Resignation, Reality and Robocop - Leaving Work in 2 weeks time!!!

The word of the week is perspicacity. 

Jan 9 - Technology is MAGICAL!!!!! 

Oh, wow... 

Technology can sometimes amaze me, I mean REALLY blow my mind; the video below is proof of that!! Why is it so special, you ask? 


Terran Trade Authority - Spacecraft 2000-2100AD from Adrian Mann on Vimeo.

Because it brought the pictures from my mind's eye as a child to LIFE! 

Background: In 1978, I received a large hardcover glossy-illustrated book called Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD, which I still have. Inside was page after page of fictional wonder: descriptions of spacecraft that never were, yet COULD have been, drawn in loving detail in 'action' with accompanying descriptions that told the story of each ship. Dozens of ships. It was mana from heaven to a young mind like mine was and I ate it up - I love the book still. 

Now those VERY SAME ships have been brought to life via the wonder of CGI and the dedication of one person named Adrian Mann. I cannot BEGIN to describe how PERFECTLY he has captured EVERY ONE of those drawings and brought each ship to life. Every picture from the book is replicated, from ship to foreground to background, with the exact colour palette and contextual to the description of the action going on in the scene depicted. It is truly WONDROUS to see what had( until now )only lived inside my imagination these thirty-some-odd years... to see it all rendered in motion left me speechless and applauding at the end. Remarkable. 

THAT is why I love technology, and always will: it can bring imagination to life!

Jan 10 - Joy Of Books 

I love bookstores; as much as they tempt me into NOT leaving without at least a small stack of tomes, I still just love the quiet possibilities that the shelves full of all kinds of books offer. The magic and the wonder of a good bookstore is captured in the video below, put together by a staffer of Type bookstore in Toronto. It's just spellbinding and magical to watch: 

Jan 11 - Real Robocop in Detroit? 

From books to bad guys: the cyborg cop of fictional film is going to get a life-size statue in Detroit! The Kickstarter.com project got full funding earlier this year and apparently is in full production swing this spring. Check out their blog page to see how this fascinating project came into being - it's not every day that a fictional character gets such support and following to turn them from an idea into reality. I'm tempted to take a detour through Detroit( scary as that is! )to snap a pic of myself and Robocop sometime in the future - which I am sure is just what the city's showrunners want people to think of doing. Go Robo! 

One person's concept... NOT mine!!!

Jan 12 - Super Dreams 

I don't usually talk about my dreams, which almost always are intricate and not that exciting( ie. violent or scary ). No, my dreams often reflect what my subconscious is going through, so for the last long while it's been a lot of longing for old days( repeat dreams from years ago, if you can believe it )and anxiety. As in the kind where you're suddenly standing naked in front of a huge crowd for no reason. Tonight, I had the 'Airplane Dream' again, where I was the pilot but I didn't know how to fly. Yet I was expected to take a plane full of unsuspecting passengers up into the sky without them knowing I wasn't qualified. There were more layers to it than that, though; something else was going on where I couldn't TELL anyone I wasn't a pilot, and I also knew that if I DID try to take off, I would crash the plane and kill us all. So that's the kind of 'anxiety dream' that I have, similar to other ones where I have to make a getaway in a suddenly-tiny car, or I am about to take a test and realize I didn't study nearly hard enough. I really hate those sorts of dreams... I much prefer the far-rarer ones where I'm a superhero! 

Not for the tights though; it's always about the cape, and flying free... speaking of which, the next entry below sums up that sentiment!

Friday the 13th - LEAVING MONEY MART !!!!!! 

BIG DAY.

It was a double today; open at Colwood, close at Cloverdale. Last one of those EVER that I will have to do though, as today I handed in my resignation to MMart, with 2 weeks notice. 

FINALLY.

I wanted to shout it out on FBook, out the window and to every customer that came in the door... but I kept my composure and spoke to my DM first to see how he wanted to handle it and make my decision then. He took the time to briefly speak to me at Cloverdale, so I had to wait until the afternoon; we both decided to leave the announcement until the staff party, which seemed all right to me. Staff will still have a week to get used to me leaving, and after that they'll only see me when I drop by on occasion with coffees... at least until everyone gets switched around or leaves, both of which are inevitable. 

It was tiring; I worked 13.5 hours, with a 30 min 'break' on the bus between stores. It was steady but not crazy( save for a few rushes )but I still crawled into bed exhausted well before midnight; I've picked up a cold this week from another manager and it's really socking it to me, starting with a sore throat. 

But I am DONE. The end is in sight. Shockingly, nobody has tried to talk me out of leaving, which I think is a clear sign that they all KNOW I need to go. 

Rather telling about the stress levels of the job, isn't it? 

Jan 14 - Why is it so BUSY when I'm already so tired? 

It's fitting that the day after I'd given my notice that I feel totally exhausted, like a marathon runner, perhaps. The cold is in full energy-draining swing and though the sore throat is lapsing, the runny nose has started. I was alone today at Colwood and the people would NOT stop coming in the door ALL day - by the end of my shift I had served one freakin' customer every 6.5 minutes; that's 6 customers an hour, not including all the usual phone calls that pour in. Toss in a fair number of 'please fix this' situations and I was VERY glad to go home to nurse my nose and doze on and off all evening 

I should mention I HATE colds; I really do, as I use the anger and annoyance that I've caught someone ELSE's germs to fight back against the tiny little buggers. A simmering annoyance throughout the day really kicks the body into getting rid of the cold, as long as you keep your energy levels up, I find. Sitting back and letting them have their way with my immune system smacks of surrender to me, and I fight against things I can't control with all my energy, when it makes sense. So far, my colds have all packed it in in just a few days, when I give them the Immune System Glare Boost... and take care of myself with fluids, rest and things like chicken soup and herbal supplements. 

Jan 15 - Damned Colds!!! 

My cold was in full swing today, but I went into work anyway - ALL the area staff were at a training seminar for tax season today, so there was no-one to spare. I had my trainee with me though, so she handled all the customers( a steady stream today )while I did my best with paperwork and tried to stay focused as my nose ran, plugged and ran again randomly. My trainee got me some chicken soup for lunch( on her! )and that helped for a while, but by day's end it was all I could do to keep focused to help her close on time. 

On a brighter note, I logged into NWN a little later after getting home to a lovely dinner of meatloaf( with mustard, yum! )to find another old friend had found our server. They went by the name of Jade and we chatted for a bit, not really catching up for all that long as I was very, very tired and nursing my nose. It was great to see them after a few years absence; they found my current server via my postings on Nichneven.com, which is one of the purposes of having that site - any of my old online friends can easily find it and see where I'm gaming. Have to love the connected world we're in now... 

That's about it; I'll struggle again through tomorrow and send myself home early ASAP when the closer arrives. I feel like I need to sleep at least 24 hours to get this cold out the door, as my sister is visiting this week and I don't want to be housebound OR give her the cold, gods forbid! To bed with a pile of Fisherman's Friend tablets beside me! 

Goals, Gotye and Goofs

The word of the week is renewal.

Jan 2 - Searching

As my 'career change' will happen in less than a month, I've been compiling all sorts of job-related articles to read - I have been for over a year, really. From ones like The 50 Best Careers of 2011 to Canada's Top 100 Employers to Pay Attention to What You Envy to Discover Work That You Love ( that's a long title! ), I'm going all-out to keep myself thinking ahead... while I still wonder if I'll get EI to help prolong my job search beyond a month or two. Ideally, I'd be able to take the next six months off to decompress. I'd be able to really dig into my writing while looking for jobs that will fit ME, not the other way around. Not to mention getting a lot of my To Do List done, with things like developing an exercise routine and getting a handle on my massive book collection( ie. document what titles I have, what to sell, what to keep )among other things. Six months - sounds like a pipe dream, yet I can but try; I've done a lot of what I've set out to do ten years ago, so this isn't much different, I just have to work on a tighter schedule of months, not years...

Jan 3 - Gotye

Quirky music and I go back a long way, to when I listened to songs from the old Doctor Demento Show. Songs such as 'Star Trekkin' and 'Wolf Creek Pass' were purposely funny ballads, designed to make you smile as you sung along( or hummed, in my case ). I like those sorts of songs FAR more than I should admit, though I also have an enduring love of deeper-layered works such as Sound Of Silence - it's a weird mix, but then so am I, some days. So when a work friend said this was her favourite song, I listened for a bit and was hooked; the video is quirky too. Have a gander and enjoy the mix of the quirky AND the sad that Gotye brings to their work in this song: 




There's already a great acoustic cover of the song here by Walk Off The Earth, though minus the cool visual art sequence of the original.

Jan 4 - Oops, missed!

The misfortunes of others are a rife source for comedy, sadly speaking about the human ability to laugh at another's pain. Yet we all do it, to various degrees; I myself draw the line at intentional violence, but the unintended nutshot so often featured on America's Funniest Home Videos will still get me to chuckle. As will mishaps of all kinds, such as this one:



And yes, the cat lived, in case you wondered - it's in the video comments!

Jan 5 - Zombie Trail game?

Many years ago, I remember playing a basic pioneer-adventure game called Oregon Trail, which teachers loved as it taught history at the same time. I just remember that it really sucked to be a pioneer in this game, as you usually died - but it was still fun to play to see if you COULD survive to win. Now I've found a spiritual successor to that game, a parody if you will: Organ Trail. It's built along the same very basic lines: get a station wagon full of survivors across a devastated America full of radiation and zombies by balancing your dwindling supplies with taking risks. It's the first game of it's kind that I can recall that captures the full breadth of the 'zombie apocalypse' in trying to reach a distant 'safe haven' by your wits alone. Try it out; it takes about an hour to play, so see if you can make it to the end with all five of your survivors alive and intact.

Jan 6 - A week to go

I thought about saving these few thoughts until after I left MMart, but they've been popping up in my head fairly regularly for the last year. In the main, I've been thinking on how I've been regularly employed for the last twenty years; sure, 17 of those were at 3 jobs, plus a few years as a party clown and my first job at the long-defunct Canadian arm of Rax Restaurants. So more than twenty years, with probably no more than 2 weeks of work missed due to illness or other serious problems in all that time - not a bad record. A week from now, I'm going to be putting MYSELF out of work on purpose, to avoid serious illness or other problems - hows' that for irony? Yet it's long overdue; even typing this paragraph, I'm making mistakes that didn't happen years ago, due to my mental exhaustion and desire to do ANYTHING else other than continue at my current job.

If I can't even summon the desire and ability write, which is my passion, then there's absolutely no point in continuing as things are. I need to leave for a new path, wherever it takes me, no matter how unknown a future that is.

Jan 7 - Best of 2011

2012 is here, so the inevitable looking-back-on-2011 articles are flooding the web. Thankfully, there doesn't seem to be a lot of schmaltz out there, at least not at the sites I frequent. Lifehacker.com has a great Best Of 2011 article that contains a metric ton of interesting and useful articles from the last year. There's also Metacritic's Best of 2011, plus TechSpot's Best Gadgets of 2011 and even Publisher's Weekly Best Books of 2011, in many different categories.

And: 2012 has already seen a stellar gadget, The OLPC tablet... for roughly $100! Tech keeps advancing - sweet! Next thing you know, they'll be erecting skyscrapers in less than a month - oh, wait, China just DID that:



Jan 8 - Washing My Mind Out

Today was a bit of a wash, in some ways. I rose a little later than usual, ready to hop online and game for a bit on Xbox... but my controller batteries were both dead and refused to hold a charge. After a bit of fiddling, I managed to get one working, but it didn't charge fully so I've left it for the day - a quick search online showed they're no longer for sale most places, so that's bad. I also tried to get into NWN, but the blasted program's decided to endlessly max-and-minimize itself( ?? )in a loop when I start it under Win7. So again I tried to solve that little mystery, yet had to leave it unsolved by late afternoon; grrrr. Which left me with getting rid of the moderate headache I've had since Friday; short naps and Advils throughout the day have led me to the evening with only a few things done, but at least I've had a second day off to deal with such things, right? As an exciting close for the day, I dug into writing up a 'Departure Document' for work, an objective somewhat-brief summary of all the things that have caused me to leave, be they small, large or seemingly inconsequential. I'll be giving a copy of this to my DM and his boss, to do with as they will - most likely most of it will be ignored, yet I can't just let things go without documenting why I'm leaving in as non-bitter a way as I can manage. I'm being honest, and it also lets me express for myself the many, many reasons WHY I'm leaving, so I can clearly see why it's right for me to go.

I think that's the best part of the whole exercise for me, mentally. Writing down all the things that have driven close to crazy over the years, so I can let them all go.

Yes, I make up all my haiku's myself, as I find my creativity returning the closer I draw to my last day at MMart. From there, I can only grow and thrive in a new life... as I intended to do 4 years ago when I moved to BC. A little delayed, but I am finally getting there!