The number you have called has been disconnected

This first line is a trick to get the spell check to work, ignore it. Basically, if you copy and paste from Wordpad, the yahoo spellcheck will not work on you content if you just paste it in, you have to type something in here to start, which is what this sentence is for. Told you, you could have ignored it, but did you listen? Didn't think so, anyway, onto the blog.

Greetings everyone, thought I might jot a few notes in my free evening I have, though those are more frequent this week than past weeks. as I think I quit my part time job. I say think, because I haven't really told them yet per se, I just hung a note in the break room saying all of my hours were available and then quit going. Those of you that listened to the podcasts or the radio show know that I have been less than enamored with my part time job, my schedule the last few weeks was just the final straw. When I was hired, I said that I wanted between 20-30 hrs if possible, just enough to pad the income a little without killing myself in the process. You see, when I work both jobs in the same day, my day starts with me getting up around 4am and getting into the office at 5am and my day would end somewhere around 10pm and me getting home somewhere around 11pm. Yes, out of a 24 hour day, I would be out of my home almost 19 hrs.

That being said, 3 weeks ago I got a schedule that was 16 hrs. It wasn't quite in the ballpark I had signed on for, but it was close enough, and given that at the radio station, it is not uncommon for me to work between 50 and 60 hrs a week even 16 hrs can push that total easily over 70 hrs in a week, so while missing my target of between 20-30, it wasn't terribly off. Two weeks ago again the same thing happened, another 16 hour week. Then last week, I was slapped with 33hrs, which for those of you doing the math at home realize, that means I am now pushing over 90 hrs a week, which is just too much and again outside of what I told them I wanted when I first started. This week again, you guessed it, another 33 hrs, so I just quit going. Simple enough.

For those of you wondering what it is I did do at the part time job, I worked in a call center for a pizza chain. I know, you think call center and you think tech support in India, but what I would do is take pizza orders for roughly 80 different stores in the Vocelli Pizza chain and then send the information via computer to the appropriate store in the delivery area of the caller. So the spiel would start with me saying "Thank you for calling Vocelli Pizza, may I have your telephone number starting with the area code?" One would think that is a simple enough of a request of the caller and the reason we ask that question is the address in the system are stored by phone number, so if we have been to your address before, by putting in the number, we are able to retrieve all of that information without reentering it. Unfortunately, that simple of a question is not always met with an answer. Sometimes it is met with another question (what specials do you have?, which I don't know until I know what store you are ordering from), stupidity (I don't know the number) or indifference where the caller just starts telling you an order without giving you any information to work with. All of that can be frustrating enough, but then you have a computer system that may or may not have the correct prices in it, and if it doesn't, then you get to go back and fix the programming mistakes in the system, Or the system doesn't recognize the address, so you get to put the caller on hold and contact the supervisor to see if we go to that address or not, which is about a 50/50 chance, sometimes we do, other times it is a store that isn't part of the call center ( an independent store, so you get to give the caller the number to the store they which to reach). And while trying to find the address, you have the caller on hold, which means by the time you get back to them, they are most happy for waiting. Now take into consideration that on any given evening you will take quite a few calls (my best was 191 orders in one evening) and any screw ups that happen during the process save for the wrong food being delivered come back on your evaluation and it becomes a less than enjoyable process. All told, they want you to keep your errors under .4% for all of the calls you take (for the record my error rate was probably approaching .3%, most evaluations I had, I had taken about 2000 or so calls with 2 or 3 errors, with each evaluation coming every 3 to 4 weeks). Sound like fun? It wasn't. I would sit in my cubicle with some scratch paper and on one sheet of paper I would have a column of numbers much like this;

4

5

6

7

8

9

This would be representative of a 4pm to 10pm shift (the most common shift I worked). Each number would represent one of the hours I was at work and beside each number I would put a little slash mark, much like a man serving a prison sentence counting the days in his cell, except each slash would be a minute out of that hour and therefore a minute closer to being done. Hopefully I would bring a book to read to help break up the monotony, or at least the paper because sitting there with nothing but the phone is a most boring evening.

Add to this, the fact that your evening consists of two parts, the first part being dinner rush and the second part being complaints from all of the customers orders that were fucked up, and you would have to agree, sitting in the cubicle can be a most enjoyable time. So overbooking my hours, combined with my lack of enjoyment when it came to my part time job make it very easy for me to just say "check please" and call it a career when it comes to that form of employment.

I am sure I will be looking for a new part time gig in the near future, but for the next couple of days I am just going to catch my breath and enjoy one job employment.

In other news, again mucho thank yous to those that checked out the radio show when I hosted last Tuesday, for those that didn't, time is going fast, the podcasts will only be available till tomorrow morning. Don't be shy about checking out Clair's show as well, as I had him guest host yesterday, and finished editing his podcasts this morning, so his will be available for about a week or so, depending on how reliable I am about updating the server with new content. The pods can be found at www.1360wptt.com in case you didn't get any of the frequent reminders I have been posting around these parts. (This is the portion of the blog where I gladly whore out my modest talents in case you hadn't guessed.)

I do have some Randomness to report as well. For those new to the page, this is a character (Joe Random) that I created in MLB 06 The Show for PlayStation 2 in career mode. The goal in this mode is to get your created player into the major leagues. Well, I suffered from a brain cramp since the last time I mentioned Joe. I had finished playing a minor league game and went to save it and shut the game off before the save was complete, thus corrupting the data file and meaning I had to start over. I didn't feel like redoing the entire spring training, so I just simulated that and sure enough, i got to start in AAA ball, same as when I played all of those games, which makes you wonder why I wasted that time the first time. Anyway, so far I am batting over .420 with 3 hrs 7 RBIs and 8 runs scored and I am in the last week of the first month of the season. See, this blog can bore you to tears if I try hard enough.

Speaking of trying hard to bore you, I got something wrong on here and I am going to throw my mea culpas out there and be done with it. I had the NY Islanders Chris Simon as my Asshat a few weeks back and in that posting and a subsequent posting I had mentioned that while the Islanders were the 7th seed in the playoffs at the time of Simon's slashing incident, if they missed the playoffs, that would be something to look back on. As it turned out, going into the last weekend of the regular season (this past weekend), the Islanders needed three things to happen in order to make the playoffs; 1) have Toronto beat Montreal thereby eliminating Montreal from playoff contention and 2&3) win both of their games this weekend as they had a game on Saturday and on Sunday. Low and behold, Toronto did them a favor on Saturday and took out Montreal, then the Islanders won their game on Saturday as well. Sunday the Islanders would go to a shootout with New Jersey before winning, thus sneaking into the playoffs as the 8th seed in the Eastern Conference.

For the record, the Pittsburgh Penguins got the 5th seed (go us!!!) in the Eastern Conference and will open the playoffs against the 4th seed Ottawa Senators. And Sidney Crosby won the NHL scoring title at the young age of 19, the youngest player to ever win a scoring title in any major sport, which means we may be in for more years of greatness here in da Burgh. We go from Mario Lemieux to Jaromir Jagr to now Sidney Crosby and it is hard not to feel blessed to be a hockey fan in this town. I may have to youtube some Sidney Crosby for you kids just so you can see what we get to see all the time here.

Speaking of hockey, my fantasy hockey season came to a close this past weekend as well. For those who need an update, I was stuck in the consolation game after losing my first round match up, mind you I don't get a trophy in my fantasy sports profile on yahoo if I don't finish at least third, so I was all about winning just to make the profile look a little better. As it turned out, with two days remaining in the season for me, I trailed 3-5-2 to my opponent. The thing is, you can make roster moves that take effect the next day, so Saturday I scrambled through the free agent list to see who was still available for Sunday, knowing that anyone I had that wasn't playing Sunday I could drop because there were no games after Sunday, and I could have a full roster for Sundays games as well as Saturday. The crafty gm-ing on my part paid off as I ended up sneaking by with a 4-3-3 win for the week and the third place trophy. This is trophy number 6 for me in yahoo fantasy sports. Here is the list of winning teams I have fielded to date;

Hockey 2002 1 of 12 Argonauts Yahoo Public 47612

Football 2002 1 of 10 Argonauts Yahoo Public 47129

Hockey 2003 3 of 12 Argonauts Yahoo Winners 11246 only previous winners (see hockey 2002) get invited to a Winners league

Baseball 2004 1 of 12 Argonauts Yahoo Public 335382

Hockey 2006 3 of 12 Argonauts Yahoo Public 60278

Football 2006 1 of 10 Argonauts Yahoo Public 295954

Tournament Pick'em 2006 5 of 50 Argonauts RBC1

Tournament Pick'em 2007 22 of 85 Argonauts RBC1 The last two I added not because they added to the trophy case but because they were office pools and in both I won cash and prizes from the fine people at Renda Broadcasting, in both cases it was because I lead the office NCAA tournament bracket after the second weekend and we pay out winner after each of the three weekends of the tourney.

So, have I officially bored you to tears yet? I won't even get into my fantasy baseball team then, which is just as well because after the first ten days of the season, I am making a case to be firmly entrenched in last place. I may have to throw out the lucky cap at this rate.

Well, I was going to go on another rant on the whole Don Imus thing, but I think that will keep for a day or two, and this is long enough, I still have spell checking to do and what not. Night for now kids.