A variety of subjects

I can waste a lot of time online. I have that skill.

I'm not going to talk a lot about the election. I'm happy. It's not going to be as great as some people think, because that would be unrealistic, but it's good for America. And I didn't wake up this morning with that grinding feeling like nothing in my life matters. I mean, no more than usual. Nothing like four years ago.

At the convention someone asked me why there weren't any sex scenes in the book. Not in an accusatory sort of way, just curious. I said it was because sex isn't like that. It isn't like it's presented in so many books. When two characters start out as friends and, in the course of the stresses and strains of the narrative structure, getting closer and closer until something, that peculiar something, happens...well. It's very rarely pornographic in real life. It's usually awkward and embarrassing and just...strange. That what I wanted to present was actual people actually falling in love, rather than two characters ticking off plot points in an editor's mind. Moment of Darkness. Check. Retribution. Check. Ball-Cupping. Check.

A number of things have happened in the last week. I am aware of $4000 that has been lost to employee error. There's another $2000 floating around awaiting resolution. And prior to any of these mistakes, my boss did three things:

1) He canceled our offsite tech support. So now when things break, I have to try to fix them. I'm an English Major.

2) He canceled our cleaning service. Once a week wasn't enough for the men's room, and now it's going to be none a week. I'm sure our customers will appreciate that. I know I do.

3) He asked me to look into "cheaper alternatives" to our postal software. Now, I'm not against this in practice. Our current provider has done less and less to keep up with developing technologies. In a lot of ways they're still writing their programs for Unix shops running mid-80's inkjet equipment. And that's a big market. But that's not us. What concerns me is that my coworkers have been using the current software for about 8 years, and they have yet to figure it out. It's easy to use. They're just not detail oriented. So now, to introduce a whole new suite...yeah. It's going to go well.

What this all adds up to is a crisis of cash. I know that, I've known it for months. The number of printers in the office has steadily decreased for a variety of reasons. At first it was because we didn't want to pay to have them serviced, so when they broke we'd just default to a network printer and that person would have to walk across the office to get their reports. I'm one of those people walking. Now we're running out of printers because they won't buy us toner. Toner. We have different machines, and they've just stopped buying toner for certain models. It's stupid to have different machines in the first place, but that happened because whenever we needed a printer, some dumbass would just drive to office depot and buy whatever was cheapest.

You see, this is what happens when you make bad business decisions, over and over again. We're bleeding money because we make mistakes and have to reprint. We lose clients because of mistakes. We take the cheapest alternative because we're losing clients, and the cheapest alternative ends up costing us money we don't have. This comes in cycles, has for years, but this is supposed to be the busy time of our year. I just don't think it's working out like they thought.

I have a lot of thoughts. I don't like a lot of them. This is why I waste time on the internet. It's why I drink at night. It's why I enjoy going to places like Calgary and spending time with smart people, and why I really hate leaving those places and slowly losing contact with those people as our social lines gradually pull taut and snap with distance and our daily lives. And then it's next year and are we better off? Is everything better now?

Anyway.

UPDATE: One of my coworkers just told me that if I wasn't happy in my job, I might want to think about taking my writing more seriously. Yeah. I might want to think about that.