Gina is a friend of mine from High School that recently moved back to Philadelphia and has taken to running. Â We got together for dinner at Beau Monde, a creperie on 6th and Bainbridge that I remember enjoying in High School. Â The entire wait staff was in skintight leather and the crepes were good. Â I remember one of those from high school but wonder if the other was what really made the selection for me. Â Gina and I talked and we went over our recent past. Â She had apparently gained and then lost a lot of weight, started and then quit smoking, and dated and then stopped recently but now had a vastly better job. Â I had gained and lost a lot of weight, gained and then lost a neat job (medical device start-up gig), and started and stopped dating, but now I had a vastly improved cardiovascular capacity. Â I’d prefer the job.
Tag: jobs
Morning Zoo Actuary
A relative thought I should combine my actuarial training and my people skills to start a morning talk show with me as Dr. Terry, the Feel Good Actuary. Each show would start with me reminding people with each day they’re alive they’ve set a new personal record and I’d then take calls from people who aren’t dead. I’d essentially get paid to sugar coat mortality statistics like “Only 8% of people with pancreatic cancer live more than 14 months. You can be that 8%!” I could also help people navigate life insurance questions and such. Finally, the show could serve as a sleep aid because I can’t think of anything duller on the radio than fielding insurance questions.
Guerrilla Upgrades
My previous reasonably nice PC at work was taken for a validation process that requires four identical computers to the point that one candidate PC was rejected its RAM having come from two different lots. So my 3.2 GHz Xeon was replaced with something having a 1/3 the processing power, 1/2 the RAM and a video card that could maybe power Q*bert. The low RAM’s killing me as I normally leave an instance of Firefox open as well as each of the programs I use in my workflow and it chokes if open an instance of Notepad beyond that. I’m seriously considering breaking into my bosses office, stealing the case key, installing an extra gig of RAM and installing my spare NVidia 7900.  Could I be fired for improving the assets at work?
Boss: Terry, we’re going to let you go for messing with company property
Me: But everything I did improved my throughput.
Boss: You think you can just waltz into your workplace and increase your productivity? We live in a society of laws, Mr. Robinson.
Although that’d be an awesome interview story “why were you fired from your last position?”, “I was too efficient”. Although that comes close to the phenomenon of “what’s your biggest handicap?”, “I work too hard” or “I don’t let go until everything’s perfect”. Boy does that anger me. Should I ever encounter that as an interviewer I’d reject them for failing to understand the word “handicap” and thus not meet workplace communication standards.