I spend all day staring at numbers and spreadsheets, to the point that I have certain facts and trends burnt into my eyes, wind up working two hours overtime to prepare data and then come home to be mobbed by our own little monster who wants her daily ablutions (”dada, bath!” :).

Work is genuinely interesting. I’m surprising myself that I’m enjoying a job so much that basically has me stare at numbers all day. I physically count stock to control discrepancies - it’s not right to say ‘’stock loss” - I’m of the opinion that there’s very little theft ongoing, and even if someone steals a t-shirt, it’s a dollar gone. In the long term I’ll worry about it, but for the time being I worry about stock movements that cause the disappearance of hundreds of dollars of goods, such as happened today.

It’s a normal thing that I might be up or down a certain quantity of stock because 90% of the time we can account for it. The other 10% of the time it’s been weird random stuff like stock being shipped off to a vendor without anyone telling me. On rare occasions though we are completely missing an item without any explanation. The boxes have upped and vanished. When this happens (four times in the past week) I have to do something extreme and crazy like doing a complete physical check of the warehouse where the goods would be.

As I enter the counts into a spreadsheet and put numbers together I can see here that our sales staff and account executives have been poaching from a stock line for vendor and customer samples, without creating an order so we can track it. Over there I notice that a recent order of goods has been very sloppily shelved. The goods are spread across several non-adjacent bins, rather than being in one. Most important of all, I can see that that the random number generator that picks out items to be counted is really and truly broken, which was the big fact for me. I’ve been convinced for the last month that it weighs goods to be selected. It picks more active lines and more active goods within those lines. The problem is that it includes a prior count as being activity, so the more an item gets picked, the more an item gets picked.

Nice.

Alright, I think that’s enough geeking over facts that very few mundanes will appreciate. And now onto everything else that’s going on in my life.

On media, pirated and otherwise I’ve finally, at long last, had a chance to…

…watch the Simpsons film. I’m still iffy on it as I’m not sure I like how the humour has changed since I watched it regularly.
…watch Bender’s Big Score. Futurama=cake!
…listen to the full season 3 Battlestar Galactica. Great work, as always, although I think everyone else at work is really sick of drums at this stage (sorry, Christine!).

And lastly, Mariah and I went to see Cloverfield on Sunday last. Holy awesome film. :/ I’m already waiting for the sequel.

“What book is that?”
“Cyptonomicon.”
“Oh, what’s it about?”
“Cryptograpgy..”
“Oh, what’s that?”
“It’s encryption, scrambling.”
“Ah, I see. What’s that?”
“It’s a form of math.”
“What kind?”
“Cryptography.”
“What’s that?”

I don’t know which of us was worse in that conversation. I’m on my (I think) third run through Cryptonomicon. Like all of Neal Stephenson’s works it’s a lengthy and excellent read, but it’s not for the faint of head.

In a shocking change of subject, photography is doing much better. I’m second shooting at a wedding in Utah over the weekend, I had a promising interview yesterday, and I had fun shooting some very beautiful dogs over in east Las Vegas:

Kinbu

Currys has been an interesting eight years, for better or worse. I could always say “haha fuckers!” and write up a shocking kiss and tell expose (those red signs in the shop? Little is it known that the red is actually from the blood of orphans. True fact), but it’s more of my thing to mumble out a few anemic lines.

So it’s been an interesting eight years. Eight years…christ. Nearly a third of my life, if you want to put it that way. I started out during my last year in secondary (at the tender age of 18), pretty much dumping Dunnes Stores at a moment’s notice on the ground that it was a horrible place to work for. It still is, if some horror stories I’ve been told are halfway true.

Me being me, I actually got myself fired during my first day in Currys for some pretty indiscreet comments, although I obviously made things well. I started and stayed as warehoue staff, and although some will argue otherwise, I actually picked up a fair amount of useful things to know. I broadened out into technical support and customer service for a bit, although I was a complete asshole to customers who tried to bring back iPods because they couldn’t read the fucking manual. Or had a computer. Or somehow assumed that the iPod somehow had the internet and iTunes inside it, even though I streesed otherwise before you bought the dammed thing (does it look like it has a slot to swipe your credit card? An iSlot? Ass). I’ve since completely cut down on such support as I was honestly a huge prick to customers.

I loved and hated many co-workers through the years. I’ve had nothing but absolute respect for most of the warehouse staff, although some of you can go burn in hell (Sean the yank, Philip and Adrian come to mind). But the rest of you…respect. I know a lot of people have a very dim view about sales staff in general, but from where we stand, you can’t help but respect a person who’ll convince a young couple that those flat-panel speakers are telepathically controlled, will automatically interface wirelessly with your TV and are so fragile that the five-year warranty is a must (true story).

I bought my first computer through Currys, with Frank and Jenn, saw a really cool game on sale in a local toy store. It has an interesting concept: You were logged into a server with hundreds or thousands of other people and cooperated with them to explore a savage land and do quests. It sounded incredibly cool, so I bought it. At this point I promptly wasted about four years of my life and ran up obscenely huge dialup bills playing Asheron’s Call. I can’t really stress how huge AC has been in my life. It led me down a long and interesting path that’s ultimately led to Mariah, Caira and happiness, but it’s a rant for another day.

Work suffered for a while and I nearly wound up getting fired again because online games, but I finally cut down severely and put work back in front. Of course by that point I had failed my Leaving Certificate rather badly, but I’ve honestly never had any need to put any of the material they crammed into us in those years to use. Again, the Irish secondary level education system is a rant for another day.

I threatened to quit from Currys more times than I care to count, but honestly who the fuck was ever going to hire me? So I stuck it out and had a mostly interesting time. There was the mouse in my pants, the customer who tried to seduce me, the scooter races, and the drugged up junkie who started headbutting a wall when we stopped him shoplifting.

Bleh

Tough choice, I’ll maybe do both as I’m trashed. It’s been a great weekend, I started my nightclub work for Clubbing.ie and I’m forced to admit that I enjoy it, for all I ususally hate pubs. The unwashed masses in them are good sports and most of them can’t get enough of their photos being taken - if you were in Fibbers, Fox’s or Kennedy’s over the weekend and you want your photo, give me a shout.

Of course I’m absolutely trashed. I spent all day Friday moving whites at work. I then had to come home, hop in the shower and go right out again to photograph a club. Saturday was a little easier as I was only in work until 6, but it still mostly involved moving more whites. Blargh.

IMG_0510

The 30D is awesome, is all. It actually talks with my flash in a usable way, compared to the 400D, it has an excellent range of ISO settings (ISO 1000 FTW!) and it’s larger buffer and faster write speeds made my life painless. I had trouble with the charger, but a shaver adaptor got me out of that spot. Speaking of spots, the spot metering is a similar godsend, it’s made it much easier for me to get portrait photos, especially candid ones (…of Killer).

The bundled lens is similarly great, and it’s an excellent replacment for my 18-55mm. I actually wound up using the 17-85 over my 50mm and 28mm as I really didn’t have the space for anything except a wide angle most of the time.

Tomorrow I plan to head out to a forest if Lady Sun smiles on us and try out some IR with the camera and really test it. Har.

May 18th looks to be the day. Mum and Jenn are asking me to stay until the end of the summer (…) so I can make more money. Because I won’t be working in Las Vegas, just sitting down by a pool.