This is week 93 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 644): Human Perception Is Exception Based

I made #1GF! breakfast, and then we sat down to watch RocknRolla, a British action movie from the director of Snatch. I didn’t think it was a phenomenal movie, but it was sort of gritty and had enough action to keep me interested. If there were a sequel (which seemed likely, given the way that it ended), I would probably have to check it out.

The sun was shining and it was warmer than expected, so #1GF! and I went outside and stood in the street talking to the neighbors. There were kids hard at play everywhere, so the parents were standing in the street to keep car speeds down.

After the conversation died down a bit, #1GF! and I went for a walk around town. I felt OK, but my voice was still dropping as my cold moved from my head to my chest. I still wasn’t ready to admit that I was sick, because admitting that there is a problem is the first step toward defeat. Or something like that. We walked around for a half hour, enjoying the sunshine and the ocean breeze before heading back.

When we got home, I took twenty minutes to fix #1GF!’s headlight that I had failed to fix the week before. When I got back in, #1GF! looked at me like she was surprised.

“Wow, that was fast,” she said.

“Well, it’s not like it was hard or anything. It’s just a headlight.”

“Why didn’t you just fix it last week then?”

“I guess because it was cold and snowing and I couldn’t get a grip on the light. When it’s warm, things are easier.”

Indeed. When it’s warm, things are easier.

As if to balance out the cap full of manliness that I had gained, I sat down to read #1GF!’s pregnancy book. Manly or not, I want to make sure that I knew everything I can about what was going on inside her belly. I read until I was rereading the same lines over and over without a drop of retention. It was my third pass through the book, and I was well ahead of where #1GF! was in the pregnancy.

At night, I watched a crappy romance movie with #1GF!, on the promise that I’d keep my mouth shut and not ruin the movie with any eye rolling, snide remarks, hand gestures, heavy sighing, or inserting my own rolling commentary and/or lines. I agreed.

I wasn’t feeling well, so I didn’t really care what was on TV. I just wanted to sit on the couch with #1GF!. If she wanted to watch a romance movie, I would sit through it just to be next to her.

I kept my word, but what a pile of crap the movie was. It had all of the excellent acting of an episode of AirWolf, without bothering to include a cool chopper. Don’t ask me what it was called, although it may have been something like Honey, I Shrunk Your Testes.

When we went to bed, we noticed that a neighbor’s TV wasn’t on. The TV has been on all night, every night since we moved in, and even though I’m not tight with the neighbors yet, I was a little worried that something might’ve happened. It’s odd how a lot of human perception is exception based.

Monday (Day 645): Monkey Vs. Bear

I stayed in bed after #1GF! got up, which #1GF! constantly encourages me to do (she seems to think that she can somehow sleep vicariously through me), but I never actually do. I got up by the time she was out of the shower, but I was feeling very well.

I decided to give myself a sick day to knock the cold out faster, and spent the day under a blanket on the couch. A sick day from what, you ask? That’s a good question. It’s odd to feel the need to allocate sick days if you have no job.

I hadn’t had a sick day in many many years, and had forgotten what they were like. I lay in a vegetative state flipping between Remo Williams and an amazing number of episodes of Cops from the 1990s.

As my mind wandered, I couldn’t help but think that sickness is caused by systemic imbalance. I tried to think of what I was doing that would cause stress or get my systems out of whack. I couldn’t think of anything but the idea of getting a job. Saying that getting a job is making me sick is an interesting, although unlikely proposition. I work at things all the time. Maybe sometimes a cold is just a cold.

I also thought of an idea that I thought was so great that I got off the couch to write it in my notebook. All that’s written is: “There should be a Flash video game of a bear fighting a monkey. The monkey can have a stick.” I don’t know where the thought came from, but it seems more than a little strange, considering that I wasn’t taking any cold medicine.

Notebooks are the simplest first line of defense between stupid ideas and the world. They should be required of all college students, blow hards, and the unemployed. A monkey versus a bear? Where the hell did that come from?

Tuesday (Day 646): The Complaint Department Is Open

I spent the entire day writing LOR because I took a sick day the day before. I had only a handful of e-mail complaints asking where the post was, but I thought it was neat to get email complaints at all. Thanks, complainers!

Wednesday (Day 647): Welcome To Tapioca Town

Upon waking up, I had a moment of realization. As I groggily walked down the hall, making entirely too much noise with a pair of nylon sweatpants, I asked #1GF! for her opinion about something.
“Hey, remember when [Mrs. so and so] asked if this was a planned pregnancy?

“Yea.”

“That’s not something that you’re supposed to ask people, right?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yea, I just thought of that. Maybe people who are really close can ask something like that, but we’ve only met her a couple of times.”

“And she thinks my name is Karen.”

“My name is Karen. It’s fun to find out what you’re voice really sounds like. (reference)”

“What?”

“Nothing. I didn’t realize it until now that it was sort of a rude question. You handled it without a hiccup though.”

“Oh, I glaze over when people ask me about the baby. I was lucky I didn’t well up.”

Once #1GF! was off to work, I updated my resume a little more and then started writing recommendations for people on LinkedIn. There was something about my profile requiring three recommendations to be complete, and I only had one. I figured that I should write some recommendations for people if I was thinking about asking for some. Don’t ask people to do things you won’t do. It’s only fair.

After about ten reviews, I noticed that there was a bit of life being thrown into the Life of Riley Week 37 by a disgruntled customer and a CEO. I chose to stay out of it, although I’m not sure that this site is really the best forum for airing customer grievances.

At around lunch time, I got my typical call from #1GF!, which always seems to start off the same way…

“Oh, it can’t be noon already,” I said.

“Why, what are you doing?”

“Looking for jobs.”

“Oh, that sounds like a super fun day.”

“Yea, it’s not all that fun, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”

[under her breath] “Oh crap. I forgot my phone. Listen, I gotta go.”

“Love you, babay,” I said in my best Barry White / Jon has a cold voice before going back to looking for jobs.

Two minutes later, the phone rang again.

“Did you hear me say that I forgot my phone?” asked #1GF!.

“Yes.”

“Did you think anything of it?”

“No, I just figured that you forgot to SAC your desk phone.”

“No, you’re going to love this. I went up two floors to find out that I really hadn’t forgotten my phone because it was in my hand when I got to my desk.

“The same cell phone that you were talking to me on at the time.”

“The same one.”

“Well, at least you made it this far. Welcome to the club. I’m going to cook up some bread pudding for us for dinner, and then we’ll have a real old time sing-a-long. Bed time is at 7:30 after the moving pictures, so don’t be late.”

“Ok I’m hanging up now.”

“I’ll iron your shawl…”

By the time I went back to LinkedIn, several people had submitted recommendations without me asking for them. My profile was complete, and LinkedIn claims that people with complete profiles are forty times more likely to receive job offers. I’m not sure where that number came from or if it’s statistically correct, but I didn’t think that having a complete profile could hurt.

Thursday (Day 648): #1GF! And I Don’t Have A Talk Show

#1GF! and I lay in bed talking about the baby for a few minutes after the alarm. She was nervous because the books said that she should feel a lot of movement, but we couldn’t feel any. I put my hand on her rounding belly and felt what could’ve been movement, but it was hard to tell. We’ve never had a baby before, so we didn’t know if we were feeling gas, baby, or simply #1GF!’s pulse.

I told #1GF! that everything would all be fine, but for a quick moment, I wondered if something was wrong. The thought faded quickly as I convinced myself that things were progressing normally.

You can think of the unknown positively or negatively and it will remain unknown. At its heart, our viewpoint in those situations is simply a choice on how we want to view the world.

Once #1GF! was off to tackle the corporate world, I settled in to my creaky chair tacked away at the keyboard. I looked for jobs via some RSS feeds and websites, but it ended up being a disjointed and unproductive session. I was mentally pulling myself through various tasks like the taxes, cleaning the house, fixing the kitchen people’s site, or working on my own site, and found that I was merely thinking about what needed to get done instead of prioritizing and attacking them in order of importance.

I eventually decided to work on fixing some of the duplicate title issues on my site because I still haven’t been able to figure out the reason that Google slapped down my page rank two notches last year. Google frowns upon multiple posts with the same title, and my beard shaving pages were all titled the same. I eventually had to rework the PHP in the pages so that they automatically re-title themselves based on their page number.

While going through one of the years, I found out that my beard shaving pages didn’t work on Macs. What? No Macs? People with cool glasses and lots of disposable income would never know the story of the bearded mountain man? No MC Butterworth?

I couldn’t understand why (at the time), but Mac browsers refused to tell the story of the bearded mountain man, no matter which browser was used. Corresponding browsers on Windows did not have a problem. I sent an email to a friend to do some Mac testing for me, because even though I have the small glasses, I’m a bit too poor and way too uncool to have a Mac of my own.

I went back to looking for jobs, and found a job posting that had a little bad English in it. No, it didn’t play a midi of “When I See You Smile”, or anything. It simply said “Ability to converting” instead of “Ability to convert” in the job description.

I had seen the company in the job boards over the last few weeks, and thought that the typo gave the impression that the company was not in a primarily English speaking country. I’m no stranger to typos, so I sent the company a quick, non-judgmental note to let them know that they had an error.

#1GF! made her noontime call early to let me know that her doctor’s appointment went well and that everything was normal with the baby. She explained the reason why we couldn’t feel any movement, and she sounded a lot more relaxed. Her explanation made perfect sense, but I’m not going to get into lady stuff here. Instead, I’ll simply add some macho words to distract you: nun-chuck, stock car, bearded, arm bar, bar fight, seat up, chainsaw, pry bar. Hmm. It’s almost a chant.

I worked on the kitchen site for a bit, trying to figure out exactly how I was going to build it out from my new design. I came up with what seemed like a logical way to proceed, but didn’t want to put in the effort before talking to the kitchen people. I wanted to explain the changes and the reasons behind them, so I looked into screencasting software.

Wait, what? Um, how about grabbing a couple of pieces of paper and pen? Yea, I don’t know. Sometimes, I simply want to delve into things I don’t know a lot about, and I end up making simple things more complex. I tested out a few free packages (CamStudio, uTipu, Wink, Jing, etc.) to build screencasts, and never actually built one because I realized that it wasn’t really necessary for this project.

Instead, I sent the kitchen folks a note explaining what was going on, and told them that I wanted to meet with them to discuss the site. I probably should’ve called because email is a notoriously slow method of communication.

I left the house at 5:30 to meet #1GF! and an ex-coworker for dinner. #1GF! got there first, and while we waited, we tried to identify a bunch of partial album covers that were hung on the wall as decorations. They weren’t all that difficult, but we couldn’t identify one or two. I felt a little shame, but not very much.

When our friend showed up, we settled into tall, but narrow table at the bar. The evening was interesting, as it always seems to be when this particular guy is at the table.

We talked about our old company, and rehashed the past. I always think that it’s interesting to hear people’s viewpoints on how it was to work at my old company. Personally, I liked working there. The pay was decent, the benefits were good, and for the most part, the people were decent and fun. I’d encourage other people to get a job there, but it just wasn’t the place for me.

Even though I had all the access and control I wanted (virus guys can get access to just about everything, biotches) and a decent check, I left my company because I didn’t want to wake up there twenty years later wondering what other creative things I could’ve done with my time. I thought that there were better ways that I could spend my day than keeping a system running that no one really cared about because I never let it break.

Once I made sure that everything was in order and documented, I gave my notice. There was no evil intent, no fanfare, no request for more money. I had no job to go to, but I just needed to abruptly extract myself from the cushy womb of a job, or I never would. That’s why I’m here now. At this terminal writing to you.

It’s always interesting to see when someone else has a very different and seemingly fresh perspective on events that happened in the same workspace.

In a break in the conversation, the ex-coworker asked why I was suddenly looking for a job. I could see #1GF!’s eyes dancing out of the corner of my eye as if to say, “Opportunity in sight, engage target with baby information.” She was smiling, and waiting to see how I’d answer. She was right on the edge of leaning over and elbowing me in the ribs if I didn’t take the shot.

“Well,” I said, “I’m going to be a baby daddy.”

Butterworth would’ve broke into a chorus of “Smoov… like Butter” to increase the suspense and send us to commercial break, but #1GF! and I don’t have our own talk show, so Butterworth was never hired for the gig. Our friend turned to #1GF! as if I was no longer there and said, “Is he serious? Sometimes, I can’t tell when he’s being serious. Are you serious?”

#1GF! nodded emphatically and assured him that it was true. I could see the shock sort of spread over his face while he tried to grasp the situation. I haven’t seen someone that surprised since I told some of my co-workers that I had been living with #1GF! for five years right under their noses. The expression is priceless as they process the information.

The guy was nice enough to pay for dinner, and we all jumped into our separate cars to head home. During the drive, I realized that with all the joking and talking after the check came, I forgot to thank our friend for dinner. I sent a quick note to him once I got home. I sort of felt like an ass.

Friday (Day 649): Should Do Vs. Want To Do

I logged into LinkedIn early and found another recommendation on my profile. I had picked up five in the last few days, which seemed pretty good to me. On a whim, I went back to see if the job posting from yesterday had been corrected. Oddly, it was, and my opinion of a company that I knew nothing about dropped a little.

I didn’t expect a reward for finding a typo, but if someone lends me a little help, I try to at least drop them a note to thank them. Otherwise, you sort of look like a dick. But, that’s a personal philosophy and sometimes it’s not personal. It’s businesses. Maybe it was just an oversight.

As if to waste more time than I thought possible, I tried to work out comment threading so that people could reply to each other’s comments on my site. After an hour, I said to no one in particular, “Why am I doing this?”

I get maybe ten comments per post, and they are generally to comment on the post rather than respond to other commenters. There are plenty of things that I should’ve been doing, so I closed out the WordPress Codex and moved on. Or, I should say that I intended to move on.

I ended up writing a post on a WordPress hack, and then applied for a job at WordPress’s parent company. It was like I was treating the words “should do” and “want to do” as equals.

To veer myself onto the right track, I sent a note to a recruiter to see if he could get me a job where my soul wouldn’t be turned to ash one molecule at a time. Of course, I didn’t use those exact words.

In the late afternoon, I finally figured out why the beard shaving pages weren’t working. The cache to stop social sites like Digg from blowing this site up was preventing the display of the beard shaving posts from being viewed on a Mac. Once I eliminated the stories of the bearded mountain man from the cache, I asked a Mac friend to test it and it worked. My friend was laughing more than I expected at the story of MC Butterworth, and offered to produce his next album if I ever get around to writing it.

I went back to looking for jobs for a bit and then played fifteen minutes of QuakeLive. Look, it was Friday, I ain’t got no job, and I ain’t got… I’ll let you fill in the rest.

After QuakeLive, I started piecing together some of the structure of the kitchen site and then worked on the WordPress site login to make it marginally more secure. In the little time that I had before #1GF! would get home, I looked for any graphic work that I might’ve done over the course of the blog to see if it was good enough to put in a portfolio.

I was a little impressed with myself after looking at Mr. T or Sewer2-d2, A Zero Wing Remix, a little photo retouching, the surf Album, or the Finetune Friday posters (King Of the Road, Psi Fi, Sex, Halloween, or Doo-wop), but after looking at a friend’s portfolio, I decided that although my graphics work is better than it used to be, it isn’t very impressive in a professional light.

#1GF! came home and we settled in to watch some TV, including an episode of 30 Rock before going to bed. I couldn’t help but mention the “fun cooker” every chance I got for the rest of the night.

Saturday (Day 650): Do The Right Thing, Nose Picker

We got out early and went to a went to a baby store to take another look at all the $300 baby apparatus that has a useful life expectancy of a couple of months. We still have no idea what we really need and what is a waste of money, but I think we’re starting to figure it out a little.

As we walked down the cheap, linoleum path leading out of the store, a six year old boy jumped into the aisle in front of us. He held up his hand and yelled out, “STOP SIGN!”

#1GF! and I stopped in our tracks. The kid’s expression gave away how surprised and amused he was with his new found power. We stood with our eyebrows raised, waiting to be let go.

The boy suddenly realized that he didn’t know what to do with us now that he had us, so he shoved his finger up his nose and stood staring. “Oh, oh, you can go,” he said suddenly while waving us on with his free hand. He smiled, jumped between a couple of racks of clothes, and disappeared from sight.

“Did you catch that nose pick?” #1GF! asked.

“How could I miss it, I said. “It almost seemed like a magic trick. I swear he was almost up to his second knuckle.”

#1GF! and I went to another warehouse that sold fine furniture to people with children names “Ellsworth Leighton the third,” who, through good breeding and early training, do not release bodily fluids in their normal nor projectile form. I could not imagine that would be my kid. The furniture was nice, but it was all twice the cost of anything that we had seen.

Because “warehouse” usually implies “cheap”, I felt like I had walked into some bizarro universe. We didn’t spend long in there because our arms were getting tired from pointing at $800 strollers that were imported from some secret, baby safe, Scandinavian location.

We went to a big, mainstream baby store, and they seemed to be the middle of the road in prices, although middle of the road is relative. Don’t let me give you the impression that anything was cheap. It wasn’t. We looked at everything in there, and then hopped on the highway to go to IKEA.

I know. If there was an IKEA around when I had a dorm room, I would’ve been all over it, but at this stage of life, IKEA has little to offer besides annoying crowds of hip people who like to shop at IKEA. The only thing that we saw were a few neat baby toys, but we didn’t buy them because baby toys aren’t really a priority when your baby is looking at sleeping in a dresser drawer.

We headed out of there and up the road to a regular furniture store. Even though we walked by the kids section a number of times over the years, we had never stopped to look at it before. We never had a reason to. Suddenly, we did, and it was like we were seeing a new part of the store.

Everything in the kids section seemed as expensive as the full-sized stuff, but made on a smaller scale to limit its useful life. It was pretty neat to look around at all the small chairs and beds and try to wrap our heads around the little person that could be using them in our house in a few years.

Over the course of the day, I talked to a couple of friends about baby stuff, who both offered to give or loan us some of the older stuff that they no longer needed. Each item had the potential to save me $300, so I was thankful.

Our feet were hurting from walking all day, so we stopped into Vinnie T’s for dinner while the sun was still high in the sky. Thank you daylight savings time for making winter seem like it’s on its way out.

I had calamari, and surreptitiously hung the legs out of my mouth at #1GF!. Yes, I too think it’s odd that the universe gave me the green light to reproduce. I tried not to be caught by other diners, because, well, squid legs hanging out of someone’s mouth look gross even if you like calamari. If you don’t, it’s could be a vomitable offense. I started to feel bad about making a joke with food because food isn’t a joke if you don’t have any. I stopped joking and started eating and acted like a typical human male for the rest of the meal.

When #1GF! and I got home, we found a letter from a lawyer’s office who had been hired to represent the plumber in his negotiation with the Attorney General’s office. Awesome. The letter was full of fabrication and misdirection, but the fact that we got a letter from a lawyer at all made #1GF! a little nervous. I recognized the letter for what it was: an attempt by the plumber to bully us and minimize any potential financial impact of not delivering the boiler that we paid him for. I didn’t think it was possible, but my opinion of the plumber dropped even further.

I truly didn’t have any stress about responding to the errors and misstatements in the letter, but I didn’t want #1GF! to have any level of stress because stress and pregnant ladies don’t mix well. I calmed #1GF! down the best that I could, and told her that I would respond to the letter within a couple of days. I put the letter away so that she wouldn’t be reminded of it, and began using idle mental cycles to pull apart and respond to the many inaccuracies and misleading statements it contained.

Hey, what can you do? Among the thousands of good people you meet, you’re bound to find some people will use any tactic they can to turn lies into truth. When they can’t turn the lies into truth on their own, some will try to get bullies to do it for them.

If you understand that those people are out there and deal with them while still maintaining your own personal values, then you’ve done what you can. They don’t have to change the way you view the world.

I haven’t always been the best guy in the world, but a lot of what I’ve tried to become in my adult years can be summed up in a single conversation from a movie I saw when I was still a kid.

Da Mayor: Doctor…
Mookie: C’mon, what. What?
Da Mayor: Always do the right thing.
Mookie: That’s it?
Da Mayor: That’s it.

It’s all you can do.

What I Learned

• Some people will complain if LOR is late. They are probably some of my favorite complaints.
• You’re not supposed to ask if a pregnancy is planned.
• An updated LinkedIn profile is 40 times more likely to land you a job. Unfortunately, we know from basic math that forty times zero is still zero.
• Tracking jobs with RSS feeds is so much easier than opening ten sites and searching.
• I figured out a way to uniquely title each page in my beard shaving posts with a little PHP.
• I figured out why the beard shaving stories weren’t working on Macs.
• I found out a valid medical reason for not being able to feel a baby kicking that is no cause for alarm.
• I learned about screencasting.
• Some people have a hard time letting go of the past.
• Some people don’t believe me when I tell them that the universe has given the go-ahead for me to reproduce.

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