My job is pretty cut and dry. I set up the show, I'm like the back stage crew. I enter all of the numbers, code invoices, choose trivia questions, and see who's winning the fantasy football league. I make sure that the ship is running well, and everything that needs to be, is in line. We open at 11am and start serving lunch, which is generally pretty slow. I walk around, greet people at their tables, and make sure the beer is nice and cold. The major difference is the customers. Instead of dealing with people who are already pissed off when they called me, I'm dealing with people who generally, are just looking for a good time, something good to eat and cold to drink.
Gone are the mundane hours of variances and two and a half hour long calls, logging every few words into the big database. Now, I have about five to ten different things to do on any given day, which are rarely the same on any two days, and one of my very best friends is also my boss. There are about five people that I met right off the bat right after moving back to Austin in 1999, Ron being one of them.
It was about nine weeks ago that my manager at Apple pulled me aside to let me know that my customer satisfaction scores had been slipping. He asked what else I would like to be doing within the company, so I told him, the same position I had been applying for the last 3 years, management. He asked me to give him another six months to try and work something out for me. The very next day, Ron called and asked me if I would like to be his new day manager. I interviewed with the outgoing general manager, with the area director, and finally the vice president of the company, and got the job.
On my last day at Apple, my manager made the comment that he had walked many people out of the building on their last day, most of them kicking and screaming. He had never walked anyone out with the huge shit eating grin that I had on my face. Never had he seen anyone so happy to be walked out of the building.
Anyway, in other news, due to the fact that I'm not staring at a computer screen for nine hours a day, my bulletin, blog and Youtube video sharing is WAY down, and will likely remain so. I have found that it's been a lot better for my mental health as well, to be relatively cut off from all of the conspiracy that's found here on the inter-tubes. I still get to browse the titles of many other videos that my friends here on Myspace and Youtube post, but I rarely watch more than one every few days. It's all begun to repeat itself anyway, it's like it's all on a loop, and every few months the same videos resurface as "breaking news" and "must see". I've seen them all, I've taken in as much as I can handle.
So, outside of work and personal computing, there is the rest of life. I went camping in Tanglewood again this last weekend with James, Katy, and the rest of the Tanglewood crew. Here were the entries for this year's pumpkin carving contest:
And the the winner, with bragging rights until next year: James!
The weekend before that I went fishing in Canyon lake with Rick and his Dad:
And the rest of the time, Rachel and I have been working on our new, and very first, vegetable garden. I've got pretty much everything you can imagine in there: tomatoes, greens, squash, broccoli, cabbage, onions, you name it.
It's been pretty fulfilling, and extremely relaxing. We're even starting from seedlings and transplanting into the main garden box. The only real problem has been these little guys:
I've built one screened box to keep them out, but it's taking longer that I expected to build these things, so every afternoon when I get home, I curse them and get back to work. They even crawl under the one I have to get at the roots.
