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.

Splinter Cell 3 demo score. Next step is to go through knocking out the least amount of people possible, no killing, etc. To be a ghost.

Earthlink revolves around poo.

http://www.youdecideonline.com/youdecide_home.htm

Anyone whos seen the new Earthlink ads on TV knows what I am talking about. "Who deserves a new office?" or "Who gets a company car?". I for one, am furious.

For those of you who don't know, I worked at Earthlink from August of 2001 until February of 2004. I loved it there. We were like a family, we had a lot of fun, it was just an overall great place to work. That started to change in the beginning of 2003, when Earthlink announced that they would be outsourcing all of their dialup tech support. Earthlink has always outsourced, just not on this scale. The Natomas office where I started closed and we moved to Roseville, no big deal. The feeling of family was starting to leave, however, things seemed to be getting darker. Our higher-ups assured us that they had no intention of outsourcing our high speed products like DSL/cable/satellite, that these postions were secure. What a crock. In January of 2004, right after the new year starts, we get the news: Earthlink would be outsourcing all of their phone based support, email and live chat as well. We had essentially six or seven weeks until everything went bye-bye.

Overseas outsourcing is getting very popular. Dell did it. Dell went from number one in customer support to number two, maybe even further down; Apple, whose call centers are stateside, rose to the top. Dell aknowledged their mistake and bought back tech support to the states. Basically, what a company gains by outsourcing is money. It is cheaper to send support overseas than keep it here. I guess there is a fine line to be aware of, that is, how much your customer base can stand talking to someone whose first language is not English. Not that I am racist, not that I am a xenophobe, but I believe that it is incredibly important that you and the person on the other end of the phone have an understanding with one another for it to work. We were told that if Earthlink kept their call centers in the US of A, within a year the company could fold. So it was in the company's best intrest to save money by sending support elsewhere. It was hard for us to accept, but we all moved on with our lives. I wouldn't trade anything for my time with the company, the people I worked with were awesome.

Which brings me up to date on the rant I had going. What. The. Fuck. "Who gets a company car?" "We did such a good job on scamblocker please reward our efforts!". What about the THOUSANDS of call center employees who were let go because of money problems? Is Earthlink saying now it has money, it is going to reward the few employees they kept? I find the whole thing insensitive and downright immoral. A scant year later Earthlink is in the clear, so select few get new offices and cars.

cl_rant 0

Blog you, mother blogger.

Got back from meeting... ouch. Had to shell out $3k for food, and we have just about that much left to pay as well. Next week. Fortunately, after that, we won't have much left to pay for, just rentals of some decorative equipment, DJ and Officiant fees, cake... I think that's it.

Started playing Hitman: Contracts, and I must say I am happy with it. Didn't think Hitman2 was as good as the first, and Contracts started off kinda the same, but I was pleasantly surprised that some of the missions from the first game were in it. I can understand how a lot of people might feel gyped because of the rehash, but I enjoyed playing the same missions again. For one, they were slightly different, and the graphics were better. Plus, the hotel mission from the first game is, hands down, one of my favorite missions from any game, ever. The sheer bad-assness of starting the level with a metal detector and needing to ditch all your guns and walk around pretty much defenseless with TWO targets to nuetralize... awesome. You can snipe the cops at the beginning and take a uniform to pass the detectors, but if you want a Silent Assassin rating you can't exactly do that. I've been playing the game trying to be as stealthy as possible, getting a Silent Assassin rating on about half the missions. But when it came time for the assassination of Lee Hong (again)... I went a little gung-ho with the micro-uzi and wiped out nearly everyone in the restaurant. Which is pretty much how I finished that mission the first time in the first game. Oh well, maybe one of these days I'll go back and play it, super-stealthy style.

Commence with the bloggings

Well, it seems everyone and their mom has a blog, I figured it was about time I had one as well. And what better blog service to use than Google's? I don't know how often I'll update or the rhyme or reason as to why I'll update.

Short list of things happening in my life:

*Got hired by Teksystems yesterday for a contract job out at Sutter Health in Rancho Cordova. After 6 months of being unemployed, I finally have a source in income again.
*Getting married April 16th, 2005. 23 days to go...
*Have a new apartment, it's pretty sweet. Has water meandering through the complex, and a swarm of ducks live here.

Well, I am off to meet with our site coordinator to finalize the food for the wedding.