Update XVII: I Ate The Strawberry (The REAL, AUTHENTIC Update)

[Indy Texas]

There's been a schism of the Update.

Will Eraserhead maintain control, or will Bushie's Avignon Papacy stubbornly persist?

[Indy Texas]

How about you guys be adventurous and have spaghetti made with whole wheat pasta and put some sliced eggplant and mushrooms on top?

[Indy Texas]

I know he's sad, but he's staying strong for mom.  He is not a crier.

I never got that idea... what is not strong about crying?

And the work thing, when my cousin died I had 6 days off. Then when my grandmother died I had... 3 I think.

Most of the other times (yikes, just thinking about that) I tend to only have the day of the funeral off. Unless it's inter-state.

Mind you, I live in a country where workers are generally treated with more respect.

I think it has to depend on your relation to the deceased. I fortunately have yet to experience the death of a close (immediate) family member. But unless out-of-town travel was involved, I would not expect to take any more time off than the day of the funeral itself and I don't think it's reasonable to expect more than that unless your spouse or your child has died.

[Indy Texas]

His boss is already moving on from him.

That's my concern.  When Bushie returns next Monday, will  his boss think:

1) Wow, I missed Bushie.......back to work!

or

2) He was gone?  Didn't notice.

That's what's happening. I think he'll just hang on until November 1, and then he'll let Bushie down easy and that will be the end of it. When you have an employee who's new missing multiple days like Bushie is doing for doctor's appointments and funerals, it doesn't bode well. I'm not saying he should skip the funeral, but he could just take a half day, you know? Go home the night before the funeral, go to it at 10am, then go back to Tulsa and go to work in the afternoon.

But because his boss offered him to take a week off, I'm thinking it's all over. He basically said Bushie wasn't really needed.

Agreed. If you can leave your job for a full week, you're not needed as a full-time employee. There is a difference between requesting a week off and making preparations and asking co-workers to handle certain projects in your stead, and your employer suggesting you take a full week off when that was not requested. If he thinks not having Bushie around for a week won't be a noticeable burden, he's thinking about not having Bushie around period.

Honestly, Jeff, if you haven't started looking for other opportunities, you ought to start after the funeral.

[Indy Texas]

Hi, guys, I made it home to Tulsa.  We had a family dinner after the service, so I didn't start home until 1345.  I got home about 1530.  It was a good and fitting service.

I'm hearing what you guys are saying.  It is odd for a new employee to get a week off for a non-immediate family member.  My aunt told me to thank my boss for letting me off for the funeral and to grieve properly.  It meant a lot to her for me to come down and help carry the casket.  Even though he gave me the week off, I did help my cause by going into work anyway for all of Monday, half of Tuesday and I will keep my promise to him to return the day after the funeral, which would be Thursday.  I had planned to take Friday off, but since I was off today, I will work the second half of the day on Friday.  I should get back to work by 1230 and will work until 1600.  It's only 3 1/2 hours, but that's more on my paycheck.  I will get back to a 40 hour week next week.  If he does let me go at the end of October, then my aunt's brother told me I could apply at his place where they have gobs of positions including CAD work.  I'm not too worried.  Plus, I will go out feeling good about myself.  It's not guaranteed that I will be let go, though, so I'm not going to even act like it.  I'm not going to act defeated, because that will only doom me.  Instead, I'm going to get back to focusing one day at a time and doing the best job that I can.  If that's not enough, then so be it.

No, but it's also not guaranteed that you won't be let go, and recent events have left a lot of flashing arrows pointing in that general direction. I'm not suggesting keeping all of your stuff in a cardboard box next to your desk. I'm just suggesting you put some feelers out there so that if something does happen in a month, you have an exit strategy in place.

Things aren't going so well at my job right now. They're having cash flow problems and a recent major case was not decided in our clients' favor. Because I am the assistant to the managing partner, I am less expendable than some, but I'm still reviewing my resume. I have been wanting to leave for a while and the current situation has removed some of the inertia. My goal is to be out of that place on my own terms by the end of the year.

[Indy Texas]

Hi, guys, I made it home to Tulsa.  We had a family dinner after the service, so I didn't start home until 1345.  I got home about 1530.  It was a good and fitting service.

I'm hearing what you guys are saying.  It is odd for a new employee to get a week off for a non-immediate family member.  My aunt told me to thank my boss for letting me off for the funeral and to grieve properly.  It meant a lot to her for me to come down and help carry the casket.  Even though he gave me the week off, I did help my cause by going into work anyway for all of Monday, half of Tuesday and I will keep my promise to him to return the day after the funeral, which would be Thursday.  I had planned to take Friday off, but since I was off today, I will work the second half of the day on Friday.  I should get back to work by 1230 and will work until 1600.  It's only 3 1/2 hours, but that's more on my paycheck.  I will get back to a 40 hour week next week.  If he does let me go at the end of October, then my aunt's brother told me I could apply at his place where they have gobs of positions including CAD work.  I'm not too worried.  Plus, I will go out feeling good about myself.  It's not guaranteed that I will be let go, though, so I'm not going to even act like it. I'm not going to act defeated, because that will only doom me.  Instead, I'm going to get back to focusing one day at a time and doing the best job that I can.  If that's not enough, then so be it.

No, but it's also not guaranteed that you won't be let go, and recent events have left a lot of flashing arrows pointing in that general direction. I'm not suggesting keeping all of your stuff in a cardboard box next to your desk. I'm just suggesting you put some feelers out there so that if something does happen in a month, you have an exit strategy in place.

Things aren't going so well at my job right now. They're having cash flow problems and a recent major case was not decided in our clients' favor. Because I am the assistant to the managing partner, I am less expendable than some, but I'm still reviewing my resume. I have been wanting to leave for a while and the current situation has removed some of the inertia. My goal is to be out of that place on my own terms by the end of the year.

I've got my resume ready to give to this company that my aunt's brother works for in case I do get let go.

Then give it to them. It would look a lot better for you to quit this job and start a different one than it would for you to be laid off from this job and start a different one. The former allows you to spin it in your favor however you want - that you left because it "wasn't a good environment" for you, that you didn't "feel challenged enough."

[Indy Texas]

I don't think he should quit unless he has an offer from his family members company. That said, I do think he should apply because this job sounds like its nearing its end.

When I said he should give them his resume, I meant he should keep his present job and then give them his resume and then only quit if they offer him a job.

The only problem with this new company is it is in Oklahoma City, so I would have to move yet again while keeping my apartment in Tulsa since the lease doesn't run out until May 31.

You can sublease it.

[Indy Texas]

i dont understand why bushie doesnt pursue becoming a preacher.  he seems to love church (and church people).

See King's post. Bushie thinks he's going to be a powerful businessman who makes loads of money and is the talk of the town. Whenever someone comes to him with a realistic opportunity, he scoffs at it as being beneath him, like being a security guard or working in retail or working during school or anything like that.

I don't think he likes CADD and only did it because Papa Bushie told him to do it. If he really liked it, he'd want to learn all he could about it; practice it; ask whoever he could for guidance instead of watching the clock all day; and he would've finished his class instead of leaving early while doing the bare minimum to graduate.

I know what it's like to work jobs you don't like. Most of my summer jobs in undergrad and high school were at a golf course where I worked 15 hour days from 6am to 9pm and it sucked being outside in the heat. I'd watch the clock or play on my phone half the time. That's Bushie now. He just doesn't like CADD no matter what he says here.

Because being a CADD drafter is the go-to ticket to riches and power? What is the ceiling as far as career advancement in that field? I agree that Bushie has a very archaic vision of himself being the sole breadwinner in his nuclear family household and retiring from his CADD job at age 65 with a pension and a gold watch.

I still maintain my opinion that Bushie would be better suited doing Christian non-profit work or becoming some sort of pastor. He could eventually become a program director or a grant writer.

[Indy Texas]

Jeff, I think at this point it's clear that your decision to leave your program early, not do the final project, and then proceed to spend several months proceeding to forget a large chunk of whatever you paid $7,000 to learn was a mistake.

You say your main problem is attention to detail. That's like an accountant saying his main problem is not being very good with numbers. There is no point in hiring a CADD person at all if they're not going to pay attention to the details and make sure the designs are exactly the way they're intended to be. I don't really know what the professional standards in that line of work are, but if there is some way you can do continuing education, whether online or taking another class at MetroTech, you ought to avail yourself of that if you seriously want to stay in this field. You also should have sought out a mentor at your present job, but alas that ship has already sailed.

The litigation paralegal in me is wondering if your Tourette's puts you in a position to sue your employer, but it sounds like they're too small to be covered by ADA and most other workplace laws (and I seriously doubt a state like Oklahoma adheres to anything beyond the bare minimum federal laws). And besides, even if that were an option, it seems downright sickening to consider bleeding a small business dry and likely destroying it altogether just so you can get a lump-sum settlement to cover your daily Braum's combo meal and premium cable packages.

DO YOU WANT TO DO THIS JOB, JEFF? I want you to seriously answer that. Don't talk about the student loans - those are a sunk cost and there's nothing you can do but pay them regardless. Don't talk about your fantasies of a stable middle class life and a wife and kids. Don't talk about wanting to be independent of your parents. All of those things can be obtained through a lot of different avenues, some no doubt more promising than this one. If you're going to try to shoehorn yourself into a job that you do not seem to be succeeding in, you're just going to cycle through a couple more CADD positions, render yourself unemployable in that field and then return to your call center joke jobs. And there's no path to a real life through those. The only thing sadder than a 32 year old man who's dependent on his parents is going to be a 42 year old man who's dependent on his parents. At this rate, that's you in a decade.

I don't know why I'm wasting my time writing this because you're not going to listen to me if you're not going to listen to anyone else here.

[Indy Texas]

Good advice for workers:  be first to work, last to leave, no music, head down, don't watch clock, show up every day, don't suck.

You catch on fast, newbie.  The Update is an excellent ongoing education on How To Not Live Your Life.

Yeah, the American workplace is terrible.

How are things for workers Down Under?

Not that bad... I mean, the idea that you can't get sick or need to be away from the office for the first six-weeks without being fired?

I mean, there are certainly more restrictive and controlled workplaces.

This is Bushie's first [real] job and he's been kind of mediocre when he is at work, from what we've gathered. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone to be at work 5 days a week every week for at least a couple of months. For God's sake, he's missed more than a WEEK of work already! What would you say if you hired someone and two weeks later they disappeared for a week?

The way you talk, you'd think he was in China working an 18 hour shift on the iPhone assembly line.

[Indy Texas]

Constructive Idea #48482984:

CarMax has dealerships in both Tulsa and OKC. From my understanding, their sales associates are paid hourly rather than by commission, and since the cars have fixed non-negotiable prices, that takes a considerable amount of pressure off the salesman. At their Houston stores, they even have little golf carts to drive you to the car you want to look at, so there's not even any walking involved.

Can Jeff handle this?

[Indy Texas]

Constructive Idea #48438573:

Jeff should move to North Dakota and get a job at a well site. He can be a flagger - the guy who stands there with bright orange batons and directs the trucks into the jobsite. Literally anyone who does not have a positive drug test or a criminal history can get hired doing something up there.

Best case, he actually learns something and makes some decent money.

Worst case, he injures himself, which gives him a socially acceptable justification for swearing off gainful employment and spending the rest of his life on SSDI.

[Indy Texas]

Seriously, guys, I know where my career is headed.  It is headed in a good direction.  I have a few corrections I need to make, but I'm on my way to something good.  The future is brighter than it's ever been.

maybe work on my CAD for an hour or so after the game tonight.

Jeff, at this point you are basically the Baghdad Bob of your life. You think things are fine when they're not. You think they're going well when it's quite obvious they aren't.

The future is brighter than it's ever been? Well, you weren't about to get fired a few weeks ago, so I'd say your future was brighter a few weeks ago than it is now.

You haven't changed your attitude at all. You're still going to spend all your time napping, watching TV and going to church, and if you have an extra hour to spare when all that's done you'll do some half-hearted CAD work or job searching. I'm not calling your abilities into question. I'm calling your judgment into question and pointing out that your priorities are totally screwed up.

[Indy Texas]

Do you have a learning disability or something, Jeff?

You've had over six months to get all your ducks in a row on this CADD thing. People kept telling you to practice and you didn't. People kept telling you not to leave school early and you did it anyway. When you got your negative performance review, they told you that you needed to work on that outside of the office and instead you watched more baseball and gorged yourself on church potlucks. You had multiple opportunities to deliver and get your $#!% together and you didn't do it.

The fact that you are two days away from getting canned now is proof enough that your effort has consistently and repeatedly been half-hearted.

Why wait until tonight, Jeff? Why aren't you applying now? Why aren't you calling that relative of yours? Or, a better question,

Why did you not get your act together to begin with and avoid this whole situation?

I'm not asking you for some cagey admission that you could have done things differently. I'm asking why you refused to take any of the advice offered to you. I'm asking why you always grudgingly admit that you need to improve and then do nothing to actually make that happen.

[Indy Texas]

Again, I've said this before, but apparently you didn't listen.  I was away from my resume all weekend.  It was on my main computer at home, and I was on my laptop 100 miles away at my parents.  I didn't have access to update the resume and apply.  So, I did a search on Friday night and found a few places I can apply to tonight now that I'm back home on my main computer, which includes my family's company, and I found the two places I will go tomorrow morning.

I know that despite having degrees and certificates in very technical fields, your approach to technology is less developed than that of my 55 year-old mother who is a liberal arts professor. I keep most of my "important" documents, including my resume, in a cloud drive that I can access anywhere. I use OneDrive because I can access it through my Outlook.com email address. Dropbox is another widely used one, as is iCloud if you have any Apple products. You need to sign up for one of these, particularly since you seem to often go back-and-forth between Tulsa and OKC.

"It was on my other computer" is a downright pathetic excuse to make in 2014. It's not a valid excuse at all.

[Indy Texas]

Hey Jeff, have you ever considered a career at Walmart? I genuinely think it'd be a great opportunity for you. You may recall that until recently I was a Customer Service Manager there, and I can honestly say without hyperbole that you would have been far more capable and much easier to work with than at least two-thirds of my former colleagues among that management team.

Assistant Manager is the lowest salaried position with pay starting at ~$40,000 per year (i.e., after taxes, you would get around $1200 every two weeks). You also get full benefits and an annual bonus tied to store performance that is generally in the ballpark of $5,000 to $15,000. There are eight assistant managers per store, and it takes time to fill vacancies, so at any given time it's actually fairly likely for a store to have an opening in the position. You can get hired in directly as Assistant, although some store managers prefer to promote them internally (if you're hired in any hourly position, you can apply for an Assistant Manager spot after IIRC 12 months).

It's a job that would compensate you well and plays towards your strengths (and wouldn't really have as much of a way for your weaknesses to interfere). It'd be very easy for you to ensure job security and become a favorite candidate for promotion; just follow these steps:

1. Take to heart the stuff they teach you about Sam Walton's vision and philosophy in your orientation, because quoting from them is an insta-win trump card when dealing with your superiors
2. If you're doing your job right you'll be doing very little actual work- when you are told to do something by your own boss, you're supposed to "delegate" and tell your minimum wage underlings that they have to do it.
3. You have no reason to be scared of difficult customers because you are literally told to give them everything they want so they go away and stop bothering you
4. Walmart Corporate grades stores and allocates bonuses using specific performance metrics, and the store manager has to focus on those numbers above all else. If you ignore all other concerns, problems, and complaints so that you can look at the store's statistics page and find the red numbers, then do something to make the red number become green numbers, and brag about how you fixed what was obviously a serious/pressing issue, you will be looked upon as a walmart wizard and management genius.

Also, you will probably like this part, before you officially become an Assistant Manager you are grouped with other new Assistant Managers and you all stay at a hotel for four weeks so you can learn how to manager by taking an easy class in the conference room. For this 28 day period all of your meals are payed for in full by Walmart and you can eat literally anywhere you want. I've heard stories from four different manager class things, and in every single one a competition developed to see who can spend the most of Walmart's money on their extravagant restaurant purchases

But for real, I think this is the kind of job you'd like to have, I think you'd be successful doing it, and the fact that you have a college degree means you'd automatically be on the top of the pile of job applicants. Also free food!

Let me know what you think; if this is something you'd be interested in I'm totally willing to help you on this 

Bushie, this seems like a great opportunity! Why don't you go apply to some walmarts?

http://jobs.walmart.com/

I pity the hourly part-time working stiffs who work in a Wal-Mart run by Jeff and have to report to him. $8 an hour with little or no benefits in return for cleaning up his messes and putting out his fires while he probably takes a nap in the back office. And if they actually succeed in doing so, he'll get a performance bonus. No justice in this world.

[Indy Texas]

So far in the 2 1/2 hours I have been home, I have updated my resume and sent in two applications, one of them to this family member's company.  I am still looking for other jobs to apply to.  I am about to grab some dinner and then get back to the job hunt.

I know I have many doubters on this forum, but I must focus on what I know I can and need to do and not let all the negativity get to me and get me down.

Are you cooking it or buying it? And what kind of processed, fat- and sugar-laden garbage masquerading as "food" will you be shoveling down your gullet this evening?

[Indy Texas]

Maybe we're going in the wrong direction here. None of these job ideas seem to be working, minimum wage grunt work is beneath Bushie and going on disability probably is too.

That leaves an option that many men in his situation have pursued: find a reasonably industrious woman who is stably employed and also suffers from low self-esteem; convince her she needs you and you're the best thing that ever happened to her even though you're a broke, overweight, unemployed schmuck, and let her go out and bring home the bacon while you sit around the house all day doing whatever the hell you want. Dump some of your seed in her, make her have a kid by you and you two will officially be irreversibly entangled.

Poor black and white men with few skills or ambitions all across the country have gotten the steady income and roof over their head that they need by becoming Common-Law Husbands/Baby Daddies to women who deserve better but lack the self-respect to actually dump those losers and find someone else.

Jeff would do well to find a woman who is a nurse's aide or has some other comparable stable, working class job, who came from a broken home and has daddy issues. They tend to set their standards lower than they should and the fact that Jeff has no priors and doesn't use weed/meth/etc already puts him at the top of the heap. She'll pay the rent, cook and clean while you sit around all day. 'Tis the white trash way of doing things.

[Indy Texas]

Here's an example: http://www.prismresearchinc.com/about-us/studies/#/?study=study1415

It requires basically to be locked in on site for over a week, but after that just 9 1-2 hour visits, and it pays almost $3000!

But of course Bushie wouldn't meet the BMI requirements. Didn't consider that. Of course I'm sure there's plenty of studies requiring obese subjects.

You want to pump Jeff full of untested pharmaceuticals?! Are you trying to kill him?!

[Indy Texas]

If BK is willing to put his own reputation on the line by offering Jeff up as a referral, I'd say Jeff would be crazy not to jump on this ASAP.

[Indy Texas]

It wouldn't surprise me if politicians started holding campaign rallies in Wal-Mart parking lots.

This would be great because it would inevitably cause a hilarious calamity

Walmart vigorously prohibits anything from ever happening in their parking lots except for A) parking and B) things that are specifically and explicitly approved by the store manager in advance. This strict rule lets them shoo away union stuff at the first hint of trouble and keeps potential picket lines on the far side of those giantass parking lots, except with enough vagueness that they can't claim it's specifically to target unions.

There's a 24/7 "labor relations" hotline that a store is supposed to call when anything union related happens (my computer training told me it should be called like literally any time I ever heard someone say the word "union" on the premises).

If a campaign event was happening but the shift manager forgot it had been scheduled, then saw the campaign placards from a distance and mistook them for picket signs, then it's entirely plausible State Senator whats-his-face would find his campaign event being forcibly broken up by modern-day Pinkertons

What would happen if I showed up and paraded around the store waving red banners and singing "The Internationale" at the top of my lungs?

[Indy Texas]

this wal mart chat is pretty boring.  though i was delighted to learn that one is supposed to report even the mention of the word 'union.'  it really is a great company.

anyway, bushie,  *DO NOT QUIT* tomorrow.  go in and face the music.  if you get fired (which is 99% likely). so be it.  but dont quit.

Walter, you don't have to go blue... But at least give green some thought.

I remember back in the day, Walter was an R-MA. He's under some sort of delusion that there can be mass prosperity (and by mass, I don't just mean the quarter of people who are legit professionals) without unions. A true believer.

Isn't he some kind of a blue collar worker himself though?

[Indy Texas]

Jeff, if you do end up in this position, please do your store's customers a favor and make sure that someone is actually at the Site-to-Store pickup counter or designate someone whose job it is to check every so often and see if someone's there.

Every time I have ever ordered something for in-store pickup, (1) there is no one at the counter, (2) the little "Touch the Screen to Alert an Associate" screen never works, (3) an endless stream of employees comes in and out of the restrooms and breakrooms right next door and no one ever asks me if I need help despite the fact that I am a non-employee standing at a counter that no employees are attending.

It's extremely irritating and it ends up taking an absurd amount of time to get what I ordered.

[Indy Texas]

My impression of WalMart workers has been more that they simply don't give an Inks about your precious S2S purchase. Being in a hurry to help people has never been their strong point. But if you're already online, why not just have whatever you're buying shipped to your home? Or, conversely, if you prefer to go to the store, why bother going online? Are you buying something so supremely obscure that it's not ordinarily carried by The Largest Store on Earth?

This happened on two separate occasions. On one, I was buying a new iPod for my mother for Christmas; I ordered it online because I hadn't been able to find it in store; I was buying it from Wal-Mart because I had a Wal-Mart gift card I wanted to use toward the cost; I used site-to-store because I was home for the holidays and didn't want it sent to the house in case she or someone else opened it. On another, I was buying light fixtures that they did not have in their stores and that were noticeably cheaper than comparable ones at Lowes/Home Depot and I didn't have them shipped to me because that costs money and I'm cheap/ain't nobody got time for that.

[Indy Texas]

I must say, the product placement this season is getting very innovative. Get the viewers talking about the sponsors.