Old School stuff

Well, this weekend I decided to start tackling this huge pile of unused hard drives that have been sitting on my shelf for way too long. I was able to take these old hard drives from my college days and recover a lot of the files. It's interesting to see these old papers I wrote, old chat transcripts I had with my friends, and especially the emails I sent almost 10 years ago now. Just for fun, here's a chunk of an email I sent exactly 10 years ago.

I had the worst night at work today. I had like 9 jobs to get done, 6 of which were digital. The digital copier broke down about half way through the second job, so I tinkered around with it for a while. Giving up, I called a tech to come fix it. I did what I could with the other jobs, then I just had to wait. So, my manager comes in and I explain the problem to him. He say's something like 'man, you ain't got da skills. i show you da skills....', which I thought was pretty funny, personally. He tried to fix it, but couldn't, and got angrier and angrier and started yelling. He accused me of breaking it and stuff. I told him I called in someone to fix it, and he said I should have just gotten some troubleshooting advice. I told him it was after hours, and they only offered that service until 8PM. He yelled at the top of his lungs 'MAN, THAT'S FUCKING BULLSHIT! DON'T YOU FUCKING BULLSHIT ME!', so I said 'fine. fuck it', grabbed my stuff and stormed out. If I hadn't done that, I would probably have quit. Hopefully he called and asked for troubleshooting advice and feels stupid now. I better get an apology, too, or that man has lost every bit of respect I ever had for him. There's some things you don't do to your employees, and that's one of them.

I had actually totally forgotten about that whole exchange, but I remember it now in re-reading it. 10 years ago I was working 3rd shift at Kinko's in downtown Chicago and had little patience in dealing with anyone, customers and managers included. Working full-time and going to school full-time really took its toll on me. I eventually transferred to a Kinko's a little closer to my apartment with a better manager, and soon after that I quit Kinko's to focus more on my school work.

Work is busy and doesn't seem to be letting up, but at the moment that's a good thing.