11/19/04: Days of Unironic Moustaches

Home sick again today.  Hopefully I finally rested enough that I will be healed up for the weekend. It's important to be healthy on the weekends.  I am just about out of PTO days, and my remaining allotment are already spoken for -- another California trip at Christmas. PTO stands for Personal Time Off.  Our company has lots of little abbreviations like that -- PTO Days, DIRT safety team, EAC event planning committee -- and I'm sure yours does too. I suppose they're acronyms, although I always kind of thought acronyms needed to be pronounceable.  I guess not.  People love using the term "acronym."  It's like sun shower.

We used to get separate vacation days and sick days, like maybe 14 vacation days and 6 sick days. Then they lumped 'em all together under the PTO heading.  So now we get like 22 days (more for lifers like me) and we can take 'em however we choose.  Somehow, the move to PTO days pissed people off.  They were like, "I don't want to have to take a PTO day when I'm sick." WTF? You get the same number of days -- check that, you get more -- as you did before, and now you can take them for either sick or vacation days. What's the problem?  In the past, if you weren't sick, you'd sometimes pretend to be in order to use up those sick days. Now you can just be like, "I'ma go ahead and PTO it tomorrow.  Maybe I'll go to the movies, maybe I'll go duck hunting, maybe I'll stay in bed watching porn.  My choice.  My personal choice.  Not your business.  Thanks."

I am also on the DIRT team at work.  I think that stands for Disaster Internal Recovery Team. So we really don't need to say, "I'm on the DIRT team," it should just be "I'm on the DIRT." We're responsible for restoring network services* if there's a nuke or a bad rainstorm.  I suppose we're also supposed to make sure people get out of the building safely, but I'm thinking it's gonna be pretty much every creature for itself when the big one goes off.  I know, I am a bad DIRT member.  But somebody else volunteered me for that shit.  Not that I'm not a kind soul, but shouldn't the DIRT be comprised of people who are good at shit like this, people who are all into it?

I am sick and I have little to say. So I will move on to the next edition of the GISG.  HERE IS YOUR IMAGE(#13). Begin guessing at noon. I think you might get that one too quickly, so HERE IS IMAGE #14. You can't start guessing image #14 until somebody gets image #13. Then you can fire away. If that changes, we'll let you know in der comments section.

If you are sick of the google image search game, perhaps you want to give google-whacking a try (don't worry, it's not dirty).

Since I ain't got much tonight, you can play around with this one, too.

I feel bad for all the little kids out there who give a shit, but I have to say it's been a pleasant little autumn without all the hockey.  I could get used to this.

* Actually, I really don't know what we're responsible for.  I should probably get on this.