This Geek

Yesterday there was a minor incident at my house. Seems some blokes strolled on to my property and knocked on the front door, giving our 60+ year old house cleaner a near heart attack. Considering that our electronic gate was closed, this was quite a surprise for her. Fortunately my neighbour spotted them cuz his dog was going crazy, so they ran off. I had no idea how they got through the gate.

While I was on my way to work this morning, I got a call from my wife. The house burglar alarm had activated. Seems the motherfuckers from yesterday had come back, broke my so called security gate, and kicked the front door in.

They obviously weren’t aware of the alarm, because they only managed to grab my crap old tv and my brand spanking new xbox 360 (which I have only had for 5 days!). Fortunately my neighbour saw them again, saw their car and got their license plate. He can also identify the one guy, should they catch them (unlikely). He called the cops as well (who only showed up an hour later I might add).

What a frickin’ ball ache. Now I have to screw around with insurance etc.

Considering my negativity about work the past few months, I was quite shocked when we received our bonus and increase letters yesterday.

I was quite sure that the increase would be a waste of time as per usual, and after last year’s decent 10k incentive bonus, I was not expecting to get much, if at all this year, especially considering I verbally attacked my completely incompetent boss one day on the phone awhile back (shortly after she started and was trying to assert herself), so my jaw nearly hit the floor when she told me that the bonus alone was almost double last year’s and my increase was just about an extra 20k per annum.

Speaking to my friend in the development department, he said his increase and bonus was also quite substantial, so it looks like the company is finally trying to appease the IT department as a whole.

With regards to my earlier mention about verbally attacking my boss, I must say that it is something that I have never done before, and will most likely not do again in the future, but she had made the mistake of pushing me too far with unfounded allegations etc, and I had had enough, so I lost my temper and blew up.

I don’t know what it is lately, but the street behind my house seems to attract accidents like a venus flytrap attracts flies.

Two nights ago, at 03h30, there was yet another loud bang that roused us and our neighbours on both sides from sleep. Fortunately there weren’t any injuries, because I saw the driver walking around his car while talking on his cell phone. It looked to me like his front left wheel had come off, which accounted for the loud scraping noise we had heard after the bang. Shortly after that, 5 tow trucks pitched up to fight over who would tow him. I went back to bed.

When I was on my way to work the next morning, I noticed that the newly planted lamp post was now folded in half and lying on the ground, loking much worse for wear. I’m guessing that the guy somehow took out that pole, losing his wheel in the process, so that probably accounted for the bang we heard.

And of course, last night, a good night’s rest didn’t happen either, as I was woken up at midnight with my electric fence alarm going off. Actually, I didn’t hear the alarm. I woke up with my phone against my ear, speaking to the security company. I had not even conciously heard the phone ring. It was kind of bizarre to wake up while speaking to someone on the phone, let me tell you, also considering that I hadn’t even taken off my cpap mask, so I must have sounded really strange.

Anyway, I got up to check the fence, and discovered that there was a short in the usual location that was causing a huge spark, and setting of the alarm every few seconds. After turning off the fence and grabbing a torch, I discovered a huge ass spider had somehow decided that the fence was a good place to try make a nest. It must have gotten a rather nasty surprise.

I cleared it and went back to bed. =20

I’m now feeling like a zombie. It’s gonna take me a few nights of decent uninterrupted sleep to recover.

The world being my department here at work. When I became a staff member nearly 7 years ago, there were about 12 people, although 3 of them were in different parts of the country. A retrenchment process where we all had to re-apply for our jobs got rid of those 3, along with one or two others.

Then there were around 7 of us. Surprise surprise, another retrenchment process happened, and we had to reapply for our jobs again. And then there were 4.

A junior guy got tired of being messed around for a pitiful salary, so he resigned. And then there were 3.

Then rumours of an outsource for our department came about. And then those rumours became truth. Another colleague resigned, although they begged him to stay on, so he’s currently on contract until the end of May. And then there were 2.

While our department has gotten ever smaller, the workloads have not decreased at all.

I love the smell of resignations in the morning!

Looks like the Wordpress 2.1.1 download was compromised. I’m not sure if the download I had was the compromised version, but it never hurts to be safe, so I upgraded all the blogs I look after to the latest version.

Obviously the script kiddies were bored. I wish they’d find something better to do than to try fuck up other people’s web sites.

It’s shortly before midnight, I’m just on the verge of dozing off when we hear an almighty bang. Another car accident, in almost exactly the same place as a couple of weeks ago. This time it sounded like two cars colliding, and shortly after the crowd gathered, we could hear an extremely drunk sounding woman shouting obscenities in Afrikaans, and then a guy responding in like tones. It wasn’t too long before emergency services showed up. Typically, a vulture (tow truck) was on the scene literally 5 minutes after the accident. Again, typically, it took the cops about half an hour or so to show up. Fortunately the ambulances and fire trucks were on scene in short order. Good grief. Two years we’ve been in this house with no major incidents, and now we have 2 nasty accidents within weeks of each other. I’m just worried these assholes are gonna crash through my back wall one day, considering these accidents happened 2 houses up from me.