Wednesday, just before I was fixing to head over to Karen’s for a night of Japanese dramas, I got a phone call from work. This is pretty unusual, because work doesn’t call me unless it falls under one of three categories: 1) Something broke. 2) They need me to cover a shift. 3) I’ve been fired. I mean, let’s face it, no one from work calls you out of the blue, just to chat. Though, that would be nice from time to time, it just doesn’t happen. Anyway, it turns out that my teammate and best co-worker got terminated from his position due to “performance issues.” I’ll just go on record by saying that this fucking sucks. Even more so for him, but more to the point that we’re just not in a position to lose people right now. We just got a sixth person on the team, and we were running pretty smoothly. But now we’re undermanned even moreso again, so now it’s stress city until we hire someone else. I did call him that night, to see what happened, and I got the full story from him, and then my boss on Thursday morning. All I can say is, I just didn’t agree with the call to let him go.
Since it wasn’t my call to make, though, we had this thirteen hour gap in our schedule. I had just returned from my AX trip, so that meant everyone and their dog was scheduled to go on vacation this weekend, instead. This also meant that out of five people, I was the only one available to cover his shift. That meant someone else would have to cover mine. Instead of working from 3pm until 4am, I’m now working 3am to 4pm. At first glance, this seemed like an okay thing. I’m working the same amount of hours and on the same days, just at different times. Then I ran into some problems:
1) I slept on the knowledge that I’d be working my normal 3pm to 4am shift.
2) When I went home from the meeting, no matter how hard I tried, I could not go to sleep. It was too hot, and I have no air conditioning.
3) The guy on shift while I was pseudo-sleeping called me in early so he could make his weekend trip.
4) I got not sleep whatsoever, in the end.
Oh yes. I was up for twenty-nine hours yesterday. Under my normal shift, this means absolutely nothing. I’m seated at my desk, I’m pretty sensitive to sound and the audible alerts we have for problems in the NOC. I can literally tilt my head back and that’s it, I’m out like a light. However, I was working Friday during the normal business hours, and that means thanks to these large bay windows that look into the NOC, anyone walking by could pretty easily see that I was dozing at my desk. Not a good image to be sending to those from upper management who tend to buzz the NOC windows to check on us. That’s all I would need to get my ass fired, too, with the way things have been going. Thankfully, though, some of the daytime members of IT kept coming in to chat with me. Since I work weekend nights, I haven’t seen some of them in months. They walked in to catch up and stuff, and when people are talking to me, I somehow find this energy reserve and I’m wide awake. That was pretty cool. By the time my relief wandered in at 1pm, I was actually playing chess with one of them. I didn’t actually leave until we called the game a stalemate.
As I’m sure most of you are aware, there’s a wonderful database online that takes all the stupid little trivia about movies and television, and compiles all of that information into this nice little cross-referenced database for people to just click on and use. I would have to say that 98% of it is accurate. During the morning and day, I was scouring the net for solid information on an actress by the name of Esumi Makiko, and while visiting IMDb, I noticed that there wasn’t a whole lot of information this actress listed. In fact, the listing of her filmography was woefully incomplete, and suddenly I felt compelled to submit major corrections. Shit, they even had her birth year incorrect. Now, let me explain about my obsession with Esumi Makiko. She’s a Japanese actress (duh) that I had the privilege of watching for the first time in a series shown on KTSF called “Shomuni.” The series was a comedy about a group of girls who work in the janitorial section of a corporate building, and their daily square-off with the corporate salarymen who work there. All they want is a little respect. But it was a good series and very funny. The lead character was played by Esumi Makiko, and I never forgot her. She was pretty tall for a Japanese woman, she towered over some of her fellow male cast members. Long jet black hair, and this icy stare that had the ability decimate you and turn you on at the same time. Some time later, I saw a series called “Over Time” (when you click on that link, check who wrote the user comment listed on that main page), where she starred with Sorimachi Takashi (another of my favorite actors), I sort of rekindled my whole little lust affair with her.
Getting back to the point, in my bid to stay awake, I went out on the net to search for biographical and filmographical information for her. And where else could I go but to the Japanese fan pages? I mean, we can talk about Trekkies all we want, and how obsessive they get, but they don’t hold a candle to the otaku in Japan. These guys make the die-hard Trek fans look like sedated Barry Manilow fans. If you hit enough fan sites to get a general understanding of your research, you can compare notes and figure out the more common information versus some of the sporadic and often untrue rumors floating about out there. Armed with the proper information, I went back to IMDb and I submitted a record number of 57 corrections, including the addition of about 7 new title entries. They probably won’t get around to it until Monday, but when I was done, I definitely felt the sense of major accomplishment.
In a nutshell, that’s pretty much how bored I was last night.
