Revenge of the Squicky Vandals

After work today, I was going to go to a Geocaching Cash In Trash Out event. Essentially, a bunch of cachers were going converge on a park in Moon to pick up trash for the betterment of society. Riding home, I thought about how if the guy greased my car I would have to skip my public service and go to the police to file a report. I also thoght it wouldn't be a factor because so far he had attacked only on Fridays at the begining of the month. Today was a wednesday not quite at the end of the month so I figured I had at least this weekend to try to wire my laptop and webcam up to my car battery to set up for next week.

After arriving at my car and putting the bike on the rack I spelled the grease.

Bastard. He changed his pattern and caught me for now the fourth time. On the other hand, he is clearly not going to stop and, by falling into an increasingly more frequent pattern is only going to trap himself. I may just give up on the laptop-wired-to-the car-battery option and spend the money on the sport tracker digital camera. Sure, it'll be a couple of hundred dollars but I won't run the risk of draining my car battery or wrecking the laptop in the heat of an enclosed car sitting in a parking lot all day. I'll get a higher resolution picture, too.

Thanks, now get out.

The Help Desk's current Site Manager is apparently getting screwed again. Years ago, N*** was a Team Lead. In fact, he was my Team Lead. He left for two years to essentially create a Help Desk from scratch. When that
contract was over he came back to Pittsburgh, only to find there was no job waiting for him. When another Analyst here at the Help Desk left, the Corporate Overlords changed their minds and hired N*** back.

Except that he was hired back not as a Team Lead with Team Lead pay but as a part time Analyst, with part time pay and lack of benefits.

Great, huh?

When our Site Manager left for greener pastures, they offered the Site Manager position to N***.

Great, huh? Except that it was only a temporary position until the
Corporate Overlords found a permanent replacement. I've seen the ad online. They were offering over $100,000 a year to fill the position. And today I learn through the grape vine that when N*** is replaced, there won't be anything else for him. He won't be made a Team Lead. He won't even be a lowly Analyst like the rest of us. He'll be out on the street.

Great, huh?

Meanwhile, his replacement will be easily making twice what N*** was making doing the same job.

I'll say this, if N*** gets out in the world with a Help Desk Site Manager job, I would drop this place to go work with him in a minute. Literally. If I got the offer, I would clear out my desk immediately and be gone.

Pay Day Delay

Some three years ago, our Corporate Overlords called us in to a Help Desk meeting to give us a relatively rosy update about how the company was doing. I distinctly recall a char showing where The Company rated in relation to all our competators. It was a comfortable place to be. A week later, we learned that we we loosing our 401k matching and, shortly after that, our bonuses.

So, last week when we received a press release anouncing that The Company had landed a $150 Million contract with a major client, I could see the storm clouds. While everyone else was seeing it as a healthy thing and hoped we might start getting raises again, I remained skeptical.

Today, the other shoe dropped. The Company is going to a bi-weekly pay schedule instead of the current weekly pay and they were also going to discontinue mailing paper copies of our advice statements.

Clearly, even our new Coroporate Overlords are squeezing the stone in an effort to "maximize efficiency".

The Bank, the Help Desk's client, is also likely to be engaging in some streamlining with an expected 3,000 "displacements" on the horizon.

Squicky Glass

After work I rode across the river to the "Grand Opening" of the South Side trail between 4th Street and 9th Street. There was food and music and Mayor Murphy with a t-shirt, shorts and a well-worn bike.

But afterwards, I returned to my car parked at the Children's Hospital to find that not only had the passenger side door been greased but there were huge globs of the stuff on the windshield.

Clearly an escalation. So, I went to the police station in Squirrel Hill and filed an official "malicious mischief" report. I'm thinking of getting on of those digital game cameras, the ones that hunters use to take pictures of deer along trails. Properly set up, I could get a photograph of the vandal and seal his fate.