Saturday Morning, Sun's Up and the Worm Turned
Well now, who'da thunk it, its supposed to be pissing heavy coastal rains today but instead all we've got are blue skies above and a sweet gorgeous day at the ballpark ahead.
Today, Paula and I are headed up to Oaktown today to watch the A's and Indians play, its a 1:05 start today but we've got to show up several hours early because (cue drum roll to pump up the excitement) its Miquel Tejada Bobblehead Day at the ballpark. First 15,000 fans will get one which normally wouldn't be a problem at all since the A's routinely draw about 11,000 people to their games, a travesty considering the quality of the team.
But that's what you get when you put a baseball team in Oakland, its not an especially affluent community and people are more likely to spend their cash on crack than on baseball tickets. Yeah, yeah, I know I'm grossly generalizing but so what, its my party and I do have first hand knowledge of the goings on in that city.

On to the worm turning aspect of the post. Some of you may recall my post a few weeks ago about my fist job review with the new company. It didn't go well although my work was far better without the outside agency supporting us. So I wrote up a proposal, presented it to my boss who promptly tossed it in the trash and basically said I wasn't worth what I was asking for.

Update to yesterday. We had our weekly PR meeting later than usual so I could prepare some extra breakouts of the hits we've gotten thus far this year. Expanding the hits into tiers of importance and relative reach. Not an unusual request at all and it was kind of fun to figure out the breakdown of hits into the categories.

And so, when I met with my boss for the meeting, I brought in the spreadsheet, all 14 pages of it (I did mention that we've been getting excellent coverage in the media so far this year didn't I?) and we sat down to go over it. And that's when my boss shocked the earth upon which I stood, seriously, I thought a lightning bolt could strike me down at any moment.

It would seem that the gestation period for reflection on my proposal was a bit longer than I thought. Although the form was different, I am now working with incentives attached to bonuses! Yee-fucking-ha! And the rest of the meeting went swimmingly as well.

Not quite the same as my recent dealings with the post office.

Mail Theft and What the Post Office Won't Do for You
On Thursday I had two packages delivered to the house. One from UPS and one from the USPS. Both things I wanted (obviously) and yet I only ended up getting one of them, luckily the more expensive and much, much harder to replace of the two, my new Ibis Szazbo. The other one was dropped off on my front porch by the USPS, our front door is on the corner of two busy streets with a lot of traffic and alot of foot traffic so it was not a big surprise when someone saw the package leaning against the door and decided that they needed it more than I did, neverminding that tampering with the US mail is a federal offense.

How did I find this out? The assholes opened my package as they walked away, discarding the box in front of my neighbor's house and keeping the contents, nothing special just a replacement keyboard for Paula's computer because I'd spilled water in hers.

The UPS package was delivered to our back door and was safe and secure when I got home, as it should have been. The postal carrier was just too damned lazy to walk around to put it there or even to leave it with my neighbor. Too lazy to write out a pick-up-your-package-at-the-post-office slip. So our postal carrier didn't do his or her job properly at all and I had some of my things stolen as a result.

What's the Post Office's response? They have to consider whether they will replace the stolen property because it wasn't insured. What the fuck? I have to insure my packages against the asshole postal carrier from not doing his fucking job properly.

And it made me realize that the postal service has no competition, no incentive to do their job better or even at all, no alternative if you want to use another service. They are a monopoly and can literally do whatever they want, even more so because they are a government agency. So, luckily I'm only out about $20 but I am going to catch the delivery person one day and give them a serious piece of my mind and let them know that they basically gave away my things. Come Christmas time, you think this asshole is getting any gift from us? Maybe a lump of shit in a box but that's about it.

Anyway, I'm off to the store for some creamer for the coffee so we can ge tthe day rolling.
Go A's and I'd love to see Tejada break out of his slump today, that would be awesome!