Penny Hero (dot) Net

I’ve got a job interview in a few hours, and I’m nervous as heck. My stomach is threatening not to cooperate, and I have been half awake for the last 3 or 4 hours.

I also had all kinds of crazy dreams. Like, sitting in a lounge waiting for my name to be called when about 15 minutes before my interview, the reception desk calls me over and says I have a phone call. It’s a client from my previous job asking for SEO consultation. In my brain, this gets mixed up with my current situation, as if it’s the same company, and thus I really should take this call to impress my interviewers.

So I talk with this guy about EngineWorks services, his options, how to make a site-map, etc. Then he puts me on hold because he can’t remember the URL to his website and has to go find it.

Suddenly I realize that I’d been laid off from EngineWorks a month ago and that this call is taking a really long time. It’s now 15 minutes AFTER my interview should have started, and i glance into the smokey room of rumpled businessmen who are to interview me and see their disapproving looks and their impatient glancing at their watches.

It was an odd dream. First dream I’ve ever had where I could read a clock. I thought time wasn’t supposed to work in dreams.

okay. i better start getting ready. *is still nervous* I think I’ll turn off my cell phone when I arrive.

I find this very odd. Two of my friends today asked me “How’s working for Comcast?” or something like that. (Granted, one was a postcard dated March 2… but I GOT it today).

I don’t work for Comcast… Never have. Probably never will. It’s just a very odd coincidence that a friend asked me over IM “how’s your new Comcast job?” while an unread postcard asking roughly the same thing was sitting on my desk.

Odd. haha. :)

Comcast was giving us trouble with our internet… which was PREVENTING me from working for a while. That’s really the only connection.

Yesterday evening, I finally launched the new design for my WoW guild’s website. If you feel like it, check it out: A Horde Dazed Knight. It’s not 100% finished though. (12/15/07 edit: I’m no longer webmaster. This site is Shadowfox’s creation.) Some things I still need to do:

• create thumbnails for all the images (instead of just resizing them in the html)
• Add some way to contact me about site problems
• perhaps link to mozilla and put a happy note somewhere in the footer saying the site works best in Firefox (which of course it does)
• Finish the archives. I’m missing the Gnomes’ Night Out stuff
• Fix some random grammar typos and a link in the guidlines
• Pull out the non-guidelines info out of the Guidelines page and create a “resources” page in the main nav (with Dirge’s permission).

These are not in any particular order. :)

In Other News

My job sort of starts today. I’ve had a million technical difficulties since I got hired involving Comcast, which prevented me from being trained with everyone else and caused me to miss one meeting (the second meeting I missed was due to my own stupidity… grrr).

The project seems cool. Improving an existing technical document for ease of translation later. Very awesome and right up there in “some of my most loved things to do… fix other people’s writing!” (no joke. seriously. yes, we’ve long established that I’m a nerd.)

The software we’re using requires windows though… which forced me to hose my linux box… at least until March anyway.

And last but not least

I had an interview with Google last week. That was very very exciting. I don’t know exactly how “well” I did, but I know that I gave a pretty accurate picture of my abilities and my skills, so now it’s up to Google to decide if they want me as a tech writer. I’m crossing my fingers, but Plan B is still a strong possibility in 2008. Yay for more debt! At least this would turn into a USEFUL degree.

I’ve just been informed at the end of the day yesterday that I’m being laid off from my job.

I’m less upset now than I was yesterday. Went out and got pretty tipsy at a bar with my roomie and his friend, which was nice. I’m taking it all surprisingly well. I was recently contacted about a technical writing contract job, so I think I’ll try to go for that now that I’ll have a full 40 hours a week to commit. Could be pretty sweet.

I’m finishing out the month, which will be Super Fun(tm) but at least it will let me earn ONE full paycheck on my great big raise they offered me in December.

*sigh* Never work for a startup unless you have a safety net.

I need to keep reminding myself that employment is not a need-based program and probably never would be even if Ayn Rand had died before learning to write.

Wow.

I didn’t even hear about this before now, but today while reading some of my work-related rss feeds, I came face-to-face with the story of AOL’s big screw up last July… and the fact that now they’re being sued for $5k a person-whose-data-was-released…

wow.

Here’s a link to the complaint and here’s a story and another story.

The “Factual Allegations” in the complaint outline the basic facts of what happened and the consequences of AOL’s mistake. (I read all of it. yeah. really I did.) It explains the basic mechanics of the search marketing business, how companies and regular people can (and have) profited improperly from the release of the data, and the types of potential damage that could still occur from it (including the steps necessary to connect the data with the real names, addresses, SSNs, etc of the searchers).

The thing that makes me sick is that AOL did nothing to make this up to their members once they started realizing what AOL did. All they did was offer members who complained a free month of service (this is even described in the suit). *boggles*

Item 23 describes what happened to one woman whose data was released and the New York Times apparently wrote an article about her after tracking her down THROUGH HER SEARCH DATA. Quote from the complaint:

Once identified, the reporters contacted the individual and asked her questions about her Internet Searches, which included…. As expressed, by the AOL member, her “whole personal life” was revealed. AOL’s response has been to do nothing. AOL has not even bothered to notify its members that their private communications have been released. AOL readily admits that the release of the Database was wrong. In AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein’s own words, “This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it.”

Crazy. (the language-nerd in me cringes at the use of “AOL has not even bothered to…” because “not even bothered to” is not a very neutral way of describing AOL’s (lack of) response.)

Anyway… someone’s heads are probably rolling (three people lost/gave up their jobs over this incident already… I imagine a few more will too once this really heats up in court.)

Anyway… newsworthy, yes.

Distraction from work, yes.

Important? hell yeah.

I’d been telling people I worked with in the Writing Center that in a business environment, emails should be short, easy to reply to, and direct.

I thought I knew what that meant… I’m a good writer, confident in my ability to be professional and clear… direct and concise… I asked a client a question 7 days ago about something related to their company… something I needed to know in order to finish something for them, and never got a reply. At all.

I basically wrote:

Can you give us more information about your [type of service] services? For example, which products on your site apply to these offers? How big can orders be? Do you have any electronic or print materials describing these services we can reference?

And then I said “my goal is to do x, y, and z with this information” in about 2 sentences…

I really thought that this was concise enough. It really only asks one question “can you give us more information” and then clarifies what types of information we need. If I saw an email like that in the Writing Center, I would have said “good job with being clear, clarifying, etc” and thought it fit the business environment.

However, like I said, I never got a reply, and today we were about to finish the project for this client and we still had these unresolved questions.

The bosses from Portland came down today and our President shot an email to this client to get the issue resolved because for one thing, time is running out. His email was literally 2 lines long and just asked

“Hey [name], do you do [x] or do you do [y] for your customers with your [type of service] services? Thanks, [Name].”

…

We got a reply in 5 minutes. He saw my email and suggested that it might have APPEARED that I was asking a complicated question simply by having so many words in my query.

So really folks, short is better. It’s better to shoot off a few emails several times a day with specific questions than to put them all into one email and send it out hoping for a long complete reply.

Moral of the story is: ask one question per email. Make it something that the person can answer sitting down in about 30 seconds. DON’T suggest options or alternative ways of seeing the question. “Either/or” emails work well. Essayistic thoughtful ones do not.

DON’T BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR.

All three of my supervisors at work have a great work relationship with each other and also all have offices within 2 feet of each others…literally. Yet today, they hilariously apparently decided to communicate largely via email and all three of them basically passed each other in the writing center on their way in and out to tell me about the new developments in their conversation.

So it seems that they all knew I was there within 10 feet of their computers and each other, came in to tell me stuff, and then went back to their respective offices to email each other.

Wow. laff laff at the use of technology in humanities departments anyone?

It all worked out though, and we have a new meeting time. I just opened my inbox when I got off work and laughed my ass off at the written record of their conversations with me and with each other.

:)

I just went to my weekly writing center meeting… and was immediately pulled aside and dragged into Dennis’s office to talk about something “serious”. Wayne couldn’t stop smiling so I knew it wasn’t too bad, but I was still a little scared.

But… holy shit.

I’ve just been named the student representative for this year’s Pacific Northwest Writing Center Association. I’d link to a website or something, but it seems that the association doesn’t have one yet. But the association encompasses Oregon, Alaska, Washington… the whole region. Lots of people. (hundreds?) The conference invites hundreds of centers, and since OSU is going to be the host for this year’s conference, they get to pick the student representative.

I’m literally sort of beside myself. I think I actually had a little OBE for a second in Dennis’s office. I was sitting on his couch, and then for a minute i was sitting about 2 feet in front of myself. I’m still a little in shock, but this is going to wear off soon… like when i start getting emails and learn what I need to do. Come April 29th (30th?), there will be lots to do to help prepare for the conference, and before that I guess I might get to vote on some things.

This is… exciting. And a big huge boost to future grad school applications and career.

I’m so gratful.

So, today I had two meetings, neither of which involved me contributing anything accept laughter at Geff for leaving us to pick up his tab the night before after our Budget-request thingie. I was slightly annoyed at the website meeting though, because the first half was basically my boss and co-worker talking about security issues with authenticating our future userbase… all of this I pretty much followed, if not totally understood. I can listen to people discussing security issues and contrary to popular anti-feminist belief, my brain does not turn off. The thing that irritated me was that when it came time for my boss to ask me how the design aspect of development was going, he immediately “dumbed down” his language, to the point that he should have been embarrassed. Yes, I know how to install extensions on firefox, and you don’t need to be surprised when I do it right in front of you. Yes, I know how to upload a static html file to my onid account. Yes, I know how to locate and view a page’s css. My co-worker also seemed to notice, and tried to enter the conversation on a more “normal” level, asking me more specific questions… but my boss maybe didn’t quite notice that.

*sigh* The problem is that I’m probably to blame, because I don’t know how to talk about what I understand. I can make webpages. I even know a little php. I’m learning how to work with more advanced web design stuff, and well on my way to understanding how xaraya themes work. I can modify and write css and “make shit look cool”, and make it work across various browsers, but because of my lack of group-experience, I’ve never had to actually talk and discuss stuff… so I don’t know what things are called, or how group-procedure is generally done. So if I would just learn the vocabulary/diction/discourse that they are involved in, and pushed myself into the conversations a little more, maybe he would stop thinking of me as an archetypal “non-technical girl”.

The funny thing is, my boss’s wife is apparently pretty feminist-ish… so it’s kind of funny that he seems to default to this way of interacting with me. It’s probably NOT because I’m a girl though… I should give him the benefit of the doubt… he’d probably talk like this to any guy who appeared to have the lack of understanding that he seems to think I have…

Anyway… that’s all for now I think. I have seven chapters of The Turn of the Screw to read… and a crappy Philosopy paper on Descartes (*pukes*) to write… and a nihongo test to study for… and a pallet page to make, and some layout mockups to make, and some MLA research to do…

And it’s all going to make me explode at some point soon because my personal life is growing more and more tense… and the more I try to ignore it, the more it scratches at the window. (I’m telling you… androgyny would be nice! demo, I think there’s something wrong with me if I’m trying to cut myself off from the very things that make us human beings and not ants. )

P.S. Hi and *hugs* to . I had no idea you were still lurking around livejournal. Glad to see that you are. ^_____^

This morning I woke up, made coffee and toast, and then sat down to edit one of wikipedia pages on the Red Sox.

My boss at the writing center (a huge Red Sox fan) would be proud.