Vail Life

Three more days to go.

I am getting all kinds of butterflies in my stomach thinking about starting a new job. One of the things that I still get excited about is the fact that I no longer have to wear a uniform to go to work. When I asked about dress code my manager told me nothing with competitors' logos and nothing profane. Otherwise anything goes. Sandals, shorts, jeans, t-shirt, I get to wear anything I like. That is going to be so cool. I have been wearing a uniform for the last 9 years of my career; it is going to be so comfortable going to work in whatever I feel like throwing on.

The new guy is starting to show his true colors. He showed up late today and asked to leave early last week when the 6 a.m. shift showed up to relieve him. He was already talking about finding new work as we were talking today. I really feel sorry for Shane, one of the Front Desk agents, because it will be Shane who has to work Midnights if our night auditor leaves. The night auditor said that he hit some serious rain on his drive in but even still that is just poor planning if you can not make it to a job in time for an 11:00 p.m. shift.

I will literally start my new job four hours after leaving this one. I get done Thursday morning at 7 a.m. here and start at 11 a.m. on Thursday at Vail Resorts. No break for me, but at least I will not miss any paychecks.

I helped my new roommate put a railing on the deck yesterday, burnt my shoulders something fierce doing it to. But it was all good. I will be moving in to my new place this coming week. I will be able to move most everything in my car. I just need to find someone with a large vehicle to move my dresser. I dread that.

One of the things about the house I am moving to that I don't care for is that the dog likes to tear through stuff. Not that I can not live with that, it just means that I am going to be cleaning the house up all the time. My room is usually disorganized not dirty. We will see how that plays out over the next month or so.

My roommate does have a really cool Ninja 900 bike. Seeing him on it makes me want one. Maybe when I sell the Porsche next Spring I will look at buying one for myself. Of course I also want to buy a new car so that may not happen.

My parents were here to visit me and we spent 2 days together running around. I took them on a long hike up into the mountains and golfing at a course that normally costs 79 dollars to golf at. It was pretty cool and a lot of fun.

I finally got a new comic up. I date all my comics with the name so my script will put them in order and I am sad to say it was a month since it was last updated. I apologize to those few who actually read the front page that it took so long. I just kept running into other things to work on or play with that I just didn't have time to do the comic.

Today's comic is the first one that I did completely on my laptop. One thing I have to say is that it is a lot harder drawing on my laptop than it is to draw using my trackball on my main machine. I definitely need to get a mouse for this machine.

I am not sure if I will get a new rant up this week. With me starting a new job and moving I think my days are going to be pretty full. I will see if I might get some time to write one up while finishing out my last few days at the Marriott.

One last item of note. I finally got my Ebberon campaign book in the mail and am close to finishing it. I have been reading it cover to cover. It is a really cool world filled with magic driven technology. I am really excited to start that campaign up. We will most likely play at the new place I am moving to. It has a large kitchen table to play on and now I have my own laptop to track the game. So hopefully I will start updating the D61 portion of the main site. Although it is not D61 any longer so I will have to update that header title and then get some new stats and storylines going.

Posted by Coign at 4:29 AM | Permalink | Comments

Yeah I accepted the job at Vail Resorts. I thought I would just talk a bit about that here to combine the notes in the rant along with the notes in the forum.

I was really feeling let down there for a while. At my interview she had told me that she would come to a decision on Monday and let me know then. I figured she would call about 1 pm. It was actually on Tuesday about 2:30 that she let me know. That was 22 hours of depression I wish I could have avoided. But it wasn't so bad. I still had Eagle County at the time to fall back on and I kept telling myself that as I would think about how I thought I had failed another job interview.

Funny isn't it? I went a full 6 months of active hard searching putting out over 100 applications. I got few interviews and zero offers. Then within the last couple of months I am now weighing offers and choosing my job. Let me tell you choosing between jobs is a lot more fun than just choosing a job.

Do I feel guilty about hanging Eagle County out to dry? Yeah, I have this weird sense of work ethic that employers do not seem to have. I really had to fight my conscious on this one to accept the better job. I do not think I would have the resolve to do so if I had not been the victim of a company layoff. That really shows a person how to choose the more profitable deal.

I stayed at CP Internet a full year after I should have been looking for other work. Those that worked with me can attest to the fact that I had talked about leaving the company at least a year before being laid off. It was the sense of comfort and ease that kept me from leaving. I knew my job, I liked the people I worked with, and I liked the work I did. It was the pay and upper management that I had issues with.

Let me tell you a little story that I have told a few people. It started off as a work order. It was to help a customer get his ISDN running in a phone call. The odd thing was that it was to be an install in Cambridge using ECE hardware. We did not offer ISDN in Cambridge at that time. So I asked my co-worker Chad.

"Hey, do we offer ISDN in Cambridge? Better yet do we even have the equipment to support it out there?"

"Well the equipment is out there because the existing hardware will work but it is not configured for it" he replied.

OK, I have worked on doing installs on both ends at the same time before. I used to do it for DSL and frame relay technologies all the time. I can't remember but I think I even had to travel out to Cambridge during that install to do some hands on work on the router to make it capable of doing ISDN. Then I talked to the customer and started testing it.

Now you have to understand. The preferred method of installing a new service in any area is that you build it, get yourself a test line, and then test to see if it is all setup correctly and works properly. Then when you get your customer and you know if it does not work for the customer it is something on the customer's end that needs work. But when you are using the customer to test a connection you have to try a ton of different things to get everything calibrated correctly on both your end and the customer's end to get it all up and running.

So the install, that in a working location usually takes a day, took about 1 - 2 weeks. The customer was satisfied with the work in the end and we had got a working connection. Then ECE called me. They were wondering why this one-day install took so long. I told them it was because we did not offer ISDN service in that area and so I had to reconfigure a lot of hardware to make it all work. They told me that Stewart, our company representative sales guy, told them we offered it.

I told them, “No, we had the equipment for it there but the hardware took a lot of reconfiguration to make it all work.”

She thanked me for my work and hung up.

The next day I had Stuart call me into his office. He then proceeded to yell and berate me for telling a customer that the reason it took so long was because we did not have our end working. About 15 minutes into him yelling at me I had enough and I yelled back at him for offering a service we did not have and if he had a problem with my work he can talk to my manager about it. I then literally stood up and walked out on him in mid-sentence.

I went straight over to my immediate manager's office, Craig, and told him exactly what had happened and how I yelled back at Stu. I apologized for my yelling back at him but I told him there is only so much blame I can take for all that. Craig told no problem and he will talk to Stew and Linda about it. Linda, Craig and Stu's manager, sided with Stu on the whole argument and from what I heard told Craig to make sure he talked to me about how to handle at situation like that in the future.

Craig then talked to me about how I should have dealt with that in a private meeting. Then a day later sent me an e-mail telling me how he was being yelled at by ECE about it. Then brought it up a day later in an Engineer meeting about using proper business slang terms to never tell the customer the truth, and then sent me a second e-mail about how I had improper told ECE about the internal operations at CP Internet.

At that last e-mail I finally had enough. Nobody had told me we had offered ISDN in ECE and I originally was not even aware we had the capability to offer ISDN. I setup our end with minimal help, thanks Chad for those configs to set that up, and setup the customer end on my own. I know the customer was happy with the end result and he thanked me for the work and the extra mile I went working late hours with him and making sure that he was connected at optimum speeds. I finally was tired of putting up as being the scapegoat that all the shit was being shoveled on.

I wrote a reply to Craig's e-mail. I wish I had that original e-mail to post here. Summarized it went through and said how the whole problem started when Stu offered a service we did not provide. If they were going to continue to yell and bitch at me about doing my job and getting a service running that we did not offer; and use a customer for testing and then yell at me for improper information, then they can just go to hell. If anyone needed to be the bottom of that shit pile it needed to be the golden boy Stu. And if they did not like it they could all go to hell.

I let Chad read that e-mail before I sent it to Craig. I told him I might as well start packing my desk as soon as I sent it because I am going to be escorted to the corner in 5 minutes. Well Craig never replied back to that e-mail and nothing more was ever said. But every time after that I would send any correspondence I had with our affiliates through Craig for proper PC wording and censorship and I am sure that e-mail was one of the reasons I was top of the list when the layoffs came about 8 months later.

But in the end I feel it all worked out for the better. Hell, I am living in Vail with a free ski pass.

Posted by Coign at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments

I just got back from my interview with Vail Resorts.  It went well.  So well in fact I am already thinking up how I am going to tell Eagle County that I have a better offer.  But maybe I am jumping to conclusions to quickly here.
 
I have a couple of benefits to my interview. 
 
One, I told them about my offer with Eagle County and how VR is offering much more than Eagle County. 
 
Two, the manager of help desk knows and is friends with friends of Craig, the guy I am moving in with shortly.  In fact Craig showed up after my interview and talked with me and the manager as he was passing through for lunch.
 
Three, I think my interview went very well.  We really seemed to connect and I feel she was impressed with my replies to her questions. 
 
Four, I got the question again, "How do you feel about stepping backwards in your career?"  I was able to confidently reply to this one as that I am not upset about going backwards and the other offer I have on the table from Eagle County is moving backwards career-wise also, though it is even less than what you are offering right now.
 
Running through the numbers today, I will make about 21,000 at Eagle County.  She said the starting pay for Help Desk is 30,000 a year salary.  Eagle County would give me 4 months off to find another job but then you have that searching and no guarantees that I can find a job for 4 months that would pay me an amount to make up the difference in salary.  And the thing I still cannot get over is the no Paid Time Off with Eagle County.  What kind of employer does not give his employees a PTO benefit?  That just really irks me.
 
So if you add in the free ski pass and the 2 weeks of PTO from VR I am making about 33,000 a year with benefits.  Eagle County doesn't even come close to that.  So the agonizing yesterday about if I can justify turning down the Eagle County job is over.  The VR job is an offer I cannot refuse.

Now I just have to stop thinking about it because if I do not get it I will be very disappointed in myself.  I find out Monday if I got the job or not.  I will update you then.

Posted by Coign at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

Well I have not been updating the site very much lately. But like I said it is because I have been doing a lot lately. Not that anything I have been doing has been really important but just that I have been keeping active doing other stuff so have slacked off on the site. Hopefully I will get back into a more regular schedule now.

Now on to the updates.

Jay and his wife are leaving for San Diego in about 6 hours from now. I gave them my goodbyes today and wish them the best of luck. The way that I keep in touch with people I will most likely be at least a year before I see them again. Although even though I lost two friends from this area I have gained others as Justin's friend Mike moved here and I will be moving to a new place and hanging out with Craig more.

I am really looking forward to getting out of my current living situation; it is just driving me nuts. I am freaking tired right now because she comes in and stomps around the house in her high heels and making her fucking yappy dog go off on a barking spree for 1/2 an hour at 6:30 right in the middle of my evening sleep time. At least with the new place I will be on the top floor so I will not have any one stomping on my ceiling. Also the dog there does not bark every time I walk in the house.

My parents will be arriving in a few days to spend 3-4 days with me. I have a hiking trip and a golf outing planned for them. That should be a lot of fun. They will be arriving with my sister and an exchange student from Germany that stayed with them for a year a couple of years ago.

Because of my parents being here I am unsure if I will get a new comic up. I know we are 2 weeks out now since the last comic but the comic takes more time. I work on Friday night so I will try and whip something together on the laptop to post while at work. I have already written the new rant for Sunday so I will post that this weekend. I know I have also talked about revamping the web site. At this point the website is just a couple of ideas in my head. I have yet to start on the new design so do not expect any drastic changes anytime soon unless I get into some type of weird mood where I pound it out over the course of a day.

What the rant is about and what is coming up tomorrow is the fact that I have an interview with Vail Resorts. I hope I get offered the job so that I can compare the offer from them with the one that I have already gotten from Eagle County School District.

As I have posted on the message boards I have received my new laptop and I bought a digital camera with it. I am very happy with both purchases and already they have made things easier. Having a machine at work where I am not worried about what I look at and store on the PC is very nice. Plus this machine plays DVDs so I could watch movies at work if I wanted. Although I watched a movie yesterday and it put me to sleep. So for the time being I have nixed the movie thing.

The new guy is done training and will start going solo on Saturday. He does a decent job but there are some small details that will take time and practice for him to iron out. The one reason I think he may not last is the fact that he is young. He is only 20 years old and working midnights truly destroys any social life you may have. You are up when everyone else is sleeping and sleeping when everyone else is awake. I predict he will last 2-3 months.

Well off to continue the night audit and roll the day. Take care everyone and I will try and pop in for another update later this weekend.

Posted by Coign at 1:49 AM | Permalink | Comments

So I let the new guy go home early tonight. It is a really slow night and he already covered 98% of the night audit. Plus he did not get enough sleep and was leaving to go camping early tomorrow. See what a nice guy I am?

Overall I think he will be an ok night auditor. He is only 20 and that shows in terms of work ethic and endurance but I think he is much better than most 20-year-old punks I know. He will be fine and I can leave without worrying about my replacement completely hosing up the system. Not that it is my responsibility but I feel loyalty to any job I do even if I don't like it or I am leaving it soon.

Well I paid Craig 200 dollars yesterday and will be moving into the new place sometime after July 15th. I knew he was hurting for money this month so I wanted to give him something to tide him over until I fully move in, in August. It puts a smile on my face every time I think about leaving the place I currently live at.

If I remember right I am 99% sure I was supposed to go to Denver with Justin's wife to get new tires on my car on the 29th of June. But I totally spaced it out until July 1 and they never called me to remind me or ask me if I was ready to go with them. I think the reason they did not call me is because I had asked them to order the tires, as they needed to be shipped in because they are not a stocked tire, and I think they forgot to do so. I have not brought it up to them because I do not want to put them into an uncomfortable situation. It was a favor I asked of them and I don't want them to feel bad for not doing it for me. So I will probably make some calls next week to Glenwood Springs and find a tire place to get some tires and get those replaced next weekend.

Well since I have bought the laptop I keep looking at the shipping notice in my inbox and I am torn by feelings of joy for finally getting a laptop and the fun stuff I can do with it and feelings of sadness at how I threw myself back into debt for 2000 dollars to a credit card. I am not as sad as when I was poor and blogging about not making bills. Because I know I am not going to miss any payments because of buying the laptop, but still I keep thinking about how I need 3000 dollars to buy a new car to replace the Neon and I just put myself that much further behind in saving that amount of money. I mean everything will be fine if the Neon lasts long enough to get replaced, but if it breaks down while I am still paying off the laptop and I have to get a new car in a hurry I will be put off. The only silver lining to that cloud is the fact that I do own two cars now. If the Neon died, even though I do not want to drive the Porsche in wintertime, I could use the Porsche as a backup car if need be. Having that security blanket of a second running car is a welcome relief to the worry of my car dying.

The biggest other thing bothering me currently in my life is the fact that I feel like I have gotten lazy recently. I have been meaning to get an oil change on the Porsche, the Neon needs one too, I should also look at rotating tires on the Neon before Winter, and I have so many web projects, and self learning books that I have not touched in so long. I want to work on things like the aforementioned projects as each one will increase the quality of my life but they feel like so much work. I am happy when I do make progress on each of them but I dread doing them as I would much rather just play on the computer or visit friends and have fun. I have talked about buying software to help organize projects and jobs I set for myself. But I really admit to myself that spending money on a program to set aside time in my life to work on those projects would be a waste as I would still be to lazy to do them even if I planned out to do so.

Posted by Coign at 3:55 AM | Permalink | Comments