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It’s that time again, to sit down and put into words what I did for the past 52 weeks. These summation missives seem to come around all too quickly any more… but just like last year‘s annual holiday post, and the year before that, I give you a pair of great tits. It was a toss up between tits or boobies, but the boobies were too difficult to envision as “zeros” in my “2009″ theme. Either way, enjoy!
Yeah, I know. Lame. Last year I received a friendly complaint. I can’t remember if it was an email, or a jabber, message by Carrier pigeon… maybe it was a smoke signal. The point is, someone complained about titties on my blog because they read it at work. I won’t mention who, but I used to work with him, it’s not the guy who looked like Jesus, and his name rhymes with Lyle Goddard. So, in the interest in keeping the image for this update suitable for work, you get a picture of birds. Thanks Kyle! Oh shit…
Alright, let’s see what I was up to in 2008. Going through old posts on the blog, I am the most boring sonofabitch in Washington state. I’m still working in Seattle and suffering through a soul-crushing 165 mile round trip commute. It’s wake up at 4:30am, do the three S regimen, dress, commute, work, commute, home at 7:30pm, eat dinner, watch a couple hours of TV, go to sleep, rinse and repeat. Finding time to write in this blog has become a chore with so little time.
In January 2008, I asked The Company for pay raise. At the time, I had been with The Company for three and a half years and only got a one dollar per hour raise in May 2006. Then in October 2006, they gave me a 25% raise because they were transferring me to Seattle. I don’t consider that an actual raise, though. The cost of living and working in Seattle is higher than Oak Harbor. While I had failed plans of moving down there, the additional pay covered gas to commute and higher food prices in Seattle. In fact, by the time January 2008 rolled around, and it was just me and LDriver making the daily commute, that additional 25% increase was just about completely spent on travel expenses to and from Seattle… then gas became a precious fluid, garnering four and a half dollars a gallon. Excellent!
They agreed to a pay raise, and gave me more than I expected. I asked for a 6.6% increase, they gave me a 21.6% increase. The only caveat was I had to move from the Hosting department to Systems Administration. I liked Hosting. I knew the job well, I liked my managers, and enjoyed the work. While I got my promotion and raise in January, it didn’t take effect until March. Moving into Systems Administration was a promotion that put me in a group of cerebral people with a different manager… and after nine months I still feel like I don’t fit in.
I started looking for a new truck last January when Capital One approved me for one of their Blank Checks with a limit big enough to afford a much newer model year.
If you’ve read this waste of time before (or know me personally) you’ll recall I bought a used 1994 Ford F-150 in June of 2006. That was a nice truck and I liked it a lot. However, about three months after I bought that truck, The Company closed the Oak Harbor office, and a few months after that I was driving that ’94 truck to Seattle once a week. I think that weekly 200-mile trip was the begining of the end. I started to have a lot of troubles with the old 4×4. It was running rough at temperature, so I had it tuned and scoped. It got new plugs and wire, a new rotor and cap, even a new serpentine belt. After all that and more than $500, it still ran rough! The next month, I was driving home from Seattle, LDriver was with me, and the transmission started slipping. We were at highway speed when the tranny slipped out of gear and the engine raced. When I let off the accelerator, the gear re-engaged. We limped to Mount Vernon where LDriver’s wife met us. We poured a quart of Mercon into the tranny, and I gingerly drove it the rest of the way home. A couple weeks later, I took the truck into the shop, and spent several hundred dollars more to have the transmission fluids changed, bands tightened, and filters replaced. That helped, but the mechanic told me the fluid was very burnt and contained metal dust, indicating the transmission was in serious need of more attention than just filters and fluid. When the lower radiator hose blew out a couple of weeks later, I knew it was time to get out of that ’94 truck fast or be buried in repair bills and a busted-ass truck!
That was the back story which led to me buying a new used truck in February. After searching the dealer web sites in Western Washington, I finally settled on three trucks at three different dealers that I wanted to go test drive. My first stop was Ford of Bellevue where they had a white 2005 Lariat. I called the salesman before driving 100 miles, and he asked me which truck I wanted to see. Apparently there was some confusion on their web site with two different trucks getting the same price and inventory ID number. Several other callers were disappointed to hear that another white 2005 F-150 with over-sized tires and a lift kit was not on the Bellevue lot. Lucky for me the “other” truck with the same inventory ID was still available. I really think that’s why the price was a couple thousand lower than other Lariats of the same year and mileage at other dealers. If you want to read the full story of the day I bought my 2005 F-150, the original post can be found here.
March… Promotion. I stayed in the Hosting department for about six weeks removing all ties to a domain registrar (which The Company owned then sold). I also spent that time resolving my outstanding tickets, after which I relocated my desk to a cubicle near the sysadmin offices in true Milton Waddams fashion. To The Company management (which I’m sure read this occasionally), don’t worry… I don’t have any plans to burn the place down… yet.
The only part of being a sysadmin I don’t like is pager duty. Being on-call sucks. With over 4,100 services being monitored network-wide, there always seems to be something that will wake you up a couple (read: ten) times a night. The very first night I was on pager duty, I was awakened by a loud beeping. Still half asleep, my brain said “FIRE?” …and my heart started to race. But I quickly rubbed away the eye boogers and realized it was the pager. From that point, whenever I have the pager, I change the alert tone to something that doesn’t sound like a smoke detector, or a FedEx truck backing up into my bedroom. Jesus!
The rest of spring was pretty much status quo: sleep, work, sleep, work, pager, work, sleep, work, ad nauseam. I was sick and tired of the Primary elections, and gas prices were higher than Heath Ledger. Holy hell, man! At it’s peak, the cheapest gasoline price I could find was $4.30 a gallon. It was costing $28 (or 6.5 gallons) a day to drive to work and back in LDriver’s 1997 Mercury Sable. Do the math, people, that was about $600 a month in fuel costs! Who am I, Donald Trump? I don’t make that kind of money! Somehow I paid for it, though I maxed out credit cards. Seems stupid to ruin a good credit rating for the sake of driving to work… especially when I can work from home just as easily… but ya do what ya gotta do to pay the bills.
I was having some serious knee troubles in late June and early July. I went to the doctor, and he told me it was Patello-femoral Pain Syndrome. Whatever it was, getting plenty of rest and staying off my knee, coupled with a liver- and kidney-killing cocktail of 400mg of ibuprofen and 1000mg of acetaminophen seemed to help a lot. It took about two weeks before I could bear full weight on my knee without a great deal of pants-pissing pain. My knee still stiffens up in the car during my commute to hell, but it’s much better than it was in July.
In September, I started getting interested in the Presidential Primary elections. I marveled at my apparent maturing into a Republican. I guess age has a way changing people. Whether it is for the better is yet to be seen. For now, I’m comfortable with being a Republican and not at all pleased with the election of King Obama. All of His rhetoric about needing change, not more of the same, is a load of shit. In the two months since the general election, we’ve seen nothing but the typical Chicago political corruption we’ve seen for decades. Change indeed!
That’s about it for 2008. Sorry for the delay, too. I started this post on December 31, but four days of pager duty — which started on New Year’s eve – lasted nine days due to a birth in The Company’s family. Happy New Year! Let’s hope 2009 is better than 2008.
