Odds and ends

Work has been brutal the past few weeks and I can't remember the last day off I had. I actually got off work before 9pm tonight so figured I'd better post while I have a few minutes of free time.

There's been a lot going on lately that I've wanted to post on but I'll have to go with the short versions for now...

• The Angie Zapata murder trial started last week about 50 miles north of here. This one hits pretty close to home and I'll definitely be posting more about it when I have time.
• The governor of Texas is threatening to secede...I say we call his bluff.
• I recently bought a gun and applied for a concealed carry permit. I should have more to say on this one soon.
• Gay couples can't get married in San Francisco but can in Council Bluffs, Iowa. WTF?!?
• I had the best Beef Stroganoff *ever* last night at Red Square.

I think that's about it for now. I'm not sure when work is going to get sane again, but I'm hoping that happens by the end of this week. Until then, I'll probably be pretty light on posting anything new.

Working for (or at) the man

I overheard a couple of conversations during breaks yesterday that got me thinking about a little linguistic anomaly. In the first, I heard someone talking about how she worked for Marriott, the hotel that shares a courtyard with the building I work in. In the second, I heard someone say they worked at the Marriott.

One person was a uniformed hotel employee, the other was not. Can you guess which one said they work for Marriott?

I started thinking about whether I work for or at my company. My answer was that I tend to work for people...my current employer and the last few that came to mind. I wondered if working for or at a company had something to do with white collar vs. blue collar jobs. I asked a couple of people I work with to answer the question, "where do you work?," and they each said "for [my employer's name]."

The more I thought about it, the more I settled on the idea that you work at places which are typically thought of as locations - restaurants, stores, hotels, etc. I think you work for a company when the company isn't so associated with a particular location.

Anyhow, these are the types of thoughts that go through my head when I'm outside on a break. Yeah, I need to get a life. :)

Since I've been gone

Hey everyone. Well, it appears I've blog-faded yet again. It's kind of funny how these things sneak up on me...

Looking at my post queue on blogger.com, I have three posts that are saved as drafts. These are posts that I started writing but then thought it was better not to post those particular thoughts. Once I start censoring myself, it's usually downhill pretty quickly from there.

Around the same time as those posts, I was reminded by my boss that we shouldn't be blogging or having public myspace pages or any of that sort of thing. The company I work for is in a pretty sensitive industry and there are "activists" out there looking for any reason to nail us to the wall. I guess that a year or two ago a guy who was doing some consulting work for us got caught with a pretty ugly myspace page that ended up all over a few of these activist's blogs and resulted in us losing a contract.

For the past month or so, I've been thinking about how I want to deal with all of this. Should I pull my blog completely down? That was honestly what I was going to do until I remembered things like archive.org and Google's cache. The thing is, I've been outspoken on a number of topics all over the internet and that stuff is out there, like it or not.

I've done some searches on my name and this site doesn't come up in any of the first few pages, so at least I have a little anonymity there. I went in and changed my settings so that the blog doesn't show up in search results or the blogger directory. I'll probably switch my profile to private too. I'm really wishing I would've done like Waldo and Mickity and used some kind of pseudonym this whole time. I've worked in the online industry for the past 8 years...I should really know better.

For now I'm going to try to get back to regular blogging. Even though my employer probably wouldn't be very happy to find out I'm doing it, I think that any damaging info about me is already out there if someone chooses to engage in a little character assassination. If it starts getting a little too uncomfortable here, I'll shut this blog down and start up a completely anonymous one somewhere else. If that happens, send me an email and I'll let you know where I ended up.

In the meantime, thanks for sticking around and keeping up with what's going on in my life. :)

Thanks W!

Thanks to our recently retired president's failed economic policies, the company I work for had to resort to drastic measures today to try and stay in business for a little while longer. They called everyone into a meeting first thing this morning to announce that, starting Monday, they would be cutting everyone's pay by 20% across the board. The sad thing is, that was good news compared to how things could have gone. I just feel lucky to still have a job.

To make matters just slightly worse, I was on the phone with my parents tonight talking about all of this when my dad snarkily mentioned that Colorado just passed a "card carry" bill that makes it easier to unionize and that perhaps that would be my salvation. Is there a reason why he felt the need to inject politics into a conversation like that? Perhaps I'm guilty of the same thing with this post; then again I'm not speaking to my daughter who just lost a fifth of her pay and is feeling pretty shitty about the world.

Anyone who still wants to claim that the republican party is pro-business must be mentally challenged. If you can look around at the ruin of 8 years of Bush rule and feel good about republican economic policy, there's probably no hope that you'll ever view our world in a rational way.

No rest for the weary

I was looking forward to a fairly mellow week this week after all of the craziness of flooding and moving the past couple. Things were going good until Wednesday, when we found out that we (the company I work for) needed to be in the Philippines on Monday for yet another demo of the new system we're trying to sell them.

This news came out of the blue - we weren't planning on having to demo anything for at least another month. Needless to say, we had a ton of work to get done in a very short amount of time so my leisure week ended up turning into working until at least midnight the past couple of nights and pretty late tonight. Oh well, at least I have a job, right?

In some of my down time today, I came across this comic from xkcd which succinctly sums up a lot of what privilege is all about:

Time to go watch tonight's Battlestar Galactica. It seems like no one else is into this show but I have to say that the past two episodes have been some of the best television I've ever seen. All of you are really missing out.

Hasta la vista

I'm leaving for Cancun early tomorrow morning, so this will probably be my last post until I get back Sunday night. I'll try to get some nice pictures - I just can't promise any will have me in them. I've gained too much weight in the past couple of months to feel very good about any pictures I've seen of myself lately. Maybe someone will catch my "good" side...

They sent out a letter at work today letting us know that they're "postponing" any 401(k) matching for the foreseeable future. My company had a great match so it's quite a financial blow. There were other things in the letter as well about how we're doing financially. It sounds to me like they're setting the stage for some bigger layoffs if things don't get better in the next couple of months. I'm still feeling fairly secure about my job at this point, but I guess I'll keep my fingers crossed that things don't get any worse.

I hate being sick

I woke up feeling absolutely miserable this morning and ended up calling in sick today. This couldn't come at a worse time as I'm already going to be out Thursday and Friday to go to a friend's wedding in Cancun. To try to make up for the time off, I went in to work this past weekend...is this my body's way of saying I really should have taken a day off sometime in the past week?

Whatever it is, I hope this morning was the last (and worst) of it. It's 4:30pm right now and I'm feeling better, but pretty run-down. A guy that sits next to me at work was out for a few days last week with something. I hope I don't have whatever he had.

Quick update

I apologize for leaving everyone hanging on the job thing after my last post. I've been meaning to write about my new job and how I came about getting hired there since it's - at least to me - an interesting story. For now, I'll just say that I started the new job about a month ago, it's going great, and I'm very happy.

Honestly, the nature of the company I'm working for right now has left me in limbo as to how I should approach this blog in the future or whether or not I should do it at all. I've erred on the side of caution by not posting anything for the past month but I feel like I have a better idea now of what will be fine for posting and what wouldn't.

Thank you to everyone who is still hanging in there!

Looking for work

As I mentioned in my post over at Bilerico, I'm once again looking for work after the end of my most recent contract yesterday. For the past year or so, I've only looked for shorter-term contract positions since I knew I was going to be having surgery at some point and I figured that offered me the most flexibility. Well, that's behind me now so I'm wondering if I should try to find something more permanent or stay with contract type stuff?

Honestly, I really enjoy contract work since it keeps my chops up and I'm usually moving on before things get boring. The down side is that it's harder to have financial stability when you're looking for something new every 3-6 months with sometimes long periods of nothing in between.

Then there's the whole trans thing. I'm fortunate in that I seem to be able to get work without too much hassle from my past. In my career field - at least with the smaller companies I often find myself working for - background checks haven't become the norm yet. I sometimes worry about prospective employers googling me and finding out I'm trans but that either hasn't happened yet or they don't care.

I should mention that we have employment non-discrimination protections here in Colorado. As big a supporter as I am for that sort of thing, I'm not really sure how much protection it really provides. There are so many reasons employers can give for not hiring someone that I'd be amazed if someone actually told me they weren't hiring me because I'm trans.

That said, I currently find myself in an interesting position to put our ENDA to the test. I just received a call about an hour ago from a recruiter for a consulting company I worked for a couple of years ago as a male. I missed the call, but the person left a voice message asking for me by my old name and talking about all of the opportunities she currently has for someone with my skillset.

Since she's already showed her hand (she has positions that match my skills) and already has my resume - albeit an old one, I'm guessing - she'd have a hard time suddenly reversing course on me. Now I get to make the fun phone call where I sort all of this out and, hopefully, still get presented to her clients. If circumstances were different, I'd probably stay away from any companies I worked for before transitioning but I can't really pass anything up right now.

I'm going to go call her...I'll let you know how it turns out.