Zel-kun’s Words

I watched Advent Children today.  For those that don’t know, its a movie that cam out that’s a continuation of Final Fantasy VII.  So, I was pretty happy to watch a movie based on a game I enjoyed playing.  There’s plenty of movies made into games, but so few games made into movies.

All in all, it was a decent movie.  The plot was okay, and the action was pretty cool.  Ultimately, though, if I wasn’t a fan of the game, the movie would likely have been pretty lousy.  Most of my entertainment was due to seeing characters I was familiar with kicking some ass.  Without that familiarity, I doubt it would be all that great.

The main reason for this is the nearly complete lack of exposition.  A new viewer would be thrown in saying, “Who the hell is that?  What is that?  Where’d that come from?  What are those?”  It is, in the truest sense, as though the FMV at the end of FFVII just kept going for two hours.

Well, that’s all for now.

Zel-kun out.

As I do most evenings, last night I was watching Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network.  Imagine my surprise when after Aqua Teen Hunger Force, came Saved By The Bell.

Surely my eyes were deceiving me?  Surely this wasn’t the 1980’s sitcom about high school?

It was.  I was watching an old sitcom on Adult Swim.

Now, I was only half-surprised, being as I’ve seen the previews on Adult Swim saying ‘Saved By The Bell is coming!’  I figured they were just doing some crazy gimmick or it would be re-dubbed so it’d be something crazy.  No, it was an episode of Saved By The Bell, just like I didn’t watch when I was little.

The logic of this baffles me, being as the show wasn’t utterly horrible, surely not bad enough to have camp value.  I watched an episode, there were a couple things that made me chuckle, but by and large it was boring.  I really don’t know why this became a part of Adult Swim, and I’m hoping this isn’t the first step in a direction I’m going to hate.  That’s what I want… a network that plays 1980’s sitcoms all night.  I mean… ANOTHER network.

The bumps for it are hilarious, though, oddly-colored slow motion bits of show, makes it look like the cast crawled out of the abyss and will not be satisfied until they have devoured all of our souls.

In other news, nothing is really happening on the job front.  Things at Getronics look somewhat promising, and TekSystems will offer me a bit of work, so that’s good.  I’ve lived this lifestyle before, with my income through part-time work and unemployment, and there are worse ways to live.

Well, that’s all for now.

Zel-kun out.

I watched Howl’s Moving Castle with Zai today.  And I will say its not often I see a truly good movie.  I never once wondered about the time (which is rare) as I watched it, and when it ended, I wanted more.  I wanted the movie to keep going, to tell me more of the story, to know what happens after.  This is an extremely rare occurance for me, generally, when a movie ends, I am happy for it.  It means I can now focus on other things.  I suppose that’s a bit of my childhood ADD showing through, not wanting to focus on one thing for so long.

The movie was a work of beauty, about the strength of one’s spirit and a sense of wonderment and magic and love, the kind of sappy stuff that oddly, I’m a *ahem* sap for.  In the american society of action, explosions, filth, lust, and even occasional moronic fluff, its nice to see a movie that has heart and emotion.  If you are a fan of Miyazaki, I highly reccomend this one.

If not, there’s other movies out there.  I’m sure you’ll find one.

Zel-kun out.

Its tough for me to write this, as I don’t like speaking about bad things, things I see as failures.  It took quite a bit of thinking for me to not see the following events as my failure.  I believe I did the best that I could, and did it well, I walk away from this with much sorrow, but with no regrets.

Monday started like any other monday, being woken up at 6:32am by my Blackberry going off.  I roused myself from slumber, opened up my work laptop, and got on the phone.  Twenty minutes later, a printer in Niles, Illinois is printing once more.

That’s how my job works.  I get messages on the Blackberry from 6:30am to 5:00pm, I call up the gym and see exactly what the problem is, and I fix it.  This can sometimes be done remotely, sometimes with the help of an on-site tech, and sometimes with me physically going to the gym.  I troubleshoot a network of over one hundred machines running four different POS (point of sale) applications, three different operating systems, and multiple configurations spanning twenty gyms… filled with jocks… jocks using computers…
Its a big and complex job.  One that has had me working many long hours, often without lunch, and have put 2000 miles on my car in the last month.  I have never once complained, nor have ever slacked off.  I did my job with pride, and I did it well.  I asked many qeustions and learned many things.  I would say that on Monday, I could deal with 99% of the issues without asking anyone for help.

A typical day has me leaving my home around 8:30am, and heading to a gym, where I take some inventory notes and troubleshoot issues I see there.  I stay and answer questions for a bit, then begin a trip to another gym.  I shoot over Chicagoland for as long as the day allows me, then finally return home, often arriving at about 7:00pm.  I would like the assembled audience to know that I did this without breaks or lunch, I just never had the time.

While on the road my Blackberry will go off, and I’ll get on my cell phone and deal with issues as I can.  Whether postponing them until I can get to my laptop, sending a tech out to fix some hardware, or talking the user through it.  My day was hectic and exhausting, but that was my job.

When I do make it to the office, maybe once or twice a week, I work with five others, three of which I consider something of friends.  We talk computers, we go to lunch, typical friendly co-worker activities.

So when one of them asks to return the game I borrowed for him, I think nothing of it.  When another asks me to send him the sheets of the projects I’m working on, I think nothing of it.  When another asks me to make a detour out to the office for the sole purpose of picking up a piece of hardware to drop off at our inventory depot in Downer’s Grove, I think nothing of it.

I am a very suspicious person.  And I do my best to cast aside many of my thoughts as foolish paranoia.  And I find that this was a foolish thing to do at this point.  What I thought were just random occurances, were actually various pieces of a trap being set in place.  And I was the prey.

I make my way to the office.  I drop off the game and pick up the hardware.  I head out to St. Charles to take a look at a USB camera that didn’t seem to be working, and to take a few notes on the inventory while I was there.  As I’m driving there (80 mile trip), I get a call from my boss at Sentinel.  He said he heard I was going to be dropping off some equipment, and wanted to talk to me, see how things are going.  I tell them what time I’ll be in that area and he said that’d be fine.

So I do my job at St. Charles and arrive at the Sentinel office at 2:30opm.  I say a happy greeting to the receptionist and walk to my boss’ office.  As the door closed behind me, the heavy click was the sound of the trap closing.

Anyone reading this knows what happened at this point, so I’m going to spare you the details.  The reasons given were I asked too many questions, and I wasn’t friendly enough.  I’m not entirely sure what the real reason was, because I can say that the reasons given were bull.

1. In the beginning, I asked loads of questions. My expertise was in working with small networks and troubleshooting errors.  When I’m thrown at a large network spanning twenty locations, I’m going to run into just a few things I haven’t seen.  And I’d rather ask a question than fool with something and screw it up.  In the previous two-three weeks, I scarcely asked any questions.  By then, I had experienced all sorts of problems, and have learned to diagnose and treat them correctly.

2. I was always smiling and energetic.  I’m not sure what else they wanted from me.  The people at the gyms likes me, and I seemed to have good repore with the folks at the office.

So what were the reasons?  I couldn’t really say.  It could be possible Judah and Mike (my Xsport boss and senior co-worker respectively) just didn’t like me.  I got that vibe from day one.  I never talked to Judah and saw him even less, but I did talk to Mike a lot, as he was in my position before I was.  I have proven him wrong on some occasions.  Not intentionally, just pointed out why he couldn’t do certain things.  Such as why you can’t release an IP address on an RDP connection then renew it.

In the end, I do not feel regret.  Because I did my best, and I did it well.  There have been jobs where I look at my comptency or motivation and found it lacking, this is not one of them.  I leave Sentinel with my head held high.

The fact that the trap was orchestrated with the help of people I thought liked me adds a bit of anger at this whole ordeal.  And the fact that I wasn’t allowed to clean out my desk another little twist of the blade in the wound.  So now I have to wait while my belongings (a set of earbuds and a picture of Zai) are SHIPPED to me.  That’s right, they’re freaking shipping me my things.

So, anyhow, as of this wiriting, I am preparing to hit the pavement again.  I have some contacts and I think I should be able to find some more work easily enough.  Its funny that I left a very stable job to try this one out…

Well, time to update my resume.

Zel-kun out.