We'll see

Today I may have convinced one of the managers at my location to start coming to Judo with me.  Don't know if he'll actually show up though. We'll see.
On Thursday, Minion was still awful in his afternoon karate class.  The new girl is setting him off. There's a boy there about his age who is acting dead-on perfect though... I asked Minion to emulate him instead of her.  We'll see.
The camera and lens I loaned to another photographer 3 weeks back came back today. The one I loaned out 8 months back came back last week. Still out on loan is a tripod to one photog and a camping tent to another... don't know if I'll ever see either of those again.  Guess we'll see.
So far I have gotten perfect scores on both of my Econ quizes, and on the one assignment that's been graded.  Will my second assignment, and the work that I have yet to turn in all come back with all the available points scored? We'll see.
Potty training with Minion is progressing slowly.  I had hoped he'd be out of his diapers by now. How much longer will this phase of his life take? We'll see.  But no matter how frustrated I become at this, I cannot understand this "father" beating his 3 year old son son so hard it killed him, over potty training. That's something I could have gone without seeing.
My cousin's daughter ran away yesterday.  I learned about it this morning on Facebook. The police found her this afternoon. I neither know what prompted that decision, nor what will happen next. We'll see.
I'm re-working a poster of the managers and administrative staff at work to reflect recent promotions and transfers. Some people had expressed a level of distaste for the image currently being used for them, so I made a sign to post offering re-shoots since I am re-working the poster now anyway. Wonder if anyone will take me up on that. We'll see.

Time Machine

I found out today that my company is replacing the 10 year old print-making equipment we use in our photolab with a refurbished machine from another manufacturer that runs 6% faster, and easier to fill with chemicals when it runs out, but is harder to do maintenance on, runs with only 2 paper rolls loaded at a time instead of 4, and cannot print the 12x24 and 12x36 print sizes we offer now.  We have some people who make a lot of those, who will be disappointed.  I uses those sizes for some of my shots too...  I print my lightning shot as a 12x36 most of the time.

When we upgraded to our current equipment in 2005, the lab was supposed to experience just 2 days of downtime, but it took the techs 5 to get us up and running. This will be a downgrade (in my opinion) and I am not excited about this change.  The vague e-mail said only that this would be happening before the Christmas season.  I was originally trained on the same brand (older models) of equipment that we will be getting...  Time to knock a decade of dust and rust off that old skillset and get mentally flexible enough re-learn. *Groan*

Cluster Hump

I stayed up last night making edits to a poster we keep with all the pictures and names of the supervisors, managers and administrators at the store I work at.  My company has low turnover for a retail environment, but... it's still retail... and promotions are always happening, so the poster needs frequent maintenance to stay up-to-date.  I realize at 11:30 last night I didn't copy down the new Assistant General Manager's last name, and don't know it.  I txt or Facebook msg the handful of co-workers who are both (1) up at that hour and (2) friendly enough with me to find it normal for me to contact them... None of them knew, either.

My 6 mo old was fussy and not sleeping at all last night. So even after I stopped being productive on the poster, there was no sleeping.  I crashed at 1am, but remember my wife getting out of bed to take care of the boy at 2... and 6.  I got up at 7 to start my day.

First thing I did was call work and get the A.GM's name.  Finish the poster. Go to order a print of it from my photo lab through our website... and the website is down.

TimeWarner is sometimes pretty wonky, and the gear running my wireless network at home isn't terribly reliable either... so I chalk it up to my connection, copy the JPEG to a thumb drive, and bring it with me to work.

Before I clock in, I show the image to the other A.GM, and she points out I forgot to remove a supervisor who transferred to another building. I forgot to mess with him in part because they haven't filled his position again yet.  oops.  She told me to print it anyway, and update it after the replacement is announced, probably later this week.

Oh, and she need to talk to me once I clock in.
Convenient she should mention that... it's time to clock in RIGHT NOW.

I hit the time-clock, go back into the office and get turned down for the position I applied for. Not really surprised, and I don't dislike where I am at, so it's not a huge deal for me, but still a little let down.

Get back to my photohut to find the company's photolab server's are down; it wasn't just my connection. No internet orders today ... and since the boss closed down early last night to run some maintenance on the printer, the 90 minute order delay had been in effect for all of the orders that had been downloaded to the lab before the web broke.

Which turned out to be a small blessing because even thought the Net orders were not comming in, I was soon to be running behind...  one of the paper-magizne bays on my printer was malfunctioning, and trying to diagnose and repair it was eating minutes... meanwhile the equipment we use to refill customer's printer ink cartridges was fritzing... and the phone was ringing 2 lines at a time with customers informing me they couldn't place online orders and demanding I either fix it or tell them how long the outage would last.

When it rains, it pours.

On the bright side... I HAVE lost more than 100 lbs. since I started...

Photo Throwdown!

I need to put my ass-kicking boots on!

My photolab no longer has the equipment to develop film into negatives.  I can print from negatives and I can digitize them and save them to a disc (16Base Resolution 2048 x 3072). If you come to me with a roll of film, I send you to one of two local, independently owned photo labs that do good work. It costs more than we used to, but it's how they have been able to afford to keep offering that service when it was no longer cost effective for us.

Today, a customer returns from having visited one of these two labs and lets me know that the worker there was bad-mouthing the work we do.  Not only that, but spreading falsehoods about it. My customer had her film processed there but was going to have it digitized with us because we charge a pittance of what the independent lab does for the same resolution scan. Their staff member asked her if she was going to bring us her film and she affirmed that she was. Then the employee told her when we scan negatives we destroy them afterwards instead of returning the film. (Not True) My customer said if she had the scans she couldn't care if she got her negatives back, she was using us anyway. Then the employee misinformed my customer that we send them off to China to be scanned. (Ridiculous) I think she has my company confused with a different, less wholesome, retail giant. After all the work I've sent them, and with all the effort we put into producing a quality product, I expect more respect from the workers there.

AAMOF this post is now a few days late because instead of polishing it up and posting it, I sent an E-mail to the owner of the little independent photo lab...  He responded that their employee meant no malice, and was working under misinformation.  Furthermore he personally loves shopping at our place and finds folk there friendly and helpful.

On Stupidity

Today, I was teaching a customer how to operate the photo kiosk, and she apologized for being so stupid, and posited that it must drive me nuts dealing with stupid people, like her, all day long. Firstly, if helping my customers drove me to insanity, I would have had to choose between a career change and the madhouse long ago. Secondly, only a small portion of my day is actually spent assisting customers to place their orders. Producing the orders, order pickups, shipping and receiving vendor orders, cleaning, maintenance, and other tasks all take time too. Even if my job was primary manning the service counter, only a small portion of my customers need help in placing an order, so the annoyance factor is often negligible. Finally, I did not find her to be nearly as dunderheaded as she considered herself. Her questions were reasonable for someone using certain features of the equipment for the first time. Not everything the programmers included in the newest kiosk update is intuitive for everybody.

I get someone like her, making some comment like that nearly once a week. In some cases there is a certain amount of stuidity... or at least carelessness or inattention involved that required my intervention, but as often as not my customers confuse ignorance with stupidity.

Ignorance, unless willful, is a far sight different from stupidity, which would indicate to me an inability or unwillingness to either understand or retain a significant portion of information provided. Not knowing something is not an indicator that someone is stupid. Being unable or unwilling to learn something, might.

If you come in and have new questions for me every time you visit, I am unlikely to think you witless. If you come in often and ask the very same questions each and every time, you will be treated kindly and well served, but in the silence of my heart I may judge you to be simple.

Chicken Noodleless Soup for the Soul

Pangs of hunger persist.
I was feeling it pretty acutely by the time I got home from work tonight. I had jello in the fridge, so I ate that first, since it was ready. It was probably somewhere between 1 and 1 1/2 packages worth.  Then I nuked and salted a can of Swanson's low-sodium chicken broth. That seemed pretty tasty, so I did it again.

All told today's intake was:
3 packages (12 servings) of sugar free Jello
3 servings of Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard 100% Whey from Whey Isolates - French Vanillia
3/4 Gallon of filtered tap water
2 cans of Swanson's low-sodium chicken broth. + ~2 tbs salt.

So what's that? About 500 calories?  Doc probably actually expects me below that, I would guess.  That's a lot of Jello today. I was kinda playing with my Jello today; spooning it out of the middle instead of the edges, in such a way it would "sloorrrrup" as you pulled it out, then dug out from the bottom of my jello pit to see how long the overhang could hold on before it collapsed like a cliff being undercut by the sea. With my lunch Jello I used a knife to cut a checkerboard pattern into the jello, then tried to lift out ever other column.  What can I say... if the food can't TASTE interesting, perhaps it can be entertaining.


There was a Shake-up at work this week.  Some of the people up the food chain from me are being moved to other buildings and we are getting a new assistant manager in. It just dawned on me today that I need to nab a head shot of him for the security poster I maintain for the building, and need to edit the two that are leaving off of it.  I'll get on that this week.

My co-worker was a no-show for the electrical work again today. I ran into him at work, even though it was his day off, he needed to run some errands there today. He had a meeting he had to go to this morning. "I should have called and let you know, man. Sorry. But Monday for sure!" When did this meeting get set up? He asked me if Friday morning worked good for me just this Wednesday night. Oh well, I didn't really expect him to show anyway. I won't be offering him future projects.