A photoblog and other things

Today when I arrived at work I witnessed something quite amazing. What I saw could be best described as a sure-fire way of finding redundancy candidates.

At my work there are boom gates such that when an employee pulls up next to one, access into the facility is granted via waving an ID in front of the scanner to raise the boom gate. Sounds complex? No bloody way.

So what do you think would happen if there was no boom gate? What if the boom gate had been broken off by some fuel guzzling SUV earlier on in the morning? Do you think people would analyse the situation and not bother scanning their ID because it isn’t fricken required? Some people would, BUT, statistical analysis showed over half the people wouldn’t. If you want comedy that comes in the “I can’t believe I’m seeing this” flava, all you have to do is watch this for 5 minutes to see that over half the people at your work are drones.

This week has been absolutely insane, hence, no updates. I think I pissed off a lot of car salesmen last weekend when I went looking for cars. That tired me out a lot. I think for most of the day I was saying “no, I’m not interested in buying!” They are extremely persistent buggers over here, much more so than what I experienced in Australia. Once they actually realise you’re not going to buy they turn into incredibly rude people. Mind you, I was looking at used car dealerships where they’re not really interested in forming a relationship with the customer so maybe that had something to do with it.

As if purchasing a car, cancelling stuff over in Australia and initiating stuff over here wasn’t enough, work has been an absolute hassle. Put it this way: people have gone well past their limits, including myself, and we’re all a bit in the “care factor zero and rapidly falling” zone at the moment. I am completely and utterly exhausted.

This may be causing me to have the weirdest dreams ever and sleep quite irregularly. Case in point: I had a dream that I was back in Pata (in country Australia where I grew up as a kid) and I was lying down in some shade next to the shed enjoying the breeze. I then heard something say “Master… Master” and I turned my head and saw a kitten that was talking to me. It then said “Feed me”. As if that wasn’t scary enough, I also had some birds later on in my dream asking the same damn thing. It’s like the scary movies that have the scary children playing – good example is “the ring”.

Luckily though I’ve got Pendulum’s debut album “Hold your colour” to get me through. I had to download a torrent of the album because my CD won’t be arriving for at least another month! That was an insane time to wait and so I’ve been listening to the album for the last week. Highly recommended even if you don’t listen to drum and bass very often or don’t really know what it’s all about.

Crazy lightning
Originally uploaded by daecks.

Over the weekend there have been some massive thunderstorms here in South Florida. Today in fact there was a strike so close that it made my speakers squeal from all the interference. Here is one of the shots I was able to get. The lightning in this shot was striking ground somewhere behind the apartment. Still pretty damn close though.

A little while back I had to book a Visa renewal interview at a consulate outside of the US. This interview was set for early September at the consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. I actually would have liked to have found one in Canada because that’s further away and I can visit Mexico pretty easily from where I live, but I couldn’t even find free slots in Canada before the end of the year for some weird reason. It seems I’ll be trying Canada again though.

I got curious today and decided to find out what was is goin’ down in that part of Mexico. According to this article: “The United States will close its consulate for one week to assess the security of its employees and consulate visitors in this Mexican border town [Nuevo Laredo] after a shootout between drug gangs using machine guns, grenades and a rocket launcher.”

Right… I think I’m going to change some plans 🙂