I really should be sleeping. Honestly, I’m torn. Writing or sleeping? And, then, of course, there is masturbation. That has a certain allure. (And, yeah, I know, my keeping a ‘blog may be masturbatory enough.)

Having a few epiphanies about my job, my life, my relationship, comedy, writing and all of the ball of shit I got going on here. Here’s the big epiphany, and it’s actually lame and pretty far from astute, but if I live it, I imagine possibilities. Anyway, it’s that no one is really any more further along then I am. In some ways, I have a remarkable knack for keeping myself on the fringe of straight up definition. In high school I was in the accelerated classes, but I skipped and got high with more middling students. The straight and narrow “good” students, thought I was a burnout, the burnouts thought I was a Bomar.

(So I typed Bomar instinctively in some sort of wayback machine in my head, because that was the word back then. But, really, I don’t know from what reservoir it came and the second I typed it, I had to look it up, because it certainly ain’t common now. It’s pretty damn funny and anachronistic that the smart kids were named after a fucking calculator. A four function calculator; my phone has that built into it. What am I goddamn dinosaur?)

Anyway, at work, as an adult, I’m still on the edge of in and out, in the same way I was with the burnouts and the Bomars. I’m in on a ton of
“senior management” meetings, which is essentially a higher level of middle management, and I get to converse now and again with the actual leaders, but I don’t have the rank and title of the other players. I also have a rep for cracking jokes and speaking up (and generally lively-ing up some dry as a vermouth-less martini meetings), and I occassionally clown around with the support staff, some of whom just figure I’m another kind of admin assistant, but not really. Same as in high school, not quite in with the managers or the secretaries.

And, so it is in comedy. I’m not in the shows of the folks I like or respect, but many of those folks certainly talk with me like I belong and am a peer. I spend my nights at the open mikes where anyone can get up, but I’m in a different place than a lot of the other open mikers.

Burnouts/Bomar; Managers/Support Staff; Comics/Open Mikers — It’s all the fucking same, and I stay between not fully in one or the other. Why?

Partially commitment. You know, you might miss a party on the other side, afterall, and half the time I can decide which group is more appealing.

But the bigger part is probably goddamn, fucking, irrational, pathetic, frustrating insecurity. That nagging feeling that I don’t really belong in whichever you perceive as the upper eschelon.

And, the epiphany? Because, I know, a little getting to the point is more than fucking in order right about now. The epiphany is every fucking walking entity to one degree or another is worrying about the same shit in their own unique way. The difference is all in how they front it and what happens when it all comes together.

So, at this moment, which will no doubt pass, I am just as fucking funny as any other comedian, I am as loveable as any other lover and for Christ’s sake I am manager enough to know that I would never have fucked up the whole entire shooting match with the wretchedness of DEMONware. (The careful reader may note that in this little self-affirming paragraph no mention was made of intelligience, although the whole thing started with the smart kids in high school. That is because the one shred my ego holds onto (with the clamped jaws of a pitbull) is that I am alright on the stupid scale, maybe even most people might think I’m a click or two above the median. You know what I figure the trade-off is on that hubris — enough comprehension of the world to really wallow in good old self-doubt. To be aware inside my brain wiring is to have a little bit of a problem with finding shit to deprecate.)

I hope “shit to deprecate” is the lowest I go in word play.

OK I wrote, now to sleep or wank.

Right now, I am missing quite a few things.

I’m missing M. Lately, just finding a time, convenient to each schedule and each coast, to talk is tough. I blame DEMONware.

I’m missing mirth and frivolity. The thing about spending a night at a comedy open mike is that you go through a wide spectrum of emotions in an evening. Most of them are off-shoots of angst, ennui, apathy and fatigue. It used to include anxiety for me, but that takes too much effort now. The emotions not experienced include joy, whimsy and gaiety (old school “gaiety,” that is, I personally have not experienced a homosexual emotion at an open mike so far.) I blame DEMONware.

I miss writing here. I truly blame DEMONware.

I miss the blush of my youth, in which tripping and crashing to the sidewalk may have meant some scratches, but not an elbow aching so that the old joke rings true about the guy saying to his doc, “it hurts when I do this.” So the doc says, “then don’t do that.” It’s hard to blame DEMONware for the loss of my youth, per se. But, it has taken some time off of my life expectancy.

I don’t know if the creators of DEMONware could in fact be classified as evil. But I will say after the most painful computer system conversion in history now about 3.5 weeks into it’s still birth, if they’re not evil, they are second to Satan alone in sheer soul crushing torque. (I’m assuming that torque would be what’s needed for effective crushing of souls.) DEMONware is on fire with whatever the needed condition is. I used to be a mildly happy, somewhat well-adjusted little worker bee. Now, I am lifeless, dead from the inside, completely unable to access any of the usual tools to do my little toil. And, the bitch that has slapped me down to limp and vegetative? DEMONware. I curse your name. Fie on you. Fie, just fucking fie.

Mostly I blame DEMONware for the state I’m in right now…

Valuable time, the precious commodity of life has been taken from me, and I have been coaxed closer to the inevitable march of mortality onto death wasting time with this software “solution.”

Impotently (is there any other way I do things these days), as I struggled with the system, I started to count how many separate screens I needed to connect to in order to buy one lowly pack of paper. In all, there were 23 separate screens that required access in order to complete the ordering process. I will be generous, and I will say that perhaps as much of half of those pages will not be necessary as I gain facility with keystroking in the various fields of near as I can tell practically random digits. (Watch out world, my muscles will develop to awesome breadth and strength as I key, not one, but as many as 10 separate fields, each and every time I order a pad of paper.)

Let’s think about this system a bit, shall we. Let’s even be a tad crude about it and look at the basest of data, dollars and sense. (editor’s note: “sense” was a typo, but a friggin’ apt one.)

For the sake of this argument, let’s say I make $20 an hour (I don’t, but the math is easy and $10 would just make me frowny). I just spent an hour keying in a supply order request, because due to an epic fiasco of implementation someone forgot to turn the switch to allow our administrative staff to buy stuff like they could in the old system. Back to the equation, though. In that hour, I added 13 line items to a requisition. Despite allegedly being linked to the Staples catalog through a searchable database, of the 13 items, seven could not be located (and required me to search both generally by description and specifically by item number before overriding to allow data entry). Once all items were located and keyed in, requiring at least one search of the database for each (Total=13 searches), there was data entry of item id #, description, quantity, unit and vendor (5 fields*7 remaining items=35 fields). Then, each line item requires separate entry of the account to charge for payment, which is comprised of three fields and a drilldown to three sub-fields (6 fields*13 line items=78 fields) So, right now we are at data entry into 113 separate alpha or numeric fields (no telling which! and up to 12 characters long, but searchable) and at minimum 13 catalog searches.

The money to pay for the supplies is coming from the same place, the vendor is all the same (Staples), and all items are easily located in both the vendor catalog we are given and Staples on-line store.

What stole an hour out of my life, my sweet unreplaceable existence for that hour, was the sheer volume of absolutely required data entry, the unbelievable slowness of the interface and server and a horrible, horrible non-intuitive design. And, while you are able to save “Favorites,” as with any web-based system, there seems to be no way to automate and/or simplify repetitive tasks.

Now, back to the reason I mentioned that fictional $20/hour. That hour it took, cost this establishment $25 for my salary itself, plus the costs of the fringe benefits I earn with each hour worked. For this $25, I accomplished a significant amount of data entry, which will now flow to the people in Purchasing who are responsible for checking Staples orders, which is an entry-level Purchasing position, i.e. one that is reimbursed at a level < $20/hr. Again, to be crude, let's say that position is recompensed at $15/hour, but in this this scenario it is much simpler for that person to perform, taking only 20 minutes to proofread and submit, so salary plus fringe benefits would only cost the institute $6.25. Total cost, therefore, to the institute for initiating the purchase order (leaving out the actual receipt and delivery entirely) is $31.25 for a total of one hour and 20 minutes work. Now, what is data without comparison? Nothing, I’ll tell you what. It’s meaningless. So, let’s compare, shall we? In the previous system, I would generally be able to process the same 13-line order in 15 minutes. I would be required to only key in the overall accounting data once (requiring only 2 fields)and an identifier for each item. It would then pass to the same entry-level Purchasing position. It would be up to that person to both proofread the information I had provided from the supply catalog and KEY IN THE DETAILED DATA. Presumably, where that position is comprised of dedicated, centralized tasks, such as data entry, unlike mine, that staff is likely far more efficient with time and have developed skills for these tasks. (Simply, if you are responsible for blue pens every day, you learn about blue pens, whereas if you are responsible only once a quarter your knowledge of blue pens is bound to be lacking.) Therefore, let us assume, they can key in the same order in 3/4 time compared to a monkey, such as I. For the old system then the final tally is (($20/hr+25% fringe benefits) * 15 minutes) + $15$15/hr+25% fringe benefits * 45 minutes). Total money expended by the institute $6.25 + $14 or $20. Total time expended equals one hour. So, folks, if you are still with me, and if you are, what the fuck is wrong with you, you bean-counting turd, the final comparison is thus: Old, unevolved, low-tech system – $20 spent during 1 hour.
Piece of shit DEMONwaret – $31 spent during 1 hour and 20 minutes.

After a late night last night, I managed to get into work without that much trouble to toil away. But, despite my best intentions the tangible results were almost nil. Nada. No product. No value in the market place. Just soulless struggle.

Today’s Sisyphian task: Go through a spreadsheet 6,378 rows deep by 7 columns wide (that would be 44,646 cells, motherfuckers) and find the 50-100 or so changes you have been requesting in one form or another for the past several months. The challenge: Contain yourself from filling in the column labeled “WHY CHANGE IS NECESSARY” with because the software gods decree your inability to get it right the first eight times.

Oh and by the way, is it somehow wrong-minded of me to think that the most efficient method of correcting categorical codes is PROBABLY NOT TO dump all of the data into a spreadsheet sorted by a somewhat random numeric code and make human eyeballs scan it?

Come on you stupid douchebags responsible for giving the world and programming DEMONware fiasco, what’s the matter with you? Every single thing I manage has a scientific person who runs it, ‘cuz, you know, it’s like their work and stuff; that’s how they know whose friggin’ name to engrave on the Nobel Prize. SOOOOOO, let’s just say, what if instead of identifying everything as 0002224438i73rabcdefg1234007account12 under that person, we just call those Sally’sthing? I know who Sally is, and I remember her name without effort. If you sorted a spreadsheet of >44K by Joe and Sally and Jimmy and Yvette, I could like find them no problemo. But, if you make it 0002224438i73rabcdefg1234007account12 ,0002224438i73rabcdefg1234007account123,0002224438i73rabcdefg1234007account14,0002224438k78rabcdefg1234007account15, I’m going to have to ask you to cram it. Hard.

I’m sitting in my office right now. Sitting smack dab on my desk is $3,000 in $2 bills. It was handed to me in one of those cliched cotton bags sans the dollar sign. I would so keep the bag and make a dollar sign with a Sharpie pen, if I didn’t have to promise to return it to Fleet.

First off, I just edited the post below. Fucking hell, I was about to fall asleep so the punctuation and shit was, well, shit.

Best part of reading something like that for me, is I pick up on all the weird aural idiosyncratacies I have in writing. I get made fun of at work for this (and many, many, many other things), but I have a habit of writing not so much phonetically, but definitely related to how I would say something verbally. For example, I once sent out a mass email within our office suite asking people to ensure that all file cabinets were emptied prior to an office renovation/move. What I wrote is “file draws,” even though I can spell and read the word drawer. The best part of that example is only in Boston are “drawer” and “draw” similar. Since I’m the only native speaker of the Boston lingo, I think everyone in the office shit on me for that one. Yeah, yeah, pahk my cah, Nomah rules, I don’t say the letter ‘r’ hijinks and hilarity. By the way, I may nevah forgive Saturday Night Live and Rachel Dratch for naming her slutty Boston character “Denise.” Any credibility I have in the workplace shattered into teeny weeny pieces of my broken ego, whenever our Grand Poobah sees an episode of SNL and then comes into work trying to get me to quote her. Bitch.

Anyway, the point is, I think I have a lesion on my brain that makes me substitute words that sound the same to me. Mostly I write “know” when I mean “NO,” which causes Zen-like statements in work emails.

“Know, you may not purchase alcohol on NIH grants.”

My kingdom for a sharpened sword and the will to run it through its target purposefully and valiantly.

I dedicate this late post to the bitch who better be enjoying herself on vacation. Nah, for her, there will be no stabbing, as I know the need to rest (as I feel it now). She really can’t help what happened in her wake as she flew to parts unknown (OK, Florida, but I know it fairly little).

BUT, there is another who is verily, truly stab worthy. She’s itching for it, that one. She’s spent two days cockblocking (so to speak) me at work. Sometimes in the course of a day, I MUST speak with the panhandler (oops, I mean brilliant scientist) for whom I manage research grants. You know, like, the guy writes something, and the people who read that something might think he meant something else that will cost them money or otherwise cause an auditor swarm; it’s my job to fix that something so it says what it says. So, when I’m tinkering this way, occassionally I gotta, I mean really and truly have to, speak with the source, you know, break the kindergarten wall of the telephone game right down. And, usually, these respected scientists are cool with my calls, since if I can’t understand it (and I fancy myself above average), there is some moke down in the food change who will surely fuck it up. My teeny hassle generally saves them some serious doom in the future. So, as the kids say, it’s all good.

Enter the way-too-fucking eager to please, destined to out martyr all of the blessed saints and prophets, “let me show my stuff, please can I, huh, can I huh, can I?” administrative assistant (which I hear tell folks used to call a secretary back in the day), who is here to save us all, lucky kid. Yeah, there was no fucking way that kid was going to let me get straight to the old scientist-type, bosserooni on her watch. Nosiree, Bob. I can tell her and she’ll tell him and I need to remember he’s really swamped because he has to write this shit (I mean brilliance). So, she’ll get back to me tomorrow, since she has a couple of meetings to go to and won’t be back at her desk until 5 p.m.

Right. I mean R….I….G…H…T. That’s exactly how it’s going to play out.

Here’s where I know for a scientific fact (get it-science, whoo, I’m a riot), anyway I strongly suspect I’m a big fucking asshole. It’s a twitch inside my brain, but the minute someone who’s been here a few weeks, who hasn’t lived on the planet long enough to hav to get what you call experience, and most importantly wasn’t hired to do my job (which was made very, very clear at the interview and hiring process, not just by me), begins any interactions by explaining how things work to me, I get nutty. I feel it almost physically. It’s not really a power trip thing, I swear to God, it’s more like the really irrational fights you get into with your brother, when you’re a kid, about something you absolutely know the answer to, but he won’t listen. It’s the infuration of knowing something as fact, and your older sibling just mocking you.

As a kid, I would yell, or tell mom, or hit (actually not much), or throw a beverage (only at Danny), something cathartic. Can’t do that at work, though. So, I do the next best thing, I go to lengths to prove them wrong. And, I do it in a horribly treacly “just helping out pal” kind of way. It’s truly insipid. Really.

“Um, yeah, thanks, ah, now that I’ve talked to your boss (because ain’t an assistant invented yet who can best me at the blocking game), he’s asked me to ask you to give me those forms. Yeah, why don’t you go ahead and confirm. That would be great. Thanks so much. I mean it, we couldn’t do this without your help.”

“Oh, OK, so he confirmed, that’s great. Yup, I got your email with all those forms. Yeah, thanks for doing that. So, I got a chance to look everything over. Just so you know, I used the instructions, you know, and the table of contents. So, just a little thing, but I swapped E. and F. Oh, I’m not saying that’s wrong, I just think it’s easier to stick with the instructions. I know how it’s so much, though, to, you know, read all the instructions. So, sure, just let your boss know that I’ve been reading for a long time now, so I can help you out in any way.”

Alright, I’m not that much of an asshole. But, I do get perverse pleasure when people who are more no-it-all than I am, and that’s not an easy thing to be, fuck up. I am right there waiting to point that out.

Here’s a tip for the kids, though, who might just be starting out in the work world. If someone is introduced to you at your job interview as one of the managers, and you do get a job (by the way, don’t be sure everyone voted, especially if you are less than honest in the interview), you might want to get to know a little bit about what she thinks is her responsibility, before you tell her and your boss that she’s wrong, and you’ll take care of that from now on. See, we get to vote, too.

And, here’s a tip for folks hiring, if during an interview someone has a very elaborate story about how they had to quit her last job, that involves staying up late, performing an exorcism and saving mankind, but her boss never thanked her, and instead was angry that staying up all night was even theoretically necessary (let alone giving him no shot at mankind saving). And, really, she’s just looking to work with people who appreciate her. Yeah, if that happens, bar the door the chick is a fucking loon!

It smells like napalm.

Fiscally speaking, here in my office, it’s apocalypse now. The new DEMONware system is up and running and working like the dogshit it is. What I smell ain’t the smell of victory (to flog the title of this post into the dirt.)

Here’s a fun little implementation management conundrum: When do you allow the end users to review and test the data in the system, and what do you do with the results?

One possible answer is not a day or so before you go live and absolutely nothing.

In a timeframe impossibly short for any results of testing to be managed and problems solved or changes implemented, we, the actual unwashed and slightly dazed end users, got to take a peek on Thursday and Friday of last week. I discovered that I lacked access to areas crucial in performing my humdrum little tasks. Today, we are live, and, quelle suprise, I lack access to areas crucial in performing my humdrum little tasks.

So, testing was an elaborate cock tease, and I will not be busting my productivity nut any time soon.

(I can’t believe that sentence just came from my fingertips. I should at least work on some gyno-centric inappropriate imagery.)

I think my weekend couldn’t really have been duller if I spent it in a coma. Actually, the benefit of a coma would be rest. I’m still going to sleep pretty erratically, aided and abetted by my compulsion to make something out of this this page. On top of my own obsessive compulsive behavior, daylight savings makes me completely unaware of what time it is actually (down around September I will have worked it out). All in all, if you see me with a set of luggage under the eyeballs, it ain’t that 40 has caught up with me, it’s insomnia.

The birthday party yesterday wasn’t as…can’t think of a word…dire…wince producing…personal angst ridden…as I had feared. It was no rockin’, tits in the breeze, Mardi Gras mosh pit either, but what are you going to do?

To be fair, I love the people who I knew at the party. They were the social heart and core of my circle summers during college. Inevitably, our lives have grown in different directions, which is cool and as it should be. I need to relax and enjoy the upside of catching up with folks from the past.

Maybe all of my anxiety over a household of kids is based only on two things:
(1) the sheer decibel level. Jesus Christ when there’s that many children in one place it hurts and (2) going that close to where I grew up and visiting the child-filled, nuclear family model highlights all of the shit of which I have consciously chosen not to take part, even though it was my apparent birthright.

I don’t know, somehow in certain situations, the choice of being single and childless seems less valid or something, as though I am failing to live correctly. It’s the “When are you getting married?” implied agenda, I guess, where “never” seems to be the wrong answer. Of course, my lack of comfort is probably more of an internal struggle. Overall, I tend to be happy with my choices, as I am sure suburbanites are with theirs.

In the end, no one likely really gives a shit what I do.

I got carried away in my violent administrative fantasies, and I forgot to write what I meant to write.

Over here, I spent a tiny bit of free time watching a shitstorm to which I can feel virtuous and amused in my distance of not being involved.

You see, on the same board, where that fight takes place, I have been known to voice my opinions. And, occasionally, I may overstate or overreact. But, in the end, I am a free speech activist at heart, so when there is hand-wringing of who can post and how they can post and what’s hateful and what’s funny, blah, blah, blah, I truly think let it ride and have the free market of ideas sort out the winners and losers. Or, just fucking pull up stakes and shut the fucker down. I guess, the last possibility is very clear community standards with policies written by the owner and rigor to enforce the rules.

I’ve actually asked for written policies and guidelines, and I have gotten hammered by people who think I’m too strident on the free speech beliefs. As a result, I edit myself far more than I used to, if only to save myself aggravation. {As a complete editorial aside, as though this whole site wasn’t purely editorial, and at the risk of alienating one person who reads this site, I do want to say what turned me off and led me to my own conclusions has been the responses evident currently on the board from the board administrators. Sometimes, I ask a straight question, because I want a straight unvarnished answer. It seems like the response has invariably been a snarky, smug “that’s for me to know and you to find out” kind of answer or an oh too clever smarmy reply bristling with martyrdom and patronization. Since it ain’t my board, I’ve given up on changing that dynamic. You know what? — To underscore and explain, I was going to point to a couple of “creative” writing exercises that used to warn the public about the content of the board. There had been two diferent levels from the main page, and they were really more stupid and condescending than clever. Thankfully, someone has had the sense to edit. I should rejoice in that, at least.}

Finally, for my own sanity I pretend to no one who is aware of this Boston Comedy microcosm that I believe the arena to have a taint of an “in” crowd/”out” crowd mentality. Some people can say what they want, some people can’t, and in the end some pigs are more equal than others.

So, now, watching this, I have distance, and I can laugh.

See, how mature I am?