He's a Little Guy

So now that I'm no longer restricted from accessing blogspot at work maybe I can start posting stuff again.

So, I have a buddy that I worked with back in my RxAmerica days and we were both lucky enough to land jobs at Vangent as well. Curt has a 3 year old daugher named Emma whom I have never met but have heard several stories about and she sounds like a very cute and funny girl. So apparently Curt talks about me at home often enough that Emma has realized daddy has a friend named Kendall (at work I go by Kendall).

So, one day a while back Emma asked Curt, "Daddy is Kendall a little guy or a big guy?". Curt, apparently comparing me to himself, replied that Kendall is a little guy. So I'm told that every time little Emma heard my name from that point on she would say, "Yeah, Kendall he's a Little Guy!". She prided in telling everyone that daddy has a friend named Kendall and he's a Little Guy. Curt told me about every time she did this and I always found it to be too funny.

So, not long ago Emma was talking to her friend and mentioned that daddy has a friend named Kendall and he's a Little Guy. Then, after whatever her friend said, Emma goes, "No you don't understand, he's really tiny!". When Curt told me about this we decided the best course of action would be to get Emma to draw a picture of daddy and Kendall to see just how little she thinks Kendall really is.

So here you go.

Yeah, I'm a Little Guy.

Swamped

Recently work has been absolutely excruciating. I have been working on the same project for the past few weeks, nonstop. This includes all of this week so far, and at this rate I will be working on this project for the remainder of my last month here at this job. Unfortunately, I have to work on this project all by myself, no one can help me. My co-workers are busy with similar projects of their own, forcing me to go solo. I start on the project as soon as I clock in, work on it all day long, and after 8 very long and droning hours I stop to clock out and go home, knowing full well that the next day will not be any different. The project is titled Doing Nothing.

That's right, ever since 90% of the staff that worked in my building was laid off at the beginning of September, there's not much for me to do anymore. At the beginning of the month all the agents, team leads, most of the managers, and a handful of others were let go, leaving me and few others to soldier on in this big and empty building. Most of my work was transitioned to Caremark just prior to the mass departure of all those employees, leaving me without a shred of responsibility. Being an hourly employee, my work day mainly consists of clocking in and clocking out each day, with an 8 hour gap in between the two.

Fear of someone from work reading this deters me from divulging what I actually do do at work all day. Rest assured, I'm not doing anything illegal or detrimental to the company. But, from an outsider's point of view I'm sure my activities would look extremely unproductive. Do I feel guilty about that? No. I mean, what do they expect me to do? Sit and stare at my Outlook for 8 hours? Since I have nothing productive to do my only option is to do something unproductive.

Now, if I were to tell you what I do here at work, you'd probably be jealous and think it's cool that I get to do that at work and get paid for it all the same. Don't be. I'm sure we all have things we like to do and I'm also equally sure that we would lose interest in those things after a few hours, let alone 8. Trust me, I know. To get through the day I normally need to find four or five things that I enjoy doing and keep moving from one to the next every hour and a half or so until it's time to clock out and go home. One day down, twenty six more to go.

For those who are interested you'll be happy to hear that I have found a new job. I will doing the same type of work I am doing now (or was doing, whatever) and I was lucky enough to be offered a salary a decent amount higher than what I'm making now. So despite all the bitterness this story in fact does have a happy ending. Feel free to contact me if you'd like to know more about my new job. I start November 2nd, which I'm excited about. But I don't think I have to tell you that November seems very, very far away...

"We strive to improve the quality of human life"

That is the Vision of CVS Caremark, the colossal mega corporation of pharmacies and prescription benefits management (http://www.cvscaremark.com/our-company/our-culture/vision-mission-values ).

Apparently they feel the best way to improve the quality of my life, as well as nearly 200 of my colleagues, is to eliminate our jobs.

You may remember when I announced that my company's parent company (Long's Drugs) was bought out last August by CVS Caremark and the uneasy feeling it gave me. I have to tell you, for a while there I was actually quite impressed with CVS Caremark. For a while I truly believed that Salt Lake City would be a great addition to their existing cluster of call centers specked across the United States.

Utah is not a stranger to call centers, and there's a reason. Utah does not have tornadoes, devastating earthquakes, hurricanes, and of course, volcanoes. We do have snow, but as long as we can still tell where the roads are, we go to work. So it goes without saying that Utah is an ideal location for call centers since 99.9% of uptime is a must for that industry.

The point I'm getting at is that a call center in Utah could have been a great asset for CVS Caremark and they certainly could have stayed a very profitable business without needing to put 200 or so people out of jobs. Sadly, that small percentage increase of profit margin is worth more than the lives of 200 people. I imagine that the increase is small because CVS Carmark literally has hundreds of thousands of employees, and laying off 200 is taking a drop out of the bucket. For that, I have lost all respect for CVS Caremark. Shame on them for making me believe for one second that they cared more about improving quality of life than making a buck. Maybe I'm alone in this thought, but if I ran a business that was already making millions of dollars a year in profit I would seek out the best solution that wouldn't require anyone to lose their jobs in this situation.

So that's it. I have until the end of October. Wish me luck.

Cruise - Day 7

Ok, day 7, our last full day on the ship and we were at sea the entire day. Firstly I have to go back to day 6 because a lot of the goings on stem from what happened the day before. On day 6, around 11:00 AM we realized that we were out of clean clothes, specifically our undergarments. On our last cruise you had the option to pay for your clothes to be laundered or you could use the ship's public laundry areas to do it yourself. After setting out to do our laundry we found, to our dismay, that NCL did not offer public laundry. So, we had no choice but to pay them to do our laundry. The charges depended on what type of clothing and how many of that article of clothing you wanted laundered, so we decided to just get our garments cleaned (we were very reluctant to do this, as most LDS people can understand) to keep the cost as low as possible.

Now, when I talked to the front desk asking about public laundry I was told they could have our laundry done by 6 PM that day. This was good because we were literally wearing our last clean pairs. When I started filling out the form I noticed that there were 2 services offered: Regular (collected before 9 AM and returned before 6 PM the next evening) and Express (collected before 9 AM and return before 6 PM that night). The Express charge was an extra 50% of the total. I wasn't happy about this, but again we were forced to go with it.

So, 6 PM that night rolled around and nothing was delivered. I wasn't too upset at this point, all I cared about was that we had them before the next morning. Well, when we woke up the next morning we still didn't have our laundry. I figured since our laundry wasn't collected before 9 AM the previous day that our "express" service would have our laundry here by 6 PM the current day. Lame.

So we put off showering and got some breakfast but after that we decided to go ahead and shower and wear robes until our laundry arrived. Well, luckily for us all we had planned to do that afternoon was watch movies. We were planning on seeing Kung Fu Panda in the cinema (btw the ship had a movie channel that played on our little room TV's and they also broadcast that channel in the cinema) but the cinema had a towel folding demo going on at that time so we would've had to watch the movie in our stateroom anyway.

So anyway, long story short we had to wait until 6 PM to have our laundry delivered so we could get dressed. When I checked our room charges later on I saw that they didn't charge us the express fee, which kinda made me feel better.

Ok, so the big show of the day in the theater was called Cirque Pacific. It was performed by the same singer/dancer team that did the other shows but they were also joined by the China Stars Acrobat Team. Again, the singer/dancers were ok, and the China Starts were absolutely amazing. If I saw the stuff they were doing on TV I would scream FAKE/Special FX! but when they were doing it in front of my very eyes all I could do was gawk and awe. At the end of the show they brought up what seemed like half of the entire crew from each of the different departments on the ship and gave a grand farewell since the cruise was coming to an end. I'll admit that this sudden realization of the end of my vacation stung a bit.

Now, as you recall a few nights ago we saw a group called Second City which did short skits and improv routines. They actually had other performances after that but they were 100% improv so weren't inclined to go seem them. However, they did have one more performance that night that was advertised as "adults only" and do not attend if you are offended by suggestive humor. We decided we didn't want to miss this one. So, it was basically another improv show but the actors could say whatever they wanted. And they did. At the end of the day though, it was still improv which in my opinion is hit or miss. But there were still a few moments when I laughed pretty hard. It was just kinda awkward since, up until that point, all the entertainment we had seen was pretty family-friendly. Also, oftentimes it seemed like they would throw some extreme profanity in there just because they could.

Well, that's about it. After we got back from the show we packed our bags and placed them outside our room for pickup. The next morning we got a quick buffet breakfast and waited in our room until it was our turn to disembark. We took a shuttle to the airport, had some Panda-style Chinese food from the terminal food court, took a plane home and our vacation was officially over :(

So, who's coming with us in 2 years???

Cruise - Day 6 (Prince Rupert)

Day six was Thursday, May 7th. We had a lot of time on the boat this day because we didn't arrive at Prince Rupert until about 4:oo PM. The first activity was a behind the scenes presentation of our cruise ship, the Norwegian Star. Unfortunately we were kinda lazy that morning and were late to the presentation and had to stand in the back of the lounge. It was pretty interesting, the cruise director shared with us a lot of pictures and stories of the ship and how it was made and what it takes to make an entire cruise happen.

Next was NCL's version of the Weakest Link, also called the Weakest Link. It was lame, mostly because the host sucked. There were two people from the entertainment staff that we saw quite frequently, the Cruise Director Paul and the Assistant Cruise Director, Gary. Paul was cool, he had had a lot of charisma and was very witty and brought a lot to the table in everything he was in. Gary... did not have that much charisma and struggled a lot every time he had to read something. So, unfortunately Gary was hosting the Weakest Link, and it was to get into the show when he was struggling to get through every question. He was reading a golf question and said "misshit" instead of "miss hit". His excuse was that there was no space in between the words on his paper. I'm not an avid golfer but I'm pretty sure "misshit" isn't a golf term. Whatever, a lady from Utah won the show so that was cool.

So later on we went ashore when we got to Prince Rupert, British Columbia. This was the coolest stop, even though I'd never heard of it before. This was actually a real town and not a tourist town. There were real residents walking the street. So Cassie and I just walked around town and saw the sights. There weren't very many traffic lights at all, and I guess the law is that you yield to pedestrians because traffic would stop if anyone looked like they were trying to cross the street at a corner. Needless to say, we were a little hesitant crossing the street since we are used to the douchebag drivers back in the good ol' U.S. of A.

The people of Prince Rupert were actually pretty nice as well, for the most part. Oftentimes people would recognize you as a tourist and ask where you were from and all that and be all friendly. There was this one extremely intoxicated guy that tried to ask me for some money so he could by cigarettes. He had a friend with him too that just sat back and laughed. I said I didn't have any cash or cigarettes and we got outta there. It wasn't that scare though, it was broad daylight and there were people around. The guy was just dumb.

Anyway, we were in Prince Rupert for a few hours but I don't really have much to write about because we just walked around and saw what there was to see.

Back on the ship we went to the nightly big show which was a ventriloquist this time. He only had one puppet, which was a Jamaican woman. The guy was actually pretty talented, and his comedy was pretty good. I hardly saw his lips move so I had to give him props for that, but still ventriloquism doesn't appeal to me that much.

That does it for day six.

Cruise - Day 5 (Skagway)

Before I get into day five I have to go over something that happened at the end of day four that I didn't mention in the last blog. At the end of day four we saw Karaoke Idol (yes, NCL's version of American Idol). The way it worked is that everyone who wanted to participate submitted their name and three names were chosen. Those people would perform karaoke of the song of their choice and then, after each had performed their songs, they would perform a random song. The contestants were also provided wardrobe for their second song. The Entertainment Staff also provided stand ins for Randy, Paula, and Simon. They played their roles very well, especially the girl playing Paula. The funniest thing that happened was this old guy who performed a country song was forced to sing the song Material Girl by Madonna. They gave him a blonde wig and a hot pink jacket, and he hiked his jeans up to his knees for the full effect. He "sang" the song as best he could and danced as best he could and it was nothing short of hilarious.

Ok, so day five was in Skagway, the northernmost city of Alaska that we visited. Like Ketchikan, Skagway is only accessible by boat or plane. Skagway was originally founded during the Klondike Gold Rush. There were two trails that early gold enthusiasts took back in the day, and we took a train ride that followed one of those trails: the White Pass. So, everyone wanted to know which side of the train to sit on to see the most. They told us once we get to the summit the engine will be moved to the other end and we would go in reverse and everyone would switch to the other side of the train so everyone would get to see everything. Well, everything was on the other side of us going up... So we still got to see everything when we went back down, but since this was our second time hearing the background stories the spots of interest kind of lost their luster. Also the ride was about 3 hours long and we had trouble staying awake after a while.

After the train ride we walked around Skagway for a bit. We went to the Tourist Center and watched a video about the history of Skagway, which was pretty entertaining I thought. Someones phone rang right behind us during the movie, and if that wasn't annoying enough the stupid lady answered and took the phone call in her seat! Grr, I was so pissed. I wanted to turn around and punch them in the throat but I'm glad I didn't cuz I got a look at her after the movie and she was like 70 years old.

After that we decided to get food on land for a change and went to a Pizza/Italian/Mexican restaurant. I got a pepperoni and sausage pizza (no sauce of course) and Cassie got cheese enchiladas. The place was kind of expensive but the food was way good. I wanted to save some pizza for later but not having any way to refrigerate it forced me to eat the whole thing (this is because of a story I forgot to include in the day 2 blog. Long story short, I asked our room steward to remove all of the alcoholic honor bar items in our refrigerator, he misunderstood me and removed the entire refrigerator).

After that we did some shopping and went back to the ship. There were two shows going on in the theater today. I mean, two different shows instead of the same show with two show times. We didn't know a lot about the first show, only that it was a comedy based show. Unfortunately we took a nap after getting back on the ship, which caused us to go to dinner a little later than we wanted and we were a few minutes late for the show. As luck would have it, this was the best show of them all and the only place we could find to sit was up in the balcony. Well, Cassie found a place to sit and I stood behind her. The show was a improv group of actors called Second City. They were hilarious. The show was mix between short comedy sketches a la Mad TV or SNL and improv sketches a la Whose Line is it Anyway. The improv sketches were ok but their short comedy sketches were just hilarious. They had me in tears. If you ever see me in person you can ask me to recall a couple of their sketches.

Anyway, the second show of the night was basically a showcase of some of the hidden talents of people that worked on the cruise ship. We saw a really good Michael Jackson routine, complete with lip syncing, good dancing and the iconic moonwalk. We also heard some stellar singing, and saw some cultural dances. The show ended with a bit they called Fountains which consisted of the Entertainment Staff sipping water from cups and spitting on each other. It was actually pretty funny.

That does it for day five!

Cruise - Day 4 (Juneau)

Day 4 was Tuesday, May 5th and we spent it in Alaska's capital city of Juneau. There wasn't a whole lot to do in Juneau. We bought some stamps and mailed some post cards we got in Ketchikan and then walked to the State Capitol Building. We walked around there for a while but there wasn't much to see. I was hoping to run into Sarah Palin but it didn't happen. After that we browsed some shops. There was this big tram that took people up the mountain but it was like $27 a person so we decided it wasn't worth it.

So this day we were supposed to go cruising right next to a glacier, the Sawyer Glacier to be exact. To get there we had to cruise up a narrow channel between the mountains. Now when I say narrow I don't mean super narrow, because it was still big enough to fit our ginormous ship and still have ample room on the sides for maneuvering. Still, we were out on our balcony taking in the scenery and the mountains were pretty darn close to us at times.

So as we were cruising up the channel we saw that ahead of us the channel was covered with a sheet of ice/snow for about a 50 yard stretch. Apparently the ship's myriad of instruments deduced that it was safe to plow through it. It was freaking awesome. It felt as though for a small period of time the ship was gliding across a big pond.

So after that we kept going up the channel and again up ahead of us we saw that the water was covered with a sheet of ice and snow, but this time we couldn't tell how far up the channel it lasted. Unfortunately they decided that this sheet was not safe to plow through and we had to turn around. So we did not make it to the Sawyer Glacier. Oh well.

So shortly after that Murray was doing another show up in the Spinnaker Lounge. This time he mostly did card tricks and had people come up and witness the tricks up close. He also showed everyone how to do a few simple tricks. One funny thing that happened was while he was talking somebody spotted what they thought was a whale out in the water and everybody jumped up out of their seats and ran over to the windows. Poor Murray, but he didn't seem to mind. He offered a free pack of cards to anyone who got a good picture of the whale. I didn't see any pictures and can't say with any degree of accuracy if there was any whale at all. By the way, I found another youtube video of Murray where he actually talks if anyone's interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGYEB6KKHSo

After Murray's show we went to the big show in the theater. It was called Band on the Run and was another performance by the singers/dancers that did the Music of the Night show on day two. This time they were doing disco songs from the 70's. I enjoyed this one more than the first because I knew more of the songs they performed. Again, they were talented but it wasn't as great as the other shows that went on during the whole week.

That's all for day four.