Local headline: Woman crashes BMW into photo shop while attempting to park.
Well…welcome to winter in Florida. The fact that we’re having our busiest “snowbird season” in two or three years must be a bittersweet pill to swallow for the owner of that Fifth Avenue photo shop, who says this is the third time in 16 years that a car has driven through his front window. Oh well, perhaps the additional business this year will help him pay his undoubtedly increasing insurance premiums.
Anyway, I would also be remiss if I didn’t welcome you officially to Oddball Update 2010. Contrary to recent evidence, this blog has not fallen under new management. I’ve simply been too preoccupied with not doing anything constructive to give much of a crap about posting anything. In truth, the holidays this past year were rather hit-and-miss. The last two weeks of December were an emotional roller coaster of good and bad, hair-pulling frustration and classic good times. It was hard to know which you were going to get when you woke up in the morning.
Things have settled down a bit in the past week or two, but the “head in the sand” mode into which I regressed during the holidays is still here. I work every day ’till six or six-thirty, take a brisk walk for my daily exercise and fresh air, and play some enjoyable video games in the evening before kicking back with Apple for some chatting, gossiping or giggling like schoolchildren before bed. The routine hasn’t varied much, if at all, in a month. It’s quite comforting, really, like your grandmother’s fresh-baked strawberry pie or a nice hot bowl of soup on a cold day.
Unfortunately, this routine hasn’t been very conducive to creative pursuits, such as writing, designing, recording or any of the other constructive tomfoolery I like to get up to from time to time. Even so, I’m trying to move beyond caring about such matters. Somewhere after I got out of high school and into a job where I actually had to (and wanted to) care about what I was spending my time doing, I started getting very sensitive about how my hours were spent. I’d get all guilt-wracked if I felt like I hadn’t “accomplished something” or “done something constructive” even during my off hours. So on those nights when I’d just feel like playing a game, watching a movie or reading a book, I’d go to bed feeling like I wasted the evening.
Not anymore, really. I’m eating it up. Give me three hours to explore the wasteland in Fallout 3, or explore the galaxy in Star Trek Online (which I’ll talk more about some other time). I’ll go to bed happy. Usually much happier than I was before I started playing, when I’d just gotten off work for the day. In fact, during the holidays I was pretty damn surly just about every weekday, at least until the sun set.
For a time, there, I really felt like the guys at work were trying to screw me. Not really on purpose; I had no illusions about them deliberately designing a conspiracy against me or anything grandiose like that. I just felt marginalized, like it was easy for them to make choices that ended up screwing me because I’m out of sight and out of mind down here in Florida, whereas the rest of the crew is in another part of the country (or the world, in some cases). See, when I was first asked to sign on with this firm, I was part of a small Florida satellite office that no longer exists today. Or, more to the point, I’m the last remaining member of its former ranks.
It all started just days before Christmas, when the company admins decided they wanted to switch our health insurance group plan to a new vendor by the first of the year, in order to save everybody some money on premiums. Unfortunately, since I work out of a different state and am thus a 1099 contractor (so the company doesn’t have to play by Florida’s rules), the new heath insurer decided I wasn’t going to qualify because they don’t like contractors. So this touched off an immediate scramble where I and the human resources coordinator tried to put together a solution that would allow Apple and I to retain coverage. Given that we’re still trying to get pregnant right now, the possibility of losing health coverage was not something I wanted to hear.
In the end, after a lot of the typical conflicting information and clueless bullshit that you’d expect from health insurers, we discovered that I was eligible for state continuation. This is like COBRA, but for businesses smaller than 11 employees or something like that. And under this plan, I’d pay the same premiums I’ve been paying for the last year, and I’d get to keep my current coverage for 18 months. After that, though, I’m on my own and I’ll have to get an individual plan, which blows. Come that point, at least, I got my employer to agree that they will cover my expenses above and beyond what the group premiums would be if I were still a member of their plan.
To my employer’s further credit, they’ve been apologetic about the whole thing and have agreed to delay their own switch to the new provider until we’ve been able to verify that my state continuation is going to kick in. (I’ve filed everything and sent in the first premium payment to the insurer, but we’re still waiting for official acceptance.) Still, I couldn’t help but get a bit torqued off that this was thrown in my lap two or three days before Christmas, and the only person who I felt understood the gravity of the situation was the human resources coordinator. Everyone else at the company was like “Oh, I’m sure you can get a comparable individual plan for around the same money; I checked here in our state.” Well, guys, your state is decidedly not Florida, where everyone goes to die. Sure enough, individual plans are a lot more expensive for a lot less coverage here, and maternity? Next to nonexistent on FL individual plans. So, I felt like I’d been given a big old shaft.
And right after this “whoops — oh well, screw you” moment from my employer, one of my bosses went off on a tear and decided, for his own personal fulfillment, that he wanted to cross off a ton of projects from his to-do list in the last 10 days of the year. So he worked us all to the grindstone over the holidays on the basis that his team was going to launch three new products “imminently,” and then how many of them actually showed up? Exactly zero. As of today, even, none have been released. So, thanks for lighting a white-hot fire under our butts at Christmas for absolutely nothing. I always appreciate that.
Topping it all off, right around this time most of the work I was doing was of the real “braindead” variety. Lame grind work, repetitive data entry crap, marketing schlockery and other shit that doesn’t require an ounce of sentient thought but which somehow seems to take so much energy out of you. It was downright depressing.
These events put me in a real sour disposition toward the whole idea of “work” for about two or three weeks, during which I started reveling in my gameplay evenings because they were a great way to lose myself in something fun and immersive; worlds in which I could call the shots (literally, if some dope got on my nerves enough) and do things the way I wanted them done.
In the last couple of weeks, the work situation has improved quite a bit. I’m on a new project now where I’m actually designing user interfaces again, which is always fun for me. I’ll be working on a big server move and upgrade of our website architecture in the coming weeks, which I’ve been looking forward to for a while. I’m still enjoying my games, but I’m not hating on work as much anymore — and, all the side jobs I’ve had running in the background for the last few months have come to a close. That’s always a good thing.
Anyway, time to wrap this up — Apple and I are about to head out for a little shopping, and on our way home, to try the new Stage 62 deli here at the Mercato. The folks who own the Stage deli near my hometown in Michigan have opened a new location right here, ironically enough, so I’m going to see if I can recapture a little of that classic Ben and George’s flavor (sorry; inside reference) with a hot corned beef sandwich on rye. If there’s anything Naples has needed, it’s a decent deli.
In the near future (I hope), I’ll have a post about the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that I’ve ever tried — Star Trek Online — and how it already threatens to seriously eat up a frightening amount of my leisure time. Also, in the spirit of my earlier review of the over-the-top Thai horror film Sick Nurses, I want to post an illustrated review of the similarly Thai parody action flick called Chai Lai Angels which we recently saw. As a teaser, I’ll just say: Best homage to ’80s action TV scenes to ever come out of the eastern world.
Sayonara for now.
