Life in 2D/3D

I had a very unusual shopping experience today. Usually i'll avoid the shops right after christmas to let all the vultures swoop in and fight over their post-christmas bargains - i mean really, who can be bothered with the whole thing? Being shoulder to shoulder with strange, sweaty women who will give you a quick hip-and-shoulder to beat you to a bargain - not because it's something they want or need, but purely because it's 'on sale'. Bizarre how people will buy things simply because they're chaper than normal. I'll never understand the logic behind buying a 1/2 price barbeque grilling set when you don't have a barbeque, or buying a size 8 t-shirt when you're a size 12 because 'someone you know might like it - and it's on sale!'

No, normally i would avoid the shopping centres at this time of year - but i needed to pick up a few things that i couldn't get anywhere else, and i'd already put it off since before christmas, and things were becoming depserate. So i headed off to the local shopping centre, stalked some poor, helpless shopper for their parking space and headed inside. It wasn't as busy as i thought it would be inside, but there was still the usual, crazy struggle over useless crap going on. i did the rounds and picked up the few things that i needed, trying to avoid any sort of discounted christmas stock and headed back to the car. On the way out, i walked past a store that had a gorgeous skirt displayed out the front. The entire store was covered in signs that said '20% off all stock' or something similar. I didn't pay that much attention to them. I have this strange (and slightly ridiculous) shopping habit whereby i will buy anything that i like, regardless of price, regardless of a sale or of whether i can go to some other place and buy it cheaper - provided that the price is under $89.95. I don't know hwy this is, but i think it stems from my laziness - i just can't be bothered trekking through 18 shopping centres and 25 discount outlets to try to find the best price on an item. If it's there and i like it, i'll buy it. I think $89.95 is my cutoff because when you get to the 90s, it starts to sound expensive and mildly unreasonable. This reasoning goes for almost everything i buy, except for Jeans, but that's a whole different story.

So i wandered into this store and picked up the skirt. Now everything that was in this store, for some bizarre reason was in those stupid pants measurements that i think have something to do with the imperial/metric conversion thing. Instead of saying 'size 8' or 'small', they all had '34' or '36' etc. on them. Needless to say, i had no idea what the equivalent of size 8 is in crazy measurements, so i had to ask one of the sales people, which is where things got unusual. I asked her what the equivalent was, and she told me that 36 was a size 8 and i thanked her. All of a sudden, she yanked the skirt out of my hands and started fumbling around with it. She didn't ask me for it, she didn't take it carefully, she just yanked it out of my hands. She fumbled around, looked at the price tag.

"I don't think this is on sale" she muttered at me.

Obviously, i didn't really care, since i had barely even noticed there was a sale on.

"Er, ok..." I managed to stutter through my shock at having the item snatched out of my grasp.

She took the skirt and hung it back up. I reached forward, picked it up again while she watched me.

"That skirt isn't on sale!" She snapped as though i had done something to make her irate.

"That's fine" i told her.

"But it's not reduced" she told me, yet again.

"I realise that, but is it ok with you if i still try it on?" I couldn't beleive i had to ask the shopping nazi if i could try on a skirt - in a clothing store!

"I suppose" she muttered back at me, and led me through to a canging room with no lighting so that i had to change in the pitch black.

I ended up buying the skirt (from another salesperson) despite being totally freaked out by the weirdest shop assistant i'd ever met. The strangest part of all was that while paying for the skirt, i discovered that it was discounted after all.

Next year i'll just make do without the things i need until after the sales. I think they've finally started to drive the sales people crazy.

I officially feel like i'm on holiday.
This feeling has mostly been induced by sleeping until 1pm for the last two days and having the longest, most relaxing bath in all of history.
I'm now tossing up what i want to spend the next two weeks doing. I know that i want it to be entirely stress free (if that's possible) and i want to spend some time outdoors, since the better part of my days are spent working in a concrete cave. I'd like to go away somewhere, but i don't know whether or not that will happen, since i haven't organised anything, and it's really the sort of time of year where you really need to organise your trips. I think maybe if we just get in the car and drive, provided we leave at a reasonable hour of the morning, we should be able to find somewhere to stay. I'm not so sure this is the best idea for a stress-free holiday, but it will mean being outdoors and being somewhere that's not home, so it's an appealing sort of idea to me.
Tomorrow i plan to dedicate to becoming entirely relaxed. This will mostly involve more sleep, lots of lying around and plenty of eating things that don't involve any preparation. I'm looking forward to it.

I'm sitting here at my desk, trying to kill the last 10 mintues before work is over for the year and finding that i've exhausted every possible thing i could do to keep myself occupied and i am now official being paid to do the exact opposite of work. It's 2:57pm on the 23rd of december and i'm still at work. Could someone please explain why? Oh yes, i forgot - it's because everyone else has so much work to do to finish off the year and i am the only one who managed to complete everything with quite a few hours to spare.

I am so incredibly organised for christmas, that tonight i'm going to the local shopping centre to start my christmas shopping. It could be worse - i could have left it until tomorrow night. I'm not quite that disorganised.
Maybe next year i'll move to one of those countries where they don't celebrate christmas, just to save having to drag myself shopping when i really can't be bothered. THere are countries that don't celebrate Chrstmas? I hear you ask. Well yes. I'm sure there are. I'm sure i could find one that was totally christmas free. There are lots of countries. (i'm not sure how many exactly, i always get that number and the number of bones in the human body confused. Don't ask me why)

Ok, i'm going now to try and get KJ to leave so i can get out of here and go and enjoy the sweltering 35 degree heat.

 

People keep getting eaten by sharks. It's not a good thing for trying to get rid of the Australian stereotype

Have you ever experience a 'nanna nap'? Do you know anyone who takes 'nanna-naps'? Do you even know what a 'nanna-nap' is?

The newest female sales rep at work (who i believe may be slightly insane) is a nanna-nap-taker. Now you would think that a nanna-nap would just be sort of like an afternoon nap. You just lie down on top of your bed or on the couch and you have a bit of a snooze. You would be wrong. To take a nanna-nap, this woman changes out of her clothes in to her pyjamas. She brushes her teeth, takes off her makeup and washes her face. She climbs into bde and sets her alarm to wake her up - In an hour.
She goes to all that trouble, just for an hour of bed-time. If it takes her 15 minutes to get to sleep, she only gets 45 minutes of nap time. Then, after her 45 minutes is up, the alarm goes off and she sits in bed like she has just woken up from a big night's sleep. She sits around waking up (usually with a cup of tea) for 15 minutes or so, then gets out of bed, and re-prepares herself for going out. Showering, makeup, clothes, teeth etc. All of this for 45 minutes of light sleep in the middle of the day.

I have to be honest - I don't get it. Why go to all that trouble for 45 minutes of rest? You could just as easily lie back and read a book or something to relax for an hour, and it wouldn't involve slotting an extra day's worth of getting ready for work/bed into your day. Truly truly bizarre. If anyone can explain to me why, I would greatly appreciate it, because it just seems plain crazy to me.

In other crazy people news, I was served at the checkout in the busiest store in the shopping centre today by a kid that was drunk. He was either drunk, or he was stoned, but he definitely wasn't in a fit state to be working customer service. I asked him if he was drunk and he immediately freaked out and tried to concentrate on what he was doing, which only served to prove that he really was drunk, because you can't mistake the look of a drunk person trying to act sober. At one point while he was scanning my purchases, I asked him something, and he stopped what he was doing, leaned forward onto the basket in front of him and started to chat like we were old mates and like there wasn’t a massive queue getting irate behind me. This was round about the point where I asked him if he was drunk, because I figured it was either get him moving - or get lynched by an angry mob of Christmas shoppers with bad attitudes. So I took my chances with the drunk guy.

I swear - this world is going completely crazy.

Today i met our Queensland sales rep for the first time. For the past two years, he has just been that annoying voice over the phone, but today he became a real person.

People are much less irritating when you can deal with them face to face.

He looked a lot different than the photo i have seen of him, so when he walked into my office and started chatting to me, i had no idea who he was for a second. Then it just clicked and i recognised the voice.
He has such incredibly vivid blue eyes that i thought he must be wearing coloured contacts - but apparently not. His entire face had that long-exposure-to-lots-of- sun sort of look - not quite wrinkled, but just sort of....weather beaten, i guess you'd say. His entire face changed shape when he smiled. Actually, thinking about it now, he sort of looked like someone had pinned back his skin somehow so that it was creasing in the wrong places when he smiled. It was quite unusual.

it has been such a long week, i think i need to stop being a computer nerd and go and have a beer at the pub. Happy Thank-God-It's-Friday everyone!

A selection of my recent hits from search engines:

sleep talking
mcdonalds cooking
the curious incident of the dog in the night time
sleep talking
sleep talking
sleep-talking
talking in sleep
sleep talking
flushing goldfish
tool for flushing the toilet
sleep talking
stupid hats
talking in sleep
how to make 2d christmas decorations
free jellybeans
sleep talking
sleep talking
drive ya nuts
sleep talking
sleep talking
3d tits
talking in my sleep

If you want lots of traffic, write about sleep talking.
My favourite in there is "3D tits". What the....??

Over the last week i've been trying to deal with a company in Belgium. I've been trying to get them to send me some 3D files of their product, but the language barrier and their complete and utter inability to use a computer made it next to impossible to get what i was after. It was like reading an email  from someone who knew all the words to put into a sentence, but who had no idea of how to put them in the right order so that the sentence would make sense.

it is like taking i am  this sentence rearranging it and i am so that is in the wrong order.

Well perhaps not quite as bad as that, but when you're trying to talk about computer files and 3D models, it can get a little confusing. It always astonishes me that multi-million dollar worldwide businesses can be run by people who have no idea how to use their sales tools. How did they build their business to be so big? I think it's because there is an expected standard of presentation overseas and that standard isn't very high. people just expect dodgy sales presentations. I think that's why they're so blown away when i present an image of what they're buying that is on a background that looks like the area where it will be installed and where the plastic parts look like they're made of plastic and the steel looks like steel etc etc.

Imagine how big a giant corporation would be if they actually knew what they were doing?

Unreal. Totally unreal. Those are the only word I have to describe how my work Christmas party was.
Up until Monday night, everything I ate or drank tasted like bourbon. That’s a sign of a very good party. I wrote a nice big long blog entry on Sunday about the whole thing, but it was magically eaten by my computer (with a little help from my 2 Day Hangover, I think) and now I just can’t find the motivation to write about it all again. Suffice to say that it went for 11 hours and involved more bourbon than I thought one person could possibly consume.
This week has been absolutely-flat-out-non-s top-rush-around work filled. Why does it always seem like work pushes you to breaking point for the last two weeks before the holidays, so that by the time you recover from 2 weeks of trauma, your holidays are over and you’re no more relaxed than you were before you started them? I feel like I have a thousand people hounding me to get thigns done. It’s my own fault for being slack and not getting them done sooner, I suppose.
I promise to write a nice, positive, un-whinging blog in the next day or two to make up for my recent slackness. Right now I need sleep….oh how I need sleep!

In 12 minutes i am going to begin a mad dash for final christmas party preparation. A major problem has arisen in the fact that it was supposed to be very very hot tomorrow, but suddenly, the forecast has changed to 'mild and cool'. You can't wear somehting that was meant for very hot weather when it's going to be cold - it just isn't practical. I hate melbourne weather. It's like a weather-sampler. You get a little bit of everything, all at once. It's a good place to come to so you can choose a temperature you like and then find a country that has it all year round instead of at 5 minute intervals.
I have to go shopping. Wish me luck!!