Originally Posted: 2005-03-24 16:34 (no longer live)
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Damn You San Diego

So I moved to San Diego about two months ago, and I would like to think that by now, I've settled into a relatively satisfying and productive life here. Nevertheless, there are a few things that are all kinds of lame that need to be addressed. Rain. I'm really not going to blame anyone for this, but I really do love the fact that I happened to move into a room with a leaky roof just in time for the worst rain in a century. Rigging towels in the rafters because I'm too poor to do anything about it is really not the best foot to start out on. Traffic signs. Is everyone in San Diego cockeyed? How difficult could it possibly be to position highway signs in such a way as to have the arrows actually point to the lanes they are referring to? I mean hell, it's an issue of a straight line. Most places have gotten this down by now. You may be cool with having to count the lanes in order to figure out where you're going, but think about the other people that have drivers licenses. Do you really want them getting distracted by counting? You know that their heads are likely to explode, which is just an inconvenience. Trust me. Getting on or off I-5 onto Garnet. What jerkoff decided that there needed to be an impossible series of traffic lights with no apparent purpose but to impede the flow of traffic? It should not take 40 minutes to exit. I should not spend 30 of my 40 minute commute trying to get on or off of highways. Do you not have to study the essential functions of your job before becoming an urban planner here? If they're looking for someone with absolutely no ability to improve traffic flow, I bet I could do it and make more money than I am now. I won't even complain about my pension being stolen. I'll still complain about my Social Security being stolen though. Drive-thrus. I've never spent so much time attempting to get "fast" food. I was in the drive thru line at popeyes today for 25 minutes. TWENTY FIVE. Do you realize how much of a lunch break that is? that's 25/60ths. 5/12ths. some sort of decimal too! I don't have that kind of time to get something from Popeyes. I didn't even really want it in the first place. Just because I was out drinking until 1:30 last night and had to trade breakfast for sleep doesn't mean that those biscuits are really worth that much time or effort. I thought people in SoCal were health conscious or something? Go eat some sprouts. I don't have time for this. While we're on the subject, burgers. I know that everyone out here likes to cream themselves over In-N-Out Burger. Guess what? It tastes like a shit patty. It's no better than every other cardboard fast food restaurant and no amount of people who have never eaten outside of southern california can convince me otherwise. I want my burgers big, thick, charred, juicy, and with taste. It should not be interchangable with a McDonalds patty. The difference should not be in the vegetables. In-N-Out can suck a dick. That'd probably make it taste better. Pickup trucks. And I thought that there was a waste of big cars in upper-middle suburbia hell where I came from. I swear to god that your F-150 does not impress me. It does not intimidate me when you try to drive over my Hyundai on 52 because I'm only going 77. Where's the fuel efficiency? Where are the high emissions standards? Where's the drunken gun accidents that weed these people out? I really wanted to discover a better situation than this. Plenty of trucks and SUVs for no reason back home too, but they're mixed in with other pointless vehicle choices. At least gimme some variety people! Massive corruption and other government silliness. You elected Arnold to be your governor. OK, you've done it before. Reagan did alright for himself I suppose and Arnold at least has been around politics for a bit. Plus, it's a state full of immigrants. What better way to force the country to give you jobs that you aren't qualified for than to put an unqualified immigrant in a position of massive influence and power? But who am I to complain? I'm from DC, where our mayor is videotaped smoking crack with a hooker and gets reelected as soon as he gets out of jail and puts on a multicolored hat of redemption. More disappointing and confounding though is that the person receiving the most votes for mayor isn't the mayor. The electoral college is one thing, but c'mon. Most votes wins. c'mon. Public transportation. I miss it. I miss busses that go places efficiently. I miss riding the subway. I miss not having to drive everywhere. I miss crazy people proselytizing during my impossibly long commute. I miss people that really thought that shoving their briefcase between the doors of the subway would accomplish anything more than losing their briefcase. I miss people yelling at each other in different languages because nobody understands the damn map. I miss the thugs that would get high and try to sing. I miss WMATA suddenly realizing that they could jack up the prices on friday and saturday nights drunk people will pay anything. Crazy drunk people. Mostly I miss all of society being forced to deal with each other's idiosyncracies that produce so many great rants. Cultural Hierarchy. I miss being better than everyone else. I come from inside the beltway. In Virginia. Not only does that make me better than everyone outside the beltway (as long as I don't leave), but it makes me better than the smelly people in Maryland that don't know how to drive and the crazy people in DC that only live there so they have an excuse to complain about everyone in the suburbs. I miss everyone just knowing that they were pompous assholes and genuinely not caring. We had a great system set up and it worked for everyone. In San Diego, people don't put nearly enough thought and nuance into their arrogance, and as a result, my sense of superiority leaves me far less smug than it should. Rants. The San Diego rants on Craigslist have been really disappointing. Where's the frustration? Where's the urges to commit horrific acts of violence? Where are the grand tales of genuine horror or bonding with flat out crazy people and moments? Filling out myspace surveys does not count. poetry rarely counts. one sentence posts don't count. This apparently leaves you all with exceptionally detailed scientific analyses of why you should get a date (perhaps reflecting specifically why you DON'T) and stories of men being inappropriately naked. Inappropriate nudity is nothing to scoff at, but is that really all that's going on here? There are millions of you out there, and I know for a fact that crazy people do all variety of crazy things all damn day. So let's hear it already. My job. My job is finally good. After the last two. Yeah, three in a month and a half. Things not to do when attempting to hire people include but are not limited to: Lie to me about how much I'm going to make. Lie to me about what work I will be doing. Lie to me about what my title will be. Not respond to my calls, emails, or other messages. Not tell me that the work is exceptionally part time. Give me any sort of test that lasts longer than an hour calling on me to prove that I can type. I typed the resume and the email in the first place fuckwit. Expect me to pay for parking when I come to interview. Forget that you have an interview. Tell me that I likely won't get hired because of my politics. Include as major aspects of the interview process a picture and a joke. As for this job, it has a long list of things that will likely supply me with rant material, but it pays well and it's easy. I like that in a job. I'd say I've done approximately one hour worth of actual "work" today, and I would imagine that people think I'm doing a good job. When two thirds of the office goes to St. Louis for two weeks, things die down and I start fantasizing about the ways in which I can translate the responsibilities of a paper-pusher into a creeping path to world domination. I start culling the headlines on Yahoo News and deciding who will live and who will die when I rule the world. I ponder great mysteries of the world, like what if China really COULD send the earth rocketing into the sun if everyone jumped off of towers at the same time? How would that change the trade relationship? How long would it take to get fired if I started leaving fake "while you were out" messages in everyone's box? How creative could I be? How much could I draw it out? For the past 6 hours, I have been receiving phone calls that are nothing but a very loud beep and then silence. I have fielded this call at least 30 times today. This is unacceptable and I'm having visions of the automatic dialer Simpsons episode in which this evil is finally vanquished in a hail of gunfire. I need to shoot a machine to make my day better. Several times. Or perhaps, since it's likely a fax machine that's insisting on fucking with my program, a reenactment of everyone's favorite scene from Office Space. Concurrently, there's a loud buzzing sound in the ceiling. It sounds as though there may be a 6-foot mutant bee of some kind inhabiting the ceiling space above the dropdown tiling. Which is something I could potentially get behind and start charging admission for if it weren't for the hole in the tile above my head. This simply means that I would be the first to die when this bee finally decides it's time to start working on its movie. I know I'm the new guy but this really was not in the job description. I've now managed to kill at least 30 minutes and, since I made it in early this morning through some crazy traffic wormhole, I get to skip out early in the interest of saving the company from paying me overtime. So I ask this of you: Be more interesting. Be more expressive. Incorporate some variety into your lives, tell me about it, and kill the damn beeping machine. Do it now. The beeping is starting to make sense to me. You won't like me when the beeping makes sense. In spite of all this, there's no snow. That makes San Diego better. Congratulations on winning, but don't coast. Get yourself in gear. Best of? this is in or around Almost out the door

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