All I've Got Left Are My Bones

As of this morning I was reluctantly looking for jobs because I love my job and don't want to leave it, but see: $10k raise problem solver.

As of noon today this was no longer an issue, because my boss called me with the news that I was getting a $10K merit raise.

I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This is roughly $200 extra per paycheck. Enough to pay off debt faster, rebuild my savings, and spend a weekend a month in Milwaukee getting obscenely laid. The sex I'm going to have on $200 extra per paycheck. You can't even.

We… were not. 

War had ravaged us, and sickness, and war once again, until our population dwindled beyond the point of recovery. We struggled against that, of course… we used genetic manipulation, and cloning, and even more desperate measures. None succeeded. When the humans came, we were sinking into apathy, only a few tens of us left. We had begun to discuss whether we should commit a mass suicide, or simply wait to fade away. 

And then the young species came, in their clumsy ships, and they asked us why we were so few. 

“We are becoming extinct,” we told them. “We have passed the point of recovery.” 

It is custom to avoid the races that are dying – once a species reaches the point of inevitable extinction, even war is suspended, and the fiercest enemy pulls back. The custom was born of plagues and poisons that could be carried forth from a dying world to afflict a healthy one, but it has the implacable weight of tradition now. After we are gone, after they have waited for the prescribed period of quarantine, there will be a fight for our world. Habitable worlds are few, and this is a good one, with plenty of free groundwater and thriving vegetation. It is a bitter thing to be grateful for the custom that allows us to die in peace, but we are grateful.

But the humans don’t know that custom, and they do not leave. They seem distraught, when we tell them we are dying, and try to offer their aid - but their technology is behind ours, and it is too late. When they realize that they can’t save us, though, they do something that bewilders us. 

Got the link via @finalducc

you ever have just like, a really bad idea

And then he gave me kind of a blank look and said "Okay, that is. Very good to know."

The deal is that we just fired a member of the executive team who had been asking our practice leads to put together scorecards each month so that he could put together 20-slide powerpoints to go over data that he didn't understand particularly well. The scorecards were taking up at least 10% of each practice lead's time with work that we couldn't bill to the client, the clients thought the presentations were confusing, and the CEO tasked me with putting together three slides for each client and leading those parts of the meetings.

I built a dashboard in our PSA that collected most of that data, have collected links to the info that the practice leads gathered so I can screenshot it for each presentation, and totally on my own because i like data and design i decided it would be a good idea to create a client report "book" with the data we were presenting before and insights from the trends over time in case the clients asked about the info that was no longer in the presentations that i can share with the clients after the meetings along with answers to any questions they asked me in the meeting that i needed to dig into.

So I basically freed up about 100 billable hours a month (six practice leads at four hours a week) for our T3 techs and apparently also alerted the CEO to the fact that I was not fucking around about professional design skills so he is no longer looking for a contractor to do our client education materials all while costing decidedly less than $120k a year.

Also apparently I'm better at live data lookup than anyone was aware of until they started watching me do it in meetings? I don't know if that's because I'm better at using our RMM than the people who lead the meetings or if it's because I can recognize the part number, serial number, and processor model patterns of desktops and servers from major manufacturers for the last fourteen years on sight so i don't *have* to go digging in the records to figure out when something was purchased i can just tell you what year the processor was released and if the serial number was late or early into that model year because I know it off the top of my head.

Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.

This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.

A “pack” of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.

Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.

One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.

Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.

Getting a “pack” of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.

Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.

Only experienced silverbacks or the boldest young Dads dare venture into a craft store for long without his mate or offspring to keep roving Craft Ladies at bay and guide him in this strange ecosystem. If a Dad enters with his mate and is separated from her, he will often scuttle for the seeming familiarity of Woodcrafts, Models, or Paints (the latter not to be confused with Fine Arts, unquestioned territory of art students), but he eyes Scrapbooking and Jewelry with trepidation and will usually venture into those exotic areas only in the company of females of his pack.

Lumberjacks are rarely spotted entering craft stores of their own volition, for while they do not fear it as Dads do, they know it is an environment unsuited for megafauna such as themselves.

Hardware store Lesbians generally adapt more easily to craft stores, although they may enlist another Lesbian of a subspecies more adapted to that environment to guide them until they find their niche. Lesbians have even been known to seek the aid of a Craft Lady, a native fauna that share similarities with Lesbians but are usually smaller and nimbler to suit their chosen habitat. Dads who witness this are often awed by the Lesbians’ temerity, for although larger, Dads are generally wary of the cunning and dexterous Craft Ladies and may mistake their enthusiastic pack greetings as predatory swarming.

Craft Ladies, secure in their ecological niche, have no fear of interlopers and take the presence of non-native beings in stride, although they may become territorial about scarcer resources.

yaoi crab

yuri crab

I see no difference

STOP IT’S BEEN MONTHS. MONTHS!