Tell me about your job

[Salty]

My business is PAIN and pressure. Some think it's about pleasure, and I am so happy to dissuade them from that position.

I own my own business, working out of a three room suite, renting out the other rooms to massage therapists and a meditation Reiki erson.

I spend my days unpleeling people so they can think about things beyond the vice that has "suddenly" grabbed a hold of their neck/shoulder/hips/wrists/lowback. It's slow, hard work that has actually gotten kind of dull. But I love the act of massage itself because it allows me to calm down and gain perspective. It's very zen-like.

I am trying to find other ways to work that are more active, interactive. Personal training for people who hate exercising, dog massage, yoga, something.

[EK WAFFLR]

I don't work, you insensitive, careerist ass.

[LMNO]

I make money at a massively beurocratic financial institution, in the life insurance new business department.  Specifically, I handle a type of transatcion based around a single line of the IRS tax code.  That also ties into SEC rules, and any state department of insurance regulations, of which each of the 50 states have their own special tweaks.  Other than the paycheck, there is some opportunity to troubleshoot and find solutions to problems, which has a certain warm fuzzy when you get it right, but mostly I wait for the 8 hours to be over.

I work at music, both recording and playing, and this gives me endless amounts of joy.  From thrashing the ever-loving shit out of a drum kit to zeroing in on a single wavelength, I can lose myself in the work.  Don't get paid shit for it.

[Faust]

I'm a power broker in energy management.

I manage a distributed system similar to what rong described, but with most of our load coming from cold stores, quarries etc. We work closely with the supply board here and get revenue for shifting large loads /turning generators on as well as getting savings for customers via avoiding the costly periods of the day, ramping in cheap periods and shedding in expensive ones.

I mostly manage the software/distributed networks but have a little mix of hardware from time to time.

It's fun and more focussed than what I was working on a couple of years back when I was in research.

[Freeky]

I sell things on the internet for a brick and mortar hobby game store.  Specifically, I sell on Ebay, but we (my bosses and I) are trying to put together a store connected to their website, and I will run that as well when it is going.  I sell and buy games, miniatures, and cards.  I help keep the IRL store afloat, and that gives me immense personal satisfaction and gratification, being vital to something or else it'll fail.  One of my bosses knows my worth and is grateful that I am there, working for them, keeping them from going under, which I feel good about.  My other boss is extremely unprofessional in purposely hurtful ways, and makes it hard for me to deal with that one period, despite feeling loyal and devoted to boss 1. 

When I don't have work that needs doing, I play games, or I build things for the games I play.  I play and build better than I talk and write, now, which I suppose is a con.  I have more contact with people of the fleshy-and-in-front-of-me variety but less interaction with people in general than before I started working there.  I have a terror of continuing to make mistakes, and they always crop up in bunches at about the same time, don't they just.  I dread disappointing boss 1, because I want just to do well and do things right and not be a fuck up all my life and he's giving me the opportunity to force my way into the professional world by making my own place in it, scraping and gouging a hole big enough I can fit in it and have something meaningful to do without working somewhere I'll be complete shit and be fired in a month because nerves and anxiety of failing paralyzed me, caused more mistakes, while working at too slow a pace, and here what I say matters and my opinion is worth something and being more than someone replaceable and nigh faceless, nameless, pointless is better than having a minimum wage paycheck.

[Eater of Clowns]

A monitor ahead and another at ten o'clock, a mouse for each at eleven and one. Three pairs of speakers and a microphone – nine thirty and ten thirty, a television three paces away at five and a third monitor at eight. Four radio base stations are at nine.

The desk is a behemoth with motorized adjustable height, compartments to hide computers and battery backups, and a plethora of leg room. It's wide open on the bottom but for a small section that separates the underside from the rest of the room. That thin metal plate has a few hundred tiny, patterned holes in it but the holes are blocked by four sheets of 8 ½ x 11 glaring white standard office paper. The paper holds departmental seniority over me. There is no discernible reason for it to block the little holes, as the desk reopens six inches way. Why did anyone ever bother to block it off?

If I turn my head from the forward monitor to rest my eyes they fall upon another monitor. If I turn around they do the same, so sometimes I close my eyes. They sting intensely for a moment while my contacts shriek from the staring and from the light and from the air filled with dead skin and fecal matter. They rim themselves with red. I keep them closed, squeezed actually, not rested, squeezed like a child tries to block out a monster. Eyes aggressively shut to ward off danger.

They stay closed until I feel myself nodding forward or until one of the speakers blares, my head jolting upright and my eyes fluttering and my hands, my hand shockingly cold for a moment, and then nothing. My left arm fell forward in that brief sleep and it must have hit the monitor. One of the monitors. I pull at it against all that cold but it's stuck as though in thick, wet sand or mud. I move my fingers to wrest myself free but the slow cold just works its way between them, numbing as it spreads, and as I'm moving it the image on the screen shifts. Startled, I jump back. It's enough to free my arm, just a little.

The desktop on the forward monitor is a department badge. It budges, just a little. I tug again and the badge rips apart. My arm is free down to my wrist but the parts that were inside the monitor are covered with a thin, silvery, translucent residue. The hand is on the screen.

I can touch the shattered badge but there is no feeling so I find it hard to judge when I've made contact with one of the pieces or how hard I'm gripping. In a few minutes I've nudged them into some semblance of their original state.

With my right hand I grip the mouse at one o'clock and maneuver that around the screen to make contact with my left arm. The cursor makes touches a fingertip and the flesh gives gently to the sharp little arrow. I press further with mouse.

The cursor breaks skin, the little white arrow a digital scalpel. Blood beads up around the tiny wound and I instinctively pull it back. My hand sweeps aside the desktop icons. They scatter. The cursor is stuck fast and I pull it along with me. I startle again as the mouse moves of its own accord in my right hand, the feedback from my flailing. It's pulled into the little gap between the adjustable desk and the stationary table and it clatters to the floor, the jolt of the track ball digging the cursor further into my index finger.

My coworkers look over at the noise and, uninterested, return to the news broadcast at five o'clock.
I pick up the mouse and lay it carefully back on the pad. I grab my left wrist with my right hand, pulling, but the cursor is an anchor. I take up the mouse again and, gingerly, pull it to move the cursor away from my finger. It's stuck fast. The little notches on the back of the arrow snag flesh. Blood drips deeper into the screen, splattering on the five pointed sheriff star badge, running across its edges and into the cracks. There is still no pain.

My jaw is clenched and the knuckles on the hand holding the mouse are white. I push the cheap black plastic mouse and my finger together slowly. I move it through the resistance and I don't stop when the blood streams steadily from the little hole I'm leaving behind. The badge is a horrid red mess.
Suddenly my right hand, pushing the mouse, jumps forward when the resistance stops. On the screen, there is a tiny hole in my fingernail.

Freed, I yank my arm again and again. The monitor rocks back and forth and the screen, a liquid crystal monster, tears slowly away, leaving that sheen behind on my palm, then my knuckles, and then my fingertips. Blood drips from the sliced skin and nail but the blood is wrong. It glows like it's backlit and the color seeps into the air around it, pixelating the dispatch room one drop at a time. It creates little snaking rivers in the dried rock salt on the tiles and stains the grout between them.

The phone rings. I answer it with my right hand and allow my left to drain on the floor.

"Communications," I say. Pause. "Oh hey, Jack. Yeah, all quiet here." I look at the high resolution display at the end of my left arm. "Nothing out of the ordinary."

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Sams?  Izzat you?   

[Eater of Clowns]

Sams?  Izzat you?   

Ohhhh fuuuuuuck.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Sams?  Izzat you?   

Ohhhh fuuuuuuck.

Since I started writing on this board, my life has been a litany of horror.  IT ALL COMES TRUE.

So, yeah.  Welcome home, Sams.

[Eater of Clowns]

I know, the pixels seeping into the world around it is an artist's nightmare, but what are you going to do? This model of reality has notoriously bad color separation.

Sams?  Izzat you?   

Ohhhh fuuuuuuck.

Since I started writing on this board, my life has been a litany of horror.  IT ALL COMES TRUE.

So, yeah.  Welcome home, Sams.

Chaplain's got me watching a vid of Nessie tearing into a group of new templars. On an eight hour loop. He thinks I might be able to spot where the mission went wrong and we can try something new, but I don't know. I watch and I watch and the loop stays the same, but I'm seeing it differently. The templars keep changing, new people, new faces, most I've never met but some of them are friends and family, famous people and fictional characters. Their helmets cover up their faces but I can tell. It's a new person there every time but it doesn't make any difference. Nessie still has her day.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I know, the pixels seeping into the world around it is an artist's nightmare, but what are you going to do? This model of reality has notoriously bad color separation.

I keep telling everyone that, and they just look at me like I'm crazy.  Fucking ocean is nothing but jellyfish and starfish, and I live in an insane asylum masquerading as a state in the union, and they expect me to be HAPPY about it? 

Sams?  Izzat you?   

Ohhhh fuuuuuuck.

Since I started writing on this board, my life has been a litany of horror.  IT ALL COMES TRUE.

So, yeah.  Welcome home, Sams.

Chaplain's got me watching a vid of Nessie tearing into a group of new templars. On an eight hour loop. He thinks I might be able to spot where the mission went wrong and we can try something new, but I don't know. I watch and I watch and the loop stays the same, but I'm seeing it differently. The templars keep changing, new people, new faces, most I've never met but some of them are friends and family, famous people and fictional characters. Their helmets cover up their faces but I can tell. It's a new person there every time but it doesn't make any difference. Nessie still has her day.

Jesus, I miss that story.  I almost wish I had left room for a sequel.  But not really.

[Eater of Clowns]

It had to end or else we'd still be in the Southampton sewers failing in the same ways, one day after another. IMAGINE THAT.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It had to end or else we'd still be in the Southampton sewers failing in the same ways, one day after another. IMAGINE THAT.

HAHAHAHA...good thing I'm totally blind to metaphor, or that might have been depressing.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I read cards. I use a deck of 36 cards from Germany and there's a method you learn in order to do it. It's not woo, it's kind of like learning a language and it seems to work. Lo5 or illusion or something, I don't know, but it's kind of cool. It takes a long time to get fluent with it, like five or six years.

I do it through the phone lines, but they're really slow these days. A lot of people signed up to do it, I think, and it's hard to get noticed. Too many people piled on. Stupid people that never bothered to study, but the customers don't know that. I signed up at another place that does live cam but I hate it. Sometimes I get guys rubbing their dick, things like that. You get squicked out, it's hard to stay on long enough to make much there. I do typewritten readings too, through Etsy, usually. Those are tedious, but it beats thinking your going to make some money and then having to boot the customer because he just showed up to rub his dick.

It still beats the fuck out of retail though. Then again, just about anything that doesn't involve being skinned alive and rolled down a mountain of salt and broken glass beats the fuck out of retail.

But like I said, it's slow right now. I might start private tutoring or something. I do a lot of that shit on facebook anyway, try to explain the method to people. Might as well get paid for it. We're trying to start a guild to preserve the method from all the new agers trying to "innovate" it (translation: not learn it and pull stuff out of their asses instead). It's a cool method, it developed between 1840 and 1980 or so with no books written about it or anything. Just oral tradition and adding in what worked and throwing out what didn't, I guess. I like the method better than I like answering "WHY DIDN'T HE TEXT BACK?????" over and over, anyway.