FUCK YEAH!

I’m sure this is exactly the article that everyone really wants to read.  It’s all about self improvement baby!  Yeah…  I know.  It’s funny, everyone I know who has ever had a job has had to deal with the nonsense where they “train” you to sell stuff, “train” you to be a better person, or some other kind of crap “training” where you spend your time, (and more than likely, your employer’s money,) so that you can do better at whatever it is you do for a living.

I’m calling bullshit on the effectiveness of the whole damned system.  Many times in my past I was sent to some alternate location of sorts where I got to take a break from my normal work day in exchange for a seat in an auditorium where some guy rambled on about the sales process, while I slept and enjoyed some kind of lunch or breakfast on my employer all while being paid for the experience.  Rarely did I learn anything new about how to do my job better, and even less frequently did I become more more productive or motivated.

 So how can I help you be more productive at work?  I guess that depends of what your idea of productive is.  It’s all a matter of how you utilize your free time.  If you look like you’re doing something important, then regardless of if you’re working on something big or quietly downloading porn, you’re doing something important in the eyes of your employer.  (unless of course, someone is paying attention to what you’re actually doing online.)  Retail stores are terrible about their employees “looking busy”.  I once heard this guy use the line, “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean…”  BULLSHIT!!!  Fuck that guy!  Sure there’s times when there’s stuff to do, but there’s always going to be times where there’s NOTHING to do, and by telling your employee that they should find something to do when there’s nothing to do, you’re telling them that you’re okay with them wasting their time.  Busy work rarely accomplishes anything whether it’s at your job or at school, so my best recommendation in situations like that is to look like you’re doing something, even if you’re not.  (On a side note, I want to point out that I strongly feel that the way employers treat their employees in retail stores is inhumane and unfair.  Employees are rarely given the opportunity to take a seat at any time during their shifts and often have to stand in place for hours on end.  It’s a bad way to treat people and should be made illegal.)

So get to the point!

In order to be more productive at work, you need to first decide what makes you more productive.  If soldering all the paper clips together into a mess of crap is what makes you feel productive, then figure out how to do it and start soldering!  If you have a way to generate extra money online or have a band you want to promote on myspace, then use your time and make it happen.  If you’re planning a large scale embezzlement scheme, then get it mapped out and start rolling. 

If you haven’t figured it out already, the point I want to make clear is that being productive at work is doing whatever it is that makes you feel productive as a human being.  Take the system for what it is, but don’t forget that you’re still alive.  Just because you’re going through the motions to get things done at work doesn’t mean you can’t still be productive at the things that make you tick.  If you feel productive and it feels good to you, that’s all that matters.

and just in case I didn’t make myself clear before, fuck that guy! 

When it all comes down to it, I’d rather not work.  I’d happily trade in my job for time I could spend with my family and time I could spend writing music, but unfortunately I’m not in a situation where that is plausible for the moment.  So how is it that I get through the day?

 I create my own amusement.  Around here it’s not all that hard really.  My current employer has me in some new “experimental” position where they are trying out something they haven’t done before in an attempt to place it in their other establishments.  At first I was pretty optimistic that it would do well, but after the concept was built and put into motion I quickly changed my mind.  I did what I could to make sure my voice was heard, but I was yelling into deaf ears.  These people didn’t care about anything I had to say, yet I’m the one in the midst of it all as the “designers” of the project are located somewhere on the other side of the country, oblivious to the actual response of the public towards their endeavor.  When the corporate dictators saw that the new concept wasn’t making enough money, they raised its price instead of finding out why it wasn’t making money to begin with.  The fact is they provide a service that no one really needs, and it’s implemented poorly at that.  The reason they weren’t making money to begin with wasn’t that the price for their service wasn’t high enough, it was that they didn’t have enough interested parties in the service they were offering.  I made a few adjustments to the way everything was being handled and helped change things up to create a higher demand…  this would have worked with the original pricing quite nicely, but apparently creating a value at a reasonable price is beyond these morons.

 Whatever…  I can’t complain too much really.  Since there’s no one using the services this place I work in has to offer, I don’t really have much to do with my time short of writing pointless blogs like this particular one.

 Not all corporations are the same…   some run quite well, while others are good to their customers at the expense of their employees’ well being, and then there’s the ones like this where decisions are made poorly in haste (and when that doesn’t work, instead of finding out why it failed they just make more uneducated decisions in an attempt to fix the problem they’re ignoring!) 

Maybe I wouldn’t have as much anger towards work if companies really cared what their employees thought.  Whatever…  I really don’t care.  When it all comes down to it, we’re all pretty much just fucked unless we were born with millions that flowed gracefully out of our asses.  Fuck it. 

heh.

 Oh yeah…  I started this article off about creating my own amusement at work, and this article went nowhere fast.  Yeah.  That’s how it is…  I just effectively wasted 20 minutes that I would have spent doing nothing had I not written anything.  Hooray for spending MY quality time on random bullshit!

Do you ever find yourself thinking about stuff only to realize that something you had witnessed months before has just now sunk in?  It happened to me within the last few days, and it gave me another reason to be angry at the world. 

I’ve been bitter about lots of different things through the years.  Most of the time these things come out of nowhere and then go away as I find myself caring less about them or I just cease to think about them, but this particular issue has bothered me since I’ve been a teenager, and everytime I think about it, it pisses me off, regardless of if it effects me at the moment or not.  I’m talking about the almighty “dress code”.

 We run into the dress code in many different places in American society.  When I was a teen in school, we had a what I would consider to be a reasonable one for the most part.  Basically, according to those rules, we couldn’t wear shirts with offensive language on them, images depicting violence, drugs, tobbacco or alcohol, and our clothes pretty much had to cover our asses.  Whatever…  two years after I graduated from high school, kids could get sent home for not wearing a belt and everyone had to have a collar on their shirt, with it tucked in.  It was a pretty extreme change from the way it was, and I still feel to this day that it was an uncalled for move on behalf of the school. 

Move on to the corporate world…  corporations are the worst when it comes to the dress code issue.  Some things I can understand, like the uniform for instance.  When a company asks you to wear a uniform, they usually do so with good reason…  to be able to easily identify their employees.  In places like retail stores for instance, it’s hard to tell the difference between employees and customers unless the employees have some sort of identifiable image, and a uniform, be it a shirt and pants or even a nifty name tag helps customers find help when they need it.  In places where certain clothing rules are in place to keep people safe, I can also understand the need…  for example, wearing hard hats in construction sites.  You want a lawyer to wear a suit? 

Whatever. 

I understand that certain clothing is appropiate in certain situations, but what I can’t understand is the need for other types of restrictions we place on employees in the corporate world.  In this day and age, we’ve effectively eliminated the ability for people to express themselves through most types of fashion by setting up guidelines for everything from how you can wear your hair to the types of “acceptable” jewelry.  This is unacceptable!  If anyone can give me a good reason why something like an eyebrow piercing or long hair on a man is offensive, then I’ll happily shave my head and let it grow back in its natural color, but the fact is that there isn’t a good reason for it at all.  A piering for instance might cause irritation to the person wearing it, but that’s their problem, just like it was their choice to wear it.  You might not like my hairstyle, but if I’m happy with the way I look, wouldn’t I be a happier person all together?  Restricting these types of things is just another way to control employess by breaking their will, and molding them into someone else’s idea of what our society should look like.  What bullshit!

Probably the biggest complaint I’ve had about dress codes is that they are sexist in most cases in the way they are put together.  There’s one set of standards for men and another for women.  (I currently work for a company that has a dress code that is the same for men and women, so this isn’t an issue here, but this has rarely been the case in my experience.)  The problem with this is that it creates discrimination between the sexes.  For example, many companies will allow women to wear one or more pair of earrings, while men are told they cannot or can wear only a pair.  Companies like to tell men that they cannot grow their hair past a certain length, while women have virtually no restrictions on their hair.  Sometimes you will also run into situations where the clothing standards between the sexes are extremely different.  When it comes down to it, people need to realize that it’s unfair to set these kinds of standards for their employees.  I should be able to not only share the same hair and jewelry standards as those set for the women in the company I work for, but they should have the same opportunities as the men as well.

What exactly got into my head that prompted me to get so ticked off about this issue this time? 

When I was at a previous employer, I witnessed an odd scene that shouldn’t have taken place.  There was a kid there with a moderate length haircut whose hair was a bit on the curly side.  He always showed up to work early, always kept his appearance neat and was one of the hardest workers we had.  One day the manager that oversaw our department came up to him and gave him a hard time about his hair, basically stating that it was getting too long.  The kid came back a few days later having received a haircut.  Was his hair violating some sort of company policy?  No.  In fact, another member of management had longer hair than any of us, with his hair being shoulder length, still being within the guidelines of the company’s dress code. 

And that’s what pissed me off…  a perfect example of unfair company policies in action, or at least the unfair use of interpretation of a policy that is stupid to begin with.

If I supossedly live in a country that was founded with the idea of its people having the right to express themselves, then why is it that we allow our own people to take away these rights for others?  At the rate we’re going it won’t be long before we have no freedom left at all.

As a sidenote, I would like to point out that an obvious reply to this would be that you don’t have to work for these companies, you can work for yourself, and that you have the right not to work at all if you choose.  I’m aware of that…  there’s no need to restate the obvious.  The majority of us work because we need a way to pay our bills, and not all of us are have the privilege to work for ourselves.  Still, we shouldn’t have to give up our rights just so we can look the way someone else wants us to.  Think what you want…  it’s still wrong.

It’s been a slow month with Alternative Explosion.  I haven’t spent as much time working on it as I would like to, but I’m still here coming up with new ideas that I’d like to explore.  I did just get a new disc in the mail from a band called Otto’s Daughter.  I haven’t had a chance to finish it yet, but so far, I’m enjoying it.  It’s got a lot of energy, and that’s just what I need right now!  Talk about good timing.

 I’m also working on new stuff with my own band, Gravity Euphonic.  I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on the site yet, but I’m a hard working musician myself.  While I’d love to review my own stuff and say it’s great, I’ll refrain from that, so you can check it out on your own terms.  You can check it out at: http://www.myspace.com/gravityeuphonic .

Anyway…  more stuff to come very soon!  Keep your eyes open for the new review.  It should be up within the week!

This movie was open and shut.  Was.  As I was watching it, I was filing it away in the lame movie catagory – unitl the end.  Wow.  I don’t feel bad ruining this so I will.

Basically this chick (Drew Barrymore) moves in with some dude who put a roomie add in the paper.  She looks suspiciously like a wanted killer from another state.  Hrm.  She has sex with him, then denys it and starts talking about “her” in reference to things she appeared to do.  Eventually you think she’s killed her brother for money because an FBI agent tells the dude shes a killer. 

Dude gets confused and finally sees the “Doppelganger” when Barrymore is with his buddy so he figures it must be true.  Barrymore gets a call to meet her doppelganger alone, and dude follows her and sees there really are two of them.  And then he stumbles on masks of the FBI agent, her doppelganger, and several other people he recently met that seemed fishy and figures that one person was impersonating all of those people, including her doppelganger.  Makes sense right?  Wrong.  You find out it’s her therapist doing that so dude figures he killed Barrymore’s mom (the murder she was wanted for) and he says no, her doppelganger did it.  What the hell?  He’s obviously impersonating her and killing. 

That’s when it gets funny.  Barrymore suddenly turns into a worm like thing and splits in two and appears like something out of the alien movies.  The effects are horrible, but it’s so unexpected it’s hilarious.  Like the whole time you’re like “is she lying?  She must have done it!” and then she’s a worm.  ^_^  It’s kinda bad, but the worm thing moves it over to the weird catagory.  Because of that it didn’t totally suck.  f

A somewhat obscure movie from 1988, where some aliens come to Earth and there is a lot of singing and dancing.  Yah. 

This movie might have completely slipped into obscurity if it weren’t for it’s all star cast.  I think people watch this out of curiosity.  That’s why I picked it out of $5 bin at Wal-mart.  The 1988 classic includes Jim Carrey, Jeff Goldblum, and Damon Wayans as the aliens and Down Town Julie Brown (old school MTV VJ) and Geena Davis as girls that are easy.

It’s somewhat musical and completely cheesy.  However, it is funny watching the aforementioned cast run around as aliens and easy girls who like aliens.  (Kinda makes you wonder if they have compatable “equipment” ^_^)

Anyway this is bizarre so if you’re bored or drunk this is reasonably entertaining.  Just realize it’s funny – but not because it was intended to be.