ok… I really have no idea what to say about this…

click me

I would especially like to draw attention to this paragraph.

During the Iraqi TV interview, Arnett said, “I’d like to say from the beginning that [for] the 12 years I’ve been coming here, I’ve met unfailing courtesy and cooperation, courtesy from your people and cooperation from the Ministry of Information.”

actually… i do know what to say. If they are so nice over there… don’t bother coming back.

dork

stu

I can’t believe how lazy I am…

I saw this tonight on a TV show called “The Pulse”.

Dolphins Sent to Gulf to Hunt Mines

That’s right, the marines have employed dolphins (despite animal rights activists’ protests) to search out and tag underwater mines so that bomb crews can come in and disarm them. Even in murky water where a human could only see a few feet ahead, the dolphins can “see” the mines up to thousands of feet away with the help of their built-in sonar systems. They are taught specifically not to touch the mines, and as long as they are trained correctly there is no direct danger to them.

I think this is a great idea. Rather than spend billions of dollars on some kind of little unmanned, sonar equipped, mine searching submarine, why not train a dolphin? It just makes sense, and I think it’s really cool. 

Today has been so boring. I’m sitting at work wondering why I’m here. Only one out of three Customer Support Representatives is currently helping a customer, and I think she called the customer back from a previous call.

ContentWatch has been going steadily down the drain since January. I’m not sure what started it all, but recently we’ve partnered with a company called Digital River. They’ve completely automated our web-store, which has made things a lot easier for our web guys, but unfortunately it has made things extremely annoying for us Customer Service Reps . . .

Instead of using an internal database, we now have to access their outside database through our web browser. They assigned our usernames and passwords, and we can’t change them. Everytime I enter their database access page I get a popup for their promotional offers and stuff. We can no longer do refunds the way we used to, so Karma is doing them all by hand. It’s so much more work for all of us.

Digital River is also handling all of our marketing email. The system my dad has been writing over the last several months went right out the window, and now when he wants to send any mail to our customers, he basically has to do data entry. He also has no way of choosing which of the people on our list get the email. The email system he designed had the ability to send specific emails to specific sets of previous customers. For instance, we would send certain promotional offers to customers, but you wouldn’t want to send a promotional offer to someone who’s already purchased that particular product. He’s lost all of that functionality through the new system.

Our web-based ContentAudit application cannot be run a second time with an email address that’s been used once because of some field duplication violation on Digital River’s end. When we want to make changes to stuff like that, the only way is to put in a request to their programmer, who does the work on his own time while he’s juggling requests from probably twenty other clients.

The first mass mailer from Digital River went out last week and we didn’t see any improvement in sales from it. If this trend keeps up, we probably won’t be in business much longer.

At any rate, I’m really starting to dislike my job. Along with business slowing to a crawl and all of the problems with the new system, I’m starting to get really tired of answering the same questions over and over again. A few months ago my hours were cut down to twelve or so per week, which is just not quite enough for me to live comfortably. Sometimes I wish I could just quit, but with all of my bills I need as much money as I can get.

Janene says I should get a second job. I’m reluctant to go out and look, but I’m starting to wonder what else I can really do. I’m looking forward to my new job up at the U and for the tuition reimbursement it will provide, but I certainly couldn’t keep that as my only job.

If anybody out there knows of any good job opportunities that would work around my schedule, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop me an email. Thanks! 

A few minutes ago I was looking at my GuestMap and thinking about all the tacks that used to be there. The reason they are not there anymore is because my free GuestMap provider deleted entries after so many days. 😟

So I went looking and found a new free GuestMap site. This one has a limit of 100 posts (as opposed to 40 on the old one) and as far as I can tell it won’t delete any tacks. 😀

My main point in writing this entry is to encourage everyone who signed before to please Tack the GuestMap again. Thanks!