On Many Subjects

Something weird is happening at work. The phone rings, I pick it up with my normal cheerful speil designed to get people to respond and I heard nothing. So, I repeat myself.

Me: Good Morning! This is SUPER HIGH TECH WEB DESIGN COMPANY. How can I help you?
Caller:.....
Me: Good Morning! This is SUPER HIGH TECH WEB DESIGN COMPANY. How can I help you?
Caller:.....

Then, I hang up after listening to a protracted silence because nobody says anything.

I know the phones are working because get plenty of calls from people who actually say stuff, but this is ridiculous. At least 8 or 10 times every day I get a call from NOTHING.

Coworker #3: No one is on the phone. What's up with that?
Me: I dunno. I happens a lot.
C3: Maybe it is a wrong number.
Me: 10 times a day?
C3: Maybe they have a bad connection
Me: 10 times a day?
C3: Maybe it is aliens who are trying to make first contact.
Me: Oh, yeah, right. If I were an alien trying to make first contact with the human race, SUPER HIGH TECH WEB DESIGN COMPANY is the first place I would call AND I would keep on calling until some dumb human finally said the correct secret code to get me to respond.
C3:....
Me: I think you are calling me from your cell phone just to mess with me.

Me: (As Coworker #3 walks away) I'm right, aren't I? Answer me!

Then to the empty office: No one ever answers me. Maybe I am the alien. No one ever listens to aliens.

After whining about my lack of commentors (not necessarily my lack of readers) I feel I must explain WHY I have been lax in my posting.

4:30am--Alarm goes off
4:30am--Toss the alarm across the room to shut it off
4:39am--Somewhere on the otherside of the room, the snooze alarm rings and I have to get out of bed to find it. Since I am up, I may as well stay up
4:44am--Make coffee
4:45am--Check my Outlook, Opera, Yahoo Messenger, GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo news headlines to find out what happened when I was sleeping
5:00am--guzzle a cup of coffe while I make my breakfast
5:10am--eat breakfast and work on my novel
5:45am--Shower, brush teeth, fix hair
6:00am--Clothes on, make-up on, cat fed and watered
6:15am--Out of the house. I start my car (hoping it will actually run) and drive drive drive, over the river, through the woods, down the road, up the road, through the tunnel, past the airport, see the Atlantic Ocean, watch the sunrise, avoid several accidents and finally get to work.
7:30am--Unlock the door, make the coffee, sit at my desk and begin working
12:00noon--Eat lunch at my desk as I continue working
3:30pm--Leave work to drive home (please see 7:30am and reverse the action)
5:00pm--Arrive home
5:01pm--Remove my work clothes and get into my jammies
5:05pm--Make dinner
5:30pm--Eat dinner while I check my Outlook, Opera, Yahoo Messenger, GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo news headlines to find out what happened when I was working.
6:30pm--surf the TV for a few minutes before settling on the Science Channel, Discovery or Animal Planet as background noise. Check to see what is coming up that evening to see if I need to set the DVR to automatically record something that I may watch over the weekend or I may delete over the weekend.
6:35pm--8:00pm--Work, work, work (school work, or Virtual Assistant work)
8:00pm--Bedtime

Which, by the way, makes me one of the most (temporarily) boring people alive. It seems like I spend most of my waking and non-working or non-driving moments staring into space. I am told it will take about 4 months to fully adjust to not being able to take an afternoon nap whenever I want to. Working in a Big-Girl office sucks. I have two more months to go before this will be fun.

I wrote about my terrible apartment in my last entry.

How about this?

Since I have a new job, I am not here very often, so that gives me less time to despise it.

I know you have all held my hand during a lot of events in my life, dear readers.

Here is another new event: Today, I started a new job in a new office... I am still a Virtual Assistant, but I am doing that part time because my hours fell off and I was going to starve to death if I continue trying to make a living being self-employed.

It's not easy, I can tell you, especially if you have developed a bad habit of eating on a regular basis, which I have.

My new job is a DREAM job for any person with an interest in web development, which I have, of course. I am going to be working on Search Engine Optimization, writing articles, writing web content, manipulating graphics for web sites, web design, and writing blog entries (who would have ever thought you could get paid for that?) It is a dream come true for me. The company handles over 500 websites, so there is a lot of work to do.

The people I work with are nice and interesting. Today was day one and I was given about a ton and a half of information to assimilate before I go in tomorrow morning, but it was a great great day... except for the tractor-trailer that was disabled in the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel. That wasn't so great. So, you take three lanes of traffic and squeeze it down to one lane and the world stops moving.
Once everyone passed the truck, it was like we were all participating in the Indy 500 and I was only a 1/2 hour late on my first day at work. What a way to make a good first impression.

Which brings me to the question that I am addressing to the universe, today: Why do vehicles always become disabled in the tunnel instead of the approach to the tunnel or after they are through, when they would have somewhere to put their disabled vehcile that wouldn't disrupt the flow of traffic?

Working as a Virtual Assistant does have plenty of perks beyond the obvious one of getting to commute a whole two seconds to get to the job site and then being able to wear my jammies all day if I want to.

Most VAs are women. A vast majority are women with small children who work from home to save on exorbitant day-care expenses. Many of those women are single moms. It is unusual to have a male Virtual Assistant, but the agency I work for has one, that I know about. There could be others.

In a IM conference that is remarkably like a chat room. The players: Kathy, Sherry, Martha, Guy and Me.

Sherry: What do you do to unwind after working all day?
Kathy: I like to go to the spa and get a massage.
The Only Guy VA in the Group: I do that, too. Hey do you girls ever get aroused when getting a massage?
Kathy: OMG! He is such a guy.
Me: Then, his question shouldn't surprise you.
Guy: No one answered me.
Martha: Yeah, it happens to me all the time.
Sherry: Me, too. I mean you lie there and someone touches you all over. But, then, I'm a single mom and it doesn't take much to get me going.
Kathy: I have a husband, but with a screaming baby in the house, I love to get away to the spa. I think it is time away from home that arouses me.
Me: What about you, Guy?
Guy: Are you kidding? I never get aroused. I am a total cheapskate first of all and having to pay that much money makes me nervous. Second, Yanni playing on the speakers is a real libio killer. Third, everything smells like lavendar.
Me: So you don't get aroused when you get a massage?
Guy: No way. It is probably because I am too old, too.
Martha: So, a massage never got you aroused?
Guy: Yeah, when I was in the drama club in high school, I used to get totally aroused when we gave each other massages. It is hard to remember your Shakespeare when you have a woody. But, then if the masseuse looked like Princess Leia in her slave girl outfit, then, maybe. Probably.
Sherry: Oh on, you did not just say that!
Martha: What do you think this is? a Locker Room?
Me: Good grief!
Guy: Stop being girls.
Me: Only if you stop being a guy.
Kathy: Do you leave a big tip if you don't get aroused at the spa?
Guy: If I got aroused, I wouldn't leave a tip.
Me: Why not?
Guy: Because that would be like a physical thumbs-up, so to speak. Job well done! I wouldn't need to leave a tip to express my gratitutde.
Me: He's right. He is a cheapskate.
Guy: I heard that!
Martha: How can you hear anything? We are in a Chat room.
Guy: Metaphorically speaking, of course. Oh, wait, we are in a chat room! I forgot. So, what are you girls wearing?

It occurred to me that most of the people I associate with on a day to day basis are somewhere else. What I mean is, they live in a city that is far, far away.

Most of you know I work as a Virtual Assistant, which is a fancy word for secretary, but what makes it fancy is that I don't have to be sitting in your office to work for you. I can sit in my own office and do my nails while on a conference call with six people and edit some idiot's web page because he can't spell worth a hoot and the spell checker button doesn't work on his computer. All at the same time. And normally, I will be making a sandwich, reading and/or creating a blog entry and listening to the neighbor across the courtyard yelling at her (spouse, brother, boyfriend or casuaul acquaintence... I don't know the relationship) to get the f**k out of the f*****g apartment and get hisself (her word, not mine) a f*****g job. The ultimate in multitasking. The really cool part is most of this can be done while I am still in my pajamas. And I get paid to do it.

But, that isn't what I wanted to talk about so, I will start again.

Most of the people I know live somewhere other than where I live. In fact, a vast majority of them I have never met in person. One classic example is all of you grand Opera friends that are stretched across the globe and on every continent except for Antartica. So many places are represented.

And my family is stretched liberally across many state lines and county lines, so most of my interaction with them is via the telephone, computer, or snail mail. I choose the telephone most often to talk to the family.

Even my bf is in another state and we communicate mostly by the computer because when we get on the phone, something strange happens to the space-time continuum and we start talking and then all of a sudden it is several hours later and we wonder where the hell has the time gone and what did we talk about that was so important that it took several hours to discuss? But that is okay. He satisfies my mojo and when we finally physically get together, then... well it is like Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July all happening at the same time. Pretty cool stuff.

My bf proposed an idea that this may be the wave of the future, that people with have a circle of thousands of friends, most of whom we will never meet in person, ever. The old traditions are slowly eroding away. I think (strongly) this is the way to create true globalization. Differences and philosophies will fall away and people will do what they always do when they get together in the name of friendship and companionship. I feel like I am on the cutting edge of the future and it is really exciting.

Proximity is never a problem in my new global society. It is a global mindset and although I live by mself, I am never alone and likely I have more interaction with people than someone who hasn't expanded their thinking across the entire planet.

The first order of business is discussing the weather in our particular area of the world, when I start talking on the phone or in IM with someone who lives somewhere else and acutal business isn't involved. (I often wonder what poeple would talk about if there was no weather.) In a conference call on Friday, I spoke with ladies who are from New York, Kentucky, Colorado, Utah, Alabama, India and Australia. That is not an unusual conference call for me. We talk about things just like we are in the same room... kids, pets, spouses, work, the weather.

I feel like an emissary for globalization because political boundries and ideologies, religious differences and social strata do not enter into my daily routine even though my day may start out like a bad joke... a catholic, a Republican, a Hindu, a single mom, a sheep farmer and a Harvard graduate walk into a bar...

In the neverending quest for money on which I have become incredibly dependent, I have to figure out a way to work for two insurance companies, be a telemarketer for a guy in New York, Mystery Shop Old Folks Homes both on the phone and on site, edit the novel I have just finished and then submit it for publishing, work on the novel I haven't finished, be a good mom to my cat, work on my blog, take yet another class in my quest for the illusive master's degree, up-date my websites, feed my fish, have my nails done on occasion, watch SciFi Friday on the SciFi Channel, heat up a slice of three day old pizza and keep in touch with close friends so they won't forget I exist... All of this while taking Sunday's off.

I think I need to figure out how to live in multi-dimensionally. So far living in just three and sometimes four dimensions doesn't seem to work out too well. I need to add one or possibly two more. Maybe eliminating something from life is a great idea... like eating the three day old pizza. It tastes like the box it come in, anyway.