Oreo had a great time at the party last night.  He had a whole yard and house in which to run around freely and two dogs to play with.  The one collie was eleven and very aged so they could not play but was very friendly and looking for attention from everyone.  It is very sad seeing a sweet dog get so old.

Dudley was there, Katie’s dog, and he and Oreo spent a lot of time running around together.  Oreo does not often get wide open space so it was a nice change for him.  They played pretty well until some kabobs were given to the dogs and some territoriality came into play.  In a surprise move, Duds, who is close to three times Oreo’s size, and a little argument with Oreo and in a flash Oreo was flipped over on his back and panicking.  We had to pull them apart pretty quickly.  That was the end of the fun night for Oreo.  After that he just wanted to be held and to relax.

We had to sleep in a bit this morning just to make up for getting in so late last night.  It was around ten thirty when we finally got out of bed.  I did a little work in the office but only a tiny bit.  Today is my last official day with a contract so I figured that I should at least do something, even if it was only symbolic.

We found out this morning that the Mazda PR5 is not going to be purchased as we had hoped.  We have been waiting for the final approval of the purchase for two weeks, or so, thinking that everything was pretty much finalized and then today, in the midst of everything else, found out that they weren’t actually interested in it.  Of course, bolstering my already hearty dislike for people’s concepts of “vacations”, we would have known this quite some time ago but people went “on vacation” and stopped communicating to the outside world – ignoring obligations because somehow some parts of society have approved the idea of a “vacation” as exempting the vacationers not only from their work obligations but from their personal ones as well.

I think that this concept is probably quite old.  When I was a child (and obviously any time before that) going on a vacation (one that involved travel, at least) meant going to a remote location where postal mail and telephones were impossible to get or unreasonably expensive for anything less than a full emergency.  But that world has past and today with the Internet, mobile phones, BlackBerries, etc. you are no less accessible while in a remote location than when sitting in your living room.  Today, having a telephone that doesn’t reach you everywhere actually costs you more, usually, than one that does not reach you everywhere.

Basically, we live in a world when the traditional concept of escapism in vacations is no longer an intrinsic feature of travel but now requires active, intentional ingnorance (in the tradition, true meaning of the word as a derivitive of the word ignore.)  You have to ignore people trying to reach you.  You have to avoid responding to people.  It is a completely different animal these days.  And this phenominon is not new.  Mobile phones have been making this shift occur since the early 1990s and the Internet has been changing it since the late 1990s.  It has been roughly eight years now, a decently long time, that there has been little to no excuse to ever be out of reach for more than half a day or less.  And now that most people use instant messaging and text messaging via mobile devices all day long any breach in ongoing communications because of a “vacation” has to be completely intentional.

I am not suggesting that people never stop working and never take a break from work.  Moreso I am saying that personal responsibilities are not curtailed in any way by a claim of “vacationing” or being out of town.  People have traditional used the idea of vacationing as a way to avoid responsibilities and communications because it was a difficult claim to dispute.  No one would be able to know if you were truly stuck in a situation without communications or not.  Today that is not true and there are so many, free or nominal cost communications modes and so little change between home, office and hotel in relation to those modes that not responding to responsibilities while away is exactly the same as not responding to them when standing face to face with someone.

If you want some sympathy from me in reference to you being helplessly out of reach you had better be backpacking through Kyrgystan and even there you will likely have intermittent phone and Internet access.  There are very, very few places left on earth where you are truly out of touch and fewer and fewer people who are comfortable being in those situations.  Most people today desperately want to keep in contact via email, phone, web, etc.  Recently I even had a conversation with my friend David while he was hanging out in a cafe in Tunisia.  He was just checking up on his email, FaceBook, etc.  It’s far more interesting, I think, vacationing in places when you can still communicate to the outside world instead of just “disappearing” for a few days and then returning with some pictures.

All of that aside, we are rather happy that we are not selling the car as we think that we will most likely want to have it once the baby arrives in November.  We need a car that can haul some things and will easily fit the baby’s car seat, Oreo, both of us and the baby’s things.  The PR5 also gets good gas mileage and has amazing snow tires.  It just had a bit of work done to it and has been sitting all summer not getting any older so its value to us is probably much higher than its street value and we had been planning on selling it at rather a bargain.  So, other than a certain desperation for cash right at the moment because of the house, we would prefer to hold on to the car.

My afternoon was spent writing a very large BASH script that will take our newly built Castile Christian Academy workstations and turn them into fully ready desktops.  It has to remove all of the unnecessary and inappropriate packages, change repositories, add in needed educational packages, change system files, detect the system’s identity and do all of our standard customizations.  It is rather involved.

I got some word, finally, from the consulting firm this afternoon but it wasn’t encouraging.  Basically, they claim that their hands are tied and they have no contracts to protect them.  It would appear that doing the “right thing” is way too much effort and so instead they see me as a scape goat and are just passing the cuts on to me… including massive monetary gains for themselves.  The original cut was just 7.5% but it escalated to 15.73% by the time that it reached me.  That means that while there was a cut (which was at their discretion and they opted to take) at the beginning I am taking more of a cut than anyone and the only person losing here is me.

In fact, everyone else is making a fortune on the deal – coming completely out of my pockets.  In addition, I took the furlough earlier in the year which was an additional 3.5% or so.  So my total cut, between March and August comes to 19.5%!!  This is insane.  And they wonder why I won’t even discuss the possibility of accepting the cut.  To make things even more stressful I have a very large amount of comp time and 401K money on the line that could very easily be taken away.  At least things look promising to have my contract moved to another pass-through vendor, but who knows what all impacts there could be along the way.  I think I need ulcer medication

For dinner we ordered in Brazilian Pizza again.  It was awesome.  We ate pizza and watched two episodes of Frasier.  We are on the third season still, I think.

The weather is cooler today than it has been in a while so we decided to open the windows and let some fresh air into the apartment.  The apartment has gotten musty and stale.  The air conditioning units did not get cleaned like they are supposed to be because our bed takes up the entire room and there was no way to clear space to do the cleaning.  Or at least we imagine that that is the reason.  Nothing was said to us so we are giving the building the benefit of the doubt that the cleaning process even occurred.  It might easily have not taken place at all.

I was doing some shopping on eBay and discovered an amazing price on a high effeciency Hewlett-Packard DL145 G3 rack mount AMD Opteron based server.  It even comes with the rack mounting kit which is nice.

Andy called and we talked for an hour or so this evening.  Then it was time to walk Oreo, wrap up SGL, do a little work for the office (in the minutes running up to the end of my contract), answer emails, update Twitter and head off for bed.

No wonder it is hard for me to ever actually make it to bed!

This coming Saturday, Dominica and I have Nadine and Clarence’s wedding to attend.  So we will be gone for most of the day.  Every moment that we are not gone I am scheduled to be working – although that is obviously in some question at this point.

Once again I am backed up on email.  One busy day and everything falls apart.  It took me days last time to get caught up on all of the mail.  It comes in so quickly and so much of it is something that I need to keep for one reason or another.  I find the constant flow of it to be pretty frustrating.  Even with all of the diligence that I put in attempting to read everything that pertains to me the levels of SPAM that we have – internal SPAM that is, not external – completely overwhelms us and forces us to automate huge swaths of email reception so it is extremely easy to miss something.  I must spend two hours per day just managing the email.

I had a very busy morning with tons of requests coming in even before my morning started and while I was on the train in to Manhattan.  My entire morning was spent just completing incoming requests as quickly as I could.  Very draining.  I am going to be doing a lot of catch-up work tomorrow – if just to get my mailbox back to a state in which I can manage to take care of people without missing critical things!

For lunch, Katie and I went out to Financier Patisserie on Stone.  It’s Friday so that sandwich of the day is the hot smoked salmon and Gruyeres which is amazing along with their crap quiche which I have not had an opportunity to try before.  Lunch was excellent although it is always so crowded down on that part of Stone – it can be rather uncomfortable to attempt to eat there.

My real shock of the day came in the early afternoon when my consulting firm called me to tell me that not only was I going to receive an “out of the blue” paycut but that it was going to be 15.27% and that it was effective immediately – starting Monday morning (today is Friday.)  I was originally told, by my consulting firm, some month or two ago that there was a cut but that I exempt from it and not to worry.  This news, apparently, is actually the news that caused this disaster to happen.

So my day went from busy to insanely stressful in a moment.  No warning at all that something like this was going to happen.  Blissfully going through my day thinking that everything was great and then “blam”, humongous paycut and a hearty muhahahaha!

Most of my afternoon, somewhat obviously, was spent panicking about what was happening with my pay and my job and my consulting firm.  What a mess.  I finally reached my boss out on Long Island and was able to talk to him and then administration and the staffing department.  The company for which I work was not happy to find out that I was getting  a massive paycut, without warning and for no reason.  Their recommendation to me, that I had also come up with on my own, was simply to not accept the new offer.  On Monday morning, in theory, there will be some serious renegotiations and very likely a change of consulting firms.  We are going to see.

So, somewhat nerve-wracking, I am officially unemployed this weekend.  Monday morning is going to be interesting.  The company at which I work is thinking that things will be okay – but it is still stressful as there are so many variables and changes and potentially bad things that can happen.  For example, this could really impact the 401K that I have been investing into as I am not completely vested yet.  I hate that companies can take away your vestment simply by lowering your rate or firing you to protect themselves.

I was at work until seven this evening.  This is going to be a long weekend as we wait to see what will happen come Monday.  I hate that so much of my career involves major disasters in the eleventh hour and then having to wait while no one is available to see what is happening.  Completely inappropriately, my manager at the consulting firm is both on vacation all next week and decided to just leave in the middle of the afternoon so that I had no one to reach.  I reached out to her backup manager to whom important things are supposed to go when she is not available and that person’s out of office email message said that they were on vacation and that people who needed them needed to speak to the person that I tried the first time!  Circular out of office hand-offs.  How professional.  Argh.

This has been an ongoing situation for me over the years.  I cannot count anymore how many times I have been given incomplete information or have received major changes in plans or have gotten disasterous news on a Friday afternoon (I seriously believe now that this is planned so that people don’t have to “deal with it”) and then absolutely anyone who could be involved leaves the office early and hides.  This has often occurred when work scheduled for a Monday morning gets cancelled and no one wants to admit that they never had a contract for the work.  It is very common.  A consulting firm should never have a circumstance where people are not available over the weekend.  I even left a voicemail for the entire consulting office, before five o’clock which is well before the end of the working day, for just anyone to call me back as it was an emergency and not one person bothered to contact me knowing that I had an emergency and that both of my managers decided to stop working today.

Something that “non-contractors” seem to forget is that in “business time”, a Friday night and a Monday morning touch each other.  There is no work over the weekend.  Not real work anyway.  There is no HR, staffing, managers, etc.  If something is left unresolved on a Friday night that means that it is unresolved over the weekend and on Monday morning.  Did my consulting firm really forget that when they said that Monday morning I had a new rate that that meant that it had to be completely dealt with before I left the office today or else we had no resolution and no contract on Monday morning?  It isn’t like they can get into the office (or will bother to go into the office) early on Monday, contact me before I am supposed to start work and make a deal with the company at which I work and coordinate with the “pass-through” consulting firm all before I start needing to work around seven in the morning!  They aren’t prepared to deal with this situation in any way.  They just run home, stick their collective fingers into their proverbial ears and go “la la la la – I can’t hear you” and hope that the situation resolves itself, magically, without their intervention.

Why does every company find it so important to make going to work everyday and doing a good job incredibly stressful?  It takes real effort to make things have this much stress.  This doesn’t happen naturally.  It took a minimum of four or five people at my lowest level consulting firm alone completely failing to do their jobs to get us into this situation and they aren’t even the company that initiated the whole problem!  It took a lot of screwing up to get here.  How come all of those people aren’t getting major paycuts?  I put in a lot of effort this afternoon trying to find a way to keep my job.  Apparently neither of the consulting firms cares whatsoever if they lose me as a consultant (and, as we approach the end of day – perhaps lose the company at which I work as a customer.)

It’s no wonder people go out drinking so often!

It was after eight when I finally got home to Newark.  When there is this much stress, though, it isn’t fun going home.  You want to stay in the office and get things fixed.  You want resolution.  That’s what makes me the most upset.  That so many people can just knock off for the weekend because it doesn’t directly affect them is outrageous.

So I got home but it is pretty hard to relax on weekends like this.  Ryan came up from downstairs and we ordered in Brazilian Pizza from a place the Dominica and I had never heard of before.  The pizza was amazing.  Min and I got a corn and cheese pizza which was delicious and we all shared a chocolate and cheese pizza for dessert which, sounds awful, but was amazingly good.  Mozzarella, chocolate, cherries and cinnamon!  We will be ordering from this place a lot.  They have like fifty different pizzas.

It was around midnight before we actually got to bed.  Busy day tomorrow.  Working all day and then going to Katie’s house on the Hudson for a riverfront party in the evening.