Ambrose Shitesworth, guest writer
I was enjoying a quiet evening in my cavernous manor-house yester-night, imbibing a bottle of absinthe and searching the Old Testament for any passages that could be interpreted as a command from the lord on high to horse-whip shabbily dressed individuals, when my tranquility was disturbed by the shrill, skull-splitting sound of children. The sweet, angelic sounds of the great castrato Alessandro Moreschi on the Edison cylinder were nearly drowned out by the high-pitched voice of a neighbour's child who had been allowed out of doors without leash or muzzle. The brief, yet horrific, experience, which repeats itself at random times, prompted me to ask myself why our thimble-headed lawmakers ever thought it in our best interest to rob us of our right to use child labour.
The legality of 12-hour work-days for children must be re-instated. Think of how grand it would be to be able to walk the streets of the town without one's eye being offended by the sight of wretched youngsters skipping and prancing, their idle hands instead occupied by sewing-machines, pick-axes, coal-furnaces, and welding-torches. Think of the drop in prices of consumer goods, as children would naturally be paid less due to their physical inferiority and easily be replaced should they slip and fall into blast-furnaces, clumsy oafs as they are.
Take a moment to consider the obscene amount of resources we waste on sending every child in the Republic to schools. Most of these urchins are the result of general ignorance of the new "rhythm" method of preventing the conception of offspring, born to parents too feeble-minded to track down a reliable abortionist and who care not a whit for the academic achievement of their spawn. Currently, they must, under penalty of law, be sent to schools paid for by landowners such as myself, where public funds are pissed down the shit-hole in a pointless attempt to drill knowledge into their empty heads while they contribute nothing to the betterment of their house-holds, draining their parents' already thin resources. Why must this occur in shanties across the Republic, when their strong young backs could be put to much better use mining coal and their nimble little fingers could be stitching affordable garments, all the while earning a haypenny or so an hour to provide their parents the means to purchase side-meat and flour?
Of course, any legislation that restores the business-man's right to the full use of this vast pool of inexpensive, expendable labour must be free of costly provisions for superfluous "safety" standards, as it is unfair to compel a business-man to assume the cost of ensuring the safety of persons who are naturally clumsy and already prone to accidents.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
8 1/2 years for this?
I went to college for 8.5 years. I earned two bachelor's degrees. I'll admit the first one was a total waste, since I practically never use anything I learned in my current job. The second degree came after a very challenging curriculum in which my teachers pushed me to break through my barriers and achieve the full potential of my natural abilities.
So where am I now, after all that? Am I working in some glamorous job in a fabulous office earning $70K a year? Nope. I'm sitting in a cubicle, staring at a 20" LCD monitor, sipping instant coffee in an effort to keep from nodding off, for the same crappy 30 G's I started with nearly 3 years ago. Meanwhile, the Boss is out on yet another week-long vacation, which he seems to take every 2 months or so. I've been working nonstop on one last-minute, can-you-do-this-for-me-real-quick project after another in addition to my regular duties. The company took out a 2-page spread in a publication that goes to press tomorrow, and gave me the work order yesterday. So whatever I produce is going to be a little sub-par because of the rush, and I fear that it will reflect badly on me. Also, today I had to find out what the fuck .emb and .dst files are, which a supplier requested for embroidering our logo onto garments. No, Illustrator can't magically make those, you dumb fuckers. I guess they just assumed every Mac comes bundled with embroidery digitization software. And then there are the fucking idiot clients who submit design requests and don't have their shit together before I start their ads, so after I make a great first draft, they come back with all these changes because they were too fucking stupid to write clearly what they wanted in the first place. It's like ordering a hot dog and once you get it, telling your server you want a hamburger instead.
I'm fucking worn out. I'm not used to working 8 full hours a day. Plus I went to the gym last night and will work out again tonight with my trainer, so I'll basically want to curl up and die come 7:00 tonight. If I didn't need a day job, I could work out in the middle of the afternoon when I have more energy, it's less crowded, and I don't have to drive back home in the dark. Thank god there's actually daylight again when I leave work. Gentle-men such as myself are not meant to rise at 7:30AM like common farmhands. I'm having to take time out to blog about it so that I don't set the god-damned building on fire. I've always bitched about having to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours, but now I yearn for the kind of workdays I had a year ago, when I had another person in my department to help with the workload. Back then I had an average of 4-5 hours a day in which to goof off. Nowadays I'm lucky if I have 1-2 hours, if anything. I ain't paid enough for working a full 40 hours a week.
Well, at least today I received my synthetic paper and thick lamination pouches so I can make my own custom ID cards. I made one today during lunch that proclaims my status as an ordained minister, and another generic "freelance press" card that may somehow come in handy one day. When you think about it, under the First Amendment everyone is a member of the press who wishes to gather news. They're pretty close in look and feel to PVC cards, lending them a feeling of authenticity. Soon I'll order a tool to punch a slot in the ID for a hangy clip. I could make great money selling fake IDs to college kids, but I dare not for fear of pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
So where am I now, after all that? Am I working in some glamorous job in a fabulous office earning $70K a year? Nope. I'm sitting in a cubicle, staring at a 20" LCD monitor, sipping instant coffee in an effort to keep from nodding off, for the same crappy 30 G's I started with nearly 3 years ago. Meanwhile, the Boss is out on yet another week-long vacation, which he seems to take every 2 months or so. I've been working nonstop on one last-minute, can-you-do-this-for-me-real-quick project after another in addition to my regular duties. The company took out a 2-page spread in a publication that goes to press tomorrow, and gave me the work order yesterday. So whatever I produce is going to be a little sub-par because of the rush, and I fear that it will reflect badly on me. Also, today I had to find out what the fuck .emb and .dst files are, which a supplier requested for embroidering our logo onto garments. No, Illustrator can't magically make those, you dumb fuckers. I guess they just assumed every Mac comes bundled with embroidery digitization software. And then there are the fucking idiot clients who submit design requests and don't have their shit together before I start their ads, so after I make a great first draft, they come back with all these changes because they were too fucking stupid to write clearly what they wanted in the first place. It's like ordering a hot dog and once you get it, telling your server you want a hamburger instead.
I'm fucking worn out. I'm not used to working 8 full hours a day. Plus I went to the gym last night and will work out again tonight with my trainer, so I'll basically want to curl up and die come 7:00 tonight. If I didn't need a day job, I could work out in the middle of the afternoon when I have more energy, it's less crowded, and I don't have to drive back home in the dark. Thank god there's actually daylight again when I leave work. Gentle-men such as myself are not meant to rise at 7:30AM like common farmhands. I'm having to take time out to blog about it so that I don't set the god-damned building on fire. I've always bitched about having to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours, but now I yearn for the kind of workdays I had a year ago, when I had another person in my department to help with the workload. Back then I had an average of 4-5 hours a day in which to goof off. Nowadays I'm lucky if I have 1-2 hours, if anything. I ain't paid enough for working a full 40 hours a week.
Well, at least today I received my synthetic paper and thick lamination pouches so I can make my own custom ID cards. I made one today during lunch that proclaims my status as an ordained minister, and another generic "freelance press" card that may somehow come in handy one day. When you think about it, under the First Amendment everyone is a member of the press who wishes to gather news. They're pretty close in look and feel to PVC cards, lending them a feeling of authenticity. Soon I'll order a tool to punch a slot in the ID for a hangy clip. I could make great money selling fake IDs to college kids, but I dare not for fear of pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Old Man Winter needs a good swift kick in the snowballs
Note: A portion of this post was deleted that I would not want co-workers to read. In the event that a co-worker somehow stumbles across this blog, he or she may be able to deduce the identity of this blog's author by carefully reading old posts. Friends who read this blog and wish to read the deleted portion must request it via e-mail.
Snow is pretty! For about a day. Then it's just a pain in my fat white ass.
We received a good 8 inches of powdery snow last Saturday. Now I love being snowed in as much as the next guy. We had plenty of food, snacks, beer, and DVDs, and had a great time just being lazy the whole weekend, and the neighborhood is always pretty under a pure white blanket. But when it comes time to go back to work Monday, I hate snow.
Saturday's snowfall forced us to cancel our plans to go to Raleigh and meet my wife's dad for dinner. We had also planned to transport a piece of furniture to store in her grandparents' house, and retrieve more stuff from my parents' house. Sunday afternoon we had to scoop and scrape all that snow off our cars in preparation for the next morning's trudge back to the Gulag. Then came the fun of making sure our cars could get out. Mine wasn't much trouble, but we had to push and shove my wife's car to get it moving. We decided it was unsafe to attempt to go anywhere, which meant I was stuck paying an extra buck for each of the 3 Redbox movies we'd rented and already watched.
Then Monday came. My office has an adverse weather policy, but I knew that the main roads were clear and only my cul-de-sac was problematic, so I didn't really have a good reason to skip work. So I had to get dressed, put on my rubber boots and carry my regular shoes in a bag and go out into the cold, unforgiving world. I had to circle the whole office building until I found a parking spot that had thawed out enough not to be a terrible slip-and-fall hazard.
As if all that shit weren't bad enough, Tuesday bestowed us with freezing rain. My wife was sent home from work over an hour early and complained of slick spots on her drive home. I had to cancel a personal trainer appointment thanks to the foul-ass weather.
Today we were shown some mercy. Temperatures got up into the 40s today, melting snow off pavement and concrete. Our cul-de-sac, however, is so shaded that it will likely take at least a week to get rid of the slush and ice. We'll be pummeled yet again by more winter weather this weekend, too! So of course plans to go to Raleigh must be postponed yet again.
On an unrelated topic, this made my day, as it reflects the kind of thoughts that go through my head every time I look at my dismal paycheck:
While I'm on the topic of salaries, I'd like to take a moment to bitch about how much physicians make. It's absurd. GP's probably take in at least a hundred grand a year, and some specialists can rake in half a mil or more. You can argue all you want about the amount of schooling, testing, and licensing they have to go through, but the shitty service my wife and I have been receiving lately from medical personnel leads me to conclude that doctors are overpaid for what they do.
Last week I went in with a fever, sore throat, congestion, etc. After waiting 45 minutes to be seen, the doctor was in the exam room all of 5 minutes and pronounced that I have a bacterial upper respiratory infection. A week and 30 antibiotic capsules later, I still have a sore throat and yellow mucus. So the guy probably got around $100 just to make a half-assed educated guess and throw some pills at me. Fuckin'-A, I wish I could get a hundred bucks just to glance at someone's head-holes for 5 minutes. But I don't. I work in a job that requires precision and great attention to detail, plus a comprehension of principles of color, value, and space that not everyone has. I can spend hours on a single project, getting it arranged just right. And I get paid probably a fourth of your average general practitioner. So somehow, someone somewhere decided that my time, effort, talent, skills, and education are worth a fourth as much as that of a guy who's in his office maybe 3 days a week and probably misses the mark a good 10% of the time. If I had that kind of failure rate with the stuff I create, I'd be out on my ass.
The longer I work for a shitty salary that doesn't reflect the true value of my abilities, the more of a socialist I become. I find myself lauding budgetary plans that I would have decried a few years ago. Tax the rich bastards and send some of it my way! And give me some free god-damned healthcare while you're at it, paid for by people who earn over 100K a year, because I'm sick of forking over $600 a month for the two of us to get shitty coverage. I'm beginning to understand how democrats get elected.
Snow is pretty! For about a day. Then it's just a pain in my fat white ass.
We received a good 8 inches of powdery snow last Saturday. Now I love being snowed in as much as the next guy. We had plenty of food, snacks, beer, and DVDs, and had a great time just being lazy the whole weekend, and the neighborhood is always pretty under a pure white blanket. But when it comes time to go back to work Monday, I hate snow.
Saturday's snowfall forced us to cancel our plans to go to Raleigh and meet my wife's dad for dinner. We had also planned to transport a piece of furniture to store in her grandparents' house, and retrieve more stuff from my parents' house. Sunday afternoon we had to scoop and scrape all that snow off our cars in preparation for the next morning's trudge back to the Gulag. Then came the fun of making sure our cars could get out. Mine wasn't much trouble, but we had to push and shove my wife's car to get it moving. We decided it was unsafe to attempt to go anywhere, which meant I was stuck paying an extra buck for each of the 3 Redbox movies we'd rented and already watched.
Then Monday came. My office has an adverse weather policy, but I knew that the main roads were clear and only my cul-de-sac was problematic, so I didn't really have a good reason to skip work. So I had to get dressed, put on my rubber boots and carry my regular shoes in a bag and go out into the cold, unforgiving world. I had to circle the whole office building until I found a parking spot that had thawed out enough not to be a terrible slip-and-fall hazard.
As if all that shit weren't bad enough, Tuesday bestowed us with freezing rain. My wife was sent home from work over an hour early and complained of slick spots on her drive home. I had to cancel a personal trainer appointment thanks to the foul-ass weather.
Today we were shown some mercy. Temperatures got up into the 40s today, melting snow off pavement and concrete. Our cul-de-sac, however, is so shaded that it will likely take at least a week to get rid of the slush and ice. We'll be pummeled yet again by more winter weather this weekend, too! So of course plans to go to Raleigh must be postponed yet again.
On an unrelated topic, this made my day, as it reflects the kind of thoughts that go through my head every time I look at my dismal paycheck:
While I'm on the topic of salaries, I'd like to take a moment to bitch about how much physicians make. It's absurd. GP's probably take in at least a hundred grand a year, and some specialists can rake in half a mil or more. You can argue all you want about the amount of schooling, testing, and licensing they have to go through, but the shitty service my wife and I have been receiving lately from medical personnel leads me to conclude that doctors are overpaid for what they do.
Last week I went in with a fever, sore throat, congestion, etc. After waiting 45 minutes to be seen, the doctor was in the exam room all of 5 minutes and pronounced that I have a bacterial upper respiratory infection. A week and 30 antibiotic capsules later, I still have a sore throat and yellow mucus. So the guy probably got around $100 just to make a half-assed educated guess and throw some pills at me. Fuckin'-A, I wish I could get a hundred bucks just to glance at someone's head-holes for 5 minutes. But I don't. I work in a job that requires precision and great attention to detail, plus a comprehension of principles of color, value, and space that not everyone has. I can spend hours on a single project, getting it arranged just right. And I get paid probably a fourth of your average general practitioner. So somehow, someone somewhere decided that my time, effort, talent, skills, and education are worth a fourth as much as that of a guy who's in his office maybe 3 days a week and probably misses the mark a good 10% of the time. If I had that kind of failure rate with the stuff I create, I'd be out on my ass.
The longer I work for a shitty salary that doesn't reflect the true value of my abilities, the more of a socialist I become. I find myself lauding budgetary plans that I would have decried a few years ago. Tax the rich bastards and send some of it my way! And give me some free god-damned healthcare while you're at it, paid for by people who earn over 100K a year, because I'm sick of forking over $600 a month for the two of us to get shitty coverage. I'm beginning to understand how democrats get elected.
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