Usually the person with the addiction is the last to know, or at least the last to admit it.
I was the first to admit my addiction, and still no one believes it to be true.
Today, Gloria (my supervisor) put eight of the little packages on my desk. They didn't fit in her little jar. I yelled at her just like I always do when she brings some of those luscious tidbits in to work.
Eight... sheesh. I knew this would be a problem, so I delayed shoving them into my mouth by opening each package and sorting the tasty morsals by color. Orange, Red, Yellow, Purple, Green and White.
Six piles of sugar tablets. Solitified Pixie Stix.
I speak of the greatest gift to mankind, "Smarties."
I could eat them until I vomit... and the fine folks I work with want to see that happen.

Me: I have a job for you.
Virginia: What now?
Me: I need you to stop me if you see me eating those again.
Virginia: Oh, I don't think so. It's funny.
Me: sigh

The six piles of wonderous candy sat on my desk for about.... 30 seconds. It was too much at once... because I needed more. Much more.
I think the fact that I was almost in tears because I was resisting the jar full of rolls of the candy... only 5 feet away from me.

sigh
I wish this was all a big joke entry. Sadly it's not. Which is good, because it's not funny.
I've asked, begged and commanded not to have Smarties around. But the humor value is just too much for these people. I can't wait until I go into sugar shock, a quivering mass on the floor. Sure, they'll still be laughing at me, I'm sure, but then I can sue their asses off.
We'll see who's laughing then.

This addiction is not as easy for me to fight as the Pepsi addiction, which is under control except under very stressful situations. If they are near, I must eat them.
But I promise that I will do my best to resist those tasty pills of glucous. Just one day, then a vacation from those madmen who wish to hurt me.

The good news is that we've caught up at work!
The bad news is that there's no more overtime.
The good news is that I should be more alert after I get a decent nights sleep.
The bad news is that I rarely get a good nights sleep.
The good news is that I get that week off I promised myself.
The bad news is that I have nothing to do for a week.

Any ideas?

Ahh... it's so nice to be out of work.
I've been working too hard lately, getting to the office before sunup so I don't have to stay beyond 5 o'clock. There's just something icky about staying late, yet getting there early isn't nearly as bad.
Of course, I'm pretty much out of it by 8 o'clock these days. I come home, maybe take a nap, eat some dinner, nap again, then it's off to bed.
Oh, sure I do a few things in between. Yesterday I even managed to stay awake all the way untill 11PM!! Though I got to work late... 6:45AM on a Saturday. Phooey. Although I must admit that the overtime pay is quite nice... though a bunch of it will go to my folks for letting me crash here.

The plus is that I don't think this will carry on up to the next week. We're almost caught up! Huzzah!
But next week our second biggest catalog orders start coming in... crud.
I'm tired of being... uhh... tired. I was going to go to Irish Fest in Arlington Heights tonight, but I doubt I'll be up to it. My afternoon nap today just didn't cut it.
Oh well, at least I get Sunday off.

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So what the hell have I been doing in what little spare time I have, you ask?
Well, mostly, I've been working on programming. With much thanks to Mr Nosuch aka Mr "I'm too good to post to my blog anymore" I've been working on a little project that's been in my mind for a long time.

See, a few years ago, I used to try to run a game that was played over the email (some readers may remembe an attempt at this recently, as well).
The game was an old bar fight simulation, complete with projectiles, blades, fists and flying tables and chairs. Originally a board game by Yaquinto Games (they don't exist anymore, and I'd like to look at getting copyright availability for this, actually, but I'm too lazy to do that), I scanned in all the pieces and the board and rounded up about 10 players... local and distant friends, and some of their friends.
Using Photoshop and InDesign, I would get all the turn info from the players over a week and on Sunday morning I would spend about 4 hours making images, moving pieces and writing up a narrative for the characters involved in the brawl.
The problem was that I would inevitably make mistakes, and that was the rough part. I'd spend the next three days getting emails from the players complaining about the mistakes, about the fix to the mistakes and a thousand other things.
Eventually I gave it up in frustration. I offered for any of the other players, who had so gleefully played, to take the reigns and give it a shot. I recieved no reply at all.

Sundays' became fun again! Oh, did I mention how I would be swearing and stomping around in anger at running the turns.
But, sadly, all of my gamer-geek friends who have moved away are once again unable to join us in a game. And I have the unexplainable need to include them.
Adventurer (as the game was originally called) is very well suited to be played over email or any other means of a week long turn. I thought about running it again, but shuddered greatly.
But I thought about it, and realized that it could be easily programmed... not actually programming anything since 1986, I was niave to think it would be easy.
So I looked into some programming languages, and asked Mr Nosuch about some. And he hooked me up. And has given excellent customer support.

I think it's been about 2 months since I started this project. It's in two parts, a client and a server. Although neither, I think, is truly a client or a server.
Both are as done as they are going to be before I start running real tests on them... and in fact I ran the first official test Thursday night. Take one little green lizard dude, and make him move 1 space forward.
How hard can that be? The movement routines were VERY easy to right.
Perhaps a little too easy, since the bugger didn't budge an inch.
It's a problem that could be in a dozen places, and my minimal programming ability needs to find this. What a nightmare!


There, now you know my free time, and my un-free time. It's 5:15 on a Saturday, and I think I need another nap.

Ok, the good news is that Carlos got his car back. Huzzah!
He decided we were all right, and managed to get his paycheck 2 days early so he could go down to the pound and get it back.
Of course.....
The deadline for the city sticker was past, and they wouldn't let him get his car out unless he got the new sticker. In Chicago this is a nominal fee of only $75 (as oppsed to about $0-$30 outside the city), but since he got it late, it only went up to $110, only a small fraction of what he owed.
Congratulations Carlos!
(Someone did mention that it would have been cheaper just let them keep the car and buy a new one... au contraire, he still would have had to pay the $2300 or had his drivers liscence suspeneded until he did, though he wuold have saved that $110, I don't think he felt it was worth it).
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The bad news is, on Wednesday, I was dilligently working, when I was disturbed by what I can only describe as an excited scream. My first thought was, "hey... somebody won the lottery" or something like that.
But it got louder, and louder, and then I realized they weren't happy screams at all.
The department manager isn't one to get vocal, and when I stuck my head out of my cubical/hermit cave people were beggining to mill about with confused and worried looks on their faces.
Long story short... Mona's oldest (16 year old) daughter was driving her 3 younger siblings to grandma's house, somehow managed to get his by a car carrier (which somehow managed to lose some cars off the top). Two of the kids were onconscious, the driver pretty banged up, and the last one (who had, for some reason, been scared to death about going to grandma's house that day) was just fine.
By the time the paramedics arrived, one had regained consciousness, but the youngest, Kevin, hadn't.
At the hospital, he was in and out of consciousness. The other 4 were eventually released with minor wounds.
By the end of the day, we'd heard that something had happened to his C1 vertabrae. I have no idea what this means, but Debi, according to Mona, accoridng to the doctor, said that if anything happend to the C1 you just die. So of course the doctors were quite perplexed by this.
The next morning we heard from Mona, Kevin was on morphine, strapped into bed, and desperately wanting to get up and run around.
By 5:00, he was sent home with a huge list of things he can't do for a year, and a list of "bad signs" to watch for.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems kind of odd that a 4 year old would go from ICU to home in a day (actually he was in something before ICU in the same day, but I have no idea what it's called... trauma, maybe?).
So for those two days, nothing really got done at work. No one was in the mood, those kids have been in the office several times in the 10 months I've been there. And everyone knows them quite well. (see below on why this is bad)
At least everyone's ok, thought "fault" is currently undetermined. It was at a blind curvey on-ramp kind of thing. Everyone at work that knows the intersection says they try to avoid it because you can't see the other traffic. Gotta love these Illinois roads.
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What about me? What have I been doing lately, you ask?
Well, work is awful. It got to the point where I no longer loved my job. Marketing screwed us royally.
We have one huge annual catalouge, it's got two versions. One has highlighted prices for some items, the other doesn't. Well, marketing decided, that in order to keep up with the competition, we would offer 3 new versions.
Normally, this isn't a bad thing. Change is good. But this all went through after we'd finished processing the majority of the orders and sent them to the printers(I've heard differnet numbers of quantity on this, between. 2,000 and 10,000 I'm still the new guy, I trust no one on this number).
This means that all the orders need to be changed, recalled from the printer, manually deleted/reentered/changed, re processed, and rereleased. This is at least three months of work. The department has one month to do it. But to make things worse, not every dealer wants to just change their order... oh that would be too easy. What with three new versions (one being customizable), they want to try them all...
So if they were ordering 500 of version A, now they want to drop that to 100 of version A, 200 of version L, 200 of version L3, and 100 of the custom version.
Being in quality control, my job is to make sure everything is done right... none of us really know which way is the right way. All the people that made the changes did them differently, and are getting really ticked off at us for constantly badgering them with "are you sure this is right?" and "did you notify the printer to send these covers to the other printer, even though they want a differnt cover on these two versions?"
No one really knows how many changes were made. The printers came back a few times with lists of hundreds of orders that they received new paperwork on, but were never recalled...
The absolute worst part is. We all know (even the manager) that this will NOT go well. Even if we do everything 100% correctly (which is so unlikely as to be disgusting) the printers will screw things up (like every year), the shippers will screw things up (like every year), and the dealers will have screwed up their orders (like every year).
This wouldn't be too bad, normally... but we usually print about 150,000 "extras" of the two versions. This year, however, there will only be 5,000 of each. If we screw up an order for 20,000 copies..... well, we are going to be so fucked.

The overtime is nice though. But I'm going to miss my nephews birthday because of this. And who knows, after everything gets shipped and recieved, my company may be out of business, so more time for my sisters kids.
When this is all over, I'm taking a week off and I'm going to stick my head in the sand.

And now back to current events:
A few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, that mexican fiesta who calls himself Carlos says to me, "[Instert spanish salutation here], what does seizure mean?"
Now, I know this is something epileptics and diabetics and other sick people get, but I wasn't quite sure of the exact meaning... off to Websters I went.
"Seizure: A sudden attack."
"No, no, no," he denied. "Read this."
And he hands me a letter from the city of Chicago saying they were going to seize his car.
"Ooooh, that kind of seizure. Pay your tickets and you'll be fine."
Carlos denies this righteous course of action. For you see, the first step is putting "the boot" on your car. The fine people that do this work M-F 9-5, which is exactly when he's in Mount Prospect working. So, obviously, he had no need to pay his $260 worth of parking tickets.

On Monday, July 7th, Carlos took the day off to do some things.
Twit.

His car was booted. It wasn't going anywhere. His $260 in tickets became a whopping $900 to get the boot off (including the tickets).
Twit.

Wednesday, Carlos came to work bragging about how he'd paid his $900 and they'd get the boot off in a few days.
Twit.
On Thursday, his car was gone. Towed to the impound lot.
Twit.
Of Friday he took half a day to "take care of things."
Apparently this meant going to a hearing, though none of us knew this at the time. He called after the hearing, to find out if he could work 8 hours of overtime on Saturday.
Twit.
See, at his hearing they found that his car had many more parking tickets that were issued before the liscence plates were reissued last year (or maybe 2 years ago, I forget). They found this out because they got the VIN number during the impound.
Oh, what a twit.
As of Saturday, his fines/fees/other were up to... get this: $2,300!!!
Twit.
He doesn't have the money, of course. He sold his record collection (130 albums in all) for $700. He's still short.
He's denied his fathers help to get this dealt with, a commendable act, but.....

He plans to get this taken care of Friday. He should have the money by then. It sounds as if he'll go after work, I'm not really sure about that right now.
Of course, Friday is the day he says they say they'll crush his car.
Call me a cynic, but I constantly badger him to get the car NOW, since I'm sure he's got the day wrong, and after he hands them all that money, they will hand him back a very heavy cube.

I can't wait for Friday, the tension is almost too much.

Two quick things...
1) If anyone knows who or what Tyco Bravo is, please let me know!
2) My comments don't seem to be working right, oh, sure you can read and post them, but the little counter at the bottom of each post always says 0. I blame Polerand for this.