Thursday 28 November, 2002 at 1:27PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (2)

Hey. Happy Thanksgiving Day. Is it called Thanksgiving Day, or just Thanksgiving? I have no idea. Whatever, have a good one anyway. We are heading to IceQueen's parents house this afternoon for thanksgiving dinner. kewl. I don't know if we're having turkey, but hey, turkey is just a big ugly bird so who gives a toss? It's the thought that counts.

Just been advised we're having chicken. Yay. Who wants to spend six hours cooking a turkey anyway? Ok, the other Weasel is here telling me she's deeply offended about my 'big dumb bird' comments about turkeys - apparently without turkeys the pioneers would have starved and the USA might not be what it is today. Hmm.. in that case, turkeys have a few things to answer for if you ask me.

Yesterday I went to the dentist. What a drama. It was pretty embarrassing, and I'll tell you why. IceQueen's Dad (the Lemur) met me there as he was having a check-up too. I sat in the dentist chair (as ya do) while the dentist took a look at my sharp pointy teeth.

If you read my entry a few days back (weeks, whatever) you would have read that I needed a root canal and crown. I was here for a second opinion (and price check). Ok, this dentist was cheaper, by about US$230 which was a good start. She said that it needed to be started on immediately before it got beyond help (creating urgency like any good salesperson would), so I said yup, go for it. That's where things turned bad.

Naturally I needed local anesthetic, so the dentist shot me up about five or six times around my tooth and then told me to sit in the waiting room for about 20 minutes while it took effect. The Lemur was still in the waiting room, and as I sat down I could feel myself starting to feel faint.. y'know - cold sweat, ringing sound in your head like you're hyperventilating? I told the Lemur I wasn't feeling great and he ran and got the dentist ..just as I went unconscious.

Ok obviously I don't remember being out, but when I came to a short while later I was still sitting in the chair, but instead of a Lemur, I was surrounded by dentists, dental assistants (one was vigorously waving vial after vial of smelling salts under my nose), a receptionist, and some other dude who worked there but hell if I know what he did ..also: a Lemur. A couple of patients were hovering in the background too (bet I scared the shit out of them. muahahaha!).

They moved me back onto the dentist chair and laid me out. Next thing I know two paramedics arrive in an ambulance (this is all within a few minutes) and check me out and ask if I want to go to hospital. Feeling embarrassed enough about the mayhem I'd caused already, I declined. They were kewl with that and said it was probably the epinephrine in the injection that did it (epi mixed with lidocaine), which would have sped my heart up and caused me to black out, combined with the fact I have an infection in the tooth and I'm still getting over a flu so therefore have a weakened system.

Believe it or not, the dentist still wanted to go on with the work on my tooth since it was getting pretty numb by this stage. The paramedics seemed a bit shocked by that and said, "Well, you're the health professional here, but we definitely wouldn't recommend it". I took their advice.

They kept me there for the next hour or two while the dental assistants seemed to be taking turns at holding a fan in my face to keep me cool (and conscious I guess). A doctor from down the road came in and checked me out as well, but said I should be ok. I almost blacked out again just as he left which was kind of freaky since I had been feeling much better up till then.

The dude 'who worked there but hell if I know what he did' bought me a cup of sweet tea and a chocolate thing to eat to get my sugar levels up which really helped. The Lemur stayed there the whole time which I really appreciated and held the fan in my face as well. Thanks Lemur, don't know what would have happened if he hadn't been there, especially since everyone there spoke Russian except the paramedics.

Lemur also called IceQueen and told her what had happened. Poor Weasling must have been freaked, she left work immediately and came running straight to the dentist. I was glad to see her though, even though it interrupted her work. About 2 hours after my appointment, we left the dentist and went home. Lemur went down and picked up a prescription for me - antibiotics for the infection and ibuprofen for the pain (although I thought ibuprofen was an anti-inflammatory, but whatever) and the other Weasel cuddled with me. Think it upset her a bit. *sneef*

That was my drama for the day. Fun huh? Wonder what today will bring.

Oh, by the way it did snow the other day. It snowed around 4am but the snow melted as soon as it hit the ground, so nothing for me to get excited over, I couldn't even throw a snowball at someone. When I got up this morning it was -1°C. It changed to 0°C about midday where it still is at right now, but still no snow. Ok cya.

elections

      Thursday 7 November, 2002 at 5:47PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (0)

Hi. I'll tell you shortly what happened with the interview process yesterday, but first I want to make some points about the elections I mentioned in my previous post. The main election (where I am) was between the incumbent Pataki (a multi-millionaire businessman), Golisano (a billionaire businessman) and McCall (not a multi-millionaire that I'm aware of).

McCall was the one that was being trashed the most on television ads such as the one I mentioned in my previous post. He got 33% of the vote, but expected more. His reasoning: "I just didn't have the funds that the other guys did to fight this election." ..fair enough. Pataki kept his position with 49% of the vote, and Golisano about 15%. The thing is, I don't think Pataki would have done nearly as well if he hadn't been able to spend tens of millions of his own funds trashing McCall, as he knew that would be his main opponent.

My conclusion: the office has indirectly been bought rather than elected, at least to some extent. I know very little of the policies any of these guys promote, since they spent all their time and money publicly trashing each other instead, but it's sad to see that what must be a significant proportion of people voted based primarily on this campaign of shit-throwing more than anything else.

What I have always thought is that all election ballot forms should have an additional option of 'no confidence' which would basically mean that you want to vote, but you feel none of the people nominated for the election are worthy of the position - this would give a far more realistic view of public opinion. I believe many people don't bother to vote mainly because they don't think any particular party is all that great, but their opinion is not taken into account as there is no option to cover that opinion. You see my point? And for the ones that do vote, possibly a significant portion of Patakis 49% win would have been gained from people voting for him purely because he was the incumbent and they wanted to feel like their opinion was being heard, but there was nobody else worth voting for.

I also have to wonder about conflict of interest when you have billionaire businessmen at this level of government who can make decisions that become law, and any one of those decisions that become law can make millions of dollars of difference to some businesses, including their own businesses - often laws that are passed because they generate little interest as they have little or no effect on the general population, but make a huge difference to a few select groups, specifically their own private business, be it directly or indirectly.

I'll give an example of politicians pulling crap like this. Quite a few years ago in New Zealand, the government imposed a national wage freeze in order to stabilize the economy and rein in the escalating inflation at the time. Ok it made sense everyone should tighten their belts, and it worked, that's great, except for one thing. In the middle of this national wage freeze, at about 11pm one night near the close of business for the day, a bill was passed through parliament that was allegedly one of the fastest bills ever to go through. Guess what it was? Yup, the members of parliament elected almost unanimously to give themselves a 5% salary increase. Good one. You just cannot trust most politicians, no matter what country you're from.

Here's another example of what I consider blatant political fraud. Dr Lockwood-Smith during campaign time quite a few years back (again in New Zealand) made a promise that if he were elected as a member of parliament as the Minister of Education, he would revert back to university education being heavily subsidized by the government as it had been only a few years prior, and he backed that up by repeatedly saying quite categorically he would resign if he did not fulfill his promise. This was his main campaign promise, and it got him elected.

Guess what? Yup, once he was safely elected, he did not do as promised, and refused to resign based on the fact that he could not carry out his promise due to unforeseen circumstances in the economy, and that it was not economically viable to go back to the old ways of heavy government subsidies. What a load of bollox. The economy was the same as it was before he was elected. What sucks is that he could not be forced to resign until it came to elections a few years later, by which time people had just accepted things as they were and moved on. As far as I'm concerned, this guy committed fraud to win an election, and should have not only been removed from office, but prosecuted.

Ok I think I'll end my rant there and come back later and post about phase two of the interview process I went through yesterday. Oh, I better add that I did not vote in the recent elections, partially because there was no way I could make an informed decision based on the information that was available.

ascii man ..and other things

      Tuesday 5 November, 2002 at 6:26PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (1)

Isn't that kewl? I thought so. I have my second round of interviews tomorrow morning at the Marriott Marquee in Manhattan. kewl.

Hmm. Don't think I mentioned the interview that wasn't. A week or two ago I was contacted by an agency who saw my resumé on monster.com and wanted to set up an interview for me with Nextel. The job was business marketing cellular and I think some network solutions for about $80k on target earnings. I said bring it on (not in those words), and the guy from the agency rang me back later and gave me a date, time, place and name. The name rang a bell. I realized that I had already interviewed with Nextel a long time ago with the same guy there, and via the same agency, but the guy at the agency said no worries, the job is presumably open again.

Ok so I turn up for this 9am interview in Manhattan looking all professional in my black designer suit and white YSL shirt, silk tie, black leather satchel and Bill Blass overcoat, y'know, the whole nine yards, shining resumé and all. Come 11am I'm still sitting there waiting patiently and wondering wtf is going on. The secretary has been checking his line religiously every 20 minutes or so for me while he's been on some major conference call, and finally just after 11am she tells me he is on the way. Yay.

Finally out comes this guy and we instantly recognize each other and smile and perform the obligatory 'hello again, how are you' handshake routine (I managed to get down to the 'short list' in the interviews for the same position months previously).

He asks, "You're here for an interview?" He looks confused.
I reply, "..err ...yes." I look perplexed.
He asks, "umm ..who sent you?"

One eyebrow may or may not have been raised by me at this point. I tell him who, and the name of the agency that sent me. He then tells me that he doesn't know why they sent me, and backs it up with two qualifiers:

• They aren't actually looking to hire anyone, and
• He's interviewed me already so he would contact me direct if they were looking for someone anyway.

He apologies profusely for keeping me waiting so long for nothing, and explains he was on a high level conference call, although I know it's not his fault, and I leave the building. Damn.

I called the agency and the guy there who sent me was not sure what happened either but also apologizes. An employee there had resigned a week or so prior and he took over her work, and I only guess he found my old file from the interview months earlier and thought it was current. Doh. End of story. Fun huh?

Currently there are elections here and the adverts on television are mind-boggling. There are copious amounts of them all the time, yet not a single one I have seen has actually stated what their respective candidate proposes to do if elected!

It's truly pathetic, like a bunch of egotistic adolescents, they instead have spent their millions of dollars of campaign funds on telling you what the current [insert miscellaneous elected position here] didn't do during their term in office, or else slag off some other candidate and point out every conceivable fault the person has ever made in their entire life.

Just to add insult to injury, the people running these campaigns must presume that the majority of voters are dangerously close to brain dead. Here's an example:

One ad that runs frequently attempts to slur a current appointee by stating that "in his term of office, yes, he has increased the amount of teenagers staying in school (this is a good thing), but at the same time the "results show" there are less students graduating school than before, and the percentage continuing on to college (university) has also dropped. Therefore he is bad."

Ok, hello? Use some logic here. If you're getting kids off the street and back into school, then of course the average level of education is going to be sub-standard at first, and therefore the percentage of kids graduating high school is going to be lowered as a result. Even the slowest people out there must surely realize that many of these kids will get their high school diploma and then join the workforce rather than going on to university, because (1) university isn't cheap, and (2) without the politician's initiatives, they would never have gone back to school to complete their high school diploma in the first place, let alone university.

What amazes me is that from what the polls say, these truly misguided adverts full of half-truths actually work. Scary. Ok that's my rave for now - comments welcome. Are my posts too long?

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