fucking iPhone

i'm fucking over it. seriously. i used to do graphic design therefore i love apple everything but the iPhone is a piece of absolute shit.

i bought it and in the first week it froze on me.

then i discovered i couldn't send or receive picture messages - half of my fun in my life is sending stupid pics to my friends. big problem for me

then i discovered that the text messaging is screwed in a hundred different aspects. i can't forward messages - eg. invitations, addresses etc. i cannot cut and paste to combat the lack of forwarding functions. and worst of all - i cannot text message under my desk, or in the car etc, i need to LOOK at what i'm doing - it's decreasing my multitasking abilities.

i keep telling people not to get it. for a period of time, when i was having serious withdrawel symptoms from MMSing i was using three phones; work, iPhone and old phone.

and now this.

the only thing i've ever said was good about it was the iCalendar. it was great for my work appointments. awesome.

then this morning i decided to update my iphone to 2.2 before work.

and it was taking too long.

so i pulled the plug.

and now it's FROZEN telling me to reconnect to iTunes immediately.

SHUTUP. just turn on and tell me who i coming in to see me today! every client is a surprise and it's killing me cos i usually prepare before i see them. actually, i HAVE to prepare before i see them.

i'm miserable. this phone is killing me.

fuck you, iPhone

grrr

i'm still at home sick, so i call my clients and reschedule, i call my workmates to let them know what to do if my clients rock up, i call reception to let them know i'm off sick.

then i log into my work email to let my boss know that i'm off sick (i work offsite, so he wouldn't know)

i see a bright red email from him to me from early this morning. lo and behold, entitled 'Please read and then CALL'. hmm. i open it. obviously cos i was off for one day he went into my caseload to see how things are going with my clients. not good - never has been. my clients are lazy lazy lazy. but that's not the problem. the difference between my boss' caseload and mine is that I DON'T LIE OR PURPOSELY MAKE MISTAKES TO MAKE IT LOOK BETTER.

i shit you not, i can't count the number of times i haven't been able to get in contact with a client so my boss tells me other 'ways' to make it look like i've seen them. it's bullshit. and i can't tell you how many times in supervision i've expressed that my only problem is that my office isn't centrally located and kids never 'drop' past; they only come if they're forced to. but that's still not the problem.

the problem is that my boss thinks it's perfectly ok to break the rules when it suits him. the bigger picture here is that if you look at my caseload it looks like i'm not working with a number of clients, which is breaking guidelines, obviously. if you look at his caseload, it appears that he's working intensely with his clients (he's not, sometimes he's only listening to their voicemail and he puts in the computer that he's spoken to them), and if you look at his exits they're all done incorrectly or can't be justified. but you have to take off a couple of layers before you can see what he's doing, whereas mine is all on the surface.

i don't know. i know that i have to be more of a bitch and really lay down the law with my clients, but they change their mobile numbers every two days that even if i successfully put the fear of god into them the first day, by a week later they've forgotten and i can't contact them to instill it a second time.

sick at home

this absolutely sucks. i hate staying home sick.

1- i'd like to think that it's a nice break from my clients and their problems, but it's so not, cos i know that when i go back into work that they'll have made decisions on their own and totally screwed any number of things up. so it just means more work when i get back, that could last weeks if not months to sort out, especially if it's housing.

2- i am losing money staying at home, despite the fact that i get paid sick leave. I get paid... hmm... not sure, around $230 a day before tax. Friday alone: i drove dangerously with an eye patch on to the local shopping centre, bought a coffee $4, bought macdonalds $7.50. then drove to the doctor's, bought iron tablets, eye ointment and eye drops $46. went home, was bored, bought André Rieu tickets in the Netherlands for 75 Euro ($147). so total expenditure for Friday alone was $204.50 which you'd think is ok - i'm breaking even BUT NO! because yesterday and today i have spent all day trying to work out flights from Rome to Maastricht and it's terrible, i'm going to end up spending around $600 to fly Rome to Brussels, take a train to Maastricht, then back to Brussels, then fly to Florence. Not to mention the $70 per night hotel in Maastricht. And the fact that I think i'm going to have to forward my large suitcase from melbourne directly to Florence as i don't think i will be able to take a local train lugging my large suitcase plus my hand luggage plus a handbag and stay on top of not getting robbed. This conjunctivitis is costing me an arm and a leg; it should know that when I am bored I do things like this.

3- I'm struggling to see because of my eyes, yet i've never blogged so much, spent so much time in front of my laptop, read so many travel brochures, studied so many maps in my life. I could have gone for months without doing all this, but the second i know it's difficult for me i suddenly REALLY need to read non stop for 12 hours a day. and i can't even tell if my eyes are hurting from it all cos i'm already in so much pain.

the trouble is - my eyes sort of feel okayish now, and i wouldn't mind going into work tomorrow as i have so many clients to see, but my eyes are blood red, i look like i've escaped from the set of 28 days later. so i might go to the travel agent and back to the doctors... have to stay away from shops and my laptop as much as possible; it only results in more spending.

microsoft publisher...ugh

once upon a time, before i was a youth worker, i did graphic design. i stopped only because i didn't have the drive any more (and because i couldn't handle pulling three all nighters in a row, getting glandular fever from being so run down and trying to think of concepts for stuff i hated). Basically, though, i didn't give it up because i was a crap designer; i just realised that I wasn't right to be in that field cos of everything else that goes hand in hand with it.

all i do now is tiny stuff on the side; invitations for 21st and other celebrations, advertising for my uncle's business etc. and it's great, cos now i love doing it as opposed to before when i was forced to do it.

so, i work with youth workers. and they have to advertise all the time with fliers, newsletters, posters etc.

and they use publisher.

and don't get me wrong - publisher isn't the issue. when i've been on other people's computer i've used publisher and made simple, yet effective, brochures and stuff. it's not the program; if they were using Adobe or Indesign or Quark the problem would still be there.

it's like they're blind. mish-mash of colours, no thought as to whether or not their colour design is going to end up being printed in black and white, no thought to legibility, fonts. These youthies; they're into Comic Sans and Curlz.

stop and think about that for a moment.

Comic Sans

Curlz.

so then! they see me walking past and they jump out of their chairs and yell 'Bee! Bee! you're into design can you have a look at this for me and tell me what you think' and they drag me over to their computers.

and i feel like i'm going to a funeral.

i look at the screen and i see illegible fonts. i see words that are meant to stand out so they've changed the font size for each letter. i see fucked up kerning cos of the size differences. i see widows everywhere. i see text justified wherever they see fit. i see everything in the centre of the page. i see hyphenations from one line to the next - not one, but several. i see... wait for it... clip art images. Or, worse still, images that they've taken from google image search and they've used without a thought to, well anything, and they've blown it up and it's all pixellated.

what can i say?

and! don't even get me started on the language used, or their mispellings, or grammatical errors.

so i end up saying something vague like 'oh... well, um, i'd probably maybe just fix up where that hyphenated word is... and that one... and that one...' and then i have to totally lie and say 'but other than that it looks fantastic! wow - it's great!' and they kind of frown when i say my one little problem too, as though they can't work out what's wrong with having 4 hyphenated words on one poster that only has 40 words on it.

i don't want to go back to graphics - but i really struggle with this.

unbalanced

if someone asks me something i tell them.

if the conversation is going towards something i have a thought on, i say it.

if someone asks for my opinion, well i'll crap on till the cows come home.

i've always been one for talking/crying/laughing/arguing through problems - never one to sit and stew. and for this reason, i think, people understand me pretty well. but too well perhaps.

everyone knows everything about me, like as in EVERYTHING. and the problem is not that i don't want people knowing everything, i obviously do cos the words are coming out of my mouth... but i can't help but become furious when others don't reciprocate. and i know i'm in the wrong - i'm fully aware that, and i hate that i get angry, but i do. when i found out that one of my friends was getting married and i found out about a week later i was astounded. Not that she hadn't told me - but that she could keep it in.

what am i looking for? friends who will shutup and listen to me 24/7 but somehow i also want them to tell me as much as i tell them - when would this opportunity come up with me talking all the time? i always get off 1 hour telephone calls and realise that i've spoken for 90% of them. that's just plain rude, but i can't stop.

i started writing this blog so i would talk LESS. i don't really tell any of my friends about this blog or the boys one (partly cos i bitch about some of them in it). so i end up writing on here and then seeing them and repeating most of my stories anyway.

ok - my best friend - she's a listener BUT when she has something important to say she'll scream over me 'Bee Bee Bee hang on shhhhh i gotta tell you first...' and that's awesome! i need to be told to shutup.

my workplace - we all fight for the spotlight and i love it. When my sister came into work with me recently she came to the conclusion 'Bee, everyone at your work is like you!' they're almost all extroverted and easily excitable to say the least.

i need people to talk over me. I need my friends to remind me to breathe during a story. i need my friends to put things into perspective for me. and i need friends to tell me to shutup and be forceful about it when they want to talk, because i'm 24 years old and i try really hard and i still talk over everyone.

my sister is exactly the same. there's no hope for her.

all that said and done i am fully capable of keeping secrets. all the stuff i blab about is my gossip, not even gossip about me and other people. so at least i have one filter of sorts.

scrubber

scrubber: hmm - well that's not right at all. I was going to write the urbandictionary.com definition for scrubber here to describe how i've been dressing at work lately, but it is most certainly not the case that I am a woman who 'throws herself at any man's crotch while wearing revealing clothing'.

i'll write my own...

scrubber: someone who wears unladylike clothing ie; trackpants, stay at home jumpers and runners. Unflattering. Goes into work without a second thought to dirty hair. Tries to pass it off as being appropriate youth worker attire (ok this is no longer a general definition)

I have gone from corporate to (my version of a) scrubber in 6 months. People used to compliment me on what I wore all the time, and now they compliment me only... actually they don't at all anymore!

my mum is so angry - she is getting into fights with me every day because of the way I've been dressing for work. My hair, my chipped nail polish, my addiction to runners, my addiction to comfy-stay-at-home-and-watch-dr-phil jumpers.

I told my co-workers, J. and S., and we've decided to make mondays, tuesdays and wednesday 'no runners' days. If i can't wear runners, i can't wear trackpants, and if i can't wear trackies it means i'll be looking a little better. it's a start anyway.

J. and I were in favour of a 'runner-in-lieu' option... if on a thursday or friday we had to go to a meeting and wear heels we could then transfer our runner day to another monday, tuesday or wednesday, but S. put her foot down and stopped us with our organised planning.

so as of next week... we'll see if i go back to getting compliments

:)

(hope so... otherwise it just means that not only have i become a scrubber, but i've also become fugly!)

inappropriate conversations topics

i've worked with kids for so long and the best part of the job has always been the day after, with other workers, teachers, my cousins. when we all sit around and share our hilarious stories of what the kids did and how hard we had to stop ourselves from laughing.

but now, with the kind of kids i'm working with... it's no longer cute. D. was telling us a story how one of her grade ones wrote 'i rub my dik' instead of 'i ride my bike' because he mixed up the direction of the b's and d's and stuffed his vowels up.

Her sister B. then told a story about a kid who responds with yelling 'HELP!" no matter what she says to him... as in that's the only word she's ever heard him say.

hahahaha!... they looked at me expectantly for a story.

'oh, uhm, what happened today... well i'm kind of lying in my case notes at the moment because two of my girls have found full time employment at a massage parlour with happy endings and i don't really want that to be connected with me... ' i laughed weakly. they just sort of looked at me then busily stirred their tea.

nope, not the same!

what i will miss (or not miss) from the youth centre...

things i have done over my period of time at the youth centre:

-asked young people when they last had sex while giving them condom after condom knowing they won't use them
-held a young person's tooth in my bare hand while blood gushed from her lip onto my arm (yes, i tested myself, all good)
-witnessed young people ram their heads against brick walls in anger
-listened to parents who have no one else to talk to speak of their children for forever on end
-given insulin injections
-been vomited on by a newborn (it was a good excuse to go to myers and buy another tshirt)
-been the mediator of so much teeny bopper gossip on youth programs
-been hit with footballs, tennis balls, yo ho diabolos, foam missiles etc
-been covered at one time or another in pva glue, glitter, sequins, staples etc
-been the object of lust for some twenty something boys (as in, they lusted after me, not the other way around)
-had my desk lost amongst the most enormous pile of art supplies i could ever imagine... had to take off my shoes and literally jump over boxes to get out.
-some other horrible stuff that is coming to mind that i shouldn't write on my blog


my achievements:
-broke the photocopier at least 5 times (i think 4 of those times were within one fortnight)
-tried to fix the photocopier once with my boss and a screw driver set only to REALLY break it
-drank at least two thousand of the two thousand one hundred and sixty litres of water we've ordered over the last 2 years
-got paid to work out how much water i've drank on the calculator haha
-been the instigator of fake gossip when i've been bored
-been the passer on of quite a bit of real gossip
-been a large part of the cause for getting facebook blocked
-lied to my boss / her boss / unit leader / manager / mayor at some time or another to cover for someone else

losing nearly an hour of my life

this guy from my work, B., had been bugging me for a week or so to attend one of these seminars. he was vague about it, but i didn't even bother asking him questions about it because up until last night i had always thought that he and i were very alike... very obviously not the case, or he's been brainwashed, one of the two.

so i agree to stay after work last night, along with my other sucker of a co-worker, S. just before we went into this 'meeting' one of our workers said 'uh, guys, you know what it is yeah? you're going into one of those join-and-make-money-or-die thingys'

shit.

pyramid whatever it's called. you know, those networking business ventures whereby you join and then if you manage to force another 50million people to also join you then make around thirty cents? man, did i get sucked in or what.

so S. and i went in to see this tiny geeky looking man in a crumpled suit, and he was already sweating profusely. he began his spiel, basically calling us losers because we make 'active income' (we go to work for our money) as opposed to making 'passive money' (sitting at home doing nothing while the money just floats on in)

sweaty man: so, S. B. Tell me. what do you both, personally, need in life to be successful?

i immediately thought 'happiness' but then thought 'nah, corny answer, let S. answer first'.

S.: happiness
B.: yeah me too, just happiness

WRONG ANSWER TO GIVE THE SWEATY MONEY HUNGRY MAN! his temple started visibly throbbing.

sweaty man: (he sounded like he was choking when he spoke) well, of course, and in order to acheive HAPPINESS you need MONEY!!! from a PASSIVE INCOME!!!

S. and I were looking at eachother like 'uh, wdf, no you don't...'

S. and i tried to explain that we liked working and we both actually dislike staying at home. sweaty man's eyes boggled at this, his face turning purple from complete and total non-comprehension.

sweaty man: so, what do you think, will you join in this fantastic entrepenuer voyage to money making bliss?

all i wanted to do was book this guy in for intense sessions with the counsellors at work.

needless to say we didn't join.

54 HOTDOGS IN 12 MINUTES

temporomandibular joint disorder. that's what i have. basically, i have a sore jaw.
let's begin at the beginning.

i had bad dreams last night and the night before. horrible dream where i was at the dodgey IGA near work and there was a veiled lady behind me who asked which nationality i was and i replied 'italian' and she muttered something under her breath about arabs. then another dream where i was driving down kings way and when it became queens road there were roadworks and i couldn't work out which lanes were closed and i accidentally drove into the wrong lane and picked up a roadworks sign in my front right wheel and i had to stop in the middle of the traffic and no one would help me get it out. i know neither of these dreams sound too bad, but i had so many more, they were distressing all together.

anyway. this morning i went to work complaining that the left side of my jaw was aching. just after 10 i found... a piece of my tooth that i had obviously ground off during my dreams.

to stress me out further at work, everyone started googling 'sore jaw' to see what it would come up with. which is when i found out i had temporomandibular joint disorder. (well, that was the last thing i was willing to listen to after 'you have tetanus!' / 'you have lockjaw!' / 'you're just gonna die!')

except i haven't eaten 54 HOTDOGS!

busted

oh man.

i just got busted by the mayor sitting on myspace doing a survey and eating pizza.

:(

hope i still have this job this time tomorrow!