The Drunken Blog

Every year, full time employees at Circuit City would receive three new shirts.  I worked there for four years, though I was not technically full time for that first year, so I only got two shirts then.  I also got some other shirts when I was promoted, and again when I began my management training.

In all, I have about 22 Circuit City polo shirts.  I’ve just had them in a trashbag in my closet for the last three years, not really wanting to let go of them, but not knowing exactly what to do with them.

I recently organized my closet and added in some more shelf space, and in the process decided that I finally needed to let go of the shirts – they were out of business, if I couldn’t get rid of the shirts now, I would never be able to get rid of them. (more…)

[update: the picture wasn’t showing in IE for some reason, I have obviously fixed it, but sorry for any confusion.]

I work in one of the main buildings for a rather large consulting firm. We don’t have the entire building, but we do have our name on the outside of it, which means that we pay the most rent and have the majority of the building. There are 18 floors and I work on the fifth.

Now, I mentioned that I work for a consulting firm, but just like any other consulting firm, they do other things as well. But the fact that we are mainly consultants makes for a certain work environment. Most of the people working here are young professionals, recently graduated from college and pretty bright. The problem is, all of these cats work on the client site as opposed to the home office. That means that all of the kids my age don’t actually work in my building, for the most part.

The people that work in my building are generally accountants, HR, senior executives, etc. Basically an older crowd; a crowd you would expect to be more professional than the young guns going out getting plastered every night and crawling their way into work the next day. The people that you see around the office are pretty much the stereotypical people you would expect to see when you think of “the business world”.

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I would hardly call my self a philanthropist; I hardly have enough money to be a me-anthropist, but I like to give when I can. So on MLK day my work sponsored a company wide day of service. Their pitch was “Make it a day on, not a day off.” Of course, the option was to do my normal job for the day or do the volunteer work. Although, I’m hesitant to even call it volunteer work, since I was paid my normal rate for it.

The day of service began with a four hour brainwashing meeting to get us in the mood for the day. We basically learned how good MLK was and how good my company is, then we learned how good we all could be if we just did more things for our community.
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I’m not a huge gambler, I realize that gambling makes people lose money more often than not, and I don’t exactly have excess amounts of money to lose (although, when I do gamble, I write the money off as “entertainment value”). It is for this reason especially that I don’t drink when I gamble. I’m afraid that I will become too aggressive and hit when I should fold, or keep playing even after I’ve lost my car (luckily, I don’t own a house to lose). It is for this reason that casinos in Vegas will feed you free alcohol while you are playing on the floor (I’ve heard they are actually working on administering it intravenously). They want to get you good and liquored up so you lose money. After all, they wouldn’t give away those drinks unless they made more money because of it.

Recently, I was reminded why it’s a bad idea to bet when you’re wasted. If you’ll recall, New Girl recently told me that she knew my Lesbian Ex-Girlfriend - quite a coincidence. I said in that post that she invited me to a baseball game (the literal type), but that’s not exactly true. As it turns out, New Girl had plans to go to the game with her roommate, but the roommate bailed for undisclosed reasons.

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Coincidences. Some people claim that there is no such thing as a coincidence, that everything happens for a reason as part of a larger, master plan, which was obviously designed in an intelligent manner. All I know is what happened to me was weird and there is a word that covers it, so I’m just going to stick with Webster on this one and say that coincidences do happen. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a word for it.

Don’t worry, this won’t be a post about semantics, but about an actual, freaking weird, coincidence that happened to me. You may remember that I dated a lesbian. It was a somewhat awkward relationship, awkward for her because she was a lesbian and I was not a woman, and awkward for me because she was a lesbian, and I was still not a woman. That was my junior year of high school, fast forward 6 years to present day, minus 2 months.

My good Office Friend informs me that she is interviewing some new girl that will be helping her out a lot. The first question out of my mouth, of course, is, “Is she hot?” Unfortunately Office Friend hadn’t actually had the interview yet and all she knew about her was her name and the school she went to. Her last name is probably the most common last name in the entire country, so I figured my chances of actually finding her would be slim to none.

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When I got to the “real world”, which is surprisingly similar to the fantasy world in which I have apparently been living for the past 22 years of my life, I learned that one of the phrases you hear the most at a job is “billable hours.” A billable hour is basically work that you do that you charge to a project, you can also think of it as man-hours - how many man-hours is this task going to take to complete? Then you have to make sure you get the right billing code so you can charge your time to the correct project, otherwise you are doing the work for free, or making another project pay for it.

This translates to the romantic world, too. It’s definitely a guy thing (since it relates to business metaphor, and clearly, guys are the only ones that should be in the literal or figurative business world). But don’t worry ladies; it’s a guy thing in a bad way. You see, we, as guys, invest a lot of time to hang out with girls. We give up a lot of things, like playing video games or using the Internet (and that’s asking a lot) to hang out with you. But there is an ulterior motive.

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Back before I was a born, kids had to make things up in order to play. They called this “using your imagination”. Luckily I didn’t have to do that, as I had TV growing up. Granted, my parents did limit my TV consumption somewhat, but I ended up using my imagination figuring out ways to get around the limitations in place, as opposed to using my imagination to find games to play. After all, when you play a game, there is no reward if you win. But if you figure out how to watch more TV, well, you get to watch more TV.

It’s not that kids don’t have imaginations these days; it’s just that they don’t have a motivation to use them. There is a saying that necessity breeds invention. Necessity creates motivation for the invention, plus any monetary motivation that might be involved from creating the invention is factored in there as well. Something along these lines happened to me recently.

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In what had to be one of the most random nights in recent history, I got to see Jeff in his element – last call on the dance floor with only one other person there in a bar in Bethesda. Let me tell you how we got there, though.

It starts because it is end of the semester – not for me, I’m done with school (for now, anyway). My good friend Jess wants to hang out. It’s been entirely too long since we had hung out, and she was in town, so I of course agreed. I suggested we go out of a Friday night, but this being the weekend before New Years she was leaving early Saturday morning to go to New York. I suggested Thursday. Normally I wouldn’t because I have work on Friday, but I was taking off this Friday off because I had some comp time.
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My company has a somewhat dilapidated database system for entering in test questions. It’s very unintuitive, has a clunky design, and makes you go through about 5 steps to do one thing to a question. Well, the other day this system (called ITS – Item Tracking System) stopped working on my computer. Something about a MDAC package not being available. The funny thing is that it was working on everybody else’s computer, just not mine.

Since I need to use this system to do some very tedious, menial, boring work, I sent an e-mail to the ITS people. They sent me back an e-mail asking if all of my settings were correct. I was pretty sure that they were, but I double checked anyway, since sometimes internet explorer likes to randomly change security settings. Of course, all of my settings were correct. They asked me to send a screenshot of the problem, I obliged.

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Over the course of my four year career at Circuit City I had a good friend there who would call the store simply “Circuit”. Not “the city” or “Circuit City”, just “Circuit”. I prefer to call it “Circuit Shitty”, and I always just did that because I worked there, and I thought it sucked. But I went in as a customer the other day (only my second time or so since quitting in October), and I found out what the true meaning of bad customer service is.

It kind of makes me wonder if I was a really good lead CSA with a good team, or if this example that I had at the Gaithersburg store was just a series of unfortunate events. Either way, it sucked. I’m not going to tell you what happened, because I filled in one of those online comment things, and I typed everything that happened there, so I’ll just post that and let you read it.

In my complaint I never explicitally state that I was customer service lead at a Circuit City for four years only 2 months ago. I want to see how it plays out with them contacting me, and I think if I said that I had worked there they would not take me seriously. If any updates come of this, I will be sure to post them.

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