May 2023

 To follow up on my most recent post, "Community Standards", it took about three weeks or so, but Facebook finally quit giving me 24-hour restrictions from Liking posts and comments. I guess that's something I'll have to deal with every once in a while.

My main helper at work moved to Nebraska. Her husband got a job there. It must pay well to move all the way over there for.

Speaking of work, they keep coming up with more ways to annoy me. One was closing down the first building (we had five warehouses in the area up until a month or so ago), and bringing those people and accounts to my building. They moved a bunch of bulk storage lanes for our main account over to what had been dock staging lanes, and a lot of outgoing stuff that used to be staged in those lanes are now staged in lanes on the opposite end of the building. So, instead of just doing dock audits in a corner of the building, I have to go back and forth from one side of the building to the other. But at least that account is away from the conveyors! The other account new to this building occupies a quarter of the Picking area, where another account that moved to a new warehouse previously occupied. We have enough issues with the main account on our conveyors, we really didn't need another account adding more bullshit. And QA is understaffed and overworked as it is, this adds a lot more to our workload. I talked our manager (not my supervisor, but his boss) into talking to the bean counters or powers-that-be about adding another QA or two. He came back, and said something like, "I talked to them, and they're like 'Well, volume is leveling off, and (blah blah blah).'"

Just this past week, they started a new break schedule. Keep in mind, we work 6:00am to 6:30pm. Our old break schedule was first break at 9:00am, lunch from 12:00 to 12:30pm, and last break was at 3:00pm. The first and last breaks were fifteen minutes. Now, we have three ten-minute breaks. The schedule now is first break at 8:30am, lunch from 11:00 to 11:30am, second break at 1:30pm, and last break at 4:00pm. This new schedule fucking SUCKS! From what I've heard, someone went and complained to HR about the break schedule violating labor laws. I'm about as pro-Labor as you can get, but having three 10-minute breaks throughout a 12-hour shift is some bullshit. That's barely enough time to eat a candy bar, not to mention that's when I have to make calls or deal with HR, and 15-minutes wasn't even enough for those! They should've just given us two 20-minute breaks instead.

Another reason we need more QAs is because the other two that I currently have cannot be depended on to show up on Sundays. I think I can count on one hand the number of times both of them have come in on a Sunday. I now expect one of them to be out any on given Sunday, but even expecting it doesn't make me any less pissed off when it does happen.

One good thing from work: my boss is in Memphis for three months, doing some kind of career-furthering training or something. It started at the beginning of April, should end at the end of June. What I should do is find another god damn job before he comes back, so I don't have to deal directly with his ass ever again.

Since I always talk about holidays, I am happy to say that we have Memorial Day off. But I still have to work that Sunday.

"Community Standards"

Or, "Mark Zuckerberg, I'm getting really tired of your shit!"

I kind of like Facebook. But at the same time, I fucking hate it. It's the easiest way to keep up with a large number of friends without actually having to message each one of them. Louisville Mojo is dead, MySpace is totally different, I don't really like Instagram, and I hated Twitter long before Elon Musk got his hands on it. I know of no viable competitor to Facebook, so I'm forced to put up with it.

But Facebook has really been testing my patience these past two weeks.

So, what have they done that's been pissing me off so bad? They've been giving me 24-hour restrictions from Liking posts and comments, due to not following some vague "Community Standards".

Due to the nature of the restriction, I'm guessing that I must have Liked what they perceive to be too many posts in a certain amount of time. I guess Facebook thinks I love my friends and cat pictures too much. But I've looked through the "Community Standards", and there's nothing explicitly stating that you can only Like a certain amount of posts/comments in a certain amount of time. This is the closest I can find to mentioning anything like that, under "Spam", which is under "Integrity and Authenticity":

I cannot find anyone at Facebook to complain to about this particular problem. You can appeal a decision about something you posted that got taken down, but I don't think the Review Teams or Oversight Board handle things like Liking posts/comments. But I've got this here blog, so I can complain about it here!

Between March 11th and March 17th, I had multiple 24-hour restrictions from Liking posts and comments. On March 18th, I started refraining from Liking news articles on the News tab, which cut down my Likes by a lot. I didn't get another 24-hour restriction until just an hour or two ago today, March 23rd.

I figure it must be some dumbass AI who thinks I'm a bot.

To Facebook: I've been on Facebook for almost 15 years. I've been the same person on that profile for that entire 15 years. I assure you that I'm not a bot, and my profile hasn't even been hacked by some foreign scammer. Why restrict people from interacting on posts when there's no stated limit to it?

Facebook, please... FIX YOUR SHIT!!!😡

Like squeezing blood from a stone

 Work has been extra annoying this past month. Since Peak is over, our client isn't as willing to throw money at us, meaning they're being stingy. They've even gone so far as to downsize my already understaffed department. My shift only had three people, when four is the bare minimum we need to run adequately. I'm really glad that my main helper told me at the end of that week that they were going to pull this shit, because my supervisor said absolutely nothing to me about it. He might possibly have been afraid of me going ballistic, which I would have, but it's better for me to go ballistic early, rather than come in at the start of the week and go ballistic then because I'm just learning about this shit that morning. I was happy to see my helper that morning, but it turns out she would be in Picking, leaving me as the only QA on A-Shift. A couple of weeks later, they moved one girl from B-Shift, and one girl who worked Monday through Friday, to A-Shift. I don't think either of these girls speak or understand much English. The other woman we had working Monday through Friday is now on B-Shift, so we now have no extra help on Mondays and Tuesdays.

They picked a really fucking bad time to downsize QA, because we've been busy as fuck for the most part! Or at least too busy to just have three QAs. Hell, I've found some fucked up shit that the girl who was originally on B-Shift should've reported, but didn't. It turns out, even if B-Shift finds errors, they don't technically report them like they're supposed to. There are days that B-Shift supposedly has no errors, which is a crock of shit, because I find a lot of crap that B-Shift did wrong.

I mentioned in my previous entry that I was going to ditch my therapist. I kind of wish I had just canceled my last appointment with him, because he annoyed me bad enough that I was like, "Yup, I'm done."

I've loved singing karaoke since 2004. I got to do it a lot during the "good ol' days" of Louisville Mojo, but I haven't gotten to do it much after 2008 or 2009. There is one place I've been going to since November that does really, really fun karaoke, but they only do it once a month. I always have such a good time there! But then I get depressed the day or so after that, because I can't have that much fun every night, and I can't channel the confidence I have on stage to the rest of my life off the stage. The guy who KJ's (karaoke jockey) there has a weekly gig elsewhere on Tuesday nights, but with Tuesdays being my Friday, I'm so wore out that I'm dead to the world by 8:00 or 9:00. I really need to hang out with friends more between those Wednesdays, but trying to make plans with others is a pain in the ass, especially if they're homebodies like I am.

Peak 2022

 Eh, I guess I can talk about the past few months.

I mentioned back in September that the QA I worked with since February would be relocating. I believe it was early October when she did. The week after she quit, we got one of our people back who had worked for a couple of months earlier in the year, and who was pretty good. She was so out of practice though that I had to retrain her a little bit to get her back into the groove.

The week of my birthday was alright, but would've been better had I not been on Qelbree that week. Qelbree is a non-stimulant ADHD medicine. It was definitely effective, but it also made me not want to eat anything.

• At work that Sunday, I ended up vomiting after lunch because I ate and drank too much, except it wasn't really any more than normal.
• That Tuesday after work, I went to see Napalm Death and Brujeria. I got a 20 piece Chicken McNuggets from McDonald's on my way to the venue, and ate them when I arrived there. It was really ten pieces too many, but I managed to keep it down. The show was a lot of fun. I wish I could've seen them at one of their Texas dates, because MDC opened on the Texas dates.
• That Thursday, I had a therapist appointment in the morning, and went to see The English Beat that night. I went to Taco Bell for lunch and just got a Chicken Quesadilla, and could barely finish it. Went to the Best Buy up in St. Matthews to look for movies, and found out they don't carry movies anymore, so I went elsewhere to go movie shopping. I ended up having a massive headache the rest of the day. Went to Smashburger before the English Beat show and got three chicken tenders, and could barely finish them. Got to the show, talked to a few friends. I really only know four English Beat/General Public songs (Mirror In The Bathroom, Save It For Later, Tenderness, and GP's cover of I'll Take You There). I was ready to leave early due to my headache, so I looked up their setlists from previous shows, and discovered that they actually do my three favorite songs early in the set, and did my least favorite towards the end of the show, so I decided to stick around for my three favorite songs, then left.
• I went to see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever that Friday, and did some shopping. I ended up vomiting when I went to the bathroom just before going to bed that night. I decided that night that I was going to quit taking Qelbree.
• That Saturday was one where I was scheduled to work, but I ended up calling in, partially due to being sick from the Qelbree, but also because the drastic change in weather had me fucked up. It was unseasonably warm that week, which I didn't mind at all. But we went from being in the mid-60s Friday afternoon, to fucking snowing on Saturday morning, and I couldn't deal with it.

This year was the first year that I had both Thanksgiving and Black Friday off since 2008. Thanksgiving was weird, mostly because my parents are weird. My dad is an asshole, and my mom's memory has been going to shit, which in turn greatly annoys my dad. My mom's memory problems supposedly stem from her meds, and not any dementia or Alzheimer's. As for Black Friday, I've been determined that if I ever had a Black Friday off, I'd spend it being a lazy motherfucker and just watch movies, or maybe just one long ass movie. I finally got around to watching the director's cut of Wim Wenders' Until The End Of The World, which is almost five hours long, but probably took a lot longer than that to get through, due to having to take an occasional nap or break from the movie.

We actually got Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day after Christmas off, and I used my Floating Holiday for the 27th, so I had that whole week off. I was glad we had that time off, since a shitty snow/ice event that weekend made driving hazardous. I went nowhere between the Thursday afternoon before Christmas, and the Tuesday morning after Christmas, and ended up doing Christmas with the parents that Tuesday.

New Year's weekend was fucking stupid. Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday that my shift would've normally had to work. You'd think they would've made us work the following Saturday, which was the 31st, but thankfully they kept that as B-Shift's Saturday, so we got New Year's Eve off. Here's where it gets stupid. I've had every New Year's Day off since I started at this place. Since New Year's Day this year fell on a Sunday, it was decided that NYD would be observed that Monday, the 2nd, so the Monday-Friday people would have Monday off. I would've had no problem taking NYD off and coming in that Monday. What they did instead was have Outbound come in on Sunday, and they gave us Monday off. The only reason I can think of for this is that this year, they've decided to give us time and a half if we end up working on an observed holiday, instead of giving us a Floating Holiday like they had been, and I guess they didn't want to pay us extra to come in on Monday. Since Sunday wasn't observed, we wouldn't be getting holiday pay or time and a half for working on Sunday, so they made us come in on actual New Year's Day. It's hard enough to get people to come in on a regular Sunday morning, having them come in on a New Year's Day that falls on a Sunday is downright moronic. Meanwhile, Inbound had New Year's Day off. I don't know if they had to come in that Monday, and at this point I'm beyond caring. But anyway, we worked less than half the day because we didn't have that much work. They should've just bit the bullet and had us work half the day Monday. Oh, and I was doubly miserable coming in on New Year's Day because I didn't get enough sleep, if at all, though not for lack of trying. I wasn't even up late or anything, I just couldn't sleep.

I've never had MLK Day off. I was prepared to work on MLK Day this year, even though my employer has made it a paid holiday. The Monday before MLK Day, my supervisor told us that we had MLK Day off, so I was looking forward to having it off. The next morning, he told us that they got an e-mail from our client telling them that they wanted my shift to work on MLK Day, so only the Monday-Friday people would be off. This really pissed me off. I assumed that all the Monday-Friday departments would be off, but they all ended up coming in. The only people who didn't come in were my supervisor and our two Monday-Friday QAs, so it was a normal day aside from those three people not being there. It would've been fine if my boss hadn't gotten my hopes up the week before.

Star Trekkin' and physical media

 I'm not only a music collector, I'm also an avid movie collector. I am not going to address streaming here. The 1980s and '90s may have been a golden age when it came to the selection of movies you could rent, but VHS was a shit format due to incorrect aspect ratios and poor quality altogether. If you were a movie purist, you were collecting movies on laser disc. Then DVD came along, and it was fine for the age of Standard Definition, but kind of underwhelming once you got a taste of HD. Now, with 1080p and 4K UHD blu-rays, we're in an era where movie presentation at home is kicking ass, but they're more challenging to acquire at a brick and mortar store. Suncoast is long gone, and Best Buy's movie selection is shrinking, and will probably be gone before too long. I can sometimes find blu-rays from boutique labels like Criterion, Shout/Scream Factory, Arrow Video, or Kino Lorber at stores like FYE and Barnes & Noble, but your best bet is ordering online. I usually try to order the boutique companies' product from their own websites, and try to avoid Amazon, but I still do Amazon every once in a while.

I have a ton of DVDs, and a ton of 1080p blu-rays, and quite a few on UHD, but only if they include the movie on both UHD and 1080p blu-ray, because I have neither a 4K TV nor a UHD player, but I like collecting UHDs so I can future proof. Even though DVD sucks by today's standards, I still feel bad for upgrading since a lot of the DVDs I have, especially "Pulp Fiction" and "Fight Club", have pretty elaborate packaging. My collecting policy is to try to buy movies on blu-ray that I don't own on DVD. I'll wait to upgrade my DVDs until they come out on UHD. It's a good idea to read or watch reviews before upgrading.

Here's my history of buying Star Trek movies, and for this entry I'm only referring to the movies that came out between 1979 and 2002. I bought a complete set of the deluxe editions in 2008. The Motion Picture was the Director's Edition. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was a really interesting one because it was the only Star Trek movie to be filmed in Super 35, so they opened up the matte to 1.78:1. I was pretty underwhelmed with the image quality of these DVDs, but they were all we had at the time. I believe I bought The Motion Picture on blu-ray in 2015, just because it was the theatrical version. I thought it looked fine, but more knowledgeable people complained about the DNR (Digital Noise Reduction) on it and all the other Star Trek blu-rays out at the time. In 2016, a special 25th anniversary edition of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan was released on blu-ray, based on a new 4K scan. I finally bought that in 2021.

I'm pretty sure Paramount has pissed off a lot of Star Trek fans in the past year or so, especially me. Not long after I bought that edition of Star Trek II, they announced that they were releasing the first four movies on UHD and blu-ray. A lot of us were like, "What about V and VI? What about the Next Generation movies?" Well, a lot of us bought the 4-movie collection. Not long after that, it was announced that they were working on redoing the VFX for the Director's Edition of The Motion Picture for 4K. A lot of us assumed they would be putting out a set including it with V and VI. This past Summer, they announced a number of releases for September, including a six movie set, and the six movies sold separately. When I heard about the separate movies, I thought, "Cool, I can just buy TMP:Director's Edition, V and VI, and be done with it." Unfortunately, while II through VI included both the UHDs and 1080p blu-rays, the UHDs and 1080p blu-rays for The Motion Picture:Director's Edition were being sold separately. I wanted all of them in 1080p and UHD, god damn it! The only way I could get the Director's Edition in both UHD and 1080p together was to get it in the 6-movie collection. So I preordered the 6-movie collection on Amazon through a link from The Digital Bits, because I love The Digital Bits, and want to support them. Somewhere around this time, maybe just a bit later, I also preordered the "Halloween: 1995-2002" Scream Factory UHD/blu-ray set. Unlike the first five Halloween movies, these had to be sold together because Miramax owns the later Halloween movies, and would only license them out to Scream Factory if they were sold in a set. The Star Trek set was set to release on September 6th, and the Halloween set was set to release on October 4th. I thought to myself, "They're coming out a month apart, there's no way they'll charge me for both at the same time, right?"

WRONG! But I'll get to that in a minute. I don't know what happened, but it seems like Amazon didn't get enough copies of the Star Trek set to actually send out in September, and they were telling me it was expected to arrive on November 1st! I went to Best Buy to see if they had the set, and that was a big no. All they had were a couple of copies of a couple of the individual movies. I checked Barnes & Noble, and they had one set! But it was about $30+ more than I would be paying for it on Amazon, and it sounded like a disc might have been loose. I have paid a premium elsewhere to spite Amazon, but I didn't quite have the money to justify doing it this time, so I decided to stick with my Amazon order. So anyway, October 4th comes, and as far as I knew, the Star Trek set was still expected to arrive by November 1st, and the Halloween set was expected to arrive in mid-to-late November. At some point, I checked my e-mail, and saw a message telling me to update my method of payment for one order. I had about $200 or less in the bank, enough for one set. It turns out they successfully charged me for the Halloween set, but payment for the Star Trek set was declined due to lack of funds. The Star Trek set was a higher priority for me, and the Halloween set hadn't shipped yet, so I canceled the Halloween set, and planned to use the money I got back to get the Star Trek set. These companies will take your money in a heartbeat, but are always slow to give it back to you. I finally got the money back...that Friday, after I had already went ahead and "updated" my payment method. I decided to wait to try and order the Halloween set later. The Star Trek set arrived just the next day!

While I was typing this up, I decided to see how much the individual sets for the UHD and 1080p TMP:Director's Edition, V, and VI would cost. It might have actually been cheaper to buy all of those than it would have to buy the 6-movie collection, thus not rendering my 4-movie collection obsolete. Fuck me running. Now, I have the 4-movie collection and the 35th Anniversary Edition of The Wrath Of Khan to sell.

Labor Day 2022, and the week that sucked balls.

 The two new girls that started at my work in August were gone just a couple of weeks later. My idiot boss waited a whole fucking month, this week to be exact, to replace them. The replacements seem to be doing pretty good for their first couple of days, though. But we may be losing the woman that's been working with me since February pretty soon. She's moving up to north Indiana to be closer with her girlfriend.

My company managed to make a mockery of Labor Day again this year. We didn't work all god damned day like last year, but I was there for a little over nine hours. I don't feel like we had enough work to justify keeping us for more than half the day, and my holiday might have been salvageable if they had let us go after eight hours, but that extra hour fucking ruined it. I was hoping to be able to make it through an entire movie before wanting to go to bed, but I was so fucking tired that I only made it through the first hour of the original Total Recall before going to bed. I had to finish it the following night.

This week has sucked balls. Sweaty, stinky balls. Work was horrible, made worse by the fact that we had to work last Saturday. I really should've taken a Floating Holiday on Saturday, but I didn't want to leave everyone else hanging. I'm not gonna go into specifics about why else work sucked. This was also the week of the Louder Than Life festival in Louisville. I thought maybe I could at least make it to the Thursday edition, when Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Tenacious D were playing, until I saw what a single day GA ticket cost, which was $129, plus a $20 or $30 fee. Then I was like, "Never mind." I've only seen Nine Inch Nails once, way back in November 1994. I've seen Ministry twice, but I wanted to see them in Covington, KY back this past March, and didn't get to because I didn't have enough money, and I'm pissed that I had to miss their second Kentucky appearance this year. I've never seen Tenacious D live. There was at least one band playing that night that I would've avoided like the plague, I heard more than enough of them when I went to Louder Than Life in 2019. Hint: the singer is a woman who does a lot of corny ass screaming. But the cherry turd on top of this week was shopping at Walmart on Friday morning, being 99.9% sure that I put everything that was in my cart into my car's trunk, and then somehow not having one or two bags of stuff worth $50+ from there when I got home. I've looked everywhere for it. My car, my apartment, went back to the store twice, and I even stopped at Meijer on that last trip, since that was my last stop before heading home this morning, and looked around the area where I had parked. Nothing. And there's nothing Walmart can do to help. You know, those assholes in charge of Walmart make more money than either I or the typical Walmart employee can even fathom, you'd think they'd throw us a fucking bone every once in a while. This is also the second time in about three years that this has happened to me at Walmart. I wonder if this wouldn't happen so much if they either changed the color of their bags, or the color of their carts? After all, other places I shop at (Kroger, Meijer, Price Less) have bags that contrast starkly with their carts, while Walmart's bags are virtually the same color as their carts and their parking lots, creating something of a camouflage. Maybe I should start a petition on Change.org to get Walmart to change the color of their bags.

That last trip to Walmart was mostly to pick up a prescription. The guy at Walmart's exit told me to have a good day. I told him, "My day's pretty much fucked."

I'll leave you with Ministry's live version of "Breathe" from 1990.

Staycation 2022, and going back to work

 I was hoping to make it out to the Austin TX area to visit my brother before the Peak Season at work hit, but I still didn't feel like I had enough money for the trip, even after my sizable backpay check. But that's okay, because my brother decided to come up to Kentucky on the second-to-last weekend of July, his first trip up here since 2019. I was originally planning on just trying to get that Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off, which Monday was absolutely necessary because I had to drive my brother to the airport. But then I decided to request that Tuesday off as well, since I had hoped to take a whole week off before the Peak season, and figured I might as well make it that week. In reality, it was more like a week and a half off. It was really nice getting to spend time with my brother, and really nice not having to deal with work for a week and a half.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were supposed to be rainy days, so I decided to work on some stuff in my apartment. I've got plenty of boxes lying around, and I refer to the decor of my apartment as, "I stopped unpacking when I went back to work." I really didn't do a lot toward cleaning up the place, but what little I did do was quite a bit of work. One of my biggest jobs was setting up my turntable and cassette deck, which I have hooked up to a DJ mixer that's hooked up to the Line In jack on my computer. When it was set up, I could tell that there was sound going to the mixer, but no sound was coming out of the speakers. After some searching, I discovered that I need to set up my Line In jack to be outputted through the speakers, instead of whatever the hell they were set to go out to. I played some records and tapes to test with. At one point, I put in my Judas Priest "Unleashed In The East" tape in, and the deck fucking ate it! Thankfully, it's a dual cassette deck, so I still have the other side to play tapes with. But after all that, I was like, "Fuck it, I'm done for the day." I have a story as to why I was wanting to listen to that particular tape, but I'll save that for last.

I went out on Friday night to an event where Goth and Industrial music was being played. I had so much fun! I ended that week in a good mood, but I knew going back to work would ruin that.

Sunday: It was raining pretty hard on my drive to work, and I absolutely hate driving in the rain, so the rain made going back to work even more horrible than if it had been dry out. And there were only two of us QAs there that Sunday. I ended up having to cover two distinct areas. Just working in either one of those areas will wear you out after a while, but going back and forth between them both will wear you out real quick! The entire Outbound department got to leave three and a half hours early. I think Inbound was staying until 6:30. I had plenty of work to do on the dock, so I could've stayed the whole day to work on it, but I was so exhausted by 3:00 that I just left then. I was in bed by 7:00 that night.

Monday: A girl who started the previous Tuesday and didn't show up on Sunday actually showed up on Monday. We also had a new girl show up at the beginning of the day, which shocked the hell out of us because our brand new people usually don't come in until 8:00 or so. We decided that I'd train the newest girl in one of the other areas until 8:00 when our boss came in, who would then tell us where to go. He decided to keep me training her, and he was going to have the Monday-Friday woman work on the dock until she left at 4:30, to which I would take over on the dock then. But sometime before lunch, he asked me if I felt like she'd be comfortable working on her own after lunch. God damn, there is a hell of a lot to learn in any given area, it took me at least a week to get comfortable with it when I started! I started off by showing her what we do and how to do it, and had barely gotten her to get some practice in by the time he asked me that. So I was pretty much like, "Hell no!" I trained her until 4:30, showing her one of the other main areas when things were slow in the area I was training her in. Taking over the dock at 4:30 was a fucking nightmare, and I got a massive headache. The headache was made worse when some dumbass new woman who thought we were scheduled to leave at 6:00 asked me what we do at 6:00. I told her that we work until 6:30, and we only leave at 6:00 if one of the higher ups tells us we can leave at 6:00. She said her husband and kids were waiting outside, and I'm like, "That's not my problem." She said she'd have to check her paperwork again because she swore that it only said she'd be there until 6:00. Needless to say, she didn't return the next day.

Tuesday: Tuesdays are almost always the worst day of the work week, like I'm being fucked with no lube, thus I call them Lubeless Tuesdays. I also got a massive headache on this day. One thing I absolutely hate is being sent to multiple areas in a day, and I ended up working in four different areas this Tuesday. Getting into the dock groove is especially hard, I do my best work there when I start and end my day there. My boss's original plan for me on Tuesday was to have me get the trainee squared away in the first half hour, then have me go to the area of another account to take pictures of some pallets that were getting ready to ship out, and the Monday-Friday woman would work on the dock. I actually started helping out in the area that I always go to first, then tried to get my trainee squared away before heading to the other account. I could barely get anything done there because my trainee had a lot of questions that I tried to answer via e-mail. At one point, I just gave up with the e-mail and went there to show her what to do. At our meeting after our first break, it was determined that the Monday-Friday guy who usually does audits in the other account would be going to another building that's supposedly even more understaffed than we are, and I'd be doing the audits in the other account after I was done taking pictures. About an hour later, we got an e-mail from our boss saying that I'd be going to the dock after lunch, and the Monday-Friday woman would be going to do audits in another section. Fuck me running! I was really hoping she'd be on the dock all day, especially since we had so many "hubs" shipping out that day. These hubs are the bane of my existence, since I'm supposed to take pictures of every single fucking one before they go on the trucks, and then take one picture when they're in the trucks. To add insult to injury, I think it was about 10:30-ish when the Monday-Friday woman e-mailed me asking if I could go to the dock and finish one of the hub trucks for her, because she still hadn't taken her 10:00 break. Things were so hectic there that I never made it back to the other account. And they started loading a hub truck right around my lunch time (12:00). I didn't even go to lunch until almost 1:30. Just as I was getting ready to go to lunch, I got an e-mail from my trainee saying that she knew I was busy, but if I could come help her out at some point. I wasn't just busy, I was overwhelmed! I apologized, and told her that I was just now going to lunch. I sent her an e-mail much later asking about the problem, but I didn't get a reply, and I never made it out to her. I usually pick up Taco Bell on my way home on Tuesdays (Taco Bell Tuesdays!), but I was so tired by the end of that day that I didn't bother, and went to bed by 8:00.

It occurred to me that I probably should've looked for another job while I was out, but I was too busy doing shit with the apartment. Besides, I need to go to the dentist before I look for another job. I realized that I'm paying about $30 per paycheck for dental insurance, so I better fucking use it!

Whew! So, back to the Judas Priest tape. I bought it in 1997 at a gas station that some friends worked at. I bought the remastered CD in 2005, only for the bonus tracks. The Judas Priest remasters are notoriously bad, the only one that's supposedly come out good was the 30th Anniversary Edition of "Turbo". Every time I listened to the "Unleashed In The East" CD, I thought to myself, "I do seem to remember the tape sounding better." So the reason why I was wanting to listen to it last week was to hear if it sounded anywhere near as good as I remembered, but it didn't get far before the player ate it.