Ah, how quickly I become blasé (is that the right accented e?). Monday number two of semi-employment is just another
weekend coming to a crashing halt. I’d do something about this spiritual complacency if I could be bothered.

I was pulling for the Colts in the Super Bowl, but my level of emotional investment was low. Nil, perhaps or something close to it. Peyton seems
like a class act, although I’ve heard he’s the quintessential Dumb Jock. In a league of Owenses and Belicheats, I’ll take it. New Orleans winning one hardly broke my heart. That city has deffo had more than its share of bullshit to deal with. I hope it can survive the utter lack of productivity coming upon its economy. How long does a citywide hangover last, anyway?

Wooga told me a while ago she was
planning a trip to the Woodburn outlets and asked if I wanted to come along. Yeah, why not? I could look at the Pearl Izumi store and maybe get her to eat some fast food. Accomplished both goals. I win! But greatest win came via the North Face store. As previously mentioned on Twitter I picked up a fleece liner for my goretex jacket. Can’t wear my Yelp hoodie at work, sadly, and the goretex itself is a bit bulky. So I grabbed a gray (mushroom gray, apparently, in girl colors) lightweight windproofish fleece. When I saw it was 35 this morning I was really glad for that. Clutch timing on that trip, Wooga. WTG. I’ve been basically wearing two coats for years. Lately it’s been my Yelp hoodie and a windbreaker. It’s kind of a Thing now to grab my jacket and not have to make sure the innards don’t fall out, or to hang it up and not have the outer part slide off. Progress, baby. Now if only my fuck up field will leave these extra zippers alone.

I just realized the title kind of sounds poetic. That was unintentional.

Progress is I (soft of) found a (sort of) job. The first sort of is my temp agency actually found me the job, and the second sort of is it’s temp to hire, so I can blow it and not get hired. At which point I might be pretty well fucked. But I have several reasons to feel good about this opportunity.

I have experience and training in the field. The job itself is easy, it’s changing light bulbs, plunging toilets, futzing with the occasional door. Although the two people I interviewed with dropped hints that if I work out there might be more in store for me. The people seem pretty chill, no one sticks out as an obvious dick and most of the people seemed to be reaching out to make me feel comfortable. It’s a fairly large crew, there’s 8 including me. One of the sources of conflict at my last job, in the Pearl, was there were only three maintainers, one of who was the chief. So it was just me and Numbertwo day after day after day. Numbertwo and I get along, I’d even venture to say we’re pretty good friends. But there would be flareups occasionally, mostly because we would get sick of looking at each other. I like this situation better.

The last reason is the reflection part and it’s about blogging. I never got into diaries or journaling, I only started blogging to keep my IM friends up to date. But occasionally I’d get bored and look through old entries. That’s how I discovered that I, in fact, do NOT have a strong immune system. And it also identified a pattern with jobs. I walk in excited, I become intoxicated with the place, then I turn against it with the type of savageness normally reserved for mama bears and bored cops. All due to overwrought expectations. So this time I’m going to keep my head about me. It’s a job, in fact, it’s an audition for a job. It’s not going to change my life. Other than the paychecks and time sink.

It’s a commercial property management company downtown with one big and several smaller buildings. Details? Ask me IRL.

Spoilers in the last paragraph.

After leaving Avatar last night a thought occurred to me. I’m no movie geek so this question might cause great pains to some out there, but it seemed reasonable to me.

Why is James Cameron so well regarded when Michael Bay isn’t? They both tell pretty bad stories buoyed by visual effects, so why is Bay in the dirt and Cameron in the clouds? Is it the technical innovations that Cameron’s movies seem to drive? Because, really Avatar’s blue cat people really don’t look THAT much better than JarJar Binks. Especially when sharing the frame with real people. They have convincing facial expressions, but so do the living sock puppets of 9 and the Wild Things. The bioluminescent flora of Pandora could have been high quality blacklight paint. Does this give Cameron respectabilty over Bay’s towering fireballs? The answer my girlfriend and I came up with is Cameron’s characters feel more human than Bay’s. We weren’t satisfied with it, but it worked.

I admit that I haven’t seen all of Cameron’s movies. In particular I haven’t seen The Abyss which seems to be held in high esteem by most people I know that have. I, of course avoided Titanic like a second circumcision. I’m seemingly alone on the planet in my hatred for T2. Really, Jimmy? A Terminator swearing it won’t kill anyone. To a kid? What the…?

Anyway.

Avatar is NOT a good movie. Specifically it’s not a good story. I’m not talking about the premise or plot, but the story the movie tells. Star Wars proves you can tell a simple story well. But Avatar isn’t simple, it’s simplistic and heavy handed (like the Prequels). This is what I’d expect a kid to make, not a supposed grand master of movie making. The hero wins over his angry boss, saves the pretty jungle and scores the hot chick. Awesome! Where’s the guitar solo? Even the specific item he uses as inspiration is a 14yo’s wet dream.

Then I read about an early treatment of Avatar on chud.com (worth a read if you have strong feelings about the movie one way or another. Even with CHUD’s terrible white text/black background. The treatment itself can be found here I can’t find where I d/l’d it from. I have the PDF if you want it.). The closing line of the article is telling, that in a big budget (although I’d call the cost of this movie monstrous rather than big, but for categorization…) the story goes out before the CGI.

I must admit the viewing public is swayed by what computers can do, even when they fail to be truly engaged emotionally by the spectacle (witness 2012, or ID4 for the earliest case I can recall). However, bringing up the budget, CGI is expensive while the story comes with a good script. So why not buy some blacklight paint?

But to the point. Judging from the early treatment Cameron can conceive a good story, even though it doesn’t appear in Avatar. But is he the perpetrator of this schlocky expensive nonsense, or the victim of his price tag? I honestly don’t know. Either way, Avatar: not good. I’m hoping there’s a lot of integrated deleted scenes on the DVD.

Spoilers below.
There were only three moments I can recall being impressed. The biggest was Grace dying. I fully expected the soul transfer to work. The second is not showing Jake catching the dragon. We’d seen him catching the bird, one avian rodeo was enough, WTG, JC. Third, and this is WAY HELLA GEEKY, showing Pandora not to be a single climate. I’m sick to death of desert planets and ice planets and jungle planets and city planets. Bleagh.

It’s been an interesting week.

Last week was Thanksgiving, of course, but gratitude is for chumps so I didn’t really do anything of the sort. Wooga was on vacation and dogsitting so I spent most of that period there. Miraculously, she did not dump me, there weren’t even any near slapping incidents. Stabbing and/or choking motions made behind my back remain unconfirmed.

I totaled up the financial outlays of that week and made a vow to be more financially disciplined this week for the, say, 15th week in a row. Having been unemployed for as long as I have (anniversary is approaching!) I’m undergoing a disconnect from the world of productivity. I do my daily futility (which is now tops 80 URLs (including multiple saved Craig’s List searches)) and after that….

I’m not writing. I’m barely making it to the gym and I’m certainly not making an effort to increase my physical fitness. Switching banks threw my financial tracking all to hell and Operation Break 220 (pounds) hasn’t been officially abandoned, but I’m not doing anything other than grumbling at my scale.

Yet I’m actually in a better headspace than I was as graduation from PCC approached. Concerns are the same, I’m never going to find a job in the field I studied two years for, but the anxiety isn’t there. There are a few differences, I’m living as an adult, I’ve got my coterie of drunkards and I’m dating someone rather than living with mom, having two friends who were frequently busy and, well, the less said about the rest of that the better.

Interesting thing the second, my homie Ron T is now a citizen of the United States. Having nothing else to do when he announced the finalization of this I bolted up and headed down. It was 12/1, and of COURSE I hadn’t bought a new bus pass yet. I discover this about 15 minutes before I was supposed to be there, y’know, when the fucking bus is arriving at the stop after I’ve been playing Risk on my iPhone.

I’m time critical with a close by destination and the weather is moderate. That’s right, bike. Sans helmet. EGADS, man! What’s wrong with you? Me, that is. I was in a hurry. But federal buildings don’t apparently much care for bikes, there were no racks on the sidewalk. So I locked the much abused Larkspur to a street sign and dashed in.

Now, how the fuck does someone in the post 9/11 world not know how to go through a fucking security point? I’ve never actually BEEN through one and it only took me 2 tries (my belt buckle is really metal, it’s Target so I was mildly surprised). Between a few codgers and an idiot who just wasn’t grasping the situation I was afraid I was going to miss it. But all was well and I arrived to sit with my soon to be not foreign friend in a damn waiting room for a while.

The people being naturalized were told where to sit, but the family/friends types were allowed to roam with cameras. There was an Indian dude with two annoying little shits who wouldn’t shut up. He tried, he really did but they were just bad kids. The girl was in what looked like a Disney princess dress. Ah, cultural imperialism, you so funny. The oath, or whatever, was long. It mentioned the draft, which surprised me. I’d always thought, or maybe assumed, it was administered by a judge, but it wasn’t. Just some lady who looked like a random bureaucrat. They played some pretty lame videos that I’m way too jaded to deal with. Lots of Ellis Island photos, some boat people pictures, what look like portraits of people dressed up for the swearing in, all to the strains of America the Beautiful. None of it was as bad as them playing that fucking Lee Greenwood song. Jesus, what’s wrong with people? That was cheesy in the fucking 80’s when it came out. God damned Walmart shoppers, and bureaucrats. No imagination at all.

Then there was a video speech from Obama. All hail.

After that, drinking. Woot.

More weirdness, I left my bike locked to said street sign and ended up going to a Pizza Schmizza bar to watch the Blazers suck somewhat less than they had been. Yeah, you read that correctly. Odd, but cool.

Hold on, there’s more weirdness. (shut up, this is only 755 words so far, 763 now). I ran over my budget for the week by grocery shopping. Really weird, that. The one time I plan on drinking most of my grocery money, I go buy stuff. Jeez, what’s wrong with me.

And in closing for weirdness, I, at 34, just asked my mom if I could borrow her car. Thanks, folks, I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip your waitress you’ve been a great crowd.

I don’t like the beach. Continuing my general policy of giving flippant, detail-free responses to lifestyle questions, I normally reply with something like the title of this post when asked why.

For a variety of reasons (my girlfriend) I spent this past weekend at a cottage on the beach. Nothing separated my from sneaker wave induced drowning but some wood and glass and an unexpected two lane road.

And it didn’t suck.

The beach itself, as an environment and medium, is still pretty unimpressive. As covered on Twitter on the first morning for some reason I woke up just before dawn and decided I was going to go out onto the beach and watch the sunrise. After tromping up and down the stairs (since I’m dating the hostess/organizer of this expedition I was, naturally, in the master bedroom) a few dozen times (inside joke, no I won’t explain it) I was on the beach in the pre-dawn gloom.

At that point I realized two things.
1: Logs on the beach after being rained on all night are wet, at that point so was my ass.
2: A commercial jingle (for a cruise line IIRC) went “from the sunrise in the east, to the sunset in the west” illustrated the reason the sun was going to peek out from behind a ridge of hills, much as it does in Portland. So while I wouldn’t get to see the sun come up from the water, people living on the East coast don’t get to see it fall down into the water.

Anyway, the sun came up, the sky turned blue and the clouds turned pink before they turned white. There was sand, water and no bars. I went back inside. So much for the beach.

Also in the “new experiences” department, non-annoying toddlers and breakfast burritos. To be sure I’d had breakfast burritos before, the microwaveable ones. I decided after some experimentation the very idea was loathsome and deserving only of punishment. Fresh ones, however, were pretty good. If you’d told me as late as, oh, 7:55am, Saturday October 31st, 2009 that I’d have pico de gallo for breakfast and enjoy it, I’d have pointed and laughed. Then looked for some stairs to kick you down. Well, shit happens, right?

Oh, you’re probably still tripping on the “non-annoying toddler” thing. There’s not much to elaborate on there. One of the cottage guests was a toddler, and he wasn’t very annoying. I’d elaborate, but, y’know, he’s a baby and this is hardly a baby blog. But if the one known as Wooga talks about a couple bringing a sub 2 years old boy and a half Weimaraner half chocolate Lab to some event, have no worries. Even though Labs are the most emo of dogs (that was another inside joke, deal).

The rest of the weekend, well Manzanita is as if you put Multnomah Village in the middle of fucking nowhere. With more real estate companies. Cannon Beach is even worse because of the gift shop plague. If I had to spend any length of time on the Oregon Coast my desire to live would evaporate. Even this past weekend would have been pretty lame without 7 other people in the house. As my past experiences in Milton-Freewater illustrated, I’m city. I want concrete and funny smells and a number of venues for poisoning myself within a few minutes’ walk.

But, y’know. It didn’t suck. I also came home with several days of black bean soup, a bag of Oreos and nearly a case of Mt Dew. And I scored points by introducing Wooga to cash n’ carry. Net positive.

A long time ago on an email list I rarely visit any more someone I didn’t like said because he was stupid said something unusually profound. This was one of those dipshits that put “school of hard knocks” in places that asked him where he went to college, but he did pull this out of somewhere.

Money is energy.

Think about that for a second in relation to all the things people say money is. It’s not power, it’s not happiness, it’s just energy. Along with oxygen, calories and electricity it’s one of the things we need to run our lives. It’s a good way to keep money in perspective. How much energy do I need? How much surplus could I use? Too many calories and you get fat, too much electricity and you’re probably starting a fire. Even oxygen is poisonous in some circumstances, admittedly ones only a few people will ever experience. But some people just don’t think that way.

I learned at my last office job, people who are about money are bad people. Not “tend to be”, not “are likely to be” but “are”, bad people. This was brought home to me, well, first a little background. At this point I was a data entry clerk at a company that did yada yada yada with securities and blah blah blah with lawsuits. At the time I was one of the faster typers and there was a case this would be useful in.

In California somewhere there was a Mexican immigrant who was a janitor. He moved to America and got a job and if the Mexicans I’ve worked with are any indication he worked his fucking ass off. He saved his money and he invested his money. This janitor had a stock broker and that stock broker, probably thinking he was dealing with some stupid brown person, began writing himself checks off his customer’s account. I don’t know all the details but I was told to put aside whatever I was working on and enter this data because that particular individual was in the custody of the FBI and would be trading his suspenders for orange coveralls and the sodomy-victim-to-be’s employer needed to know how much they were going to have to return to the janitor. Hopefully it didn’t end there. That was only the most egregious instance I saw at that job, where dealing with the aftermath of retirees’ life savings having been dropped into dotcoms was a regular occasion.

All this lead me to decide money people are bad people. I’ve yet for this to be disproven, and people trying to buy their way into heaven via charity don’t count (*cough*Bill Gates*cough).

That’s the prologue, here’s the text.

When going back to school to learn a trade I had for some God damned reason to take Psych 101, which I quickly named Shite 101. The instructor was a big fan of a book called Freakonomics, which applied economic principles to just about everything. I wasn’t really listening to him, Psych 101 at that point had yet to do anything of value (and wouldn’t) but he kept talking about this book so it stuck.

I still haven’t read the book, but I do subscribe to the NY Times RSS feed of the Freakonomics blog. I’ve never put much stock into economics as its own discipline. When trying to explain stock prices to someone I came up with “consensual mass hallucination” and at the point decided that economics is properly regarded as a subset of psychology, probably mob psychology. But I didn’t think much about that again until a Freakonomics blog entry (or maybe a quote in their Wikipedia page) said that economics is “the study of incentives”. Yeah, that made sense. That fit both everything economists said about themselves and everything I’d seen their work actually. Maybe, I thought, just maybe there was something to this economics stuff after all. Maybe these guys are okay. Ah, to be innocent again.

Not too long ago the blog started talking about bribery as a legitimate tool in various things (NBA players bribing referees to resolve their labor dispute was one example I remember). If you have to explain to someone why bribery is bad, there’s just no saving that person. Better to abandon them in the woods when wolves are hungry or bear cubs are leaving their dens.

Then I saw this article on The AV Club. The gist is that the new Freakonomics book, Super Freakonomics, well, I’ll relay the quote from The AV Club.

So the real puzzle isn’t why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don’t choose this career.

OMFG.

No, let me spell that out.

Oh my fucking God.

So, Stephen and Steven, what’s IN that part of you where empathy used to live? Is part of getting an economics degree installing a door so you can just put that inconvenient bit of yourself in a drawer or does that piece of paper just rip your fucking soul out? Is there a genetic component to this, because let’s start selecting against it. Or is this just part of the evil inherent in humanity? This isn’t an idle, philosophical question. People educated in ways functionally identical (debates over freshwater vs. saltwater economics are like picking between being stabbed or shot) to these worthless bastards are the ones really making decisions in America today.

True, the writers of Super Freakonomics are guys and the writer of that AV Club article is a woman, but this isn’t a battle of the sexes topic. I’m entirely with Amelie Gillette on this one. Economics isn’t the study of incentives, it’s the study of how far people will debase themselves. If you need that explained to you, well, go play with that cute baby bear. His mom will be along shortly and the world will be a better place soon.

I closed my Chase savings account and joined a credit union with it. I’m in the process of ridding my life of Chase, the next step is closing my primary checking account. I’m gonna make sure my unemployment insurance is all switched over before I do that. I learned the hard way that when you change your deposit info with the Employment Department they put direct deposit on hold and send you a paper check while they make sure all the new info is kosher. It took me a few days to determine that. Silly me.

Next step is closing my bills checking account, but I gotta make sure my krav maga direct payments are sorted, so that might take a month.

I also have to transfer my IRA to the credit union. I’ll start that when I go in next time, for whatever that is. I need to start an interest bearing savings account and decide if I’m going to do the two checking accounts thing or not. I got checks on my interest bearing, ATM fee refunding checking account, which was a silly thing to do if I’m gonna run a second checking account for bills. I’ll probably try to keep everything straight in one checking account, which would have prevented this whole mess. Still it’s a good thing to not have a fucking commercial bank looking to screw you every chance it gets in your life.

So, fuck you, Chase. :-)

Other news, my permanent license came already (wtg, DMV) and I’m working on getting my EPA certification to buy refrigerants. With that I can get a refrigeration repair gig. I’d rather babysit (building maintenance) but there’s more money in service.

Okay, go outside and play now. It’s raining. :-)

I got a response to a resume on Monday. It was a hotel maintenance job which I’m not really enthusiastic about because hotels typically don’t pay for shit. Which kinda sucks because hotels (you’ll note I didn’t say “hospitality”) is probably the industry I have the most experience in and the environment I’m one I’m generally interested in because, y’know, the asshole customers leave.

So the response was an email asking me to call the guy, the head tech or chief engineer or whatever, on his cell. I complied but the message said he was on vacation and didn’t give me the option of leaving a voice mail. Not a great sign. So I reply to the email, blah blah blah.

He calls this morning, wants to know where I’m at, what I’m looking for, all that jazz. At some point, in the midst of complaining that people in the NW are too laid back and more interested in the not working parts of their lives than in the working parts (more on that later) he mentions they want someone who can move up. Which causes alarm on my end because, well, I think most of you know me, or have met me, do I seem like management material to you?

So I work in to my end that I’m not interested in climbing the corporate ladder. That catches his attention and he asks me to expand on the theme. Well, sir (I didn’t say that, of course), all I want from a job is 40 hours a week (although if you want to give me some time and half I’ll take it), regular paychecks (hopefully every other week) and for it to leave me the fuck alone. Admittedly maintenance was kind of a bad choice for that last as someone’s usually on call.

But what I don’t want from a job is to deal with other people’s bullshit. Including the HR department, performance reviews, discipline and budgets and whiners. And meetings. Oh, shit do I ever want to minimize meetings. So, no promotions for me, thank you. I work, you pay me, the end.

I paraphrase that to him, of course. He then says they’re looking for someone who wants all that, so thanks for your interest blahblahblah, see ya later.

WTF? What was all that about? Were they really hiring for an assistant manager?? What bullshit. The pay was merely bad, not insulting like some (I was once offered the grand sum of nine dollars an hour for a hotel gig), but the line earlier about people in the northwest being too laid back is what really makes me think I wouldn’t have been about working for this guy/company. Why wouldn’t I be more interested in the leisure part of my life than the working part? An employer is someone who pays you because they have to, if they could find a way to do away with a body they will. So fuck them. The gold watch and pension mentality has left their end so the work ’til you drop mentality has sure as fuck left mine.

Bleagh!

Heed!, originally uploaded by JW Doom.

The sign lays it out, homes.

Yesterday I get an email that my account is overdrawn. I look online and see that I wrote a check for rent and forgot to transfer in the money to cover it. My bad. I freely admit my error and was fully expecting to be hit with a fee.

This morning I get an email that my account is overdrawn. I’d covered the transfer and I had about $13 left in my account, of which I spent about $10 last night but my unemployment insurance direct deposit should have hit. Confused, I go to the website. My balance is around $200, about half what it should be on dole day. I click to see account activity.

$136 overdraft fee.

One hundred thirty six dollar overdraft fee.

After I get over staring at my iPhone in shock I of course get angry. By the time I get home to my iMac where I can click the link (there’s a digression there about the Chase website, I’ll put it at the end) I’ve got a pretty good head of steam built up. Then I see that it’s rather four overdraft fees for four overdrawn transactions. Each one helpfully listed.

Three of these were not overdrawn yesterday. Because I looked. I monitor my bank activity pretty closely via the Chase website and these three transactions were already on my account when the rent check was processed (the rent check itself is the fourth overdrawn transaction). Today when I look, sure enough, every transaction within a day is now sorted in descending order by amount.

Which comes to one of the big screws of commercial banking. Chase, at least, processes big transactions first. Which they say is because big transactions are more likely to be important, car payments, rent, etc and it’s more important those go through. Baloney! When have bankers ever really cared about their customers’ convenience? Where did the term “banker’s hours” come from, because banks fall over themselves to help us out? Horse puckey! It’s so they can ding you for fees by overdrawing the account with big transactions first, then hitting you every time you get coffee or a beer or a taco. They know a lot of people lead cash-free lives and they work it for their bonuses and stock price. They also know this is b.s., because they’re stopping it. Some time next year.

So Chase is keeping $136. As I indicated above, I’m unemployed. Unemployment insurance has an expiration date and the job market in Portland is famously bad. I can’t just cover things out of savings when some day those savings might be all that’s keeping me from homelessness, or living with Mom again. All of this was caused in large part by Washington Mutual, now a part of Chase Bank! The screw has now come full circle.

Now another corporate screw, which goes beyond banks. The only way I’m going to get any satisfaction is to yell at some CSR. I hate yelling at front line employees. Give me a manager or partner, someone with authority and I’ll vocally add proverbial orifices to their body and smile afterward. But of course they hide behind their probably literally poor, overworked, overstressed pawns.

But they’re not keeping over a quarter of my weekly income. So I formulate a plan. First, I’d been a customer of WaMu for a long time, and I’ve stuck with Chase. I deserve better treatment than this. Second, three of these fees were because of your accounting shenanigans. The damage is far beyond my fault. Now, I want some of the fees refunded or I’m gone. I’m not going to argue, I’m not going to debate. Fix it, or you’ve got one less customer maintaining a decent balance. If you can’t do that, give me to someone who can.

It turns out Chase has a “goodwill” fee refund policy. What. The. (expletive deleted)? They know they’re screwing us, so they’ve come up with a policy to throw us a bone! But no more than once every twelve months. This “goodwill” refund is up to $70. I’d set my price at $100, but like I said I hate yelling at CSRs so I waffled and took it. I wonder now if that was planned, if they hired some shrink to ask how to defuse people like me.

But there’s more. Because of their fee I was overdrawn again, even with my UI direct deposit (I can’t see on their site what times those transactions came in but who wants to guess they process fees before deposits?). So there are more fees coming. The CSR couldn’t reverse a fee that hadn’t been assessed yet, so I have to call back tomorrow to take care of that. When I do I must talk to a supervisor because I’ve already used my goodwill refund and the CSR admitted whoever I get tomorrow will go to some lengths to avoid escalating my call.

I hate banks. I hate corporations. I hate corporate banks.

Okay, the website digression. Chase’s website sucks. There’s no way to get additional information about particular transactions from the site. WaMu’s website (which was also bad) had it, the description of each line item was a hyperlink. It didn’t give a lot of information, but you could get some. Chase, nothing. Except for on checks and overdraft fees.

This might not be specific to the website, but I hate the way Chase does transactions, particularly ones with tips. WaMu would list such transactions as pending until they’d been finally processed by the merchant with the tips included. With some merchants this could take over a week, but WaMu showed it as incomplete until the merchant said, okay, I’m done.

Chase shows them as finalized, then goes back to adjust the amount when the tip comes through. Which, okay, who thought that was a good idea? You can’t monkey with transaction balances after they’ve been posted!!! What kind of audit trail is that? You fail bookkeeping forever! Good bye.