Them Japs and their Marshmallows

It's official. The Japanese are freaking awesome.

I don't understand you. Can you please repeat that?

The company that I work for has two sides of its operations. The first side of it is CRM Software development, which is the side of the business that I work on.

The other side - which is the more stressful side - is the call routing side, where we deploy and support systems for call centres; phone menus 'Press 1 for [...]', etc.

Worker Bee was on the phone, as he often is, and being the lucky person who gets to sit next to him, I hear his end of a lot of conversations.

One day though, he was on the phone, and I heard a very different sort of conversation.

Worker Bee	...
Worker Bee	Phone's cut off
Worker Bee	...
Worker Bee	Phone's cut off
Worker Bee	...
Worker Bee	Phone's cut off
Worker Bee	...
Worker Bee	Cut off
Worker Bee	...
Worker Bee	Cut off
Worker Bee	...
Worker Bee	Cut off
Marshmallow	Oh my god WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING TO?!

His phone at home had been cut off due to some overzealous line workers, and he was calling through to the company to let them know about it. They didn't have a traditional 'Press 1 for...' menu like the ones that we deploy, they had a speech recognition menu. Supposedly the 'next level up' in terms of call routing technology. The menu said to Worker Bee, "Please tell us whether you would like to pay your account, or if you're phone's cut off."

Worker Bee, told the menu, "Phone's cut off."

The menu said, "I don't understand you. Can you please repeat that?"

In the end, he sent them an email.

And let the evil commence

Daylight savings ended yesterday and everyone around me is depressed.

...

Which has me thrilled to bits. Mwahaaha. Me likes it when other people a grumpy.

No seriously. I've always hated Summer with a passion, and I'm treated like some sort of antisocial nutjob because of it. Now, I *am* an antisocial nutjob, but not for THAT reason.

Even in casual conversation between normal people, I 'pretend' to think the way that summer lovin' bunnies do. I pretend to agree with them that it's a beautiful day, and that we'd better enjoy it because when Winter comes we'll miss these days.

Pffft! Patooey!

I get very tired and often, depressed in Summer. I have no energy, but cannot sleep because of the heat. Having a fan in the bedroom does nothing, it just blows the heat around, like a hairdryer. I initially started exercising twice, three times a day just so I would get so tired physically that I could get some sleep. And while the exercise is exhausting, it wasn't as exhausting as the lack of sleep.

But now! Daylight savings has ended! I don't need to wake up in the dark anymore, we can do Body Jam at night with the darkness around us - feels just like a night club, yo. Light in the morning, dark in the evening makes SO much more sense to me than the other way around.

And while everyone around me grumbles, I, inside, will be doing a happy dance.

<_<

>_>

*does a happy dance*

Seven Deadly Sins

Greed:	Very Low
Gluttony:	Low
Wrath:	Very Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Medium
Lust:	Very Low
Pride:	Low

---

I think it's official. I'm the most boring person on the planet. I only got high ratings for 'Sloth' because I showed no moral objection to sleeping in past noon, and for 'Envy' because I said I'd get peeved if I caught my significant other looking at someone else. I don't have a significant other, so I was just guessing.

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

I beat up my last boss

I spotted this article in my news feed reader, listing the top 10 job interview gaffes.

Reading these makes me think I did pretty good in my job interviews.

• Candidate answered cell phone and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a "private" conversation.
  
  
• Candidate told the interviewer he wouldn't be able to stay with the job long because he thought he might get an inheritance if his uncle died - and his uncle wasn't "looking too good".
  
  
• Candidate asked the interviewer for a ride home after the interview.
  
  
• Candidate smelled his armpits on the way to the interview room.
  
  
• Candidate said she could not provide a writing sample because all of her writing had been for the CIA and it was "classified".
  
  
• Candidate told the interviewer he was fired for beating up his last boss.
  
  
• When an applicant was offered food before the interview, he declined saying he didn't want to line his stomach with grease before going out drinking.
  
  
• A candidate for an accounting position said she was a "people person" not a "numbers person".
  
  
• Candidate took out a hair brush and brushed her hair.

Though there is one that made myself and Worker Bee absolutely splutter. The stupidity - it just blew us away.

• Candidate flushed the toilet while talking to interviewer during phone interview.

I mean, what?! SERIOUSLY?

If I were George Clooney

George Clooney apparently has been trolling the internets and has responded to the randomnessness.

• On Fabio saying he would win in a fight: "Yeah, that's probably true. He's a big guy. There is a moment when you are actually in the argument and you're thinking, 'If I do get beaten down by Fabio, that will be far worse than the pain. I wouldn't shake that."
  
  
• On a website calling him "gay, gay, gay": "No, I'm gay, gay. The third gay – that was pushing it."
  
  
• On Rupert Everett calling the Oceans movies a "cancer" that are "destroying us": "Where did that come from? You kind of go, Dude, weren't you in Dunston Checks in?"

And my personal favourite.

• On Brad Pitt: "Well, you know, if I was a girl and he was a girl, and I was a lesbian and he was a lesbian, I'd be all over him."

My respect for him just increased nine times.

Anyone who can be that random deserves points.

What? I'm just reading...

A bunch of relatives came over for dinner last night. I always despise these gatherings on so many levels - firstly because dinner typically gets served at about 10pm, and I've managed to devour a loaf and a half of bread by then due to the hunger.

But mostly because of the abusive behaviour. My relatives are nasty nasty people, and since I fail on so many requirements of their Ideal Indian Girl criteria, they feel the need to point out my 'flaws' every opportunity they get. You're too fat. You're not a lawyer. You're not a doctor. You're not married. You don't have kids. You don't speak the language and I don't care if noone taught you because you should know anyway. And so forth.

They also seem to 'help themselves' to me. Grabbing my limbs and bit of my body to point out "Eh! Look at how flabby this is!", since I am not a human, and I do not therefore, deserve respect.

As demonstrated by my grandmother last night.

Marshmallow's grandmother walks up to her and starts poking at her right breast
Marshmallow	*splutters* Excuse me?!
Marshmallow grabs grandmother's hand and pulls it away from her
Marshmallow	Just what do you think you're doing?!
Marshmallow's grandmother makes a face
Grandmother	I was just reading your shirt
Marshmallow	There's no need for you to poke and prod AT MY BOOBS to read my shirt!
Marshmallow's grandmother laughs
Grandmother	You're a very strange girl
Marshmallow	:-S

And we have... err... lift off.

Prettyness has been completed.

Now I just need to find some funny stuff to blog about.

Hmm. I foresee this to be a rather challenging task.

Is this thing on?

Errr... sorry its been so long.

There really hasn't been much funnies going on.

Though watch this space. I'll be redoing the CSS for this blog, and once it's all pretty to my standards, there'll be more to come.

Hot Coffee Girl: crankier old lady

I've been using a 'Recommended Reading' category on DYHAXLIT for weight loss related posts, though upon reading this awesome rant by Hot Coffee Girl, I think it's about time I started a category on here for the same thing.

Things are different back than they were in my day. Women have the right to vote, they are in the workforce, they can fix cars. You, as a gender, are not nearly as instrumental as you once were to our survival. Hell, gals these days can even stop off at a store and get things that can take your spot (pun intended) in the bedroom. Consider this when you walk around like you are god's gift to women. You're replaceable. Get over yourselves.

Read! Stat!

Extremely Supportive

My work building just had a fire alarm go off, and the whole building had to be evacuated.

But before I go into that, let me explain a bit about the support calls I take at work. The company I work for support a major telecommunications company (think along the lines of Vodafone or Telstra- let's call them... errr... Pingu), and when they have problems with their call centre software, they ring us up and ask us to fix it.

I'm currently in training, so I take the calls that don't get answered by the other two support staff. They've actually started getting lazy while I've been here and deliberately don't answer the phone because they both know that I'll pick it up. I don't have a proper support phone, so the calls that they miss get diverted to a cellphone, which sits on my desk. I guess the idea is that I can walk around with it and ask the others for help and so on and so forth.

So we just had this fire alarm. We evacuated the building, and while all of us were standing outside, one of the other support staff gasped and said, "Who's got the support cellphone??? What's going to happen if we get a Pingu call and noone answers it???"

:-/

It's a fire alarm causing an evacuation, I think they'll understand.

Heart of Ice

It was pretty cold this morning. Nothing worthy of complaining about, I had hot water in the morning, no pipes had burst, we still had electricity (before any South Islanders begin whinging about poncy Aucklanders - honestly, *some* Aucklanders have better things to do than whinge all day.), so I was just getting on with it. Sure, I would've preferred staying in bed and not going to work. Sure, I would've liked to have snuggle up with a hot chocolate and the latest Harry Potter book. But such is life; you're better off just getting on with it instead of wasting energy and time complaining.

When I leave the house after having breakfast, this is what my routine is.

1. Walk down the driveway.
2. Turn on the car's engine.
3. Turn the heater on - both to warm up the car, and demist the inside of all of the windows
4. Walk around the outside of the car, using a squeegee to wipe down the outsides of the windows.

1, 2 and 3 all went to plan. Though when I made the first movement with the squeegee on the front windscreen to wipe off the condensation, I heard a KRSHHHHH and saw that the windscreen appeared to be as it was before - meaning, opaque. You couldn't see through it.

That was when I realised. My windscreen was freaking FROZEN. That wasn't condensation on it, it was ICE.

I've heard of The Days when the windscreen used to freeze in the morning, but apparently Global Warming had taken care of that. I guess New Zealand's winters have other ideas.

Oddly enough? I didn't find this irritating or horrifying or angrifying in the slightest. I thought it was freakishly cool.

Adieu, fair students - Part 1

It was rather fortunate that my last semester as a University tutor had me come across probably a nicer bunch of students than I've had to deal with in the past.

The very first semester I tutored, the whole of the class was fine apart from one student who was crazy upon crazy. Sarah-II said that she'd never encountered a student like this one, EVER. And to make this even more memorable, others in the department said it must've been about thirty years at least since a student like this one came along. So how lucky was I to have such a problematic student to deal with first off the mark?

The second semester, it wasn't ONE student that was causing all the problems, but a collection of them, whose favourite past time seemed to be whinging about how they couldn't do the work that they never put any effort into. The one moment that sticks in my head about that semester was when a gaggle of them followed me from the lab to Sarah-II's office - Sarah-II was sick at the time and had told the students to leave her alone since she didn't want to infect them (how considerate) - to whinge about how they couldn't do the lab work. Sarah-II went back to her worksheets to try to make them easier, but then got angry with them all since it was a STRUGGLE to make the tasks any easier.

The semester following that, there was one guy who smelt very bad, one guy who had a problem with authority and kept on challenging you in an arrogant sort of way, a deaf student who was incredibly talented but didn't sit the test because he went to a camp in the South Island (yeah... I'm puzzled by that one too), and another student who used to take ten minutes to ask a question. As in, it took him ten minutes to get the words out. AND he used to ask questions at that pace in class. Oh sweet mother of mercy.

This final semester - there was no sign of the crazy students who would harass us for hours with demented justification as to why they deserved an A+, not a C. No sign of students who would whinge about how exercises were just soooooooo hard without putting any work into it. No sign of arrogant sorts, no talented deaf people who took off to the South Island when the largest assessment before the exam was upon them, no bad smelling students, and no students who took ten minutes to ask a question.

There weren't even any signifiant plagiarisers. We had dramas in the past of students copying quite badly. I was beginning to think that this was going to be a boring semester.

I attended one lecture - Sarah-II probably thinks I was being a good tutor, but really this was my coping strategy from staying away from the cafeteria line - and Sarah-II covered some certain material. Sounds fair? A guy comes down to ask her some questions about the assignment after the lecture is over. Fair enough, I've seen this sort of thing before. And Sarah-II is very approachable, unlike several lecturers I've encountered before.

I later attended another lecture, where Sarah-II covered some different material. The same guy comes down to see her after class to ask her questions; but on the material that was covered in the last class I'd attended. This would be okay, if he was asking for clarification on content he didn't understand, but in actual fact, he was asking how to do a certain thing in the assignment. Sarah-II is much too nice to the students in that she says, "This is how you do [x] in the assignment" when she's teaching the content.

Apparently, this was a common thing for Sarah-II. Every time after class he'd come down to ask her questions on how to do the assignment when she'd clearly stipulated them in the previous lectures. You'd think by the sixth or seventh time he'd actually realise that the stuff taught in class is ACTUALLY USED in the assignments? Perhaps?

I mean WHY would you come to class, and spend a whole hour sitting there, if you were only going to ask questions about it later? I totally get it if you don't understand something, or tried to do something and got stuck, but this guy hadn't even attempted the stuff and was wandering on up to Sarah-II as if she'd never taught the material before.

She HAD, and he was THERE when she taught it. I saw it with mine own two eyes.

What clean teeths you have

Seeing as it's been omgwtfbbq length of time since I've updated this blog, I thought the natural thing to blog about upon my return would be another thing that I've abandoned looking after.

My teeth.

On the 6th of June, I went to the dentist for the first time in about 5 years. Needless to say, I was terrified. Every time I'd been to the dentist thus far, someone had looked at my teeth, gone, "Your teeth are fine", and then charged me $70 for it. Now, after a bit of tartar build up and a more importantly because of a discount being run at a new dentistry , I decided to brave a visit.

I haven't ever had a professional teeth cleaning before, so when the dentist sat me down and explained that my teeth might be a bit sensitive afterwards, and that 'a bit of bleeding is normal', the first thing that crossed my mind was "Huh... NOW I see why people hate dentists."

He told me that if things got a bit uncomfortable, I could stick my hand up and he'd back off and give me a break. Of course, I wanted to be all macho and impress everyone and tolerate THE PAYN without taking any breaks at all.

The first few minutes were fine. A bit of scratching and grinding against my teeth, that while feeling odd, weren't paiful. But THEN when he got to the area where the teeth meets the gum, it got SORE. Oh so sore. SO DAMN SORE. I was trying to scrunch my face up in pain, but given that I had a bazillion different dental instruments stuck in my mouth keeping it wide open, there wasn't much face scrunching going on. It felt like an age, but he wasn't moving on. He was working over the same set of teeth, and I kept on trying to tell myself that once he move on to different teeth, that it'd be okay. He was working very hard to get 5 years worth of build up off there, but it hurt. After a couple more minutes and some tears that had managed to slip out from the sides of my eyes, I sheepishly stuck my hand up. Immediately he backed off and let me sit up and take a break. So much for being macho.

This went on for about 45 minutes, and several more hand-stick-ups for pain reprieves.

You would think after that, I would have stunning white teeth that gleamed in the sun like someone from a dishwashing liquid commercial. I looked in the mirror and didn't immediately see anything different. I thought, "45 minutes of pain for THAT?!" But upon closer inspection, he'd gotten rid of all of the tartar from my bottom front teeth, and there was a lot of build up there. What was also there was the scabs from the blood. And they continued to hurt for days to come. Eeesh. Whoever thought that soft bread rolls and soup could look so comforting?