Also this morning I got an email from a company wanting my to have a telephone interview with them, I filled out an application for one of their grad positions in March or April and now they are getting back to me? It is weird because I also keep getting emails from DEWR and the Victorian Governement about graduate positions I applied for and how I need to book an appointment for an interview/recruitment day thing but I've already called and pulled out of both of those programs in May and also removed my applications from their grad websites. I guess they must be really low on the fresh meat!

Ok short post now since new blogger ate my really long post...
Yesterday had chest pains at work, struggled on for a few hours and it got worse, people at work didn't believe me or gave stupid diagnoses, called my dad, he made me do a chest examination over the phone, thought it could be Pneumothorax, astro came and got me, I went to the hospital, they hooked me up and did a few things, blood pressure high, doctor thought I might have Pneumothorax (score one for dad), got an x-ray, felt dizzy after they gave me some pain killers (I feel sick just walking into a hospital anyway), x-ray says I don't have Pneumothorax or they couldn't see it, they think it is a musculoskeketal problem, sent me home, ate BBNT since I hadn't eaten since midday and they were they only thing open close to home after midnight, went to bed exuasted.
I feel better today, no sharp pains in my chest when i breathe in, but it still feels pretty sore down the ol' sternum, I am also a little short of breath, sort of how you feel when you get a chest infection.
In other news, looks like the house hunting in Sydney for tomorrow is shaping up, I have 5 properties lined up to look at and 2 or 3 others in the wings, here is hoping I body is going to cope with the travel and monster walk-a-thon around the inner western suburbs tomorrow!

FYI - The new blogger has tags and the dashboard provides better information but it still ate my post so I don't like it today :)

Due to an emergency in our building today my work got moved a block away into a cramped room which doubles as my companies telephone exchange, needless to say it was pretty craptacular working conditions using cheapo $20 standard telephone handsets and cheap restaurant style seating to get by. Supposedly we are going to be working in this place for another week, good thing I have 3 days off coming to me after tomorrow, it will be hellish in this place on the 36 degree day due on Thursday, it was getting pretty warm in there this afternoon.

The good thing about it is that the bosses are going easy on us due to what is happening, which means we are going to be hassled to take masses of calls and log everything and be listened in on. I'm sure that will be changed in a few days when they can figure out how to do this again on the budget equipment we have.

Yesterday at work someone managed to push out a big turd right next to the toilet bowl in one of the cubicles in the toilets on our floor, I don't know how someone manages to do that, maybe it is someone squatting on the toilet seat, maybe it is someone with a phobia of touching a toilet seat with their arse so they sorta just try and bend over and projectile their bad boys into the bowl. I found out today that is about the 3rd or 4th time this year that has happened, so maybe we are dealing with a professional(s) here???

I can't wait until I get back from Sydney, then it is going to feel like the home stretch when it comes to quitting work, it'll only be 2 and a bit weeks then, it is going to feel sweet.

Although I'm just going to get more and more busy, as I have to stop procrastinating and start finishing organising moving. Tomorrow I'll get up and have my last crack at organising places to look at on Thursday when I get to Sydney. So far my attempts have failed due to places being snapped up quickly or real estates telling me I can't view properties on weekdays??? Yes it all works a little differently in Sydney.

I'll be pretty annoyed if I can't organise anything for viewing on Thursday, I forked out for a hotel room and everything just so I could do it, I hope something turns up.

Anyway, bedtime, tomorrow is going to be an extremely long day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCKGW. I can't believe someone bothered to write this up.

So my work want me to do go over and start listening to L2 calls with a few other people from my work, I thought they were going to get a whole bunch of L1s but i've now found out it is only 4 guys, the word is they are thinking of training us up to be L2s. I think a few people are a bit miffed that I was chosen because I've only been there for almost 5 months while some guys have been pining to do L2 work for years. The other 3 guys selected have been there for at least 2 years. I don't want the job and I'm not sure why i have been chosen, although I wouldn't mind doing the training because it'll get me off the damn phones.

Tonight was a decent night even though we had an outage for the whole of one state, although the second last call I took was probably the rudest woman I have ever experienced, she was so nasty to me and she had already been on the phone to the big T just before getting onto me so that probably didn't help, she was just nasty and refused to do anything I said to try and help her, I basically asked her to tell me what she wanted cause it seemed like she didn't want my help. Her problem ended up being pretty simple, yet even when I finished she was still nasty as hell. I just don't get people.

I just acquired a '16 Blocks' DVD where it forces you to watch subtitles that are of european origin, what the hell! I just wanna see it in english thanks!

Tonight I actually questioned a customer that was bitching about having to speak to consultants from the sub continent. Basically he was carrying on about how whenever he calls the sales department he speaks to someone from "Bangladesh" (I haven't met one person in sales from Bangladesh) and that he can't understand them because they don't speak "our language" and so I asked him "What is that suppose to mean?" and he was all "You tell ME what that is suppose to mean", what I did was give a response of silence for about 10 seconds so he could think about what a dumbarse he was being and then I went on to argue some other worthless point he was going on about. What I really felt like saying was "It MEANS that your a RACIST arsenostril! And I'm going to put a big fat flashing note in all your account files so everyone knows it". What a jerk.

Yeah you know what time it is, time to bitch about work...

Dear General Public,

When you call me up why do you insist about telling me how much your hate our service? Even when you have only had a handful of problems over say 12 to 24 months? I don't really mind so much that you are telling me this I guess it is more in the way you say it with such spite and venom, like I murdered your first born or something. Do you really think that I am going to help you at all after yelling and screaming about something that is entirely not my fault and out of my hands?

Please stop asking me where our call centres are located, they are in Australia dipshits, and then when I tell you where they are and ask why do you think they are overseas(?) don't go and say something stupid like "well because all the major companies call centres are overseas I thought yours would be the same", HELLO! Stop watch Today Tonight people! You'll find that most major AUSTRALIAN company call centres are still in Australia, god damn idiots.
Also don't try to get all buddy buddy with me and start getting racist on other people that have taken your calls before, just because I can speak English well (which in all honestly I struggle with at times) doesn't mean I share your opinion about people from the sub continent.

Buh.

An interesting thing I have found out about work is that people who call would much rather their be an outage than spend 10 to 15 minutes with me to fix their problem. I really don't get this, people would rather me tell them that something major has happened and they won't be getting reliable internet access for days than let me log into their modem and put in a username and password. People are either really fucking lazy or, umm, yeah people are just really fucking lazy.

Also whenever I hear an unhappy middle aged mother on the phone now I immediately slump in my chair, because basically they refuse to accept anything I say 80% of the time. Why are they so mistrusting of people on phones? Do people realise that I want to get their shit working so that they never call me back again???

In other news, I'm finally getting my arse into gear about organising stuff for the mooooove, also trying to arrange flights so I can go to my new jobs "Welcome" function at the end/start of Nov/Dec. The closer it gets the more excited I feel about it, I am really looking forward to find out exactly what projects I'll be working on next year. From the sketchy information I've been given so far, I'll be rotated through working on 4 major projects throughout 2007 and I'll be able to choose more or less which sort of projects I am able to work on according to my interest. Got to love that! One project my manager was telling me about over the phone the other day that some of the grads did this year was going over all of my new works external public websites and making sure that they abide to usability standards and then writing docs on ways to implement changes to make things better, not exactly a thrilling job but something I am slightly interested in anyway! Not all projects I'll be working on will be web based, which is a good thing also.

I guess I'll have more concrete info to give in December!

All I know is that it will sure bet the hell out of the job I'm working in at the moment, I'd really like to take a lunch that was longer than 30 minutes just once! Oh man that would be sweet... Also not having my breaks scheduled down to the minute, that will also be good. Also not having to talk non stop for 8 hours a day. Oh yeah.

Also funkz, thanks for that link, I watched that loose change video and my mind has opened up to all the conspiracy theories in 9/11 ! :P Hooray for things not adding up! After watching it, I sure do feel like the world is a very unsafe place to live.

I feel uneasy about Saddam being hung, I was wondering to myself why I feel this way, the guy has done a lot of bad things in his life and quite frankly any head of state that has gone about doing what he did probably deserve to die. I don't believe people should be allowed to get away with launching chemical weapons at people in your own country, killing people for voicing out for what they believe in and basically doing what the hell you feel like at the expense of other peoples lives. However I guess I feel uneasy because the world leader that has bought him to "justice" hasn't exactly played by the rules, but should this matter? In WWII Churchill didn't exactly do everything by the book, eg. Leveling German population centres to the ground when he knew he had air superiority, among other things.
I guess the problem is that in the past we it was always justified of who committed the worse atrocities, Hilter really did do some pretty fucked up shit that anything Churchill did seemed pretty tame in comparison. However these days as human beings we are preached those little lines of "two wrongs don't make a right" and so on, so I guess that puts me in a bind, I'm not "glad" that Saddam is going to be served his "justice" and I'm not happy that Bush was the "good guy" that put him there. Basically I feel dirty about everything that has happened on both sides of the equation and I just feel sad that one arsehole head of state is going to get away with murdering another arsehole head of state in front of the whole world.

So yeah, I should blog.

So whats been going on since the last one? Well astro and I have been planning and thinking about moving and realising that since now everything has fallen into place and we both have things we want to do in Sydney, we now realise we have a lot of things to get down before we move. Selling crap, throwing crap out, organising the moving, the hotels to stay in when we get there, when we are quitting our jobs, the removalist trucks, getting rid of one car, fixing the other one up and getting to registered when we get up there, then all that stuff of contacting real estates before we go up so we are ready to pound the pavement when we get there and generally just all that other crap that goes along with moving.

Oh yeah and that whole having to save all your money bit to afford moving.

W to the H to the I-N-G-E.

Anyway I had my graduation the other day, finally finished what had been a goal of mine ever since I was 16 or 17, well I didn't admit that openly until I was 20 or 21 or something like that, but still. I had a great day, astro and my parents and my sister came down and watched the whole thing, I got photos taken, I got my bit of paper and got to catch up with only about three people that i knew from uni. A lot of the other guys had graduated the night before as they do different schools over different nights so I didn't get to see them which was a shame.
So yeah afterwards my parents took me down to southbank for some food and we sat there and generally had a good time. I even watched my dad play a few hands of blackjack in the casino, I swear to god that man does not lose any money gambling (not that he gambles much at all), he played for about 10 minutes and walked away $80 richer. I guess you get fairly smart about these sorta things from being a bookie earlier in your life (among the multitude of colourful jobs that man had done before sticking to his current profession).
Interesting part of the day was when I got home (via a psychotic taxi driver) and opened up my little degree holding tube and discovered I had two bits of paper, one for one degree and one for the other, then it actually hit me that I did a double degree and that it was a fair accomplishment and I should be proud of myself for coming this far. I started this whole journey when I was living on my lonesome (before this guy bought his pants wearin', stack of phonebooks chairin' butt along) in a budget flat
recently made unemployed with a host of other family/personal problems bearing down on me, and to now be finally finished with some sort of direction in my life, was something I Was never really thought would actually materialise back in those days.

Anyway I'll have to continue this at a later point as my laptop is dying on me or something, basically when the thing is turned on for over 15 minutes and gets hot it starts randomly repeating "dq1t45" wherever the cursor is typing, it has been driving me mad for weeks, I really need to do a reinstall but yeah, you know. I has taken me 40 minutes to write this purely from that problem, now im all stressed out I feel like throwing this thing into the Yarra.