Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "writeback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+writeback" bit from the end of the URL.
Nome
After deleting all of my previous entries from the bad, old, wordpress days I had resolved to not write anything about my job. While some people would have me believe my work stories were my most entertaining, I found the practice a bit worrying for several reasons. The first is entirely caused by my inflated sense of self-worth: I worry that I will write something that is unintenionally scandalous that will get noticed and bring shame and embarassment down first upon the nice people who give me money and then invariably upon myself.
The second can be explained by my vanity: going to the trouble of writing something and then not shamelessly self-promoting it? You clearly don't know me very well. So what I ran into at my last job was that I would write something obliquely about a co-worker or a call that I found frustrating, and then I'd pass the link around to my friends at work. Pretty much every story that I have to tell is borne from my desire to share how ridiculous people can be. The problem was that I didn't really know how wide my audience was among my co-workers so when something appropriately mockable occured I was unsure whether I could sling arrows securely protected by a veil of passive-aggressiveness.
Related to the first point is also the fact that I seem to recall seeing a sub-heading in the employee handbook that advised against blogging. I must consider that warning means that we shouldn't publish anything about the company because it could be misconstrued as being the ruling opinion of the company at large, which is certainly not how I am trying to present myself.
There we have three very compelling reasons to completely steer clear of posting anything to the internet that is even remotely connected to my place of employment. This is problematic, however, because living at home and saving money to finish my degree hardly make for scintillating conversation. I just can't seem to get very passionate about decrying the people I encounter in the infrequent errands and dinner dates that fill the time between work and sleep. These people are rarely ridiculous at all, they're just shopping or lazilly performing their own simple, unfulfilling jobs.
So, in the interest of living a shame-free, drama-free, and continually employed life, I am not going to write anything specific about my job. Further, I will not pass this along to anyone at work. I also ask that once I finally add the ability to leave comments that any commenters who know me personally please respect this and not identify the company that pays my bills.
With all of that said, I was talking to Justin last night and he reminded me of a story that I told him a few months ago that I thought was worthy of a few paragraphs of melodramatic buildup.
I was speaking with an older gentlemen who had just recently purchased one of our products. As is common for the neophyte, he wanted to cut his teeth on something he knew: setting the device to his home. I held his hand through this process for about twenty minutes or so and I was getting ready to end the call. He said that he just needed one more thing, one last bit of help to satisfy him. He wanted to change the name of this label he created to "home." So I show him how to bring up the keyboard and change the name of the label, when he floors me with the following exchange:
And that was good enough for me! #Him: Oh! I misspelled it! It says "Iome."
Me: That's okay, just use the left arrow button to get back to the first character so we can change it.
Him: *muttering incoherently to himself for about a full minute* Oh! Okay, I got it. *begins to read the alphabet to me as he is cycling down through the letters* I, J, K, L, M...okay, I got it!
Me: *shaken, struggling between wanting to set this right and wanting to not talk to this man ever again* I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure that was an "N." *internally: GOD DAMMIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME*
Him: What? No, it says "Home," just like I wanted!