"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

....mish mash...
2001-01-23 - 22:58:46

I had an epiphany of sorts yesterday. I've talked about on here that I 'act' or wear 'masks.' I realized that I'm not acting, well not more than anyone else, but there is a duality to my personality. There is a 'second' side to who I am, a side that comes out more and more as I become comfortable with where I am and who I'm with. It's not that I'm hiding anything. It is a just a fact of who I am, that is how I react to certain situations. I don't put on a show, a performance, that's more a conscience effort. How I am is my natural reaction to a given set of circumstances. In the past, I had thought of my 'personality changes', more as going from one charactor into another. That's far to complex and involved, though it is how it appears. My little 'revalation' brings a great many things into focus. I've always gotten comments like I did today at work, that I need a CAT scan or my screws are loose. But, those comments have always come from people I've known for awhile, or from people I've met in a situation where I'm 'at home'. People who just meet me for the first time often say things like 'he's quiet' or 'he seems kinda arrogant'. These comments have always bothered me, especailly the arrogant ones. I'm often quiet. I must speak softly, or unclearly, cause I often say things people don't seem to hear. The combination of being quiet and watching a converstaion instead of becoming apart of it, makes people think that I think I'm too good to join in. That's not the case, I'm probably just listening and learning about those who are talking.

Back to diary-type stuff. Yes, to answer a question or two I got, 'silence' was an entry writtin about myself and J. Basically, she moved back to school and I hadn't heard from her in a longish time. I fear I get impatient about such things and I must admit, as I did in the entry, I was wondering if she had decided to stop talking to me. I worry about such things. I'm actaully far more concerned with how people view me than I'd like. I know it should not matter what people think of me and profess, more often than not, that i don't care. However that's only partially true. It depends on who the people are and what the situation is. Anyway, J and I had a long talk the other night, which ended due to crappy ISP's. You'd think with all this wonderful technology they'd have the systems working such that 'random' bootings off ISP's wouldn't happen. Such is life on the internet. As frustrating as it is, there's not much you can do. Well, if you have the luxury, move to a better ISP.

I also came to see that I'm a walking contradiction in a lot of ways. The 'rules' on how I view things are very flexible and fluid, but when I do have a firm opinion on something, it's often extremely hard to presuade me I'm wrong. I like change, but within a structured enivronment, if that makes sense. I love that my job, as much as I hate some of the calls I get, is really wide open to all sorts of problems, situations and opportunities. I never know who is caling me or what they need. Do they just need a price? Are they just checking stock? Do they have a 70 page spec for a job and need to deciphering it? Are the livid that some material didn't arrive? Is it my warehouse calling about a problem with an order? Is it someone I've never spoken to? Is it someone calling to bitch me out and say they are never calling again? Is it that person calling back after telling me they'd never call again, cause they know I can get what they need? It's a fluid constantly changing environment at work. I can go from 'savior' to 'goat' with one call. My day can go from me thinking 'I am god!' to 'dear god, please kill me now.' All this is within the confines of my work. I know that every call I get is tied, one way or another, to the products that I price, ship and offer tech support on. Some days I get blasted with calls, others no one wants to talk to me. It's a fast paced enivronment that fits me well, I shift gears mentally pretty easily. Often the only help I really need is alittle time with no calls so I can type the quotes, call people back, or find the information I need. The parts that stress me out and really annoy me are situations where I can't fix what's wrong. Where what has happened is out of my control. It absolutly kills me that people in warehouses, mine and manufactors, say something will ship and it doesnt or the freight carrier can't find the correct address or any of a dozen other things. Calls where I bet bitched at, but really, I did nothing wrong. I just want to say, 'shut the fuck up, listen to me. Here is what I can do....' To bad I'd be fired if said that.

Anyways, we talked for awhile the other night. We talked about my entries here and recent events between us. Like I said, it ended suddenly and so things are kinda up in the air. I sent off a longish email yesterday and am awaiting it's reply. Things really have never been less sure in my mind than they are now. I won't say more than that, where and how we stand is what we were talking about and that's what's in the email.

I noticed a bad habit I have. I try to type as fast as I think. Theres no way in hell my poor fingers can keep up. I'm a decent typist. I dont look at the keys. I know I've hit the wrong key often before I see it on the screen. I type without looking at my fingers, unless it's numbers. But even after six or seven years in chat rooms and playing text based internet games, my accuracy sucks. Not only that I tend to miss words, especially when I'm emotionally charged about an issue or trying to type faster than I should. In chat rooms, sometimes I joke the typos are my accent. It's often things like teh or missing one double letter: mising. Sometimes though I miss whole words, which often drastically changes the meaning of what I'm saying. I'll miss 'dont' in the sentence, 'I don't hate you' or not in 'That's not what I meant.' It frustrating and annoys me. I wonder if do that often here? I don't really proof read these. Sometimes I type them in Word first and spell check, but that's about it. I wonder if I come off like a semi-literate monkey peckin at keys. Well, perhaps being semi-literate would a be step up for me and I think I'd rather fancy being a monkey. I like bananas and trees, though I could do without tossin my poop around.

I wrote about $2,000 in bills today, that sucked. I found out today that CT has a luxury tax on cars. So I owe a nice chunk for that, a bullshit tax I think. I don't even own the darn thing, I lease it.

Did I ever mention I really like dried sweetened banana chips?

Did I mention I got my ass kicked at work today? No, I just talked about those comments huh? I run a consignment room at work for one of customers. Basically what this means is, we, my company, keep stock of our material at his location. We tend to call, quite simply and orginally, The Room. It is, more often than not, the bane of my existance. Contract pricing, usage, stock levels and a whole buncha other junk salespeople don't normally deal with I do. Basically, I'm the warehouse manager. I'm in charge or making sure we bill the customer correctly, that we keep the stock levels at the correct numbers, that billing occurs when and how it should. Now, don't be to impressed. I'm only talking about 60 items or so, a very mini-warehouse. How this type of room works, is that throughout the month the customer walks into the room and takes material still owned by Me (read that as my company) and uses it. Then once or twice a month we do a replunishment order. The stock is counted and an order generated for the material that has left The Room. The customer is billed for what has been used. Off that billing, I create a 'stock transfer' and move more of My (read company) material into The Room. The material in the room is never owned by the customer. Very simple and straight forward, well it should be. The upside of the room is that for those 60 items, we get 100% (atleast in theory) of the business. The customer does not have to wait for things to ship, he has them and can take material as he wants 24/7. A huge plus for rush/last minute jobs, and the customer is not exposed financially. I own that material. However, as it often does, reality decides it wants to play and things get all mixed up. Material that should not be part of the room gets in there or people count wrong or warehouse send the restock orders with the wrong material/counts. When I hear the fax machine start up and see Room fax's coming over I tend to cringe. Sure its profitable, or we wouldn't do it, but dear god...all I did today was, with my bosses help, go line by fucking line over the room. Back around Thanksgiving, actaully the week before diary started when I was out visting J and H, a order was done and done very, very wrong. Things were billed and shipped in, what seems to me anyway, random fashion. It took us about three hours this morning to deciepher what the hell happened and then the rest of the afternoon to figure how to fix it. It's hard to explain here, but it was a twisted trainwreck of a mess.

I think will work well for a nice peaceful mish-mash of things..