Work Sucks, Let's Party!

Ok, so I think that my musings on US politics are a little boring. Instead, let’s take a journey through the last week or two. I am going to break this into two parts: the fun stuff (i.e. the weekends) and the not so fun stuff—working.

Part 1
So last weekend, I took it easy I slept a ton went out and watched two movies. The new Bond movie was pretty good until the end. I also saw “Tropic Thunder” it was pretty good even if a lot of the jokes were lost in translation on the Taiwanese people around me.

This weekend I went out on Friday to my favorite all you can drink bar for a good ol’ time. I always go there alone since I seem to bump into interesting people and manage to drink heavily in the process. I always end up with phone numbers from tons of random people but they never call me and I never call them so I figure it’s all fair. When I was there I started talking to this faux-gangster and his buddy. They were pretty cool dudes. Then one of the girls (Xiao Yang) he was there with started talking to me, and as a matter of fact was pretty into me, she started trying to hold my hand and told me she really like foreigners, yada yada. After a little bit grabbed a seat at a nearby booth for a minute and a dude there asks me about my girlfriend. I tell him nope, not a girlfriend. Soon I come to find out ol' Xiao Yang is there with her boyfriend who apparently had a huge argument with her—ok not good news.

At 4AM this the place closes, I go outside to wait for a cab and I end up bumping into the faux-gangster, his buddy, and Xiao Yang again. They suggest we get some beers from 7-11. Hell yeah. So I go outside with them to eat my chips, drink some tea, and drink some beer. Out front, I strike up a conversation with some Taiwanese aboriginals who happened to be there with beers too. Of course, this night ended with a high nore when el faux-gangster got pissed at something small some other dude says then taking off his shirt and getting ready to fight—only to be restrained by Xiao Yang. I sat back and watched this spectacle for a few minutes then bowed out and took a taxi home.

I tried to call my friend James on Skype for an international drunk dial (shout out to Schenkel for drunk dialing me on Skype when I was at work) when I made it home. Unfortunately, the combination of my internet being down, me being very drunk, and me wanting to go to bed foiled those plans.

I slept REALLY late on Saturday but did get up and go to a cool hookah bar; I’ll definitely go back there at some point.

Well Sunday I get a call from one of the random people that gave me their number, another faux-gangster named J’ro. I meet him for coffee at Starbucks. I had minimal recollection of meeting him outside the bar. Come to find out he is an unemployed, former factory worker and rapper, has “ghetto superstar” tattooed on his arm, and has a huge fetish for Latina women. Normally, I would cut this kind of person off immediately but he can apparently get me into one of the best clubs in the city for free so I’ll be hanging out with him once more.

After that, I went down to see the “wild strawberry” student protest. It was there that three 18 yr old college students stopped me and interviewed me for a school assignment. They were supposed to speak English but since my Chinese was better than their English we mostly spoke Chinese. Then they invited me to a night-market so I went with them and had a pretty good dinner.

Part 2
At work, things have been rough these past few weeks. The plus side was that I got a bonus that is equal to about $90 for my work, nice to get a little recognition. There have been three main pains in the ass. First, I have had to deal with a camera system that cannot meet the specs of a customer and try to figure out how to deal with that. But we have a tight production schedule and don’t have enough time to test it.

Second, my boss did his usual deal: hey there is this new order from China, you have no experience with it so how about you get some experience and take it on as the project manager here in Taiwan…um sure? The problem is that the bastard customer can’t seem to decide on what kind of damn artwork they want. So that means every day this week there was an artwork change that had to be made urgently and could not wait only to have a new change come the next day that also could not wait. My job was to talk with the China office and get the customer demands, relay them to the design department, check the new artwork, send the artwork, and then get new changes to repeat the cycle.

But he most stressful was the deal from Thailand this week. They held off on telling us when we needed to give them a delivery schedule for our order (until they worked out if we were to ship by sea or air freight). Then this Wednesday night they called saying they needed the schedule immediately for all air freight. This was not too hard and I was able to talk with 2 coworkers for a rough schedule that we could finalize in the morning. Then I got a call from my boss we got an additional Thailand order of 1.7 million to bring the total to 5.5 million. By this time it was after 6 and most people were gone so we told Thailand to wait until the morning for us to meet and discuss it.

Then we set things out in the morning and I call them, well it turns out we cannot have anything arrive after Dec. 25, so we have to alter our schedule once more. Ok, now it's all set. Then they send me an email that they now want us to send 4 million to them by sea freight. So we have another meeting to completely revamp the schedule due to different lead and shipping times. I send them that. I get a reply that they cannot accept sea freight after Wednesdays, which would have been nice to know before. Of course, by this time it’s getting late so we revise again, discuss and I send. When I it send I put the date like this "Dec 7th (12-7)." I get a confused response wanting to know what (12-7) means. I sort that out. The next morning I get another email saying they cannot accept our final delivery on the 25th. So we change everything once more, and this time they agree.