Good news, bad news... what else is new?

Sorry about the way late update. No, I'm not in prison... not that I got any concerned emails or comments or anything. Damn my lack of readers!

The whole lunch thing blew over, and I'm keeping my lunch hour and even my time. W00t. I even found out that I got a large, undeserved increase in my FinAid-- to the tune of four g's a semester. Daddy's buying two new pc's... cuz he's a frigging dork.

Yeah, this is a lame ass update post. No fun to be had here. I'd extol the virtues of Linux Mint (my newfound *Nixy love), but no one who reads this cares, so meh. Boring is me!

I'm sure that something will piss me off before too long... it's been a little minute. Until then, I wish you all tacos. Mmmm... warm, delicious tacos.

Fuck company-- misery loves ME

More and more it seems that every time Lachesis opens her mouth, all I hear is "Famine and pestilence upon thee! Thou shalt wallow in mine miseries forevermore!"

It has come to her attention that my coworker, Em, has pushed back her lunch hour due to her summer class. Her lunch hour now coincides with mine. And ZEUS HIMSELF FORBID that there be no student coverage in the office for one goddamned hour... which is the 11:00 lunch hour... when fucking NOTHING HAPPENS. Tomorrow, we will be brought before Atropos like terrorists to Guantanamo Bay, where one of two things will happen.

1) Atropos will tell Lachesis to stop being such a whiny baby. This happens from time to time... but not nearly often enough to bank on.
2) One of us (any takers on me?) will be forced to reschedule lunch so that there is always someone sitting around doing fuck all in the office.

Em's class runs from 12 - 2. Logically, one lunch falls at 11, and the other... well, who knows? It seems to me that one of us gets to eat, and the other gets to starve. Yaaaaay.

"But Boughnaa! Can't you take half hour lunches?"

Oh sure, we could do that. And if Em is willing to do so, good for her. I, however, bluntly and blatantly refuse. I need that lunch hour to calm the fuck down halfway through the day-- the only reason I've refrained from stabbing anyone this summer is my lunch hour. A lunch half-hour is not only bordering not enough time to get/prepare food so that I can eat, but it's also not enough time for me to get into a sane frame of mind for the return to the dark sanctum that is the WTFU Happy Magical Office of Despair Leading to Suicide.

I'm not eating at 2. I refuse to leave that late in the day and come so close to freedom, only to turn around and return to the belly of the beast. I'll sooner leave at 3:30 and just not come back.

... I could almost get to like that. Almost. It would almost work... except that I'll lose my mind.

More to come tomorrow... if I'm not in prison yet.

CMS Can Suck my Ass

I maintain the website for the office I work for at WTFU. I've done so for three years now-- it's a pretty boring job, but I don't mind so much because I've been doing HTML stuff since high school, and I genuinely enjoy working with technology of any sort. Plus, I work with some pretty cool people, at least one of which is a reader and an all-around cool person. You know who you are.

My little mundane world was rocked when I heard we were getting a content management system (CMS). From Wikipedia:

A Web content management system is a CMS designed to simplify the publication of Web content to Web sites, in particular allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files.

What does this mean, exactly? The system that WTFU has purchased will take care of all the formatting and page layout issues for us-- we only provide the raw content, ie-- pictures, text, links, etc. In theory, this is a very good thing-- WTFU is notorious for not having a uniform look across the site. Each department's pages look completely different from each other departments. It looks sloppy and unprofessional overall.

My office has always done a good job of maintaining a site that has a professional look and a functional layout. It was that way before I started, and it has only gotten better since my employment began (as well it should). It helps a lot that Atropos (another boss) has a better than average understanding of technology in general. She has a firm grasp of what can and cannot be done, and understands that functionality is priority one, with presentation taking a back seat to that. Working with her has been a positive experience for me, and I like to think that it has been for her as well. During my employment under Atropos, I've taught her some slightly advanced HTML techniques (don't laugh), and even a smattering of Javascript-- many times, she will edit some of the code I've written to make what amounts to a very minor update for me, but a fairly complex one for someone who doesn't understand how the web works. It's a great relationship, and I consider her a student of technology and a colleague in many ways.

Back to the CMS-- as I've stated, this is a good idea... mostly. Had it been implemented properly, I wouldn't be here whining... but I am, and so guess how it's going. Go ahead, guess.

Yeah, that badly.

I have a very, VERY long laundry list of complaints about this hunk of shit, but I'll stick to the big one for now:

ALL OF THE GODDAMN WORK I'VE DONE FOR THE LAST THREE FUCKING YEARS IS GOING TO BE FLUSHED DOWN THE FUCKING SHITTER BECAUSE OF THIS HORRENDOUS PIECE OF AMPHIBIOUS SHIT!!!!!

I feel better.

To clarify, I've been working for the last few years to streamline many of the office's processes and help to make our technology work for us. For instance, we needed a convenient way to allow users to navigate multiple areas of the site. The problem was compounded by the fact that our office caters to multiple audiences. The solution was to implement a multi-tiered pop-out menu to make navigating easier, and it's worked out rather well.

I can't use it with the new CMS.

I also have no way to port over our numerous databases at the time of this writing. We host a large number of events on campus, and we require people to pre-register for these events. All registration is done online, and invoices/confirmations are automagically generated using ASP. It's a good system that allows me to search, sort, report on and generate nametags for our registrants, and I can't fucking have it because God forbid that WTFU actually do any research into how the different departments have structured their processes. This is a critical early phase of the software development life cycle, and the university just tossed that right out the window.

What does that ultimately mean?

It means that I have to go out of my way to make a system that doesn't work for us... work for us. Because some shithead administrator made a bad decision.

I like to think that this is my intro to the real world. I tell myself that to make me feel better.

It doesn't work.

I think I hate my job.

Fast Food Part Two: Electric Boogaloo

The last time I had a fast food (mis)adventure, KFC proved just how low they're willing to set the bar. And just when you thought it couldn't get any lower, here comes McDonald's, barreling right through it like a fat kid through your birthday cake.

Now, I really hate to beat a dead horse, and so I won't. But I will say that when the half-educated r-tard manning the register is wearing the "crew leader" super-duper-shiny nametag, he shouldn't need the manager's help literally every other item that gets ordered.

So kudos to you, McShitbag's. I'm loving the thought of setting you on fire.

WTFU: An Intro

Welcome to beautiful, sunny WTFU-- the place where I live and work. It's a pretty nice place for the most part-- it's got its fair share of morons, but hey-- you name one place on the planet that doesn't and I'll travel there personally and prove you wrong. Stupid is as stupid does and there's not much that we can do about it.

As I said, the WTFU area is a pretty nice place. It's a little boring, but oh well. The problem I have with WTFU deals with my job-- I work for the university, and it's been a good experience, but sometimes I'd like to be one of those guys who brings a piece to work and... well, I don't think we need specifics here. Suffice it to say that I REALLY dislike a certain supervisor.

Ever seen a rolodex? Of course you haven't. They were obsoleted in the freaking 80's for God's sweet sake. A rolodex is a librarian's wet dream-- it's like a phone book, but one that some fucking imbecile decided would look better as a card catalog. Don't believe me? Take a peek:



Yep, that's right-- before the days of Outlook and Smartphones, we had to keep track of contacts on *paper*.

Ewwwwwww.

"But Boughnaa! What does a rol... a rolo... a paper thing have to do with your job? Or your super?"

Why dear reader, I'm so very glad you asked.

I couldn't say when exactly my office here at WTFU got computers, but it was certainly before my time-- they were here when I arrived. Now, I don't know about you guys, but when I hear that my computer can take something big and stupid and disorganized (like, say, a FUCKING ROLODEX) and turn it into something small and neat and sortable, I get up off my ass and transfer my shit over. That's just what you do. And since computers make nice address books, it seems logical to assume that something like a rolodex would have no business in my office.

Right?

So imagine my surprise when my supervisor drops one onto my deak one day. We'll call her Lachesis, since I know the Fate sharing that name was anal about measurements. Lachesis is the most obsessive, anal-retentive human being I've ever met. She's one of those people that you can't do favors for, because no matter how you do it... it will be wrong. It will be in the wrong color, or the wrong font, or too big or small, or any number of stupid nonsensical trivialities.

I usually wouldn't mind working with someone like this-- I'm fairly obsessive myself. I get annoyed when she's telling me why it's wrong for the fourth time, when at this point she could have easily just done it herself and had it finished and to her liking half an hour ago. That's when I get annoyed and start dreaming of strangling people.

So anyway, I get a rolodex. And I'm told to go through it, and mark any contacts contained therein that do not exist in our contact listing. Ugh, fine, whatever. There are literally hundreds of entries in this monstrous thing, and it takes me a good three hours to mark them all. Annoyed at having had to do this, but confident there's no way I could possibly have messed this up, I announce I'm done.

Then, life gets miserable.

I am now making my way through these stupid cards, and calling up anyone that is not in our listing... and asking if I can put them there. There are hundreds of contacts to call. The information on many of these cards is-- no exaggeration here-- ten years old. It takes ages to track down who I'm supposed to be talking to. And that's if I can get anyone at all-- many of the numbers are no longer in service. It's a symphony of stupid, and I'm the conductor. I hate my life. I quit.

Kentucky Fried Retard

What the hell happened to the quality of fast food service in this country?

Seriously, I wanna know. I think it's a sad day indeed when I can't stroll into the restaurant of my choice, place a simple order, and get what I asked for. And I want to make it clear up front that I'm not one of those "Number 2, hold the lettuce and mayo, and add pickles and extra mustard" douchebags who fuck it up for everyone else-- if I do place a special order, it's plain. Chicken sandwich, plain. Baconator, plain. I either want the default sandwich or fucking nothing on it. That simple.

Yet, somehow, it seems that every time I order anything from anywhere anymore, it's wrong. And truth be told, this bewilders the fuck out of me. I understand that food service, and especially fast food service, is a shit job. It sucks! I get that. But since when is a degree in astro-fuck-physics a McDonald's job requirement? Last I checked, it went something like this:

Fast Food Service Requirements:
A Compendium
by Teh Boughnaa

• Breathing
• Basic English
• "Would you like fries with that?"

DONE AND DONE.

Case in point: I like chicken. I get off work and think to myself, "Damn! I could really go for some popcorn chicken!" So, off I go to the local KFC. I'm in a good mood-- no, a GREAT mood, despite the fact that I have now witnessed the horror that is the new CMS system for the university (more on that nonsense in another post). I'm polite, I'm holding the door for the old dude-- shit, I even let a nice woman cut in line in front of me because I needed a minute to scan the menu to see what this was gonna cost. Five bucks for the combo, which includes potato wedges? Hot DAMN! This is a good day.

So I wait oh-so-very patiently, and it takes ten minutes to take the orders of the two people in front of me.

Urge to kill: 10%

Another ten minutes later, they have their food and it's my turn.

Urge to kill: 30%

TB: Teh Boughnaa
KFR: Kentucky Fried Retard

KFR: "Hi, can I help you?"
TB: "Yes-- I'd like the popcorn chicken combo." (Note: the board advertises this as the "Popcorn Chicken Combo." To my knowledge, it's the only one they have.)
KFR: "Which one?"
TB: "Um... the one on the board there."

Urge to kill: 50%

KFR: "Oh! Okay! The special is the chipotle chicken combo! It's spicy."

Ding ding ding! We have a winner! I didn't even know they had that!

Urge to kill: 0%... and falling

TB: "Cool-- I want that. To go."
KFR: "Okay, biscuits or cornbread?" (Aside-- this combo comes with POTATO WEDGES and a pop. Nothing else.)
TB: "Um... biscuits?"
KFR: "Okay-- and what two sides do you want?"
TB (realizing that KFR has completely misinterpreted my order and thinks I'm ordering something else): "No, I want the POPCORN CHICKEN."

Urge to kill: 90%

KFR: "OH! Okay... and you want the drink?"
TB: "I thought the combo CAME with a drink."
KFR: "Oh yeah, it does. For here?"

Urge to kill: NO LONGER A MERE URGE

I want to make a pact with you people. Seriously-- the next time some fucking burger drone is asleep standing up and trying to take your order... just kill them. Let's make fast food a better place.

Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits, fart, turd and twat

So, on Sunday, George Carlin pissed off this mortal coil, thereby degrading the quality of our stand-up comedy forever.

I literally grew up with George Carlin-- that probably explains quite a lot about the person I've become. Everything about the man was vulgar, grotesque and vile... and I wouldn't have it any other way.

So, in tribute to the man who told us about scabs on our heads, people who need a good killing and of course the seven words you can't say on tv... I give you this.

Enjoy.