Book of Jamez

55 y/o malcontent, something of a writer

Tag: work

  • What's Going On In My World

    A nightmare woke me up this morning around 1:30 – couldn’t fall back to sleep after an hour or so so I’m up.

    Someone was using text messages to hack into my brain – their little profile pic showed it was the Bones villain Christopher Pelant, a very smart computer guy who makes other peoples lives hell. He taunted me in the message a few times, I’d close it and another would open up again. I turned off the wifi and it was there again… pop, a new message from the hacker guy.

    I felt as if he was inside my mind trying to erase important data that I needed. I had an image of a tall brunette woman with an axe chopping through walls that were made of magazine paper. “It’s gone, I’ll find it and you’ll never even know it was yours” she said.

    I tried to close the chat window again and it just wouldn’t close – Pelant taunted me again, his profile pic laughing at me.

    A friend grabbed my hand and said – “shut it all down, shut it all down before it’s too late.” but my other hand went to close the chat window… he squeezed my wrist and yanked out the power cord.

    and I woke up

    I was kept awake by the thought that maybe someone was really hacking into my brain – like on Johnny Mnemonic and they were taking something valuable. Then I realized I don’t really have anything valuable… so I started obsessing about work…  (more…)

  • Passing

    In 2014 I took and failed the exam for insurance licensure in the state of Arizona 4 times… I kid you not… 4 times. Three of those times I scored 68% (you need 70 to pass) and the last time was under 60 if I remember correctly… ugh

    You can only take the test four times in a year… and then you have to wait one calendar year from the last time you failed. That was last October that I was eligible. I was in a class for The Hartford at the time and not feeling at all like that was going well either.

    I was pretty overwhelmed by the entire notion… I was going through some shit last fall though so I’ll forgive myself I guess. (more…)

  • Andre

    I use writing as a tool to get things out of my head – ideas, conjecture, stories and memories. I can’t seem to move on from one of these things rattling around in my brain until I set it down on paper. Sometimes it’s just drivel, sometimes it’s quite beautiful – at least to me. I’ve been having a rough couple of days and I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to get this out there. But lack of sleep and the flashing of the incident keep bothering me. I’m hoping this will help me to get better, to recover and move on. This is selfish, I understand, but I need to be me again and I’m impatient.

    My co-worker and friend Andre was a French Canadian. You could hear the accent especially when you would talk to him for a while. It was just precious the way he would say “pardon” or even “yes”. He would call our mutual friend Guy “Gi” and myself he would call “Jamie”.  (more…)

  • Never Judge a Book by Its Tattoos

    I was reading a post on LinkedIn this morning about a manager that requires his team to wear business attire – even if they’re traveling on a domestic flight. The idea behind this  “you never know who you’ll run into and you’re representing the company” makes sense I guess. They say something similar in AA – “you could be the only example of recovery that person will see” so act as if.

    For years though I’ve heard the old adage “never judge a book by its cover” – you have no idea what the story is inside the jacket and you might find, by turning a few pages, you rather enjoy the trip down into the looking glass. (more…)

  • Something New

    I can’t study. Or maybe I don’t know how? I’m uncertain. Maybe I forgot how.

    I once studied to be a police officer – had to learn about laws, guns, and algebra. I studied and recopied everything they gave me to prepare. I memorized guns by their shape and abilities. Somehow I passed the written tests to become a police officer with 80% all around (even math)… then they asked me about LSD and I told them the truth – so they said I couldn’t be a police officer. Was kind of sad I suppose. (I think everyone should do LSD at least once, was my favorite drug and I’m fairly certain it’s not physically addicting) (more…)

  • To Change: A Rose By Any Other Name

    To Change: A Rose By Any Other Name

    One of my supervisors (and friend) at the office wants me to stop using the word change when talking about modifying procedures. He’s well intentioned. People see the word and roll their eyes or sigh in frustration at the status quo being updated once again.

    It’s not really a concern for me, I can use a thesaurus and find other useful creative words that mean the same thing as the dreaded word… but I don’t think it’ll make a difference. People are fearful of the concept of things being done different and of challenging themselves more than they are the use of a word in a communication.  (more…)

  • A Future at DC Entertainment

    A Future at DC Entertainment

    Saturday mornings as a kid some of my fondest memories include watching Challenge of the Superfriends each week – I was captivated by those and other cartoons including Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Batman and Robin and others… but the first comic book I ever remember reading was … well probably Archie, my mom loved those… and then Casper, Wendy, Richie Rich… good stuff that I liked as a kid… The first one with real super heroes was a beat up copy of an X-Men book and they were visiting Kazar in the savage land… not even sure what issue that was but I was very interested.

    It wasn’t until I was a teen and had a little pocket change that I was able to buy my own comic books and I found some at a little store in Whitehall, WI… back then they were maybe 75 cents a piece and I bought up all the ones I thought I would like. It was right in the middle of Crisis On Infinite Earths in 1985 and I was very lost… there were heroes in these books I’d never heard of before like Blue Beetle, Vigilante, Harbinger, and more… who were these people and what was going on. In Whitehall it was difficult to get back issues and I struggled to figure out what was happening. In the middle of that series Supergirl sacrificed herself to save Superman in a heroic gesture… Superman’s grief in that moment and pages after are what initially drew me to love the guy… Marv Wolfman and George Perez captured a feeling that I had inside me in that book, they transported me from Earth-Prime (that’s the Earth we all live on) to Earth-2 and the antimatter universe.. I was drawn in and loved it… (more…)

  • Can't Teach An Old Dog…

    During high school, well probably even as far back as elementary school – I had no desire to learn anything they wanted to teach me. It was boring. Time would have been better spent reading a comic book, watching tv or day dreaming about anything. I wasn’t engaged and didn’t see the purpose of learning. I loved reading stories though, loved my comics and the books I managed to get my hands on and thought deep down that someday I would be a writer.

    When I graduated high school with the bare minimum requirements everyone said “You have to go to college”. As a poor foster child there were many grants and available loans for me to choose from. I managed to get into the local college and signed up for astronomy, philosophy and some kind of statistics class as I think it was a mandatory class and I wanted to get it out-of-the-way. I didn’t want to be there at all and barely went to class on sober days, rarely on days when booze was available. Needless to say, I didn’t do well in 1989 in college and soon I was academic probation – so I left, not worth my time.

    Factory jobs for a few years and writing stories on an old Apple computer in my free time when I was stoned or drunk (made for some interesting plot holes). This was, I thought, what life was all about – a factory job, beer and not a care in the world. I was aiming pretty low at the time, but I would have been content at some level to just do that for the rest of my life – but alcoholism got in the way. (more…)

  • Choker

    This morning on the way to the office I stopped at the grocery to get some healthier alternatives to the chips I tend to snack on there. I grabbed some grapes, bananas, carrots and two apples – It wasn’t all for me I was sharing with folks. I rinsed off the grapes and set them and the bananas on the kitchen counter and alerted the work folks that they were free for the taking and then I went to my desk with a snack pack size of carrots, the two apples and my bottle of water.

    Everything was going fine, I was attaching emails, answering the phone, fixing erring printers…

    (more…)

  • Pandora's Box

    The story goes the ancient gods gave Pandora a box to protect and never open. But curiosity got the better of her and she opened the box which kept safe all the evils of the world. Pandora panicked and closed the box, leaving inside one thing – hope.

    I always thought that story was a little odd – is hope an evil that didn’t get to escape? and if it’s not an evil but didn’t get to escape how is there still hope? that Zeus was a crafty bugger.

    I was recently presented … well, more accurately, I presented myself with a Pandora’s box. I crafted it myself and filled it with expectation, hope, anticipation, pride, justifications and right. It was a beautiful box and I loved to polish it and make it shine – the beauty of it called to me and beckoned me to open it. I fought the temptation for a good long while, I thought better of my desires to see what was in the box – I set it aside and thought it would keep… but it kept glinting in the sunlight of the spirit, happiness would make the box more tempting.

    I took steps to open it, I jimmied the lock open and let it sit – it was almost like I could hear it calling to me each day “just open the lid, come see the wonders we have to offer you”

    I had a moment of clarity – slam it shut, change your mind, you don’t want to know what’s in there… but the moment was fleeting.

    I threw open the box and found what appeared to be treasures and gifts – but what turned out to be hurt pride, doubts, and anger. Now those gifts are festering spoiled fruits that have lost their taste.

    I’m not sure hope is still in there and I think the spoiled fruit may have caused me to lose my appetite for what I found so promising.

    I’m not sure if I’ll ever learn to be happy with what I have and just live the life that I have… ugh.