Oddball Update

My mom recently remarked that this past week was one where anything that could go wrong, did go wrong. I definitely understand what that’s like. Ironically, I was having the same kind of a week myself. At least, now that the weekend is here, things no longer look so bad — although I’ll still be dealing with the fallout from this week for a while yet.

Since I’m in between projects at work, this week seemed like a good opportunity for me to try switching to Windows Vista again. I’ve been working with it a lot lately, mostly from setting up my mom’s new laptop, and I felt like it was time to give it another shot. I have to admit, a lot of the performance and reliability patches Microsoft has released since I last abandoned Vista have improved the experience markedly. There are still problems, but they’re starting to get ironed out.

Dealing with bugs, finding workarounds and discovering new ways of doing things are all part of the process when switching to a new OS version of Windows. It’s just that this is the first OS switch I’ve had to do on a machine I rely on for my day-to-day livelihood, now that I work from home. This can turn a minor annoyance into a showstopper in short order. Fortunately, things seem to be going very well so far, with a few minor exceptions I won’t detail here.

Those minor exceptions, however, did contribute just another element of zaniness to the whole week, which was otherwise stuffed with one crisis after another. On Monday morning, a fear I’d had brewing in the back of my mind for weeks was finally borne out when I discovered we had rats living in our attic. For a while now, I’ve occasionally thought I heard a strange noise from up there, but every time I’d listen for it, I wouldn’t hear anything else. On Monday, during a (somewhat abnormal) period of silence in my office room, I heard a very distinct skittering sound moving from one corner of my ceiling to the other. And upon opening the attic garage access, I was showered with rodent droppings. Yaaaay.

My parents have had some kind of animal skittering around in their attic in Michigan for years, and it never really bothered me. But when I started to research the prospect of rats rooming up there, I learned that they can do all kinds of damage. Rodents’ teeth are in a perpetual state of growth, which means they must constantly gnaw on cylindrical objects — otherwise, their teeth can grow so long, they won’t be able to eat. So, if you have rodents in your attic, they’ll constantly chew on wires, pipes and ductwork. This can cause fires, pipe leakage (which leads to water damage or even black mold), etc. And, there’s that other thing about how they are constantly urinating everywhere, every minute. That sounds really lovely, doesn’t it?

So I called our pest control company — Truly Nolen — hoping they would do rodent trapping and exclusion, and luckily they did. In fact, ever since we started the whole rodent control process with them, they have been absolutely phenomenal. In my experience, it’s rare to find a company where every single person you talk to is not only cordial and professional, but extremely knowledgeable and genuinely enthusiastic about their job. Every service guy who’s come out to our house has chatted with me jovially, told me all sorts of little-known facts about rodents, and has been nicer than I could have possibly imagined. And, we’ve already trapped one rat — a huge, foot-long critter, in fact. Contrast this to the idiots at Comcast, many of whom I dealt with at length during my TiVo HD setup escapades. It’s like night and day.

Over the course of the week, continual trap setting and checking occurred. Of course, I could set traps myself, and I considered it — but that’s worthless unless you can climb up in the attic and onto the roof and make sure every possible access is sealed off. That’s called “exclusion.” Not only would I have no idea what to do there, I’m way to big to be crawling around on the beams in the attic. I think I may know where the rats are getting in, though. Last night I swear I heard one climb up onto the roof and into the attic vent over the master bedroom.

What is all the rodent control costing, you ask? Over $600 — so my iPod Touch birthday present has been temporarily placed on hold. Which is fine, really, because I’m not in any great need of it just yet. It’ll be much more useful when we gear up for our next trip to Thailand sometime this summer.

Not only have we been dealing with unwanted rodent guests this week, I also had to get on the phone with Verizon and figure out why they keep charging Apple for “data usage” when she never downloads anything through her phone. Verizon was not able to tell me exactly what kicked off three separate 1-kilobyte downloads on Apple’s phone in January, they can only tell me that it happened — and that I owe them money for it. Verizon recently changed their contract terms so that you no longer need a mobile web plan to surf the web on your phone, and any other data-driven services (like sending and receiving picture or video messages) gets charged by the megabyte, rather than coming out of your voice minutes like it used to.

I liked it better when it came out of my voice minutes, because we never even get close to using the 700 minutes we get every month — but 700 is the lowest amount we can buy on any Verizon two-line plan. The other thing I don’t like about Verizon’s new data charges is that they round up to the next megabyte. So if you accidentally hit the mobile web button and download half a kilobyte, you’re getting the whole $1.99 charge for a megabyte. Thanks, guys. I asked if picture messages could be blocked, and they said no, not without blocking all text messaging capability. Gee, that’s useful. So I had them disable all the mobile web, Get It Now, blah blah stuff on Apple’s phone. Hopefully, whatever it was, it won’t happen again. (Maybe they’re “phantom charges” Verizon is using to penalize Apple for not getting a new phone during our last contract renewal. That would be just like them.)

In other news, I’m really wanting to get back to my exercise program, but my bike is still broken. Failed bearing in the pedal mechanism. At least we were able to find the time to take it to the bike shop this week so it can be fixed, but it’ll be a week before they can get to it. Oh well. The repair was fairly inexpensive at $35, so I asked them to do a full tune-up as well.

In this space, I could write a lengthy article about how much the Adobe Creative Suite 3 installer sucks, but I won’t. I’ll just say that it cost me almost an entire day’s worth of downtime as I struggled to get Photoshop and my other design tools installed on Windows Vista. In the end, it seems that the trick lies in running the Adobe CS3 CleanUp utility at level 4, then ensuring your firewall and anti-virus software are both disabled during the installation. Even then, it could be a crap shoot. Nice bit of programming there, guys.

The last bit of bad news came at the tail end of the week, when I was informed that our marketing director at work had been let go. He’s the guy who came up with the idea for that print advertisement I recently talked about, the one that garnered a lot of attention. Unfortunately, none of that attention translated into sales, so no matter how much people liked the creative, it seems that the ad campaign failed in its mission. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure what the guy was actually accomplishing; he never seemed to actually do much of the stuff he was asked to do by our collective boss. He was also highly annoying, instant-messaging me constantly about weird things he’d bought on eBay and other non-work related crap. (I also believe he was the only Hillary Clinton supporter in an office otherwise full of conservatives, so that couldn’t have helped his case.)

I have to admit, over the last few months, there were times when I really thought if he suddenly disappeared and I later found out he’d been terminated, I would not mind a bit. But while his ousting this week was not a surprise, the only thing it reminded me of was the dour state of our economy. My boss told me that he had to lay off the marketing guy because we’ve had a few months of really slow sales, and a full-time marketing position simply wasn’t cost effective. There are those who would argue that if sales are sagging, marketing is exactly what you need — but at a small company like ours, it’s difficult to justify having one guy doing one job, when so many of us are multi-taskers.

Still, getting laid off due to a receding economy is not funny, nor cause for celebration, no matter who you are. I found myself starting to get nervous about my own position. Everyone always thinks that they’re indispensable to their company, until they get sacked. I think I can safely say that I add a lot of value to our little organization, and things would have to get pretty dire for me to get the boot, but who knows how bad this economy will get — especially with the leadership of the United States currently in limbo while the 2008 campaign rolls on. It’s not a time for complacency.

Since I’ll be taking on a large amount of our departed marketing exec’s duties, I’ve already communicated to my boss my intention to really dive into the whole search marketing thing and try to get really proficient at it by studying and self-training. In truth, I hate search marketing — it’s largely based on gaming the system to garner the most attention, rather than honest and fact-based marketing. But the reality is that search marketing is the lifeblood of our sales pipeline, so if it’s my job, I have to take it seriously. Poor search marketing performance is also probably the biggest thorn in my boss’s side, so I know he’ll be watching closely.

But today is Saturday, my Windows Vista adventures have been going well, and work is out of my mind until Monday. So until then, I’m going to kick back and enjoy myself. It’s only right, after a week such as this.

Topics: hell, layoffs, rats, work