Categories
ranting

the end

Today was my last day as a Lockheed Martin employee. I’m not sad to go, I was board out of my mind sitting in the AWC. The project that Rob and I started, to automate some of the reports the administrators, long ago moved on without me. Curtis, who signed on to help with the GUI, because he know how to write swing better than Rob or I, has really totally taken over the project. Most of the work ended up being in the GUI. I have sat next to him and helped him a few times to figure out stuff, or made his job harder by saying ‘we need to include X functionality,’ but the coding and hard thinking is all him and has been for a while now.

So for quite a while now I have spent most of my days doing nothing again and my brain has slowly leaked out of my skull to form a small pool by my cube. I will not miss that. I will miss the people in the AWC, I hope they keep in touch. I think I got lucky, by sitting on the smaller side of the conference room which divided the AWC about 70/30 I sat in the area which lent itself to a more intimate setting where we all know each other and we laughed and joked all day—often we where too loud, mostly me, but we had fun.

I have not filled out any paperwork for my resignation. I sent an email to my manager two weeks ago, which he never responded to. That is all the administrators of the AWC knew I needed to do. But I have the strangest feeling that in two weeks I will receive a paycheck for $0.00 because I failed to enter my time. The whole awaiting clearance center is so badly managed by the company higher ups and so ‘out of the loop’ that I had to take the initiative to walk over to the badging office to day to hand in my security badge—with which I can get into the Lockheed buildings. I could have walked out with it, and no one would have known better or said anything about it.

I am looking forward to starting my new job on Monday. Already my boss has sent me a long white paper on the system I will be programming and on Monday morning I have a meeting to go over the architecture with the designers and coders. I get to jump right in and start coding and testing. I am so looking forward to this while, at the same time, being a little scared that the first thing I will see when my feet hit the floor is the ground rushing up to flatten my nose because I’m not running fast enough. It’s the old, ‘when it rains, it pours’ saying. I go from having nothing to do, to having an overwhelming amount to do. In a month I will be complaining about being behind and having to work late to get everything done. C’est la vie!

Categories
ranting

more natural selection

A British woman in Spain climbed a three meter high wall to stick her hand in the lion cage. The lions then ripped her arm off. Good. Some stupid woman, 54 years old, climbs a protective fence to “pet the pretty kitties.” They should have ripped her fucking head off…. (Reuters story: here)

Categories
ranting

and there was much drunkenness…

Ya! Went to Binghamton this weekend to hand with Flugie! Great weekend, aside from it being so cold you could not be outside for more than then minutes at a time. I drive up on Saturday and when I got there Flugie and his flat mates where unloading a keg. Needless to say with a beginning of like that there was much drinking that night. After a few hours of watching people play beer pong while A█████ and I caught up. We headed downtown to the bars.

At the bars A█████ kept handing me money and saying get us something to drink… A hundred dollars later A█████ did not know where he was and was being undressed in the club several hot girls. So Mike a friend of A█████s and I left him in one of their hands and headed home.

Ten o’clock the next morning A█████ called me to say he would be home soon. Apparently he had walked with the girl back to her house to get her car and then while they where talking he fell asleep. When he woke up he fell off the bed and broke the girls turtle tank—drunkard!

We just chilled all day talked and played on the computer—I got to talk to C███████ which was very, very nice. Not to mention convoluted and funny with A█████ in the room. Anyway, that night was, of course, Superbowl Sunday and A█████ and his roomies rented a projector and stole a screen for it. There where 30 or so people at the house for the game—which sucked.. the Raiders did not look like they know it was the Superbowl. They looked nonchalant about the whole thing, like it was a mid season game. Oh well, I don’t watch football anyway. Afterwards we watched ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and fell asleep.

On Monday Sherman called to say that Lockheed had decided to offer him a job. Very cool, I hope he takes it, would be great if he lived around here. I got to talk to C███████ on messenger again. I wish I could talk to her everyday like that. I headed out around five pm. After locking my keys in my truck—which is all A█████s falt! I was going to clean the snow off the truck and A█████ said to let it warm up. Normal enough but I never do it. So I turned the truck on and the heat. Then I closed the door and started scraping the snow. When I got done I remembered that when you first turn the ignition on the truck locks all the doors! Shit. Luckily I was able to use a coat hanger to push the auto window down button. So I finally managed to leave about 5:30. The East coast is so cold right now that the ice on the hood of my truck was still there when I got home—five hours of strait driving and there was still ice on my hood!

Anyway it was a great weekend, I wish C███████ could have been there in person rather than on messenger but there is nothing I can do about that right now… I can’t wait to do it all again. But with less alcohol!

Categories
ranting

sherman

Oh my god! The wind chill right now is negative fucking freezing! It’s so cold and windy. You get brain freeze just walking down the street!

Anyway, I went to dinner with Sherman tonight. He’s in town because he has an interview with Lockheed Martin tomorrow. So I gave him the inside scoop—on how cool the projects are, how boring the awaiting clearance process is and how painful the polygraph is! Hope I did not scare him too badly! I really hope he gets the job, or some other job in the NoVa/DC area. It would be great to have another friend who is a city person here. Pub crawls and nights out! He said he would want to live in the District if he lived here.

I’m going to see A█████ this weekend, so I will get to relive some more England memories. I really miss London. I miss all of Europe. I was stumbling around the web today and ran across more pictures of London and Paris. I don’t know there is just a feeling of home in the pictures, even when they where of places in the cities I never went or saw they still felt like home. Maybe it’s just that I still feel uprooted from my moves (London to C’ville, C’ville to NoVA, NoVa to C’ville and then C’ville to DC all in one summer!) or maybe it’s my biggest emotional connection is to London, or maybe it’s my subconscious desire to be euro-trash. I don’t know, most times I don’t think about it but every once in a while I just feel in the pit of my stomach that I would be happier in London, and I curse the way immigration and national borders work…

Categories
ranting

keeping in touch

Oh… haven’t ranted in a few days… nothing much happening right now. Finishing my last few days at Lockheed, I won’t be sorry that I am gone from the job, but I will miss some of the people. Hope they keep in touch. Speaking of keeping in touch with people; I’m taking a couple of days off the beginning of next week to and will head up to Binghamton [binghamton.edu] to see Flugie. And tomorrow Sherman will be here in DC to interview for a job, so I am going to dinner with him! Yea! Get to relive London days!