Baby Finances

Last night I went out to dinner with a few people. I had $100 in gift certificates for the place (thanks Mark & Lars!). So when the bill came around I asked the waiter to take that off the bill first - then we'd pay the rest. The bill for four of us was like $150. The other people were more than happy to pay off the booze etc and took the bill. The problem was, the girl went to tip on the $50 that we still owed, not the total $150. Essentially giving them man about a 7% tip. Not so cool. So I had to toss in $20 to finish it off. Which is not bad - just annoying that I essentially paid $120 on a $180 bill. The Indiana Jones movie was not at all what I expected. I expected more Speilberg less Lucas. I feel as if in the last Indy movies there was only a small sprinkling of Lucas - but in this one he had a large chunk which made it feel like the dynamic of the new film was much much different than the first three. I guess it was just a lot different than I expected. ...

I feel like I'm the Ho Chi Min trail at work. I've not been given any assignments to complete since I handed in my letter of resignation. All work that has come in has been assigned to my counter part who is not planning on leave anytime soon. I thought that the last week for most people was pretty busy cleaning up and making sure that assignments are handed off properly so that they are completed correctly. Instead, I sit in my brightly lit office with my Ipod playing, reading crap online, and generally just screwing around. Its amazingly boring; I'm so excited to have stuff to do soon. I realized one other thing this weekend. That some people still play into what our parents generation thought. That you shouldn't talk about money with your friends. I think that is a stupid plan for most people. The best resource you have for knowing if you are getting paid market value is your friends who work in similar positions. Especially if you have a number of friends ...

I went into work a little late today - I showed up about 11am. No one even acknowledged my presence until about 2pm. At that point my boss came in to beat a dead horse - and offer solutions for the problem at the horrible demo yesterday. I smiled and nodded and looked as if I was interested. In all reality I really just wanted to turn to him and say, "I really don't care because this is your problem now to take care of. I did my final duty for this company covering its ass. You can clean up the mess you created." Of course that wouldn't be very kosher . I'm learning when to keep that internal dialog more internal. I was actually really good about it when talking to Jess today too. She loves to dream things up and hope for the best. I'm learning to keep my reality out of hers. It makes us both happier. Most of the situations that we get ourselves into really can be shortened to one of us saying "I reject your reality and substitute my own....

Today was a complete professional embarrassment though I made some major efforts to minimize any damage. It was still bad. Really bad. I don’t even know how to describe how bad it was. I demoed a product that didn’t work completely; nor did it have half its capability, nor could the customer put it through its paces because IT DIDN”T WORK AT A DEMO!!!!! WTF??? I really don’t see how it could have gotten any worse. Actually, strike that, they could have forgotten to send me critical components of the system. I had all the parts except for working fucking software – which was the part the controls the rest of the hardware. I demoed a fucking crippled system. Let me just comment here that I did everything under my power last week to make sure that everything was going to be kosher for this demo – and it still got fucked up. There literally was nothing else that I could have employed form my toolkit that would have helped. I should resign and week early out of j...

Well, we had an interesting weekend. We met some new people; some were great, some not so great. Hiking was fun - I was really exhausted afterwards, but I didn't wake up as exhausted as I thought I would be. I think that the person picking out the place to hiking and who started up the trail first was trying to impress the rest of us which his superior skill and knowledge. You can only hear the same stories (mostly made up) so many times before you just want to kill someone. His roommate was really great and so his is the roommates' girlfriend. I'm not sure how we are going to maneuver it so that the two great people come but leave the annoying one behind. We're smart people, we'll come up with something good. I am not at all excited about having to go to DC tomorrow. Usually I really like DC. I get to go to Neuhaus. Who doesn't love delicious Belgium chocolate? Unfortunately this is another one of these crazy day trips. I'm supposed to leave Bos...

I officially handed in my letter of resignation yesterday. I'm starting at the new place on June 4 th . I only have one more trip planned for the day after memorial day. I will miss some of the people here - but not working here. Resigning was surprisingly short and sweet. I think I talked to the manager for a grand total of about 30 seconds. I told him that I was leaving and when my last day was, he asked "what happened?" and then if he could do anything to convince me to stay. I understand why someone would say that, but I think it's such a bad idea. If a person was just looking for a new job to get more money, and then you offer them more money, what's going to stop them leaving in another few months when they get another job offer for even more money? The base problems for what that employee was looking at other positions would more than likely still exist. The only way that I would consider it (not here of course - but in general) is if there was a ...

June 3rd - first day at the new place. All I need to do is sign and send in the paperwork and then put in my letter of resignation tomorrow. I'm jump up and down excited about this. Jump up and down. I have nothing to say other than I'm extremely happy about this. Yea!

One of my friends from high school just knocked up his wife. And by just knocked up - I mean like three months ago. Guess what they were doing during some winter storm? Bow chica wow wow! We are kind of getting to that point in life were people are starting to have babies. I really used to hate the idea of babies. They cry, eat, poop, cry some more. But they are really cute too. I'm still debating the pros and cons. I negotiated some more on Friday with the company. They upped the salary, stock options, and vacation to the point where it is actually not a ridiculous offer. Plus, I know have an upside. Not too bad for an hour's work over coffee. I'm excited. Jess gave me a really great book for understanding some of the psychology that happens at work. What Men Don't Tell Women About Business was actually pretty insightful. It did a good job of explaining how people self-sabotage. Essentially explaining the unwritten social rules of the business game; and ...

I had a meeting this morning to negotiate... it wasn't good news. Essentially they offered only about a 6% increase - where I need to get something more like a 40% increase. I don't think I want to take that far of a step back in my career. I think I need to figure out what my drop dead point is. I need to run numbers tonight and see if I can make it. There are always great promises of future raises and future compensation, but it's just a promise. And in the industry that they are in there could be a lot of potential market violitility. It's not looking hopeful; but we'll see what they come back with. Part of the problem is that I'm not negotiating directly with the decision maker - nor do I think they are willing to to let me negotiate directly with the decision maker. *sigh* Well at least I figured out what was wrong with it...

That's right - boys - not men. There is a difference. I had to verbally bitch slap some guy today. I had to go to New Jersey at a big facility where someone has to pick you up from security to get in. There were two other people waiting in the lobby - obviously consprirering over something on one of their laptops talking in muted tones. And there was me. Jeans and a polo shirt, with a huge bag of equipment. The guy comes out and hesitently looks around and kind of turns away as if he has the wrong place. Then the security lady motions him and kind of points at me. I stand up and ask his name and introduce myself. Nothing strange here. He starts to lead me down the hall and then turns to me and says, "I was expecting an engineer not a sales person." He's kind of a bumbling kind of person (he reminds me of that guy Rich from freshman year with the race car bedsheets - ironic that his name was Rich....) I know that what he means by this is that he was expecti...

I had a crazy couple of days and I'm finally starting to recover. Thursday at about 3pm I found out that I had to go to Florida on Friday morning, 6am flight, to go fix something that no one really had any idea what was wrong. So I hopped on my 6am flight got down there about 12:30, fixed the crap out of stuff until 6:30, then ran back to the airport as quickly as traffic would allow for my 8pm flight. I thought that I was pushing it a bit b/c I had stuff to check, but my flight was actually delayed until about 9pm, so I had plenty of time to grab some pizza and drink in the airport bar. I love airport drinking. It's always nice to grab a couple of beers after a trip. By the time I got back home it was about 1am. Having gotten up at 4am to catch my 6am flight, I was pretty tired, but couldn't sleep b/c I was so wired after such a crazy day. So it was probably 3:30 ish before I feel asleep. When I woke up at 8am!!! to a bright sunny day, I was super pissed and exhaus...

I haven't slept well since I got back from Dayton. I don't know what the hell is wrong with me. I think my mind is just wrapped up in a bunch of stuff. I didn't realize how much I missed spending time and just hanging out with Kyle until I actually had to leave; the weekend really just made me happy. That, plus the whole job searching thing, is really making me think about if I am choosing the right things in life. Should I be so career focused? Or does that not matter at all? Should I be more focused on my personal life and what makes me really happy? Before my current job I really felt some job satisfaction, and I would have totally said that I'm young and need to focus on my career, and that my friend will still love me and will wait a few years for me to get over this part of life where I needed to be so career focused. Now that I have no job satisfaction I think that making myself happy in my personal life is much more important and that's what I should...

I got the offer letter just now from the company I was all excited about. Ridiculously low balled offer. I was expecting a low ball offer - but I thought it would be about 40% more than what they offered me. Let me state that again 40%. I figured I could probably negotiate up to about 55-60% more than they offered. 55-60% seems like an enormous gap. When she called me she told me that it was "very flexible" so I think she knows that she's low balling me, but I don't think she realizes how much she's low balling me by. I'm not sure how I feel about this negotiating tactic. I always like people who are fair and upfront, but I also understand the mentality of if I can get it cheaper why wouldn't I? I have to admit that I'm more the type of the personality of the latter - but I think I would be really weirded out by offering significantly less than I knew they were worth on the open market. It kind of changes your perception of the company when it ...

Maybe we won't have to worry about it.

This article confirms it. Tall people are better than short people. I'm glad I'm taller than most - but not so tall that I'm a giantess. In more digg news this article makes the most asinine argument on the plant. Is poor health caused by poor socio-economic status, or by poor socio-economic status. The doctors make the argument that poor people have worse health than those lower on the totem poll. Refuting the argument that those low on the totem poll have poor health. It's like arguing which came first the chicken or the egg? The problem is that this is a classist problem - not necessarily a true cash problem. People with lower socio-economic status have poor health. Is it because they can't pay or because they were raised in a way where minor health problems were ignored, is it because they have little control over their lower level job, or is it because they work too much to be able to find time to go to a doctor? It doesn't matter - it's proba...

Two weekends ago I remembered that my little brother was going to graduate university last weekend. So with the current job situation sucking it up, a probable pending offer, and a serious need to see one of my friends who lives really close to Dayton - I bought a plane ticket last Monday morning to fly out Friday afternoon and fly back today. I really had a really good weekend. I screwed around a lot and really accomplished nothing - but it was fun to just do that. We went out to dinner with my little brother, my parents, and my little brother's friend. (I use the term "little" pretty liberally - he's only younger than me and by no means smaller.) My older brother was oddly absent. Everyone thought he was going to show up, but he didn't. We played Wii at Matt's new apartment (very sexy place.) Then we had to get up freaking early to go to the graduation ceremony. I have to say that I LOVE technology, don't you? We lasted through over half of the ...