Games people play

There has been this game going on for approximately 20 years now. The game escalated to a new level about five years ago. Many attempts were made to get me to play the game, yet the game wasn’t clearly defined, so I resisted. Recent events forced me to take another look at my efforts in this game. I looked at everything over the past twenty years, and weighed everything accordingly. That’s when I withdrew from it, but that hasn’t stopped the game. It’s evolved. My withdraw has been used to pull others around me into the game. This is rather unfair, as they’re being pulled in just to be used as pawns, in an attempt to get me back to playing. But they haven’t seemed to realize that this move is only a small part of what caused me to remove myself from the playing field. And now that it’s moved this way, further justifies my will to remove myself from the situation.

The only solution at this point is for all parties now involved to stop playing the game. Unfortunately, one party will most likely refuse, because they’ve been playing the game for many more decades, pushing players away as they too realized that they were tired of being an unwilling participant of the game. Their actions, while in the past seemed to confuse me, now seem to be completely justified in the scope of recent events.

War mongers think that they must battle everyone in order to gain everything, but always tend to lose sight of everything they’ve lost in the process of trying to reach the goal. They claim that goal is peace, but how many times have we heard that justification for war? Peace can never be attained until the war mongers no longer want war. Until then, the rest of us have to either fight back, surrender, or remove ourselves from the war in some way. I don’t feel like surrendering as I don’t feel it will stop the war, so I’m trying to remove myself from it, in the hopes that the war monger turns their sites on another target.

Bureaucracy at work (day 2)

After submitting the original ticket, as you’ve possibly read, the issue was mostly resolved. A new ticket was submitted for the remaining issues that weren’t solved by the initial ticket. When trying to close this ticket, an error with the ticket resolution system popped up. This error in the ticket resolution system caused helpdesk to open a new trouble ticket to resolve the issue with the ticket resolution system. Once they resolved the issue with the ticket resolution system, I was able to close the original ticket, but couldn’t close the ticket regarding the ticket resolution issue. This caused a new ticket to be generated. After some phone calls from Bangalore, it was determined that part of my issue may be because of some Internet Explorer specific coding in the response system that was glitching when I tried to use the system with Firefox on a Mac.

So I was able to close the original ticket and the ticket for the first error with the ticket resolution system. But this caused an issue with a survey portion of the ticket system, which caused a new ticket to be generated. So now I’m something like five tickets deep into helpdesk, four of which have nothing to do with the original issue that crashed the Mac.

One-by-one I worked with helpdesk to resolve all of the tickets. And since the final ticket was to resolve the survey portion of the ticket system, and it’s now resolved, I got to go through and answer surveys for ALL of the tickets, finally getting to the last survey. The last survey was about the ticket to resolve the issue with the survey system. Our helpdesk is always quick to respond and very courteous, at least when I’ve dealt with them (I’ve heard horror stories from coworkers), so I always rate them very high in the surveys, but there is an additional comments box. So I added:

Having to submit a ticket regarding the errors received when trying to close the ticket regarding the errors received while closing the original valid ticket is a bit ridiculous. We’ve spent many more man hours trying to solve an issue with the helpdesk ticket system than was spent resolving the issue that caused the resulting trainwreck.

Perhaps the best part of this is when they call me from India, and they are even laughing at the ridiculousness of this.

Bureaucracy at work

For those that don’t understand the above image, it basically says that they raised a new trouble ticket to resolve an issue that was raised when trying to close the prior trouble ticket. So one issue now becomes two, for now. The last time this happened it raised at least three other trouble tickets when trying to resolve why they couldn’t close the first. What happened last week is the computer refused to reboot. It kept stalling on startup and leaving me with a blank blue screen that Jobites refuse to call a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) because it’d show similarity of Macs to PCs. Anyway, IT figured that they solved that issue last Friday so I had an email this morning asking me to close the ticket. Clicking the link, the system that handles trouble tickets couldn’t find the ticket and gave me an error. I sent that error message to the helpdesk who opened a new ticket (that you see above). Bureaucracy begets bureaucracy.

-EDIT TO ADD:

In testing items that were “fixed” by the prior ticket, I found that they weren’t finished and require additional help from IT, namely an IT admin password. SO, another trouble ticket has been raised to fix the issue of fixing the fixed issue. Or something like that.

East Hollywood

Each area of town has its own art that is somewhat unique to that area. The art of a neighborhood can be sticking to a particular style, or even sticking to a particular theme. In Silver Lake, a lot of the artwork is around equality and rights. In Echo Park it seems to show happiness in the midst of hardship. And in East Hollywood, it’s littered with cartoons doing various things like dancing with balloons and enjoying life.

Like the odd Homer Simpson I posted awhile back, this may have been painted by the same artist. It seems to depict two possible scenarios. The first is that the Michelin Man is fighting with a tire. The second, that I see here, is they are sharing a joint. Considering the neighborhood, I’d almost lean towards a weed tie-in.

Regarding the Michelin Man on the right, I’m not sure what he’s doing to that tire. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.

Confused

The rest of the country is bombarded by blizzard after blizzard. Los Angeles was the warmest we’d been in the past year. This.week we’re back down in the 30s and 40s at night. It’s no wonder our trees are just as confused.

I wonder what this is going to do to our growing season. California’s economy is already in a very bad place, I’m not sure we can handle a hit to our agricultural industry.