John Zeitler

I know many folks out there reading this here blog come from different walks of life. I’m sure some of you even work in retail. I’d like to believe that all of you are smart enough not to need reminded of this particular little training hint that I’m going to provide, but on the off-chance that it comes up, well, don’t say nobody ever warned you, OK? Here goes:

When a customer says to you, “You have made me look like an idiot three times today because your staff did not perform their jobs to anything remotely close to the standards you claim to have for their photography department,” the correct response to this is “I am deeply sorry, sir/madam, for your embarrassment and will process the refunds you requested right away.” It is most emphatically not “*scoff* I didn’t make you look like an idiot. I’ll talk to my manager but you ain’t getting a refund.”

When you know that you need to get a good night’s sleep ahead of a pretty important day, just bite the bullet and go to a hotel room. That way you’re ensured that your neighbors won’t try anything silly like stomping around upstairs at 4a.

I have learned something today; call it a new law of the universe. “Whenever John wishes for something, say, a big snowstorm, events will conspire to not only give it to him, but simultaneously regret he ever asked for it in the first place.”

I recently had occasion to deal with someone who believed that, just because I happened to be looking for a job currently, I had all the free time in the world to do, well, pretty much anything I wanted. Naturally, between the three trips out I had to make today, some cleaning that I’d been putting off, and phone calls from a dozen different administrative tasks left hanging after last week, this obviously isn’t the case for me. More to the point, it’s caused me to a) revert to college-bachelor cooking (ie instant mashed potatoes mixed with tuna and some leftover shredded mozzarella), and b) made me so tired that even though I’m getting up later in the morning (read: 6:30a instead of 4a), I’m dead on my feet here at 9:30p.

I understand it’s gonna take time to adjust my sleep schedule, but dammit, this is just not fair to me right now, because now is when I have the ambition to do all this cool stuff.

Quick note tonight, folks, based on a project I need to keep under wraps for just a little while longer. I spent a significant portion of today hunched over my desk, scribbling words onto cut-up index cards. Because of this, it occurred to me that I haven’t done this much writing by hand since college.

Which is why I’m going to go take another dose of my usual pain medication and go to bed, because parts of me hurt that weren’t even involved in all the writing. Ow.

I’m gonna try an experiment with this blog over the next thirty days (since it’s not like I have much else to do in the meantime). I got to thinking about the way I’ve spent the last week: at work I’ve been focused on my tasks, getting myself ready for this coming month or so. But outside of work I’ve been a neurotic, frazzled mess because I’ve been bombarded with advertising. Not advertising from a marketing group, or advertising from a company, but advertising from people who I’m fairly certain aren’t being paid to advertise. It’s mostly been negative advertising, too: trashing certain products, implicitly praising others (or sometimes not so explicitly). Sadly, I’m just as guilty, which frustrates me to no end.

Fortunately, I have the chance to do something about it. So, for the next thirty days, I’m not going to write about any commercial products on this blog. None. If it’s a proper noun that’s not a person’s name (and, in the case of names, the person isn’t a celebrity or brand in their own right), I ain’t typing it here. It might not make a difference in the grand scheme of things– I almost certainly know it won’t– but it’s mostly just a way for me to gauge how easy or difficult it would be to “genericize” my life.

The thing is, I’ve complained at length about how we’re not supposed to be defined by what we own. If we allow our possessions to speak about us on our behalf, we quickly become slaves to them, because not everyone has the same perception of that object’s brand, make, or model. By tying what we have to who we are so closely, we objectify ourselves more than any sleazy magazine could possibly do– we become passive objects, things, instead of individuals acting on the world, people.

I’ll still post. It’s just that I’m going to be telling you more about what I’m doing, rather than what I’m doing it with. The Twitter feed is going to go generic too– heck, I can’t even say “Twitter” come tomorrow! The only exceptions to the rule are going to be e-mail (and even then only work-related e-mails) and technical forum posts (because it’s damnably hard to get help with a program when you can’t say the name of the program). Since we’ve got two days left in January, we’ll say that the product placement floodgates re-open on the first of March. Oh, and yeah, it’s not like I’m going to stop playing games or watching TV or anything like that– any Game Clear notices are going to be post-dated to the 1st as well.

And, on the off chance that you’re a corporation, celebrity, or other interest who might think this is going to be harmful to you somehow, first, please stop doing drugs. Second, more seriously, there is a way out of this. I will “unlock”, with full disclosure on this blog, the proper nouns and trademarks related to a company if and only if that company pays me $5000, cash, up front. That doesn’t mean I’ll post about it every day– just that, if I wanted to, I could. Third, there’s a catch: each time a company buys me out like that, the price goes up by a thousand dollars for the next one. (I don’t expect to make a single red cent on this, mind. Just tossing it out there in the interests of full honesty; every man has his price, after all.) Companies considering this, ask yourself: is word-of-mouth really that important to you? I could easily turn around and say that your company is a bunch of shallow, money-obsessed drones. That’s basically what years of negative advertising has created with word-of-mouth: six billion people who will more readily drag your trademarks through the mud than recommend you to anyone else.

Believe it or not, folks, tonight’s a busy night. So I’ll just leave you all with that little thought. Have a generic night, and tomorrow have a generic day.

I have a particular relationship with winter. I happen to love the season, but it is doing its best to dissuade me of this affection. Case in point: for the longest time I was able to survive the snow and cold without suffering more than the occasional discomfort of soaked gloves. However, the last couple years, I’ve been getting progressively worse instances of dry skin on the backs of my hands. My sister has graciously provided me plenty of lotion with which I can remedy, if not prevent, this situation. Of course, every time I really need to apply lotion, I’m doing something where having the substance on my hands would be extremely inconvenient, or more likely damaging to the project– like, for example, painting miniatures.

So, in keeping with this weekend’s nerdity, I have the Burning Hands spell… it’s just, well, not quite the one in the Player’s Handbook.

I’ve been thinking at some length about what’s going to happen at the end of my current job contract, and while it would be easy to look at my options in an optimistic, glass-half-full kind of way (either I have a job, or I have time to work on personal projects), I’m still sort of in that in-between phase, where I’m still upset over the circumstances but not completely through the emotion enough to actually do something constructive about it. That last part is a lie, in fact; I have been doing some constructive things, but I prefer not to put those out in the open until they’re certainties (read: until about two hours after I’ve had my first day and they haven’t called the cops on me). In some strange way this is itself its own blog post fodder. My career advancement search is in stealth mode.

Now if only I knew where it was headed…

Tired now, so no writing was done and no post of any kind of quality. Sorry.

I realize that I’ve been coasting along, phoning in pretty much all of my content and posts since, oh, 2007. I’m making an effort in 2010 to not have another bad year in terms of stuff for you folks to read. But for the interim, while I’m recovering from crunch mode and getting Frangible Time together, please bear with the inanity for just a little while longer.

So, yeah… I got sick. Like, seriously sick. The kind of sick that begins with coming to on the kitchen floor and ends with three nights doing nothing but huddling in bed waiting for the NyQuil to knock me out.

I’m better now, of course. But the writing has kind of stalled. Um, completely. So that’s my big plan for the next few nights, at any rate– to get back into working on the book. Tomorrow I should have an update on where I’m at with that.

Later, folks. Don’t catch what caught me.