misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

This blog no longer contains the capacity for my long simmering anger at the human species. The gigabytes on this server's hard drive are oozing my excess vitriol, burning holes through the motherboard. Thus, i've had to store the 1s and 0s of my words on other sites. I'm all over the internet these days. Recently, I posted a review on Citysearch in response to another reviewer so annoying, it prompted me to overcome my disdain of online registrations. Whereas the anger in this blog is never really directed at any of my readers (I save that anger for personal conversations), I've grown the need to directly confront those whose opinions I find .. unsavory. In this particular case, the literal source of the disagreement was over the tastiness of a certain restaurant's pizza, though the particulars were much more important than mozzarella and crust. Simply put, the woman on Citysearch embodied several traits I find intolerable .. egotism, ignorance, pretension, hypertension. I usually find that after an uncontrolled release of anger, such as the ripping a book, kicking of a wall or the calling of my girlfriend a useless pile of retardation, I regret that release. That said, I enjoy controlled, intelligent anger, such as that employed in my public postings. Upon reflection, I did feel a little guilty publicly dressing down a complete stranger, but not guilty enough to prevent me from doing it again. This blog has held me back long enough. I'm taking my campaign public. No citysearch reviewer is safe. To that matter, thank God for the internet. I'm much too lazy to ever actually picket on a real street, or join any sort of organizations that make you do real work. I'm more than content protesting the world from the comfort of my chair and laptop. Who said revolutions can't be comfortable?

At age 13, I was prescribed the antibiotic Tetracycline for my rapidly-spreading acne problem. At the moment, blisteringly-red bubbles, some filled with a sickly cesspool of oxygenated pus, were emerging from my skin like stars in the dawn sky. It was critical I treat this acne, as my emaciated 135-pound body, bottle-thick glasses, and history of bad fashion decisions already had me reeling in the economically-charged social hierarchies of the 8th grade universe. My doctor, more than fifty years past understanding the first thing of life as an ugly 8th-grader, blithely prescribed an antibiotic that he'd probably been prescribing since he became a doctor. Tetracycline, in particular, was patented by Pfizer in 1950, and since that time, was used the world over in a misunderstood attempt to control the bacteria acne vulgaris, which was, at the time, thought to be the core cause of acne in the faces of youth such as myself. Partly, I blame this failure on doctors failing to appreciate that getting acne as a youth is the emotional equivalent of getting a disease as an adult. Your young mind is devastated on all levels. The lonely fear of mockery in front of Michelle, the smoldering brunette seductress from Geography, or Tara, the playful, innocent, clarinet-playing blonde from six-period Band class, was a fear perhaps only felt by the astronauts of Apollo 13. The humiliation scars you in a way well past the acne itself, resulting in a stunted development of self-confidence which is never truly overcome, no matter how much money, pussy, or success you accumulate (unfortunately, i've accumulated none of any of these things).

The inherent problem with Tetracycline (that of utter ineffectiveness) was actually masked by an altogether different problem: i had a highly unrealistic fear of choking on the 50 mg pills I was prescribed. The fear of choking had manifested itself throughout my life, such so that at this point, I had only consumed one or two pills ever. Thus, my mind was host to a battle-royale between my two biggest mental terrors. In one corner, was the unrelenting desire to eradicate my acne, lest my self-image of looking like the elephant man remained with me for life. In the other corner, was the heaving, looming prospect of death by choking. The pills might of well been bowling balls. The first round was a draw. I initially tried to cut the pills in half, and then swallow them. This proved disastrous, as the pills became jagged upon cutting, poking holes in my throat upon the swallow. The second round was also a draw, as in the attempt to force the pill down my throat, i accidentally swallowed unintentionally. It went down easy, but I cannot take credit for the swallowing. Rounds three through fifteen hundred were won by the desire to rid myself of acne, although each night, the pill swallowing process took about eighteen terrifying minutes.

In the end, as expected, the doctor's lack of imaginative, or accurate, treatment resulted in little improvement. So it probably didn't matter whether or not I took the pills. The acne remained for another year, before the wonderous drug known as Acutane ridded me of it forever, while simultaneously ridding me of a functioning liver, lower pancreas, and left kidney.

This memory, and hence this blog, emerged a few days back, at a work party. For reasons I needn't explain now, the party included a beer bong. As the beer bong was passed around, as it was for Lee's bachelor party, the exact same flood of feelings stormed into my mind as they did at age 13. Fears of choking, coughing, lung disruptions. So I made an excuse, and parted myself from the group.

It was then I realized, I may be 32, but really, i'm 13, and always will be.

Just overheard at a company party:

(One female co-worker talking to another)

"Yeah, it's pretty cool, I go up to Boston a lot to visit my boyfriend. He goes to M.I.T. So I have to go up to Boston. It's pretty cool, he really likes M.I.T. That's where he goes. We have a lot of fun up there."

Thanks for making clear to everyone that your boyfriend goes to M.I.T. The woman you were talking to seemed explicitly excited by that necessary bit of information.

As I haven't changed my primary Yahoo email address since the days Marc Andreessen graced the cover of every magazine in America, my workmonkey address has made its rounds. Entered into websites, account registrations, doctor forms, dentist forms, credit card applications, magazine subscriptions, online bill pay, and porn sites for over 10 years means that 90% of the world knows that workmonkey@yahoo.com is a valid email address. For that reason, I receive about 20 or so SPAM emails a day. Unlike most Americans, I actually find most of these emails amusing, as the subject lines usually offer an intensely creative set of words. Just today, as example, a bulk email playfully encouraged "Don't Get Lost, workmonkey@yahoo.com!" Along with offers for fuck buddies, rolex watches, and L$S V##GAS vacations, I usually start my mornings with a quick visual jaunt through my bulk email folder. Two days ago, however, I received the following email, in my regular email inbox, from the folks over at PayPal:

At first glance, I actually thought it might be a legitimate email, as I hadn't been to paypal.com for over a year, and receive emails from them every so often offering one thing or another. A quicker look revealed a few errors, however:

"It has come to our attention that your PayPal billing information are out of date."
Well, it has come to my attention that you used a singular noun (information) with a plural verb tense (are). This is common among ESL students, such as, say, those with bad teeth running identity theft operations in the Yunnan province of China. I'm guessing that the marketing department at PayPal, located in San Jose, CA, would not make this elementary mistake (unless PayPal has outsourced their marketing department to the Yunnan Province of China, which isn't all that unlikely). I also enjoy the fact that my billing information, which hasn't changed in a year, has suddenly come to the attention of those at PayPal. Like some software engineer was randomly looking through their databases, came across my name, and thought, "Holy Shit! I have to escalate this immediately!" What else has come to their attention? The escalating tension between the US and Iran? That the dodo bird is extinct? A James Ingram love song?

I continue on.

"This require you to update your billing information as soon as you can."
Again, we see a problem with tenses. I feel bad for Chang Mai or Ruslan Sharipov or whoever it ultimately was that wrote this email. When to use requires instead of require is complicated even for the most advanced ESL students. I'll bet that one got past even the top Chinese manager over in Yunnan, or Uganda, or Uzbekistan. Maybe they were betting on the fact that whichever Americans actually fell for this email had a worse command of the English language than they did. Which seems fairly possible.

"This billing update is also a new PayPal security statement which goes according to the established norms on our terms of service (TOS) to reduce the instance of fraud on our website."
I didn't know PayPal had statements which goes according to the established norms. I do admire the writer's use of the word norms, as well as the acronym TOS. I can picture him hunching over a thesaurus, a finished bowl of noodles with plastic chopsticks sitting beside him, admiring his luck at discovering a colloquial replacement for the word "standards". This is how Americans talk, right? With lots of slang and shorthand?

"A failure to update your records may result on a suspension of your account."
Again, understandable error. Xiang Lie-Kwan. The preposition on being incorrectly used instead of in. Any foreign-born American can tell you mastering the prepositions is among the most difficult elements of learning English.

"This new security statement will helps us continue to offer PayPal as a secure and cost-effective payment service."
This is unforgivable. A complete verb tense disaster. A train wreck involving simple present and future verb expansions. A simple dropping of the the s on helps goes a far way. I almost feel bad for the young Chinese hacker. A single letter in a long sentence has exposed him.

service@paypal.com vs. paypal@service.com
This is Lee's domain. While I was tipped by the grammar, he was tipped by the technology. This makes sense, as he is in charge of security programs at eBay, which owns PayPal. Although they list one email address, a quick check reveals the true email address. And i'm doubting paypal.com does business as service.com. Of even more enjoyment is the fact that the link to update your billing information takes you to:

http://floridak.ns7-wistee.fr/

If you can't figure the rue at that point, you deserve to have you identity stolen.

So, dear Chinese/Ugandan/Uzbeki hacker, I applaud your effort. A letter here, a verb tense there, and you would've gotten it right. It is a shame you don't have an American friend, as even the most basic American speaker could've corrected your errors. The English language are tricky, and as a results, you is of difficult times according to the norms of grammars.

Well, the eighty-nine city tour has finally concluded, an national voting is now open. So do me a favor and visit the following link and place your vote for "Eggsistence" as your favorite movie. If you like any of the others better than that one, then that's too bad, I still want you to vote for "Eggsistence".

http://www.filmracing.com/Films/competitions/winners2007.htm

It's been a pretty standard day at Camp Anderson. I had to get to work early (10 AM) for a brainstorm to help create Capital One's newest ad campaign, which you're all surely eagerly awaiting (just a taste: you'll never look at low-rate auto loans the same way). Suffice to say, I barely made the meeting. Getting to work before 10 AM sucks: Crowded subways, long lines at delis, responsible, corporate people running all over the place. After 10, I get the entire subway bench to myself, albeit don't get the pleasure of being pressed up against a 6'5" black guy preaching the gospel.

After the two-hour meeting I was able to return to my daily routine: Catching up on ESPN.com, reading private emails, and drinking batches of the free raspberry Emergen-C. I'm about to work in a little bit of Wii Tennis before submitting my hours and calling it a day.

Maybe I'll get a Tootsie Roll before I head out. Not sure. Anything is possible.

I had to complete my job's mandatory sexual harassment training course today. This is about the third or fourth training course I've attended during the course of my career. Today I had the advantage of being able to complete the two-hour training course online. Though better than attending in person, the online presentation was still far from pleasant. Anticipating the pitfalls of moving their training online, HR intelligently programmed it such that you were forced to watch and listen to each page for a certain period of time before being able to advance. You also had to answer all sorts of questions which made you pay attention at first, at least until you realized the questions were answerable with only the use of regular, everyday, common sense. As example, one such question:

It is a) always b) sometimes c) never OK to call your co-worker a dirty, bean-eating, Mexican faggot.

Or something like that.

Ultimately, I have several problems with sexual harassment training. Firstly, 98% of the lessons they teach are steeped in common sense. Training only tells us what we already know: Using terms like anchovy cunt-face, fat titty whore, fucking chink, rice paddy gook, carpet munching dike, etc, is not proper for a work place environment. Also improper is punching a co-worker in the adam's apple, jerking off in the cafeteria, shoving Cheeze-Its up your secretary's ass in a client meeting, and watching hairy bear porn on your work computer. The only people who don't know this is ok are douche-bags, and douche-bags never learn from anything training courses, which is why they are douche-bags in the first place, so it is a moot point.

Another problem I have with this training courses is that it ultimately teaches you that the sensitivities of one person should always outweigh the needs of a group of people, which i fundamentally disagree with. One such example was a case in which an employee made a "good-bye" video for a co-worker who was being transferred to China. This video contained a scene from a Hong Kong TV show that one employee found offensive to her Asian heritage, whereas the entire rest of the company found hilarious. What did the training teach? Well, even if one person finds something offensive, and a million others don't, you should not show it, and it can be grounds for discipline. That thinking is pretty much the reason coffee cups have WARNING: CONTENTS ARE HOT messages, manpower is now personpower, and if I read the name LaShawna on a resume, I can't assume it's a black female. A few people complained about something that everyone else found perfectly acceptable, and because two people yelling are louder than a thousand people quiet, the change is made. I can understand one-on-one fuck-ups, like if I directly grab a co-workers tits and tell her to like it or she'll get fired. That should be policed. But if you don't like the hairy bear gay sex i'm watching on my cellphone with my friends when you happen to walk by, then fuck you.

The whole thing is just too serious. The idea that the workplace is some protective bubble where all human beings live in utmost respect and comfort with one another is unrealistic. Work is no different than life, and sometimes you are going to hear things or have things happen to you that you don't mesh with. Drop the bitch-boy angle and deal with it. If I assume because you're from Boston, you like the Red Sox, that isn't a stereotype, so don't complain. If you find part of a video insulting that 1000 other people didn't, well then you are probably a hyper-sensitive queef, and are offended by everything, and you should just ignore it rather than making 1000 other people suffer. In fact, here's a rule of thumb: If 999 people are laughing at something, and you aren't, well, the problem is with you, not them. Stop turning our world into a gay farm.

The good thing about the training is I can now confidently tell you that this blog violated 843 separate tenets of the harassment policy here. And I by here, I mean sfninja.com. Dragonhair subscribes to, and diligently enforces, the most stringent code of ethics when it comes to harassment.

Hey Roach

Stagnant, squat on pearl Corian.
Armor
wings, threaded eyes
beat the cracked porcelain.
no. satin peanut. no.
glass sea.
yes. Water flags the
storm. Scurry, bloated thought on
vinyl, slipping, a red hair
wrestling grease, fish spine of
year-old avocado, swoosh. Then,
darkness, always. There, needle
pokes the sky. Rain of world, but
now
Shavings of razor, swimming
everywhere, millions of sharp
worms, throb, pulse, crave. With
dead breath, and bit of turkey, time for
sleep.

My project team went on a "bonding" event yesterday (during which I learned a number of fantastic new business cliches: ideation, on-boarding, and value proposition. I've always enjoyed when business people create their own words to feel more exclusive and intelligent than they really are. Let's get this straight right now: When a doctor uses the phrase "Pulmonary Fibrosis", it is necessary and relevant, to mention nothing of the face he earned the right to say terms like that via 8 years of schooling. Likewise, when a lawyer asks for a "Motion for a Summary Judgment", he has thousands of years of legal tradition to justify the phrase, and has no alternatives. When a dipshit project manager from La Mesa Community College asks for an "ideation session", there is no basis or justification for using that term instead of "brainstorm", or the term "coming up with ideas". Douches.). Anyway, sorry, I got a bit off-topic. So, to "bond", like a bunch of hydrogen electrons, we jumped on what is more commonly known as a "booze cruise". Welcome, Skyline Princess:

Yes, this picture is, in fact, worth a thousand words. Booze cruises should be left to public high school graduation festivities, christmas parties for companies that sell shoelaces, and Theta Chi/Delta Gamma mixers. Something about them is inherently 80s. Cruising around New York Harbor, I fully expected to see someone in a Fila jumpsuit doing jazzercise to a Kansas song.

To further awkward-ify the event, only about thirty-five people came out, even though the boat was built for ten times that. So there were small groups of us standing around a lounge area in the middle deck, gripping Budweisers and cheap Merlots, as adolescent Puerto Rican servers with pimply faces served trays of Pigs in a Blanket and Mini Spinach Quiches. This boat in particular had seen better days. Scuff marks from black-soled rubber shoes (probably Reeboks) streaked across every inch of the cheap linoleum floor, like millions of exclamation marks to happier times. The chairs were covered in stained white satin, probably without a washing since the Truman presidency. After about thirty minutes of this, we were brought upstairs for a cheap full-course dinner, where I had to sit uncomfortably next to other uncomfortable people eating dry potato balls, green beans, and prime rib to the backdrop of the Jersey coast. And this is all before 5 PM. Hence, the other issue with Booze Cruises: Escape is impossible. As people fidgeted at the tables, making conversations about last week's projects, it might of well been the cafeteria at Alcatraz. When the boat finally docked, people literally fled. My science may be poor, but I do know once two electrons are "bonded" to an atom, it takes a whole lot of energy to break that bond. In our case, I think it is safe to say the bonds weren't all that strong.