I live in Long Beach, I can learn how to throw down

I think that a parking lot war is about to begin at work. I feel it in my bones.

I've written before about the unwritten rules of parking etiquette at work. The jist of the notion is that most people, even when not assigned a parking spot, find a comfortable spot that they like to park in every day when they go to work and then park in said space every day. It's a habit. A routine action. All of my co-workers do it. Tell me who you're looking for, and I will tell you what spot they park in. There are tons of other cars in the lot that I don't know who their drivers are, but I know that they park in the same spot every day.

But, BUT, there is some jackass that is totally messing up my parking routine. I have been parking in the same spot for six months. When I first started working this job, I would bounce around the parking lot, trying out a new spot every day until I found the one that worked for me. And once I found it, I stuck with it, and I park there all the time. I didn't steal anyone else's spot. There's nothing special about this parking spot. But that is not the point. Who can say why people choose to park in the same spot every day? I don't know, it must be a chemical thing. You don't park in your neighbor's garage, do you?

For the past two weeks, there has been some loser in an old-model silver Honda CRV that has been trying to take my spot. And every day that they don't get it, they park in the spot on the driver's side of my car. And every time they do that, they keep moving further and further across the double white line separating the parking spaces making it harder and harder every day for me to get in my car. It's as if they're taunting me, saying "How long you gonna take it, huh? Give me the damn spot now and this all can be over!"

I WILL NOT TAKE THIS PARKING SPOT BULLYING! I wish I knew who it was. It's not one of my co-workers, but we are in a fairly small office suite in a four story building. And it irks me as I sit at my desk every day that somewhere in that same building is a motherfucker that doesn't understand parking spot etiquette.

STOP TRYING TO STEAL MY SPACE LEST MY KEYS MAGICALLY SCRAPE YOUR DOOR.

Cavemen All Say "Uhhn"

In the course of my day at my job, I deal with a lot of college students. Specifically college boys. And I say college boys, because college MEN don't say "Yeh" or "Uhhn" in answer to everything you say. In a monotone voice. With no indication that they understand anything you said and basically making you feel like you could be speaking Swahili, if speaking Swahili is a skill you so possess, for all the good that it would do.

WAKE UP, COLLEGE BOYS. You are unimpressive and lame. Be a man. Use the vocabulary skills that the good Lord and your mama gave ya. Be engaged in what is happening around you. Wipe the beer drool dribble off your chin, pull your pants up to your waist, NOT THE MIDDLE OF YOUR ASS, and prove that the thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars that you and/or your parents are spending on your education are being well spent, because if they're not, you could have certainly saved us all the trouble and mailed me that check, and then I would have designer shoes.

And we would all be happy.

My New Job

I just want to say that I'm really sort of loving my new job. I work as an account manager (for lack of a better term that doesn't require loads of explanation) for a small company that runs an online billing service. Including our CEO, there are 12 people in my office. Quite the change from my previous jobs where employees numbered in the hundreds.

The small business environment is soooooo different from the large corporate environment. Dress code? What dress code? I've never seen my CEO in anything other than cargo shorts and flip flops. This week, we started working 9/80s, which means that instead of working 80 hours over a 2-week, 10 day period, we work the 80 hours over a 9 day period: meaning EVERY OTHER FRIDAY OFF. Score! We ordered some food in for lunch today and took an hour and a half lunch break (we technically get 30 minutes); our boss even joined us for about 45 minutes of it.

The people are different too. When you work in a corporate environment, everything is so political. Greedy people selling you out to try to get that promotion ahead of you. It's not like that here. First off, there's no middle management bureaucracy. We have our CEO, an operations manager, and a supervisor. There's not a mish-mash of departments with a VP of this and VP of that, and "Oh, did you hear so-and-so in this-n-that department is retiring and they're going to promote somebody and I hope it's me." Everyone just chills and does their job. Responsibility is divied up equally and it's not about proving you're better than anyway else. People are encouraging and friendly, not standoff-ish.

It's always hard to enter a new work environment, but I think this is the easiest transition I ever made. My first job was working at a restaurant when I was 16. Restaurants are different than any other workplace, I think. Because of the hours that you work and the lifestyle that a lot of restaurant workers lead, there's always something going on. Your fellow employees tend to be students in college, or people that never went to college and therefore can't really get your typical office job. Party here, party there. Everyone is cool, and you get invited to go out with them, but there's still a period of acceptance where you have to show that you can hang. That's a whole lot of going out. Still, I loved working at that restaurant; I had a lot of good friends during that time.

With the job that I was working at when I moved to California, I was working in a customer service call center for an insurance company. Call centers are a whole 'nother thing too. With call centers, you typically start out in a training class. You are with a big group of people that are all new too, so you band together and make friends that way. Those people are the ones that you tend to stick with; you usually spend upwards of 8 weeks with them in a classroom with the same breaks and the same lunches. Once you're "out on the floor" you don't have to worry about the other employees accepting you because you've already got your group. Call centers are clique-y. Not intentionally, but it just happens by design. I had that in Indiana. Once I moved to California, I was like an outsider again. I didn't have a class of friends. And everyone else already had their class, and there's not really room for outsiders.

When I went to work for the mortgage company from hell, that was my first work experience entering a corporate environment as a single person by myself. It was a really strange time. I was no longer in a world of "hey, what are you doing this weekend?" or "wanna go get a drink after we get out of here?" It was really hard for me to adapt. It wasn't a place where coworkers were friends outside of work. It actually was kind of was a lonely time for me. Since moving to California, I haven't really made a lot of friends. Not because I'm mean or have no personality or whatever, but mostly because I don't really have the forum to meet any. When you're younger, your main way to meet friends is through school and work. Since I lost that college forum four years ago when I graduated, that left work. And there I was in a place where people weren't really interested in getting work friends. Except for these two girls, but their conversations were so vapid I couldn't stand to listen to them.

So that brings me to where I am now. I've been here six weeks. Everyone is so nice. They're actually interested in what I did last weekend, or what my plans are for this weekend. They're interested to know how I met my husband. They ask questions, they're involved. Some of the girls have a happy hour planned for an evening next week and they invited me.

It's really refreshing to be in job where I actually enjoy going to it. Sure, I get the Sunday night blues, because who really wants to get up on Monday mornings to fight traffic and go to work? But the point is, once I'm there, I like my job. It's refreshing to be in a job where I'm given responsibility and accountibility. It's refreshing to work with people who don't suck and who I actually want to be friends with, not people that I pretend to be friends with from 8am-5pm because I feel obligated to.

Everyone always says when you get laid off from a job "Don't worry, you'll find something better." I think I have.

Corporate Stupidity

Ah, finally! My husband will finally get to start his new job this week. I was really starting to sweat about that.

When Edgar lost his job last year, he had to take a crappy, much lower paying job working in customer service for a very large cell phone company just for the sake of us being able to pay our bills while he looked for something new. Something new came along late in July in the form of a purchasing position with an international industrial supply company. He actually got the call on my birthday, July 24th, a Friday, that they would be offering him the job.

On the very next Monday, things started to fall apart. They called him back and said that they might not be able to proceed with the offer because he's not a US Citizen (he's a permanent resident). There was this whole thing about government contracts and being unsure if non-citizens could work on those things. And it's not as if they didn't know this--he had three different interviews with four different people for this position, and he stated in all of them that he was a resident, not a citizen. After a week of indecision, they finally proceeded with the offer. Which they should have done in the first place, because he's worked for other companies with government contracts and never had a problem. So at this point, a week had gone by since they initially told him he got the job.

At that point, they sent him the offer papers stating that he would start work on August 3rd. If only. Then they tell him that he needs to take his drug test and pass a background check, and once that's done he'll be able to start the next day. If only. He took the drug test on the 3rd, and that was also his last day at the crappy cell phone company (he had to work weekends there). This, of course, was his last day because he was working under the assumption that the background check would take only a few days (as it does at, oh, say, EVERY OTHER COMPANY ON THE PLANET). Not so much this time.

A week goes by. According to the manager, they're still waiting on hearing back from the background check company. Edgar was calling the manager pretty much every day at this point. Here we are, he's already had his last day at his job, he's spent a week at home, we have a new apartment that we're moving in to in September--he needs a paycheck! So after another week of waiting, the manager says they've finally gotten the background check and he'll be able to start in 3-4 days.

THEN, lo and behold, the background check company left out a document that was necessary to show that Edgar's SSN was actually his own. Luckily, that was something that he could get from the Social Security Office on his own, which he immediately did and emailed to the manager. So everything should be ok then, right? Wrong.

The background check company had filled out all of the paperwork wrong. Edgar has a very long last name (four words). He only uses, and I only took when we married, the first name in the last name. From his own experience, life is just easier that way. Of course all of his official documents, license, SSN, green card, etc., have his full last name, and the company that's hiring him is aware of the name he goes by vs. his official last name. The background company didn't put his full last name on the forms, so everything had to be resubmitted. That was early last week.

So here we are, a month to the day after he was told that he had gotten the job, and he has finally gotten word of the official day that he needs to start. He's out several weeks of salary, and now will not get paid until after we move in to our new apartment.

So with these things in mind, I have a word of advice for his company:

1. Know your hiring policies. I would think that HR would be fully aware of their hiring policies regarding the hiring of residents/legal aliens with work authorization vs. citizens.
2. GET A NEW EFFING BACKGROUND CHECK COMPANY

Ok, I'm off my soapbox. And I'm so relieved. I have been stressing this out in a major way for the last couple of weeks. When Edgar lost his job last year right around the same time that I was told that I would be laid off from The Devil in the first quarter of 2009, everything in our lives was plunged into uncertainty. Can we pay our rent? Can we make the car payment? How much money is there for groceries? With us being locked into a lease at our new apartment when all of this started to go down, all of those questions started swirling around in my head again. I hate that feeling; it's the feeling of not having any ounce of control in your life. All of a sudden you're living your life by someone else's terms instead of your own.

I'm so blissed out right now with the fact that this uncertainty has finally gone away. My life is my life again, and it's going to be a good one.

*Breathe*Relax* Smile*