The job...

Frequent readers of this blog (hey you 2, knock that off), may have heard me complain about my job somewhere along the line. How my boss is a complete and utter dumb ass, and or how I was working slave like long hours with little thanks. 

Well, I'm happy to report that a couple of things happened this week that will make that work situation that much better.

1. My un-holy turd pile of a boss was removed from his position. He could no longer achieve, well, anything, and they took him out, and moved him to another location. Ding dong the freakin' witch is dead and all of that good stuff. It's not that I wish horrible things for people, but this guy had every single chance, and then some, to make the most out of what he was doing, and he failed miserably. As a consequence, most of the people in our organization think that the quality department, of which I'm a member, are a bunch of incompetent douchey McDouches. And here's why. During the reign of my now former boss, a certain style of overlording, and or micromanagement came into effect with the quickness. This hardly ever allowed anyone to get anything done. Why you might ask? Well, he would have to review everything, and make little tweaks and or changes before anything went anywhere, and after many revisions, you'd kind of just give up, and not do whatever it was you were doing. See, thing is, this guy when he first started at the company, was trained by yours truly, and at that point in time, he was a horrible quality engineer, and well, it carried over. The other thing that really makes me mad about this whole thing is that myself, and everyone else in my department have been working their asses off for a long time. Hell, myself and another guy I work with have been doing between 10-14 hour days consistent for months on end now, and do we even get a thank you? No sir, not from this place. What we get from our staff people is this, "Quality is horrible for this plant, and it's your fault". Of course, they forget about the turnover, lack of training, lack of good parts coming from our vendors, running our floor personnel 7 days / week for months on end, the closing of 2 other key sister company vendor plants, new projects coming in, and so on and so forth. And instead, what rolls out of it, is that you guys suck, instead of looking at the real root causes, which are lie at the feet of upper management. It was pretty simple actually. A few years ago, they decided we needed to cut headcount to save money (which never works). So, they did. What they did was to get rid of most of the experienced operators out on the production floor (you know, the people that make the product that we sell for profit), and replaced them with temporary workers. I'm not saying temporary workers are bad, but you place anyone out on the assembly cell without training, I'll give you 3 guesses as to what is going to happen.

Anyway, I digress...

Getting back to things that were a cause for improvement this week at work.

2. I received a job offer, that looks really good, and I'm going to take it. Which means that in a few weeks time, myself, the wife, the dogs, and the cats will be moving out to Asheville, NC. Which just might be one of the, if not THE most beautiful place in NC. It actually reminds me a lot of my hometown, the surrounding mountains and such, the topography if you will. The town has a great vibe going for it though. There are lots and tons of people around our ages there, it trends late 20's, and or early to mid 30's in age, has great restaurants, has great beer drinking establishments, has a great culture going on out there, and so on. It's a prime place to live. Also, just about any outdoor activity that I either like to do, and or used to do is readily available. Almost limitless road riding, limitless mountain biking, climbing, hiking, running, and on and on runs the list. It's an outdoor paradise, and it's gonna be awesome.

In the future, I won't complain about the new job, well, at first, but it does look promising and challenging, and I think everything is going to be a-OK.

Bearded...

So for a short while I decided that I would really and truly try to grow a beard. Those of you that know me, know that in fact, a beard for me wouldn't really so much as be a challenge as a fashion statement of sorts. Well right before Thanksgiving, I went and had some new tires mounted for my car. I went to the shop where The Fart Sniffer works over in Cary to have his guys do it, because that seemed like the right thing to do. He was sporting a beard, and so I took it as a personal affront to try and top that one that he was growing, so off I went. The last day I shaved was Thanksgiving day, and I was pushing for March for the timeframe when I would shave again. As you can see for yourself in the picture attached above, the beard growing was a resounding success. Of course, there was a lot of white going on in there, and I needed some Just For Men for beards and moustaches, but instead of that, it started to wear on me, and started getting really fuzzy and annoying, so off it went. I couldn't help it. The March timeframe was just a pipe dream. My goal was to look like Sean Eaddie (a track racer from Australia who grew the most kick ass beard ever, while still racing his bike, and shaving his legs no doubt). Through this little experiment though, I found out that indeed, I am not a beard kind of guy. I can't stand having that hair on my face for too long, and March would have been a long time coming for me, so off it went. Ah well, maybe next time I'll keep it for months on end. Although, since I am flying this weekend to go home for Christmas it's probably a good thing that it is gone, because I'm sure that security would have loved to have taken a longer look at me. Beard, dark complexion, and the fact that when I do have a good stubble going the people I work with think I look like a terrorist, well, strip searching probably wouldn't have been out of the question. That would have been disturbing methinks.

I have been off from work this week thus far, which has been a great time for me. I've been able to kick back, relax, ride the bike (when the sun is out and when it's sort of warm out), and essentially just live a normal life for a short while. Work this year has been, shall we say, rough. I have a bad case of burnout that's for sure, meaning I don't think I could have been there for another week this year without flipping out in some way, shape, or form. I can see now possibly why people go really super crazy and go into work and start shooting people. Not that I would do this, but I can see how one could. If I got to that point, I'm pretty certain that I'd just quit, and maybe go work at a McDonald's or something for a short while to get the head back in order. You know, something low key and easy to do, no pressure. Just go to work, do work, and go home with nothing to worry about later on down the road. That would be the best bet right there. Luckily, I haven't gotten to that point, but a vacation was required. I've been off since last Friday, and I'm not going back until the 2nd of January, which again, is a nice long time off for me. I haven't had much in the way of vacation time this year, so this is a nice break. I wonder how I'll manage next year since I won't really be taking any vacation until December anyway, at which time I'm getting hitched, so then I'll have a couple of weeks off at the start of the month, and then another week towards the end, lumping lots of vacation into one month again, but that means another 11 months or so with little/no time off. Maybe I'll just have to be "creative" shall we say with "sick days". Don't even sit there and scratch your head like you don't know what I mean, because you do. Normally it goes something like this, "Hey (insert your boss' name here), I can't make it into work this morning, I must have eaten some bad fish last night or something like that..." Does anyone's boss really think that many people get that sick on fish every year? They play along with the game though as well, so they can't speak. At least I know that my boss takes more so called "sick days" than I do every year that's for sure. Well, that and for my boss, days off to go to field trips with her kids, days off to take her kids to school, days off when her kids are sick, days off when she wants to bake cookies with her kids, and so on and so forth.