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#4876 – long day in huntsville

today has been a long day.

the flight to huntsville for this business trip was leaving from DCA at 6:35 am, so my coworker and i would need to get to the airport about 2 hours in advance. work was going to pay for a shuttle to take us from the office to the airport and back, so i had to be at the office at 4 am to meet the shuttle. add in the 40-minute drive from the ol’ homestead to the office and i had to wake up at 2:45 am to take a shower and get dressed and grab a quick breakfast so i could leave around 3:20-3:30 am. i didn’t get to sleep until about 10:30 pm since i was working on some stuff for school and fixing up some photos for feisty_fitz and helping mom choose a mat for framing a photo online, so i only really got about 4 hours of sleep last night.

i thought that the shuttle to the airport would be like one of those blue supershuttle vans, but it turned out to be this little fedora-wearing black man driving a lincoln. felicia (my coworker who is also helping out in huntsville this week) later told me she tried to get one of those supershuttle vans but since it’s a shared ride they wanted us to be at the office at 1 am for arriving at the airport around 4:30 am for a 6:30 am flight — yeah, right. we didn’t have any trouble with the guy who drove us, though… he arrived right at 4 am and took us to the airport and we got there around 4:50 am. felicia was worried at first about the guy when she made the reservation, having him take the credit card info over the phone and just trust this random guy to show up to pick us up, but we didn’t have any troubles at all.

we got checked in and through security. there was a guy who had a seeing-eye dog assisting him… i think i’ve only seen a seeing-eye dog in use once before, but it got me wondering how guide dogs are trained and how they alert their handler that it’s time for walkies and stuff like that.

i grabbed a blanket on the flight and tried to get some sleep on the plane — the flight was supposed to last just under 2 hours, but i think it didn’t even last 90 minutes, and there was some turbulence midflight that woke me up and it was freezing on the plane which both made it hard to fall asleep and stay asleep. once we got to huntsville we had to take a shuttle to the enterprise rent-a-car office where we grabbed some free sodas, picked up the car and then drove to the huntsville call center.

this office was only completed in early september, so it’s only been open for about a month. it’s got crazy security, like trying to get into fort knox:

  • showed the security guard at the gate my employee ID and he told me to just swipe it on the terminal to raise the gate… i told him that i didn’t think it’d work since we were from maryland and wouldn’t be coded for the security system at this call center, so then he had to take our badges and radio into the building and ask us who we were supposed to be meeting
  • once he let us in we parked the car and then walked to the building. there’s the doors to the outside, and then another set of doors into the building itself. the doors to the building itself had another ID swipe (which of course wouldn’t work) and the security guard inside just looked at us standing there showing him our badges until we heard the woman who seemed to be in charge of security tell him that our badges wouldn’t work since we’re not from this call center and we were buzzed in.
  • then we got temporary employee badges to use for the ID swipes for the doors, had to go through ANOTHER ID swipe to leave the main lobby and get into the building itself. two more swipes to get into the federal accounts department!

    5 swipes just to get to our department! i’m all for security, but that just seems a bit ridiculous. i sent an email to one of my coworkers back in maryland about it and she asked if we were on the bad side of town… i replied back with “well, i heard a train not too long ago, we must be on the wrong side of the tracks!”

    so today from about 8 am to 4 pm we sat in the office (the federal account team here is small, just a handful of people) and made ourselves available for questions and other assistance with different methods and procedures. i’d listen to my ipod, but i’m not exactly “available” with headphones in my ears. 😛 pity, since i ripped a bunch of songs to my ipod in the days leading up to this trip.

    after work (we left early since we’d been up since 4 am EST, or 3 am CST) we went to the hotel to check in. there were a few problems with the corporate card used to reserve the rooms at check in but eventually everything was sorted out. i remarked to felicia that it was weird that we didn’t have any problems with the random guy picking us up to take us to the airport, but we try to stay in a major hotel chain and have issues. our supervisor joked during one of the calls sorting things out that maybe we should just rent a second car and camp out in the cars, bahahaha. eventually we got things sorted out and went to our rooms.

    there’s a pizza hut next to the hotel, but i hooked up my airport express (yay converting free wired-internets to free wireless-internets so i don’t have to sit at the desk to use the internet) and found a subway in the shopping center just down the street. got a sub for dinner and have been watching the baseball game. tomorrow: more of the same. if it’s as hot, and if i get a chance and if i feel like it then maybe i’ll pop on the shorts that cynicalscribe got me for skating and jump in the swimming pool here since i don’t have my swimsuit.

    but yeah, today’s been a long day. it’s nice that it’s an hour behind, so i get an extra hour of sleep tonight. as soon as this baseball game is over i’m going to get ready for sleep.

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    #4875 – "what" the "fuck"

    so i’ve mentioned on here before about how my statistics instructor often says “what” in such a way that he can (and usually does) answer himself, and i’ve started keeping track of how many times he does this in class:

    the class itself is 2 1/2 hours (150 minutes) — the “with break” is if you calculate it for 140 minutes (the actual time i’m in the class and listening to the professor), while the “without break” is if you consider the entire class period, break and all (even though i may not be listening to him or even in the classroom during that time).

    on a whim tonight i looked at the wikipedia page for “deadwood” to see if there were any details about if/when it’d be released on blue-ray dvd. there’s no information about it coming out on hi-def dvd, but there’s this gem on the wiki entry:

    It has also been reported that the series had a total count of “fucks” of 2980, and a cumulative FPM of 1.56.

    yeah, they cuss a lot on that show. i think swearengen had a word-of-the-day calendar and just happened to take a liking to the word from september 14:

    anyway, the interesting thing is that some folks decided to calculate the number of times “fuck” is said during the entire series of “deadwood” (not to mention the ratio of “fucks to cocksuckers” in each episode). what makes it even more hilarious is that during the time that i’ve spent actually in the classroom my instructor has said “what” in a way that he could answer himself with a rate greater than the rate they say “fuck” in deadwood. that’s a lot.

    and yeah, the title of this entry practically wrote itself, hahahaha…

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    #4873 – huntsvillian

    about a month ago we opened up a call center in huntsville, alabama. since we needed more room for the federal account support team we started a second federal support team in the huntsville call center so not only would we have more room to grow but we also now have a redundant call center just in case something were to happen at this location. though there’s a few people who transferred from the laurel call center to huntsville, most of the people there are new hires.

    we’ve been sending a few people there for a few days at a time to help train and assist the new hires. yesterday my supervisors asked me if i’d be interested in helping out, and i told them that i was definitely interested in going down there. turns out it’s sooner than i expected — i’m leaving on monday (yes, 3-days-from-now monday) and will be coming back on friday. it’s a bit exciting but also a bit disappointing in that it’s so soon and that i’m going to have nothing really to do. it’s my first ever business trip though!

    (on a side note, did you know that september 29th was my 4-year anniversary? bet you didn’t!)

    today we booked the flights (non-stop there and back, that’s nice), the hotel (i get a 2-bed queen-sized room with a minifridge and free internets, yay mariott), and the rental car. i get frequent flyer miles on the flight back (i don’t have a membership with delta for the flight down) and hotel points. free traveling points are always good in my book!

    but i’m going to be BORED while i’m there, any suggestions on how to keep entertained when there’s going to be one other person there i know? too bad the huntsville space center is only open 9am-5pm, it would have been nice to go check that out! 🙁

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    #4872 – 8×10 = $20

    last night i ordered about 10 prints of 8×10 photos online to be printed out at and picked up from target today after work. the nice thing about this option on flickr is that your photos are ready within 1 hour but you can only choose glossy photos instead of a matte finish. i prefer the matte finish and i wasn’t too thrilled about the glossy photos, but it sure beat saving $16 or so for super-express shipping. it still came out to be about $20 for the prints, though. i was originally going to order all of my prints i needed this way, but then i remembered the photo printer i’m borrowing from one of my fraternity brothers (i used it for taking pictures of people with cardboard cutouts of the president and with test man at an event for work a few months ago and i still have the printer with me) and figured that i’d save a few bucks and just print the 4×6 prints here myself.

    so after work i went to the target in silver spring, bought a birthday card for dad (i don’t know what to get him as a gift, though… at least, i don’t know anything i can afford at the moment :P), and went to the photo desk to pick up my order. after they looked around for a while and couldn’t find it they asked me for my order confirmation number. when i looked it up on my phone i realized that i had requested my photos to be available for pickup at the target in bowie instead – i was originally thinking of having them picked up at the one in bowie (figuring that i could grab them on my way to annapolis), but changed my mind and figured that the silver spring one is closer and would save me gas. i must have forgotten to change the store in my request. argh.

    so i drove over to target in bowie (it actually kind of worked out since my route there had me bypass some of the traffic on the beltway and i was able to stop in a few other stores along the way to look for some things i needed), but when i got there i found out that their 8x10s weren’t printing properly because a part broke in their machine and they’re waiting for the replacement! 🙁 it prints 85% of the print fine, but the last 15% is all white. they offered to let me know once it’s fixed but i told them not to bother since i needed the photos by tomorrow. on the bright side, you don’t pay for your prints until you get them from the store, so i didn’t have to worry about getting a refund. too bad i won’t be able to have any 8×10 prints like i wanted, but at least i saved about $20.

    at first the printer didn’t want to work at all, even after i uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers it still wasn’t starting up. eventually i held down the power button when i plugged it in and that reset something in it and now it’s working fine.

    now that i’ve got all the prints i need for this contest at work tomorrow (i’m bringing in a bunch of ones about baseball as well as some roller derby ones) i thought i’d find a photo of my family to pin up at my desk; one of my coworkers who used to sit next to me always pestered me that i didn’t have any photos of my family up, so i figured why not print one up now while i’m on a roll? didn’t find a good photo i liked of the whole family, but i did find this — check the notes out on the photo, hah!