trying to be funny without actually accomplishing it, particularly because she had hit it right on the nose. There was nothing wrong here, and I had no explanations to provide.

At that point, her manager asked me another question and we eventually trailed back off to her desk to look at something unrelated. Later that evening, as I was staying late working on a special project, our VP of Finance happened to come into the server room where I was sitting to see how things were going, knowing we’d hit a snag earlier that day. He happened to mention almost in passing that the woman I’d been helping earlier was about ready to kill me. With honest surprise, I asked him why, and he said he didn’t really know, that I’d smarted off to her or something. Well, I was genuinely confused, since I hadn’t envisioned myself doing anything anywhere near inappropriate or out of the ordinary. I hadn’t been rude by any means, and I’d tried to keep a polite tone as I explained the best I could that I basically had no answers to give her, because everything seemed to be working fine (which meant that yes, she was wrong). If nothing else, I could have been much more rude and abrupt, even if I wasn’t as courteous as one could have been (although I don’t know of anyone that could have been, save Mother Teresa, who probably wouldn’t have had any more answers than I did anyway, so it doesn’t really matter). In any case, the VP said that I might want to apologize to her on Monday, otherwise she might bake some cookies or something and try to poison me (I was being scolded with humor, do you see why I was joking with her when I said she was crazy?), since she was normally an easy going person.

Well, I was able to refrain from telling him that no, she was an easy going person before she got moved to this new department, at which time she’d adopted the same personality as everyone else in the department: generally evil and ready to stab you in the back at any moment without giving you the slightest hint of warning (which was precisely what she had done). Instead of telling him how I really felt, I simply nodded and we continued our work without mentioning it again.

Well, Monday came (after I thought about this all weekend), and I thought I might run into her sometime and be able to slip a half-hearted apology and explanation in casual conversation (I have commitment issues… they stem all the way into apologies, it’s sad, I know…). I was too busy to give it much more thought all day, until things started to wind down about 4:30 when I hit another snag in our plan. So, I reviewed in my mind what I was going to say and I went over and did it. It was probably one of the easiest physical things I’ve ever had to do, but one of the most difficult mental things, since I felt I had actually done no wrong during the incident. She was, however, happy to accept my apology, and simply told me that sometimes she thought I needed to lay off the attitude (WHAT ATTITUDE?! If she wants attitude, she should hear me talk to my mother, or my boss… they both get the same treatment, and they don’t care in the slightest and dish it right back 99% of the time. If anyone has an attitude, it’s her, and it’s bad…).

In retrospect, I’ve had some time to put more thought into all this (I tried my best to ignore it all weekend, hoping I’d genuinely forget about it), and I still believe I was in the right the entire time and that it should have been her that was apologizing. However, I’ve thought of 2 very good points that I think I’ll keep in reserve for the next time something similar to this should arise. Here they are:

When working in the IT support industry (as I do primarily), you learn two very important things very quickly, as my coworkers will also attest to:

1) If a user says something is happening, and it sounds impossible, it probably is. Not to disrespect the user in any way, but typically they’re not at all computer literate, and if they say something’s not working, it’s probably working exactly as intended by the developers, and they simply don’t realize how it’s supposed to work.

2) If a problem seems like it should be incredibly difficult and time consuming, it probably isn’t. It sounds totally bizarre, but when you think about it, it’s true. As weird as it is, no matter what the problem, 90% of the time, if it seems difficult, it’s not at all. The converse is also true: if it seems like it should be a 5 minute fix, it’ll probably take at least 10 times that long to accomplish.

Perhaps I’ll come up with a list of guidelines that I should hand users to read when I sit down at their computer and investigate a problem. A list of guidelines, assumptions, and reasoning for them. If nothing else, it would help spur conversation with some of the cute chicks at work, particularly if I do it in a humorous manner (and when am I serious, I mean, come on…).

But anyway, that’s my gripe for the night. Now that I’ve thought this all out, I really feel much better; especially knowing all 3 people (maybe?) will read this and probably agree with me, even if 1 of them is totally drunk off her ass…