The Diary of A Simple Man

Bought an office chair yesterday from Staples, and a three-year warranty. Given my weight, that's a no-brainer - there are sure to be problems within three years!

I lost my temper in a discussion of salaried and exempt employees over on Askville.

"I'm exempt (salaried) employee in CA, I'm suppose 2 work 8-6 w/1 hour lunch, which means 10hr day is that illegal?"

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"Be glad you even have a job right now."

What I hate about that sort of statement is that it could be used to excuse any kind of abuse by an employer.

"My boss makes me work nights and weekends." "Just be glad you have a job."

"My salary got cut in half but my boss got a bonus." "Just be glad you have a job."

"My boss raped my wife." "Just be glad you have a job."

"My boss is forcing me to donate all my organs to his family, even the organs I need to live." "Just be glad you have a job."

At what point can we STOP being glad, and start getting angry? "Just be glad you have a job" just perpetuates the worst kind of treatment of employees by abusers. Shutting up and being "glad" just means that things will get worse and worse. There are companies out there that would gladly kill their employees and sell their bodies for dog food if it would make a ten-cent profit in their bottom line. How much are we supposed to endure? At what point can we insist that our lives and time have value that's measured by more than money - that's we're human beings, deserving dignity and fair treatment?

None of the phones here at work are working. Anyone who calls me can hear me talking, but I only hear silence. Same thing if I dial out: silence. This is affecting the whole floor.

Thanks to new Massachusetts requirements I can only send certain types of data via special secure email, instead of uploading them as I used to do. I secure-emailed a data file last night for a top-priority rush...and when I got in this morning, I had a message saying that the recipient wasn't able to open the email or download the attachment. Now what?

A teen over on Askville asked a question about working at MacDonalds for the summer. I contributed this golden memory:

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I spent a college summer working at Burger King. It was hell.

The place was filthy; I've never eaten at a Burger King again if I could possibly help it. The work was boring and awful. The shift manager used to spent his lunch hour with whores in his van, in the parking lot. And they weren't having lunch! We used to have a little pool, a bet on when he'd come back from the van. I won it once.

A girl who'd been working there for several years discovered that the manager, Leo, had started me off at a higher rate of pay than she was getting after all those years. She asked him for a raise, and he said "no". So she went to the front register, grabbed the microphone, turned the volume to maximum, and shouted "F--- you, Leo!" to the lunch-hour crowd at the top of her lungs. Then she walked out the door and never came back.

They told me to clean the shake machine, but didn't tell me how. It was filled with razor-sharp blades. I did my best, but later on the inspectors found that the machine had the highest bacteria count in the state. They almost shut us down.

I won't go into too much detail about how the food was handled - just take my word for it, it was disgusting. Sometimes the flame-broiler (a metal conveyor belt that moved the burgers along over gas flames) would be out of whack, and the burgers would come out half-raw. So they'd finish cooking them by frying them on the greasy, dusty sheet-metal hood on top of the conveyor belt. Since BK was running ads mocking McDonald's for frying their burgers at the time, I found that particularly ironic.

I often had to mop the floors after closing. Boy, was that disgusting! It took hours to get the smell of the mop out of my nose. It was literally rotting.

Sometimes burgers were dropped on the floor by accident. The floors were incredibly filthy and greasy. Rather than throw the burgers away, some of the guys would pick them up, dust off any visible debris, and serve them. If a burger was really filthy, they'd take it to the sink in the back and rinse it off first.

When the summer came to an end and I was going to be leaving, the shift manager decided that he was going to reward me - I guess he liked me. So he sat me down and asked me what kind of girl I liked best. "Black, latino, asian? I like the latinos because they know how to move they a--." I didn't need a bachelor's degree to figure out that he was going to loan me one of his whores. I managed to convince him that I would really rather not, thank you.

And despite all that, that wasn't the worst job I ever had!

There are a lot of people I want to respond to here, as well as a couple of writers who were kind enough to email me. I HATE falling behind.

That said...

Last week I took a Meyers-Briggs test for work. We were having a team meeting offsite, and the test was a requirement. I've taken M-B tests before, and always came out as INTJ, or very close to it. I assumed the results would be the same this time.

At the meeting, I asked the woman who scored the tests how consistent the results were. "Very consistent," she said.

Time is short, so I'll cut to the chase. Apparently I'm now ENFJ: Extravert iNtuitive Feeling Judging. What the hell?

What's even weirder is that almost everyone else on my team was an Introvert - and some of them are real partiers. I was sure they'd be extraverts.

They gave me the actual breakdown of my score. Here it is:

E: 11 / I: 10
S: 3 / N: 23
T: 12 / F:12
J: 16 / P: 6

She said that when the score is exactly equal, the result on the right takes precedence, which is why I'm an F instead of a T.

I find it hard to take all this seriously.

Work is canceled tomorrow. Yay! Maybe I can sleep in!

This morning when I came into work there were some small but very sharp shards of broken glass on my keyboard and desk. Apparently someone from Facilities changed a lightbulb over my desk, and broke it.

No cuts yet, but I'm working carefully...

Did you ever feel like making a secret shit list of people at your workplace?

This morning I sure do!

I work with data. And I suspect that the sort of thing I do isn't done by many people. So this will probably either be meaningless to you, painfully obvious, or boring - take your pick.

That doesn't mean I won't subject you to it, of course. :D

One of the things I do involves cleaning name data. This generally arrives in Excel format (and if it doesn't, I get pissed off). It can range anywhere from a few dozen names to a few thousand, and I've had files of over a hundred thousand names come in. Fortunately, that's rare.

The problem is that the data is almost always really shitty. In part this is because it was put together or maintained by people who either didn't care about the data, or didn't really understand it. It's also true that in some cases the ultimate source of that data is a competitor who knew that we'd be working with that data. I'm pretty sure they try to make it as difficult as possible.

Just to give you an idea, it's not uncommon to see data like this, all in a single column:

Brown, Robert Q.
Harold ZbeodkwsiMr.
Neil
ABSOLOMPANDATHANIMA
John B BodyLiesAMoulderinInTheGrave
OBRIEN, Seamus

My goal is to create clean last and first name fields as quickly and accurately as possible. I simply don't have the time to go through each record in a thousands-plus name file, though. So I've evolved a lot of little tricks over the years. These generally involve searching and replacing with wildcards in various ways. If you don't know, the wildcard characters are "*" and "?". The asterisk represents any number of characters, and the question mark represents a single character.

But lately I've been seeing a new problem: somebody is throwing wildcards into the data. Specifically, asterisks. The problem is that if I try to do a global search and replace to remove "*", I end up deleting ALL the data - the "*" is taken by Excel as a wildcard. It's quite an annoying little trap.

It may not be intentional, of course; it could just be various idiots trying to "footnote" the data, although I've never seen an actual footnote in a name file.

But I thought of a solution, and had the pleasure of having the first thing I tried work perfectly. I copied the entire column and threw it into a Windows NotePad file. My hunch was that NotePad was just basic enough to not have the wildcard replace option. And it doesn't; a search and replace of "*" with nothing works perfectly. Then I copied the data from NotePad, pasted it back into Excel, and voila! clean data.

Which still has to be worked on, of course, but at least I've gotten rid of those damned asterisks.