Who Do I Think I Am??

This one's about the wastes of technology.

What's up everybody? Not too much here...unless you're a part of the world that is known as Twitter. I'm coming to you with an admission...please forgive me, for last week I broke down and created my very first Twitter account. And what can I tell you about it? It's exactly what I thought about it so far...a total waste of my time.

Quick! It's time for a statistical breakdown of my Twitter usage:

Tweets I've sent: 1
Tweets I've retweeted: 0
Times I've been retweeted: 0
Number of people I follow: 124
Number of people who follow me: 5
Actual minutes I've spent on https://www.twitter.com in the past week, not including the set-up of my account or checking to see just now how many people I follow: 0
Actual minutes I've used Twitter on my Blackberry: <5

So far, it seems pretty pointless to me. I guess I could use it in the same fashion my boss does, which is basically to follow (stalk) people you might get a little bit of news from, and get that news about 3 minutes faster than the non-Twitterers. Seems a little ridiculous to me. Of course, maybe if I actually learned how to use the stupid Twitter, maybe I'd be a little more inclined to waste more of my life on it.

The worst part of this? I never fully did a MySpace page. I was probably one of the last people in my family (around my age) to join Facebook. Yet now that I've joined Twitter, I've not heard the end of it from Jess the CWC (Miss "I'm on my computer once a week for 20 minutes"). I'll go on my laptop, open https://www.msn.com, browse the headlines, and say, "Hey, did you hear about this?" or "Did you see the article about...?" and her response? "Oh, no, but I'm not on Twitter so I wouldn't know...guess I'll always be behind ." Yup, that's my girl.

Actually, that's not the worst part of this. After I joined, I stayed up a little later than normal and typed an entire blog entry about "how I was taking this great technological feat" and "how awesome that I'm on Twitter" and whatnot. And then fell asleep before I saved it. And then thought I copied it to a file on my laptop the next day so I could edit it. And tried to find it today so I could use funny little reference points from it for this entry. And yup, it's nowhere to be found.

Other technological failures today:

As I'm typing this, I'm listening to the Sabres game online through http://www.wgr550.com/ instead of watching it on the Versus Network. See, normally, Sabres games are televised on the MSG Network. But this is a nationally televised game that Versus owns the broadcasting rights to. And after hockey season last year, we downgraded our DirecTv package because the only reason we upgraded in the first place was to get Versus. And we never upgraded it because last year, most of the Versus-aired Sabres games were on a Tuesday night, which happens to be my late night at work. Hence, no need to up the package until the playoff start, right? Yeah, until I missed Monday night's and tonight's games. Even if their announcers do suck.

I came home from work to find that our internet was not working. No big deal...kinda expected it because of a billing issue we had a few weeks ago. All I had to do was call Time Warner, let them know what the situation was, and they'd have it back on in five minutes. Which they did...but they change your homepage to thiers when they do that. And then, you have to register with them and download some toolbars and jump through some hoops I didn't want to jump through. Another phone call, this time escalated to the tech support people, who can actually turn this unecessary feature off. All good, right? Well, not so much. I have internet accesss now...but my network icon in the lower right corner (the one with the two monitors that has a tiny globe on it when you have access) doesn't have the stupid little globe thing. And that kinda bugs me.

INTERMISSION MUSICAL BREAK:

A couple concerts coming up at Buffalo's legendary http://www.themohawkplace.com/ this month that I'm hoping to catch... the singer in the first part of this video is Mark Norris (formerly of Girlpope and now of Mark Norris and the Backpeddlers). It's worth noting that the guitarist who sings is Clark from another legendary local band, Doombuggy.

{link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fit96J7sWPk

This band is new (to me) and I've started kinda liking them, and they're also playing the same Mohawk stage a few days later...ladies and gentlemen, if you don't mind some (tasteful) random boob shots in your funk/guitar/rap video, allow me to introduce to you (via my boy Adam) The Knux... http://www.theknux.com/media/default.aspx?meid=7008

VITAL STATS:

"Play Button" bullet points it is!

So apparently now at work, every day until the end of the holiday massacre season, each shift has to have a "Five Minute Meeting" briefing the staff of anything note-worthy, recognizing good work, customer service issues, etc. Any other time of the year we might have 2-3 a month, run by the store manager. Now, we're having two a day (morning shift/night shift). And they're not being run by the store manager. Nor the executive assistant manager. Regular assistant managers aren't even running these meetings. The low man on the totem pole of keys to the store gets the pleasure of holding these informative and delightful sessions. And who would that be? This guy. Yup, Ten more minutes of my day that nothing will get done.

Sure, I could be excited about this...the whole "other members of management trust me enough to get the word out about important stuff to other employees" and whatnot. Kinda cool. But I'm not. Maybe it's because I heard my boss tell the district trainer that she was glad she didn't have to be the one doing it twice a day. Maybe because I'd rather be doing my work, so I don't hear that I'm not getting more accomplished. And maybe, just maybe, the reward for wearing button-down shirts instead of the standard-issue blue polo and basically getting your work done is, simply, more responsibility (which in these days of American Retail, is the closest thing to a raise that anyone's gonna see ).

On the topic of work, go read Julie D - PUBLISHED! 's entry about loving her job...that is how a company takes care of their employees!

If you're really that interested, @fivesixer on Twitter. Tweet away!

Well, it's back to listening tohockey for me. At least some of this technology is working semi-well. Peace out... #GOODNIGHT NOW!!