The Bar Below Will Help You Find...

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Here's my first stab at Iron Man.
That's me in the suit promoting Iron Man 2.

Blocked? And other worries...

I just started this blog in the hopes of staying relevant in a way other than Facebook when last week I found that my employer is now blocking blog sites. They claim that employees are using company time to update their blog status and therefore they have the right to block any site with 'blog' on it.
Well they're right. They have every right to block it. It's their equipment and their time.
Honestly though I don't see this stopping me from doing my work. How different is this from taking a 10 minute break to stretch your legs or an hour for lunch?
I'm currently updating this from my desk but all my work is finished. What do I do until I get something else?
Just after the economy nosedived last year I needed to take a real job because freelancing wasn't getting me too far and the bills weren't slowing down or understanding of my plight. I realize millions of Americans were going through the same thing I was at the time but this is my blog, so this is my story.
I'm not going to type where I worked because it embarrasses me, it wasn't illegal or tawdry just way below my career level. I'd always thought that somewhere along the way the freelancing gig was going to dry up at some point and I knew I'd have to take a job somewhere stacking boxes. Well, that day had arrived and I had to see if I was all talk or if I was going to do as I said I would. "I'll do whatever it takes to generate income, short of downright criminal acts."
I had gone from being my own boss, dictating my own time to someone who was waiting for his wife to get home so I could get to work and start my shift. I applied at several places, never even considering my profession as an artist as an option. The few places I looked into that were remotely close to what I had been doing were crappy publishers/print shops and almost all of them didn't even have an answering machine!
I wasn't turning my nose at any of them, there just wasn't any hiring going on.
So I had to turn to a real regular job. Minimum pay etc, etc.
I find myself writing about this a lot. It's a huge adjustment in my life and sometimes I pretend I'm 15 years into the future and look back at this time and chuckle about how I was able to make it out alive and not lose everything along the way.
My point is that, at this crappy job, which I did for a good 4-5 months and made just over $3,000.00, my supervisors were always checking that you were on time, not abusing your break time, basically ball busting me every chance they got! They had rules against texting while working which made sense because the job required direct customer interaction (mostly the younger employees were at fault with that one) and that was fine, because of the nature of the job. If I were a customer and the person attending to my needs was more into useless texting, I wouldn't give that place my business either.
But here?!
BTW. This blog post took me more than 45 minutes to type cause people kept coming by and disturbing me. And yet I still haven't had work to do. Sometimes I feel like I should grab a broom and do something then I remind myself, I have an education and I get my job done when I have a job to do.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Just found the Blogosphere and man is it full!!

Every time I look up a cool artist or something relevant I find they have a blog. I always axe myself, how do you do that and how do I get one? Well, now I know. Assuming everything goes well, I should have a blog site where the FBI and others can eavesdrop on me. I realize I may have just alerted Homeland Security with just the mere injection of those 3 little letters but it's ok, cause I'm just being a smart aleck. Really.
On this blog you'll see pics of me, maybe my family (I believe everyone should have a say in what you do with their photos) and regular rants about what I feel, is wrong with this planet. More specifically, the people who run things and also others who just, run around.
As a time capsule of sorts I will add text to this intro so anyone who reads it can 'feel' when I started this blog. I'm WAYYY behind on this, I'm not even on Twitter (I don't want to. I'm avoiding going there).
In the news currently there's a massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico (that's what happens when you relocate the cast of Jersey Shore to Florida for Season 2). Also someone tried to cause mayhem in Times Square recently and they've just been caught (again, just being a smart-ass, no relation here). Personally, I'm 45 and actively going through my mid-life crisis.
So without further ado, on with the show!!