They Don't Make Them Like They Used To

Long time, no read I know, but I've been busy with my new job which is almost exactly like the old job except now I'm an employee. There are only a couple of differences.

The first is this:

When I went in Monday my boss handed me a box with the shiny new phone on the right. I unpacked the box and started charging it. That's pretty much all I've done with it for the last two weeks. Every time I stop for a few minutes I have to plug it in. It's a bit like a Tamagotchi -- if I don't feed it often enough it dies. Hopefully I don't ever need to use it for anything because the battery life seems to be about ten minutes. I give it another week before I drop it and the screen shatters.

In contrast, the phone on the left, which constantly causes outcries of "Hey, that was the first phone I had in high school!" from the young 'uns, is about seven years old, has a battery which lasts for almost a week, and has been dropped on hard surfaces at least once a week without anything worse than a little paint chipping. One of the engineers even sought me out last week to borrow it because they couldn't find another phone old enough for something they were trying to test. Unfortunately, at some point in the next couple of years the network will probably stop supporting it. That's probably okay, though, since I mostly use it as an alarm clock.

The only other real change is that as an employee I'm not supposed to be allowed to telecommute. I'm not even going to try to explain this. In any case, I now have a second cubicle at an office halfway between my house and the people I actually work with. It's situated nicely between the Budweiser factory and the Jelly Belly factory, so I figure I'm set in case of a disaster. There are only about ten people in the building. There are no vending machines, which is probably a good thing. The microwave in the break room is huge (like, Thanksgiving turkey huge) and looks even older than my own microwave which I got used from my brother over thirty years ago. It's probably going to kill us all with the number of rads it's leaking, but I'll never have to wait more than thirty seconds for my food to get hot.

Tuesday I have to go relearn the secret company handshake along with all of the nineteen year-old newly-hired retail employees. It's going to be a very, very long day...

Some Days...

To alleviate the severe shortage of space to lie down in a three bedroom house with a gigantic yard, I bought some more dog beds.

So we've gone from this:

to this:

Meanwhile the three gigantic dog beds in the living room are sitting empty.

Not really how I had envisioned it working out.