Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

I had to check to see if Dick Cheney was dead yet

CNET News.com The geek’s dream. A pocket pez styled mp3 player, where they can pop their myriad of Star Wars and Simpson’s heads onto them.

What next, Barry White pumpin’ out of a vibrator?

*EDIT-if you found this link looking for a recipe for crab risotto, try heading over to my cooking blog for a recipe.

Alright, my friend over at Tiny Little Dots asked, and threatened to do it himself. Regardless, it got me thinking about it again.

I was working for a high profile computer company in their retail store here locally in the Bay area this past winter. You know the one, with the hottest gift of the holiday season. Anyway, it started out like a dream, a kid in a candy store. Sure, it was a logistical nightmare, under managed, poorly organized, but fun nonetheless. As the holidays came and went, the day to day routine became clear. It was just another retail job, albeit working with the coolest toys in town. Things were already getting weird, with all the normal job politics and “you gotta sell more of these…” type speeches, which kinda weirded me out, as I never saw this company like that. Sure, they were trying to capitalize on the popularity, and bring in more market share, yada yada, yada, but it was still weird.
But back to the crab risotto. I’ve always worked in restaurants, where you break and eat when you get a breather, and it always was in a grimy corner away from everyone, ‘cause at that moment, you don’t want to see, talk, or hear anyone. This job was nothing like that, with at times 10 people meandering around a small area, in some phase of their lunch hour. So I had made a dinner for my girl and I the evening before, crab and asparagus risotto. I had plenty left over, threw a little gorgonzola on top, and brought in for lunch.
Now I consider myself a “tough guy”, not some Sally, but I’m eating the lunch, talking to two new employees, discussing the difference between their structured training, and my, “thrown into the fire with the wolves” experience. When this guy from another department of the store comes flying into the room cussing, saying something about the odor of my lunch, and slamming the door. I froze like an eight year old. The swell of adrenaline, anger, and humiliation overcame me, as the two new employees stumble to play off the situation, and I struggle with myself not to do what would have been done in 90% of the kitchens I’ve worked in, which would have been to grab the remainder of the food, throw it at the guy, and a few punches probably mixed in.
However, I tell a manager that I’m taking off, I go home to finish my meal (I was seriously hungry, I had to wait an extra 2 hours for my break). I then call before my scheduled break was to end, and ask for the manager (this is where it really gets good).
When I finally get a hold of him, he down plays my situation, taking the side of the other employee, simply because he’d worked with him longer. I tell him the type of language he used (I’m trying to keep the language here more on the academic level), he says, “yeah, that’s not good”. I try and explain how humiliated I felt, embarrassed, and honestly, threatened, as I really had not experienced such behavior before from a coworker. His reply is that I shouldn’t have left the store. As if I was somehow the bad guy. It truly was freaky. So the manager says he will talk to the person, and that we’ll speak the next time I work.
The next day I’m off, the following, I go in, expecting some feedback, and at least an apology. No manager, no response from any other management regarding the situation. Day goes on, the freak is there, shoots me a dirty look, still no feed back. In the meantime, I get this under-middle-level manager type freak out on me over some snafus that occurred during the day, as a new plan was supposed to have been implemented. I mean, snap as if they owned the place, and I was the primary point person for the whole operation. Trust me, I know that snap, because I have been the top dog, and heard that snap from the owner. But this is a multi-billion dollar international company, and I was an hourly (and crappy hourly rate) employee, who’d been there less than 4 months.
So I spend another hour discussing the situation with another manager, expecting some resolution. Not really, and the next two days go by without any contact from anyone regarding the situations. Needless to say, that was my last day, as I contacted them to inquire how to severe my relation.
Now I’m no dummy, and I’ve worked in some really crappy places, but this was the LAST PLACE I expected to allow this type of behavior and to be so poorly handled. I’m sure if the sales weren’t going through the roof, and the Wall Street hype running amok, there would be a greater day to day management of an outlet of this nature.
The short of the story is that for someone who was so completely enamored with a product, it’s been quite difficult to regain that excitement, and I have struggled to separate the experience from the product.
Eh, their loss. I make a mean crab risotto.

Alright, so I’m slowly piecing toghether a sidebar that I’m happy with. Now to learn som CSS (lucky for me, that’s where we are at in my HTML class), so I’ll have a tutorial in the basics.) What I want to do is slightly shift things to the right, and give bullets of some sort to the links under each link category. Right now, everything is an ul, so if I put the list type to a bullet, EVERYTHING gets a bullet, and even then, they show up to far left of the column. I will figure it out. But if anyone stumbles along this site and can offer a suggestion, I’m all ears.

And I still want to change the header image

I am on a quest to research some of those 139 Wordpress themes over at Alex Kings site, and weave together a side bar I like. Not that anyone is visiting yet, but by god, when they do, it will be snazzy. I really want to change the header image as well, the image is just a little, well, blurry.