Well...

Friends are friends, so I have to give a shout-out to those who care about me. Actually I don't, you know who you are. I'm sorry about the previous post (now deleted). To say that my friends don't care about me is complete and utter b.s., and I hope you forgive me for that oversight.

I crashed on the cigarettes. I'm ashamed of myself, but relieved for the moment. As a very good friend made me recognize, I wasn't in a place where I was comfortable enough yet to do it. Maybe once/if this job goes through to permanent and I have a little more security in my life...

I was becoming a stark raving lunatic, for the most part. Even with the lozenges. Cigarettes provide something else besides the nicotine addiction. Something horribly habitual, which is far worse than any addiction itself. I'm going to have to figure out what it is about myself that I deal with by smoking, and learn to cope with it. Once I do, the desire to smoke will go away naturally. It could be as simple as weaning myself off the damn things slowly. We'll see. Either way, I have NOT given up on the idea of quitting them. In fact, I'm more resolved than ever to get it done.

It's about 1 a.m. and I thought I'd do a little ditty of a blog while I wait for this impossibly long file transfer to go through to Shanghai.

It's interesting that I volunteered to do this. I remember when my boss first asked the group "Who wants to come in at midnight for a special install in China?", two things crossed my mind immediately.

1. A chance to stack the deck and show him that I'm a team player, yada yada.
2. I get to go home at 8 a.m.

Those were the initial reasons that caused me to speak up.

But one has to wonder...are those the only reasons? Of course not. There are trade-offs to everything, I suppose. The most obvious being that I'm going to be exhausted and my sleeping schedule is going to screw up. I left my wife to sleep alone at home, something she doesn't like (and I really don't like either now that I think about it). But...selfish as I am...after volunteering I couldn't ignore the interesting idea that I would be basically here, alone, unfettered, for 5 hours of my work day. I can do my job with no interruptions. I can get up and go smoke whenever without being noticed. I can belch and fart as much as I like. Now that I definitely don't have a problem with. Is that selfish of me? Maybe. But there's still the trade offs that I have to deal with.

Also (and this is something very few people know about me), I'm always looking to break the monotony in my life, whatever it may be. Nobody likes to work. I have never met a single person who does, but that's just life. And I always look at things like this working late as a chance to do something different, even if it's some crazy bullshit like working off-the-wall hours of the night. Well, off-the-wall compared to my normal schedule. If a night like this became a habit, I'd hate it. I think that's why I never handled your 'standard' daytime office job very well.

Take my last job before working for this company for example. Law firm. I was a paralegal by title. I did well my first few months there, very well. Well enough to get a $3,000/year raise by my third month. They liked me so much they promoted me to a position and fired the girl in that position the same day. I liked my job. Then my job got more tedious. And actually, tedious isn't a big problem at all for me. Sometimes the more tedious, the better.

But it got monotonous. I dealt with the city and county tax assessors regularly. Once in a blue moon, even the mayor's office. I should have been honored, I suppose. Even my divorce dragged me down, but it wasn't the final reason I quit. I quit because I couldn't stand the monotony of it. I was going nowhere, doing nothing new. Nothing changed. Every day the same pile of affidavits had to be drafted. Every day the same legal documents had to be typed up for the court docket. Every day the same attorney came to my desk and yelled at me in front of everyone for doing the job wrong (it wasn't me, she was just like that to everyone except her personal favorites...I don't play that game with people). Day after day, it was just a long pile of paperwork. I soon realized my job was stagnating like a festering pile of trash, and because of it, I was learning nothing new, in addition to doing the same hellish job every day. So, my current friend/boss told me there were positions available where I'm working now, and I walked out on that job two weeks prior to coming here. Only job I've ever walked out on. There were other things, I suppose. Dishonest supervisors, for one thing. A general tight-assedness in that place that I just couldn't stand.

But what drove me away from it was monotony.

I've always been a very good independent worker once I've figured out whatever system of a job it is I'm doing. Indepedent to the point where I don't like human contact once I get going. I've been told that's an ADD trait. Whatever. I think it's just a me trait. If I'm knee deep in several projects at once, and you come to me asking me to do something else, I'll take it with the most fiendishly conjured 'Sure!' that you will ever hear. But rest assured, when you walk away, I've already pondered a hundred ways to make you pay. :)

Lovely. The site I agreed to come in and do has NO idea what their setup is as far as dial-up or broadband. F**kers. Oh well.