-= Thought =- Mmmmmmm

Mmmmmmm, pasta bake.

-= Game Thought =- Leisure Suit Larry - Magna Cum Lauda

Game Title: Leisure Suit Larry - Magna Cum Lauda

Genre: Adult

 

Rating: 8 / 10

 

Well, I've finished this game, and contrary to many conflicting reviews about the game, I found it pretty good. That's not to say it was outstanding, or GREAT, but it wasn't as bad as I thought.

 

I'm a big fan of the Leisure Suit Larry titles, and have always enjoyed the game. It was certainly interesting to take it from being an adventure game to a game that revolves around mini-games.

 

It's a shame that this game was banned in Australia, though I can understand why. It's got a lot of swearing, and sexual innuendo. Additionally, the version I played was not the "Uncut and Uncensored" version. The normal version has a big CENSORED across the genitals area. This can be easily removed (in the PC version at least) by applying a simple patch.

 

Anyway, if you've enjoyed the Leisure Suit Larry games in the past, this is worthwhile to look at simply as the jokes are fairly similar to the ones in the past.

 

The graphics are good, the character designs are great and the music is good as well. I like the fact that the old Leisure Suit Larry theme is played in the background occasionally.

 

I wonder what Al Lowe thinks of the game ......

-= thought =- Happy Happy Joy Joy

Tuesday, 23rd of November

First day I heard my baby's heartbeat. My 14 week pregnant wife and I went to the Doctor yesterday, and she used some weird half ultrasound looking thing, and half microphone thing, and we could hear the heartbeat.

 

Very cool !!!

 

Next step, ultrasound in about 3-4 weeks time.

 

Happy happy.

-= Thought =- The Blah of Mondays

Well, it's been 11 days since my last post. And what an exciting, marvellous ride these 11 days have been. NOT!

Work has been busy, as my Second in Command (.Gif) has gone to Malaysia for 3 weeks. This means I get to do his job as well as mine, and the other Team Leader in the department doesn't do anything because he comes in too late and by the time he's here, everything has to have been done already.

Gah!

So today, having started at 7:00am, I still haven't had a break and it's now 10:00am. And I haven't even started my own work yet.

This seems like a pretty crap day, but it seems to be a normal Monday to me.

I think that whoever invented Mondays should be forced to perpetually live in a Monday. A fate worse than death.

Well, it's 11:00am now, and now it's 12:55pm before I got to write anything else.
*sigh*

Mondays. Bloody Mondays

-= Thought =- Ouch

How can someone wake up and have a headache? It's not like I've been staring at a computer or TV, using my eyes or slept too long.

I woke up this morning with a blinding headache. Took some neurofen and went to work, and been ok, but I'm just puzzled about it.

Maybe I was deep-sleeping and moving my eyes around a lot, it's the only thing I can think of.

-= Fiction2 =- Chapter 1 - Welcome to the Jungle

Introduction

Welcome to my recollections of a life within a call centre. This is the mostly true account of my personal struggles through a call centre, and survival within. The names are, of course, changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.

A little bit of information. The call centre I work in is an outsourced call centre. This means that we have customers (i.e. the people who we talk to on the phone) and the client (i.e. the people who pay the bills). This is an important bit of information as I'll be referring to The Client throughout this.

Secondly, we do technical support for an I.S.P. This is an Internet Service Provider. So this means that some of the jabs I deliver will be aimed at those that have a little bit of technical knowledge. Additionally, I'll be poking fun occasionally at those who don't understand technology. If this offends you, you may not want to read on.

--

Welcome to the jungle

We've got fun 'n' games

We got everything you want

Honey, we know the names

We are the people that can find

Whatever you may need

If you got the money, honey

We got your disease

In the jungle

Welcome to the jungle

Watch it bring you to your

knees, knees

I wanna watch you bleed

[Welcome to the Jungle - Guns 'n' Roses]

--

Day 1: The Begining

Looking up at the building that I am starting work at, I am overwhelmed by the tackiness. Whoever designed the building obviously subscribed to the motto that vertical stripes are slimming. When used on a 10 storey building, they are not slimming, they're bloody ugly.

-= Thought =- Thoughts of the weekend

Well, it's been an eventful weekend. We're in the process of selling the house, and this weekend has seen an inspection and an offer.

The original offer was too low (i.e. $625k) but we've bargined him up to where we wanted him.

So now we just have to get papers signed, deposit taken and hopefully we'll have sold the house.

I think I'm more nervous now (and stressed) than when we were just selling the house. Now we have something to loose, rather than before when we didn't have anything to loose at all, just a buyer to gain.

And hopefully, I'll be getting a new laptop and 'puter once we sell the house.

*fingers crossed*

-= Thought =- Massages at work

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, just got my massage.

Definately makes Friday the best day.

-= Thought =- Thoughts about Friday

Friday, the end of the week. It's amazing how much you look forward to a day.

I always find that Fridays are generally better than any other weekday.

1. Mufti every Friday
2. $3 for a 5 minute massage. And the girl who does the massages is cute. No ugly guy doing massages here
3. Bad things only happen right at the end of Friday, before going hmoe time, not throughout the day like most other weekdays.
4. Weekend is almost here !!!
5. Don't need to go to bed early. It's not a "school night" so can play on my 'puter till all hours (or until my wife yells at me to get to bed).
6. More relaxed atmosphere at work. People are less likely to cause trouble for me, whinge at me or similar.

All Hail the Mighty Friday.

-= Fiction =- The Virtual World Society and Reality

Imagine if you will, a future society based on it's technology. Mankind had developed the virtual reality world to the point where a persons biological needs could be maintained by machines while the person remains in the Virtual World. This society eventually fully retreated into the Virtual World, as this was a much nicer, cleaner and easily maintained world than the real world. In reality, the world had begun to suffer from neglect, and mankinds obcessive development of it's technology. Huge factories were built, pumping pollutants into the atmosphere, that powered the massive computer systems and the tubes that sustained mankind in it's "little slice of heaven".

Life was good, once society had retreated into the Virtual World. The world followed guidelines that were clearly established, but could be changed if something dire went wrong. Generations were born and died within the Virtual World, without ever having exited to view the real world. Unlike "The Matrix", this was not a prison, but a self imposed exile from reality.

But as all systems do, eventually this one failed. Mankind had lived within the Virtual World for a thousand years, with the real world being simply an old story, or even a myth told around camp fires. One day, however, mankind woke from it's nighttime slumbers to a terrible, new reality. This was a reality of dark, dank factories, where tubes were inserted into various orifices to maintain their existance. The terror of waking up within a glass tube, feeling the uncomfortable sensation of tubes inserted throughout your body and in various orifices. Many people could not cope with this terrifying, strange and uncomfortable world, and lost their sanity. Some people hurt themselves, or hurt others, in their quest to escape from this "unreal" world that they never knew existed. Ultimately worse, however, were the tubes of people that didn't wake, those killed outright when the system fatally crashed. Some of the survivors thought of these people as the lucky ones.

Mankind floundered. Few had the skills to work with, what were now archaic designs. During mankinds time within the computer system, they had continued their quests for knowledge, but generally on paths of pure knowledge, and not practical solutions. With everything catered for them, mankind saw no reason to change their existance, and so had not developed any type of practical skills.

Months passed as the remnants of humanity attempted to repair the failed computer systems. Knowledge was gained slowly, and painfully. Many died, either through refusal to accept the new world, or through mis-managed attempts to bring the "real" world back online before vital repairs had been conducted. For many, all that sustained them was the promise of their leaders that ultimately the Virtual World would be restored to humanity.

While the majority of the survivors eagerly awaited a return to their real world, within the computers, the leaders of mankind had realised that this existence would ultimately doom mankind. But they were powerless to prevent the return of mankind to, what the had come to realise was simply a self-imposed prison. If they proposed remaining in the real world, very few, if any, of the survivors would accept this. They had had enough of this strange and hard world, where they had to fight simply to survive. They wanted the sheltered reality that they had grown up in. Additionally, few people, even after months in the real world, had anything like the skills to survive and rebuild society to it's former levels.

Finally, a bizarre plan to salvage humanity was born. The majority of the survivors would reenter the world they had left. However, the leaders and some of the scientists who understood the issue would remain behind, building some safeguards into the computer systems, and building mechanical minders for the machines. They would also implement the major portion of the plan, that would ultimately take the rest of their lives to fine tune and complete.

They would build a seperate Virtual World, imitating the real world in every details. All laws of physics and similar would be hardcoded into the system, and the Virtual World would work exactly the same as the real world. This system would be unchangeable from within, but could be altered from without, at least initially. The Virtual World was fed all the history data and information that existed, and would initially recreate the beginning of the 20th Century. Sophisticated Pseudo Intelligences (PI's) would be created to exist within the world initially, but later retreat out of the Virtual World and exist in the bcground of the world, monitoring it for any signs of anomolies.

Into this world would go all the new born babies that were created in the system. The vast computer system had a sophisticated way of managing human procreation, essentially monitoring sexual intercourse and, based on a formulae, if pregnancy ensued, would take the appropriate genetic material from each parent and "tube" the resulting embryo. Ultimately, the baby would be inserted into a full tube, which it would grow into ultimately, and inserted into the Virtual World, and grow up in the 20th Century created world.

The idea behind this was to give mankind a second chance, and allow it to develop the skills it had lost again in a safer environment than the true world.

-= Thought =- Final thought for the day

I wonder, should there be some kind of IQ test that comes with working at a call centre? Most people think of this as a monkey answering phones type job, that anyone could do it, but I tend to think it takes a certain something.

You need to be able to be able to answer the custoemrs query (technical or not), and also provide a good customer experience. Some of the best technical agents I've seen have absolutely no customer sense, and some of the best customer service agents have no skills whatsoever.

For example, the guy sittnig accross the desk at me is pretty good with technical questions (when he can be bothered and isn't lazy). However, his customer services skills suck. He doesn't pay attention to the customer, and leaves very long silences in the call. It's enough to make me cringe when I listen to his calls. It's hard to get him to understand as well, as it's always some excuse like "I was thinking of the best solution for the customer", or "I was talking to someone about this issue". Perfectly valid excuses, kind of.

Anyway, home time for me now. Yay!

-= Thought =- Todays Count

Number of times answered stupid question today: 15
Number of times answer has been ignored: 15
Number of times I've needed to re-answer stupid question: 15

Number of meetings scheduled for this morning: 3
Number of meetings that have started late: 3

Number of violent throughts today: 145

Number of times that I've been told that someone is going to the bathroom today: 17

Number of voicemails received today : 4
Number of voicemails WITH a message and a point: 1


Stress Level: 62%

-= Thought =- Blog title

I should just retitle this to something like "Disgruntled musings of a Call Centre Team Leader". It seems that the majority of things I come up with tend to do with work, and that's what I do/am.

Call Centre Team Leader

It's a thankless job, but someone has got to do it, otherwise all the agents wouldn't have someone to complain to, whinge at or otherwise abuse.

-= Thought =- Daylight Savings again

Yes, Daylight savings is very hard to bear. It has been a pretty ordinary morning so far, having to get up for work at 5am (really 4am) is not nice, and not worth the extra daylight in the evening.

To quote the Simpsons

"Ouch, my eyeball."