You have an assistant? My *wife* doesn't have an assistant. :) 

Wed Oct 06 2021 16:03:48 MST from TheDave

 

Tue Oct 05 2021 18:41:06 MSTfrom ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

I noticed an uptick. That explains it. Of course - the outages only last so long. I imagine you're right. If Facebook disappeared, this place would likely get busier. That is a shame. 

People bitch about WalMart and Target - but they don't stop shopping there. 

 I'm trying to be more regular here, but my mental load is full.  I did just get an assistant so I can have him remember what I'm supposed to be doing inst ead of me keeping track and I'm already much happier.

Thu Oct 07 2021 17:11:53 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

You have an assistant? My *wife* doesn't have an assistant. :) 

 

That sounds like an error on her part.  Everyone should get one, they're extremely useful.

I think she had one in her last job. 

These guys are a little more small time. 

Thu Oct 14 2021 16:57:54 MST from TheDave

 

Thu Oct 07 2021 17:11:53 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

You have an assistant? My *wife* doesn't have an assistant. :) 

 

 

That sounds like an error on her part.  Everyone should get one, they're extremely useful.

I really enjoy sharing an assistant, ideally. Having to keep one busy would just be another problem.

What I need, what I suspect we all need, is Jeeves from the Jeeves and Wooster stories by P. G. Wodehouse. That's some good reading and Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry did an ASTOUNDING series of episodes for the BBC. It's my favorite television show ever. 

I don't really need an assistant. I just need to spend less time fucking off and more time organizing my todo list. But, even then - I keep it pretty simple. My life is not terribly complicated, in general. 

Sun Jan 16 2022 21:49:26 MST from Wangiss <wangiss@wallofhate.com>

I really enjoy sharing an assistant, ideally. Having to keep one busy would just be another problem.

 

What I need, what I suspect we all need, is Jeeves from the Jeeves and Wooster stories by P. G. Wodehouse. That's some good reading and Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry did an ASTOUNDING series of episodes for the BBC. It's my favorite television show ever. 

My life is monstrously complicated right now. Thankfully, I've had phases of relative simplicity that give me hope.

Just the normal monstrously complicated, or an additional set of monstrous complications? 

I'm working 10-14 hour days at the new job and I'm telling them I need an assistant and they're like "well maybe we can just task some of the existing office staff with answering your phone for an hour a day each" and I'm over here like "I'll take ANY HELP I CAN GET thanks" and they still haven't done it yet.

What are you doing now? 

I'm working as a dispatcher for a materials testing company in the construction industry, so we sample concrete for testing, check asphalt composition, inspect rebar installations, verify floor flatness for large slab pours, that sort of thing.

I'm the only dispatcher, and I'm responsible for taking the calls that come in as well, so between keeping the job super happy on the various site, babysitting the techs I send out on jobs, and writing the damn schedule for the following day, I'm pretty swamped. One day I barely got any calls, and was able to leave 5 whole minutes early.  I have too many responsibilities with the amount of jobs we're working.

The bottlenecks I need cleared are:

1. Lower phone traffic.  I'm working on a webform that will email me, but being so swamped means no time for side projects.
2. More technicians.  I can work miracles with enough time to "solve the puzzle" but sometimes you just have too many people asking for a 9am slot.  They're working on that but finding people is slow.
3. Less bullshit on my plate.  When someone asks me to keep track of some sort of inventory, I tell them I can't do that and please talk to my supervisor because I don't have the bandwidth to do that.

I'm making progress and doing a pretty good job on establishing proper boundaries, but it's a lot of effort to change the way old men go about things.  I have enough credibility to get them to consider things and I'm good at explaining tech that will help us make things easier, so I'm confident in my ability to make headway.

Can your assistant work remotely? What is the pay? 

I'm a pretty good bitch for $20/hr with flexible hours. 

Sun Mar 06 2022 13:41:12 MST from TheDave

I'm working as a dispatcher for a materials testing company in the construction industry, so we sample concrete for testing, check asphalt composition, inspect rebar installations, verify floor flatness for large slab pours, that sort of thing.

I'm the only dispatcher, and I'm responsible for taking the calls that come in as well, so between keeping the job super happy on the various site, babysitting the techs I send out on jobs, and writing the damn schedule for the following day, I'm pretty swamped. One day I barely got any calls, and was able to leave 5 whole minutes early.  I have too many responsibilities with the amount of jobs we're working.

The bottlenecks I need cleared are:

1. Lower phone traffic.  I'm working on a webform that will email me, but being so swamped means no time for side projects.
2. More technicians.  I can work miracles with enough time to "solve the puzzle" but sometimes you just have too many people asking for a 9am slot.  They're working on that but finding people is slow.
3. Less bullshit on my plate.  When someone asks me to keep track of some sort of inventory, I tell them I can't do that and please talk to my supervisor because I don't have the bandwidth to do that.

I'm making progress and doing a pretty good job on establishing proper boundaries, but it's a lot of effort to change the way old men go about things.  I have enough credibility to get them to consider things and I'm good at explaining tech that will help us make things easier, so I'm confident in my ability to make headway.

Sun Mar 06 2022 17:59:44 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Can your assistant work remotely? What is the pay? 

I'm a pretty good bitch for $20/hr with flexible hours. 

So far I'm not getting an assistant, and nobody works remotely even though I should totally be able to do this job from home.  Hell, I'm convinced that if they let me work from home I'd be way more effective, since I get distracted by office noise far too often.

I'm making 18 an hour but I'm also working 50-60 hour weeks so I'm making more than I did at my previous job.  If they don't significantly bump my pay at my 6 month review, I'll be looking for something else shortly.

My problem is I want income, but I don't want to work. 

It is a difficult balance to find. 

Tue Mar 08 2022 23:38:30 MST from TheDave

 

Sun Mar 06 2022 17:59:44 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Can your assistant work remotely? What is the pay? 

I'm a pretty good bitch for $20/hr with flexible hours. 

So far I'm not getting an assistant, and nobody works remotely even though I should totally be able to do this job from home.  Hell, I'm convinced that if they let me work from home I'd be way more effective, since I get distracted by office noise far too often.

I'm making 18 an hour but I'm also working 50-60 hour weeks so I'm making more than I did at my previous job.  If they don't significantly bump my pay at my 6 month review, I'll be looking for something else shortly.

Thu Mar 10 2022 07:24:35 MSTfrom ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

My problem is I want income, but I don't want to work. 

It is a difficult balance to find. 

 

Too much risk... I'd love to do something where I just sit around and make that kind of money, though - for sure. :) 

Fri Mar 11 2022 05:59:46 MST from TheDave

 

Thu Mar 10 2022 07:24:35 MSTfrom ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

My problem is I want income, but I don't want to work. 

It is a difficult balance to find. 

 

My friend Jamin is selling shares of the dispensary he's setting up.  You'd get a passive income of $35k-$50k per year, and it's $25k per share, not a public company.  

So, I had a dream recently that was more than cinematic - it felt...prophetic. I don't know if that is the right word. It felt like a vision, like revelations. 


I was together with a group of friends - I can't remember the details - but for some reason we were holed up at their place. It felt a bit like a hotel, or apartments - but it was... chaotic. The exact scenario escapes me now, but I feel like I was looking for a place to crash - there were a number of choices. Some sort of major, almost gilded stairway and lift/elevator was in the lobby area, I think. Again, it felt elegant and run down at the same time. Anyhow, I found I had to go to the bathroom. They advised that only one was open, it was in a brick corner of the building, but they warned me it was terribly small and uncomfortable. I really had to go, and found the doorway, which was awkwardly hidden. It opened up onto a super small, badly lit room with one toilet that was in bad shape - unclean, unflushed. I resigned myself, when I noticed that the room opened up much larger behind the toilet, it was just difficult to see in the dim lighting. I edged my way past the filthy toilet, and there were two seats, like, cushioned seats, behind the toilet, facing the opposite direction - but they were toilets too... and there was far more room on this side. 

Suddenly I was back outside, and people were running up to where I was at the edge of a balcony or patio overlooking a valley of trees. Rolling tree covered hills stretched away to the horizon, and a indistinct, smoky gray-black cloud descended from the sky to the south. Along the ridgeline of the hills on the horizon I could see a town - and as the cloud fell upon the town - the shapes it was made of became distinct gray "darts" - almost like arrow heads - it was a swarm of them. As they impacted, explosions and billows of fairly small clouds rose from the village/city - like miniature mushroom clouds, but, hundreds, thousands of them, all grouped closely together. They did not all impact simultaneously - the hit like a shotgun pattern - causing a rippling, spreading wave of this destruction. I realized it was my city, my home being destroyed. 

The next part of the dream, suddenly I was shirtless, wearing just pants, barefoot. I looked down and regarded myself and my stomach was flat and tight - there was no difference between the flatness of my stomach and my pelvis. I thought to myself, "if I get through this, I'm going to make sure to keep this shape," but I also knew I had taken this shape from a critical lack of food. I wasn't concentration-camp starvation thin - but I was "living on bare sustenance on a deserted island and working like a dog to achieve it" thin. What a dietician would refer to as a "starvation diet". A friend joined me, and we watched as heavy machinery rolled bulky objects down the bare dirt road. This is where it gets weird. The objects appeared to be seals, like, the aquatic animal. They had the bodies of seals - but they weren't brown and covered in hair. They seemed hairless and pinkish-gray with almost translucent skin - like waterlogged dead animals. I'm not sure if they had faces, or if it was something shoved down into them, like they were being worn as a sink, but the faces were children, swollen and distorted, yellowish with bright red patches. Not like, rosy cheeks, just blooms of red color, on foreheads, chins, temples... They were piled on top of one another, like logs on a logging truck, being rolled along one another down the street into a small opening into a canal. 

My friend and I were in the path, and it seemed wise to not be noticed, and we let ourselves be pushed with these objects into the canal, where we floated along as they bobbed upright, as if they were weighted on one end, down the chest high water of the canal. The water seemed polluted, slow moving and choked with algae, vegetation and settled dirt. Windowless brick walls of buildings, fences, lined the canal, making it an enclosed, secret waterway that could not be seen. At the top of the canal, I noticed a parcel as we moved along with the objects, which were starting to spread apart from one another after being claustrophobically close at first. I waded over, my friend joining me, asking me what I had found. I opened the parcel, a green canvas bag, I think - but also, a box - it shifted in the dream - and a round high capacity magazine fell from the satchel - I could see that it held hundreds of brass bullets. I had no weapon for it, and reached inside the satchel, which now had transformed more into something like a pillbox or chest partially buried in the muck and grass at the top of the canal, and among damp dead leaves and other debris,  I discovered a makeshift pistol. It didn't have a traditional chamber, and the plates of the grip and trigger and firing mechanism were of steel, with rivets holding it together. It looked almost toy-like, but in the barrel I could see the brass of a bullet. We took it and I hid it down my pants and we hurried on to try and find a place to examine and discuss what we had found. The canal abruptly spit us out onto a broken cobblestone street, we moved away from the collecting pile of seal-children bodies - and there was a gate in a brick wall with a heavy iron reinforced black wooden door. A guard noticed us, and walked toward us, calling us over. He began to question us, and then began searching me. He felt the gun and demanded, "What is this?" I panicked and considered shooting him, and instead quickly and slyly passed it back to my fellow traveler behind me, hoping he would make a better decision of what to do with it than I had and that the guard would not notice the handoff.  My traveling partner grabbed it in abject horror and panic and froze... 

And that is when I woke up. I was, unsurprisingly, unable to go back to sleep. 

The vegetation, the construction, the buildings, the landscape, none of it felt particularly like any place I lived, most closely like Ohio - which is an old enough part of the US, close enough to the US, that it feels in many ways like large parts of Europe. 

It didn't feel like any of the western states - and in fact, a lot of it, felt like someplace where things had been around for a long time. It didn't feel like Lucca Italy so much, but it was LIKE that, a bit like the Tuscan countryside in the mountain/hilly regions North of Lucca. The city parts felt OLD though, like, how I was in this kind of run down yet extravagant building at the start, where rooms seemed to have been built to accommodate what had already existed there - and how I could see across a large empty valley to a city on a distant ridge. Same with the small streets leading to the canal, and the canal itself, and how it was walled in - like - the way train tracks in Europe run through "backwater" paths but are built up on either side, nearly to the edge of the railway. Same with the guarded wall, and whatever was behind it. It all felt like any city where modern things have built up around, over and inside of medieval construction and planning - and how that often results in cramped spaces and dead/wasted spaces repurposed and utilized for utility purposes. It was not dry and dusty like a desert or arid climate, but it was also not, at that point in the dream - snowy or cold - it seemed temperate - like, there was a lot of mud and dirt and vegetation. 


It wasn't the kind of scenario/setting I would imagine my mind would paint pulling from my own subconscious. 

 
It was a very bizarre dream. 

So, tonight on the personal hellscape of dreams I seem to be travelling through lately: 

I was with a group of friends. We were travelling along a frontage road, and we were being pursued. I think we had been speeding. We passed a ramp onto the highway the frontage road ran along, and decided to take it. I think it was an off ramp. We ended up on this highway, but on foot. It was deserted. It looked like Highway 99 - but a sunken part, with levees on each side and buildings higher above the walls of the roadway. It felt like the section between downtown and Florin, but it also felt like parts further south, Modesto or Stockton or even Elk Grove and Galt. Country roads and trees with canopies over old gas stations at country road intersections. As we went beneath an underpass, I noticed a doorway in one of the support walls built into the side of the freeway. There was a circular driveway, and the door was covered in fake, brass-studded padded leather with a small window set into it - like, salmon colored Naugahyde - like an old bar or restaurant from the 60s or 70s. My friend Jeremy Hurst and I went into the doorway, and found ourselves in the upstairs lobby of a old-school retro Hawaiian cuisine restaurant. It wasn't like it was retro, though - it was like it was once very posh and trendy, and still perfectly maintained - but forgotten in time, left behind by modern restaurant-goer tastes. The kind of place that has little red cup shaped candles in nets at each table, has two-colored matchbooks with the name of the place and a simple picture of a palm-tree on a beach with a catamaran in the distance.   The lobby was empty, and we wandered around the spacious lobby, looked behind the hostess counter. The decorations were spartan and period appropriate. It looked very 60s/70s elegance. 

A large man in a black suit and tie appeared up the stairs. He looked Asian or Islander. He seemed shocked to see customers in the lobby. He gruffly asked how long we had been waiting, apologized before we could answer and barked down the stairway for someone to help us. A younger man, skinny, Asian Islander - appeared in a white shirt, black slacks, bowtie, wearing an apron, and began to attend to us. His speech patterns were Pacific Islander pidgin English - and he was a little difficult to understand. My friend started talking to him, mimicking his verbal patterns. I was a little shocked and uncomfortable with this, but the host seemed comfortable with it and they had a discussion. The discussion was adversarial - though - we were asking tough questions about the place, and he was giving evasive answers. The manager reappeared up the stairs, and choked out something about having <a name> give us a tour. I don't remember the name, but it was like "The Flea" or "The imp." I'm going to use The Imp, because basically that is what appeared. A twisted, tiny little monster of a man, dressed similar to the host. He motioned us to follow him, and we exited back through the door. Now there was more structure, the circular driveway was covered, arches held the covered area up, like the entrance to a hotel. The highway was more of a pavement area, and there was a glass enclosed walkway over the pavement. There was more building on the opposite side of the pavement. I had time to wonder where the rest of the people we had been with had gone, and figured they must have gone to explore the building on the other side of the pavement/highway. 

The imp scurried up the ramp and across the paved area, and we hesitated and then pursued him. It led across the roadway and into the building on the opposite side, and felt somewhat like a parking garage but also like an airport terminal. He ran ahead of us as it ramped upwards in a pattern zig-zagging back in on itself, again, like a parking garage. There were few people milling about on these rampways - but they seemed sort of directionless and meandering - lost. As we climbed, the construction became worn and broken down - crumbling with exposed iron rods supporting the concrete. A man sat leaning against the wall. He asked what we were doing in such a hurry, and when we told him we were trying to catch up with the imp, he cautioned us not to follow him for some reason. I don't remember his exact words. We asked why he was making us chase him, and he said it was all part of the game. We ignored him and continued on up the ramp. At the top of it, we turned right and were confronted with a cavernous ruins. Three pathways branched off, one curving to the left and behind us, one to the right and curving off in front of us, in an S curve. The ground was broken gravel, exposed dirt and pavement, potholes collecting water and rutted with tire tracks. Ahead of us, was a semi-collapsed structure like a bombed out or abandoned building, or again, a parking garage's parking area. Pillars disappeared into the distance, but piled rubble and refuse and collapsed sections turned it into a labyrinth of sorts. Crumbling piles of concrete and rebar dotted the ground in that direction. Everything was gloomy and naturally lighted, but the area head of us quickly deepened into cave-like darkness. The paths to the left and right also disappeared into dark cavernous openings that prevented us from seeing what lay beyond. 

Our initial momentum had carried us around the turn and towards the opening into the garage-structure, but half way across the ramp to it, I stopped and considered the paths leading to the Left and right.  The imp could have turned either of the three directions, and I didn't want to get side-tracked down the wrong path and lose even more time trying to take up his track again. As I contemplated this, we heard something, the clunk of disturbed rubble, in the distance ahead of us. We waited, listening carefully for any more sounds, and then heard it again, as we saw the Imp emerge to the left of the garage area, near a square spiral stairway. A path semi-blocked by fallen rubble led directly to the stairway - but it was clear the imp had hoped we would follow him through the maze of rubble in the garage area and fall further behind him. He regarded us with a frustrated sneer, and quickly disappeared into the stairway up. We gave pursuit, scrambling over the rubble in between us and the stairway, catching site of him rapidly turning the first corner. The Stairway had open sides, and as we rose we could see it was near a similar structure with a gap between it and the stairway we were climbing. We came out on an open level, and the structure next to us was reachable across a drop back to the ground level. The imp had disappeared, and we realized he must have jumped across onto the other structure. We bridged the gap between the structures and scrambled up, reaching the top level of it, a rooftop buried under collapsed rubble and debris, mostly of concrete. The imp had to be here, hiding behind or under the rubble. My friend wanted to just give up - but I picked up rubble and tossed it off toward the far edge of the structure. On the third toss the Imp popped up from beneath the rubble, glaring at us angrily and rubbing the back of its head. He disappeared back beneath the rubble, and we both began throwing stones and rubble in the general direction. I intended to capture him, and felt our odds were good that we would. It felt like maybe we were catching a Leprechaun - but a real historical one - like a genie, dangerous and deceptive and not at all what it appeared to be. Malicious and tricky. I didn't know what we were going to do with it once we caught it - but I felt like its pot of gold, whatever it was we were promised, would be more deception. 

I woke, feeling a little feverish and bloated. I've been up since.  

I also had a song in my head - not a song I'd ever heard. I only got the chorus, which was, "I'm going on - a per-son-al - vay-cay-shee-on." (I'm going on a personal vacation)  broke up just like that. 

The world in the dream was hard, broken down, cold, desolate, and overcast and gloomy. Thinking about it, it felt a little bit like one of those weird Infocom text adventures based... a little bit like an AD&D module or scenario, or even a Make Your Own Adventure book. Especially coming to the three branching directions and hearing the sound in the darkness from the obvious choice forward - which turned out to ACTUALLY be the correct choice, yet the best decision was to wait for the Imp to emerge and reveal himself, at which point the more direct shortcut path became revealed. What appeared to be 3 choices was really more like 4. Go Left, go Right, go ahead into the darkness, or wait. But the branching possibilities from there were far more complex. I realized that as I waited. The Imp could be EITHER left or right, and the sound unrelated. The sound might be the imp, and waiting for more sound in order to decide might be leaving us further behind as he moved further into the darkness ahead of us. The Imp emerging from the area in front of us, having attempted to lead us through a maze of rubble and darkness - when there was a shortcut directly to where he emerged, was not a possibility I considered until I saw it happen. There was a general feeling of malevolence and deception throughout the dream. None of it felt happy or positive. It was all very dystopian & apocalyptic - like a world run down.