It's Obscene, It's What It Is....

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 8:55 PM

...that my last real blog around these parts was 2 years and a day ago! Honestly leaves one a mite speechless from the vapourlock effect of not being around this place for that long, other than a few temporary stopovers

I honestly have to say that it has been an interesting (in the old Chinese curse type of way) 731 days since I last put thought to paper, so to speak. On the employment front, I no longer work for Verizon's DSL division as a tech support agent...the call centre I worked in downsized its employee numbers in March 2009 and I was one of the unlucky numbers given their 2 weeks' notice. Wasn't a bad 14-month run, overall...barring the stresses of dealing with constant negative events in the lives of Verizon's Internet customers and the changes in working hours a bit too often at times to make things easy. Spent April to late August 2009 unemployed, but found work again as a Customer Service Representative/Service Professional (gotta love those vague and PC titles ) for the satellite TV arm of Bell Canada. It's via another call centre but the environment is friendly and I'm not solely doing tech work anymore, so there's less overall negativity when I'm working with a customer (cover tech support, programming changes, billing, customer inquiries, etc.)...plus I seem to be capable enough at my job to have earned the second highest bonus payout for my pod of Bell CSRs for the month of December 2009, so I think I'm in a better place re: employment.

To counter-balance the overall improvement of my employment situation since last I blogged, I have to report I lost my mother to a stroke on March 13, 2009...one brought on directly by a heart attack that caused a piece of atrophied heart muscle to break off and block off an artery to the brain... BUT indirectly caused by her less than stellar dietary habits. Almost 11 months later, I'm still not sure how I truly feel about this...my mom's health has long been something that has had an effect on my family, between things like breast cancer and diabetes and debilitating headaches; it's just I am struggling with the realization that her death was probably preventable had she - and the rest of my family, by extension - done more to ensure she ate right and more often than she did. Guilt and anger have been things that have been floating through the back of my mind...I think I have become more in-tune with what Joss & co. were doing with Mal at time with his struggles to cope with what had happened to those he cared about in his past interfering with his present. My father, brother and I are coping the best we can, and a visit with family in the UK this past June and July did some good for us in helping to ease the pain some what...but the knowledge that my mom had wanted for years to see Britain again (she was born and raised Canadian like I am, but she went to school in Wales for her Bachelor's in Library Sciences and it's where she met my Dad, who was studying at the agricultural college attached to the same university as her College of Librarianship).

So...guess you have it, if not entirely then for the most part. Stuff like my recent woes with my laptop having it's HD fail and losing vital data that I hadn't backed up yet or falling down a set of stairs with it and buggering up the LCD less than a week after getting the HD fixed are amusing tales, but they honestly pale when compared to all I've noted above. That and my debate of what kind of smartphone to get to replace my badly beaten Sanyo SCP-7050 that has taken one too many dips in the toilet and falls out of my pocket...military-grade ruggedization, my left buttock!



Alun aka BEB

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