Crunch.

Whats left of Ashley's car. A Truck rear ended us at an intersection and totaled it.

That sucks

I suppose I should explain the pictures above. On Monday, April 11th, 5 days before our wedding, we were in a car accident. We were on the way to pick up my car from Der Wagon and had to stop at a green light because traffic was backed up in it. Almost instantly we were rear ended by a teenager who was, and I quote, "Checking the price of gas" on the corner. In retrospect, the time between us stopping and us getting hit seemed like an eternity, things were going in slow motion. I wasn't seriously hurt, just some cuts from the flying glass of our rear window and some aches and pains the day after, but Ashley has severe whiplash according to her doctor. We have been to the Chiropractor three times since the accident, and she feels a lot better now. We are still dealing with the insurance company, but we have some help with that since Ashley's father is a lawyer.

Kinda chilling. The insurance adjuster came out last week to look at the car (it is parked at her mom's house right now) and said he had seen cars in better condition where people had died. O_o I guess since the kid who hit us truck was lifted up so high, it only crumpled the trunk and bashed the window, never hit the frame and transferred energy into our bodies. He hit us at about 35, you should see the damage to his truck. Negligible. He had a big ass bumper and a wench on the front of his lifted truck, I think all he broke on his car was a turn signal lens. In the meantime, our car isn't safe to drive, the adjuster says that it is totalled, so we have a rental.

I guess Ashley's mom said that someone at Intel had a similar accident and got a settlement of ~$60,000. Considering the accident happened 5 days before our wedding... well, I hope we can expect similar numbers. Maybe some good will come of this. The week before the accident we started taking dance lessons so we could have a nice dance for our first at the wedding. We had 2 classes, learned about 6 moves and were practicing to get it down right. After the accident Ashley was in too much pain from the whiplash to dance, so we couldn't practice. Come the wedding day, nearly every step was forgotten and we looked like a couple high school kids at Prom. I can't get that back, but maybe a settlement will fix it.

Married Life

So, got married on Saturday. It was a beautiful day, everything was great despite the numerous problems that plagued us. But I try to focus on the good things. You can see some of the pictures here, they were taken by Ashley's friend Kat.

The job a Sutter is coming along, training was weak but fortunately they are pretty lax on what they want me to do. So far I have been working on email issues, which is nice because there is almost no direct interaction with the customer. Either they have enough information for me to fill out a ticket for them or they don't, and I send it back to them. Piece of cake, except the email system has been going haywire so I've had a lot of downtime. Today I started taking voicemails, which is alright. I'm kinda fearing getting thrown into the queue to take blind calls, there is SOOOO much to learn here, what department supports what, what applicatations there are, etc etc etc. It'll come with time I'm sure.

I picked up Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory at CompUSA on sale for $29, I'm stoked to start playing it. Ashley said I couldn't start until after the wedding, and it is after! Just need to clear up some hard drive space and install it...

/me can't wait

*Edit* Oh yeah, almost forgot. My titanium frameless polycarbonite lens glasses BROKE yesterday... frikkin piece of crap. Called up the optometrist and they gotta order the part... so I am only driving and watching minimal amounts of TV with my glasses on, as they are giving me a headache wearing them broken.

More on outsourcing, job update, and maybe pickles.

I'm writing this from the training computer at my new job at Sutter in the IT department. Kinda funny, Sutter Health doesn't refer to us as Sutter Health IT, because then our acronym would be SHIT. I started my job on Wednesday, and so far I think I am really going to like it here. Has the same vibe I got at Earthlink, the sense of closeness between coworkers, not the detached feeling I sort of got at HP.

Anywho, outsourcing. Went off on it in my last blog update, going to vent some more in light of this news post, courtesy of the Indian Times. It seems that as many as 12 call center employees of MsourcE, and outsource call center located in India, (who, coincidentally, is the same company Earthlink uses to outsource) stole approximately $350,000 USD from customers of one of the the companies that they are outsourcing for. Now, to put things in perspective, call centers reps in India make about $20,000 a year, give or take. This is quite a bit of money, as the cost of living in India is pretty low.

http://xe.com/ucc

350,000.00 USD (United States Dollars) = 15,281,000.00 INR (India Rupees)

15 million India Rupees. Not sure how much a rupee gets you in India, but 15 million of them sounds like an awful lot.