Life and Associated Annoyances – Page 19

Good News!

Something positive for a change…

Maybe now she can pay back that money I sent her… (joke! joke! I swear!!) 😀

On the work front I sent the boss a long email yesterday explaining why I can’t continue to do the job I find myself doing. I’m not quitting the company – I’m just divesting myself (or trying to divest myself) of some of the responsibilities I’ve been wrestling with for the last year or so.

I realised over the weekend that the reason I’ve been feeling so wrung out for months is because I’m simply not up to the task allocated to me, and the stress of trying to carry it out has been eating away at me 24/7. This is why my apartment looks like a tip, why I’m not sleeping properly and why I’ve been increasingly anti-social of late. So I’m kicking it to the curb and going back to being a simple programmer again. I hope.

I’m still waiting for a reply. Wish me luck…

Bleeeech

Hufflepuffs are excellent finders!

Ack. I have all kinds of things I want to blog about (a run down of the improv game I ran on the weekend, why the core premise of Bryron Hall’s rebuttal to the famous rpg.net F.A.T.A.L review is invalid, just what is a true Hufflepuff anyway) but work is stressing me out so much that at the end of the day I just don’t have the energy to be creative. The best I can do is fill in a few more simple articles on the FreakWiki and collapse into bed.

But I don’t like to end on a down note, so here are some songs…

Come to Australia – It’s all true!
I’m on a Boat! – Metal Style!
Sweet Caroline – Tripod!

Calling all Crabs

Ramblings and complaints

Well, we’re battening down the hatches for a major heatwave – just in time for my birthday. Oh joy! Temperatures are expected to range between 37° and 42° C until Sunday, after which they’ll drop down to a merely hellish 36° for a few days. I love this city but I hate this weather.

My work email account keeps getting spammed by the “Ruby Royale” online casino. Some strange part of my brain continually misinterprets this as “Ruby Rose”, so every morning when I come in and start sorting through the spam I get a sudden jolt of irrational excitement before sanity kicks back in. Damn spammers.

Finally I know it’s neither new or clever to make fun of Emos, but sometimes they make it so damn easy!

Social Energy Crash!

An excuse for appalling behaviour

One of the things about being both an Aspie and a severe introvert is that you have only a limited amount of social energy.

Social energy may be a bit of an odd concept for the majority of people out there (most of the population being extroverts) but basically it’s a measure of your ability to be around and interact with other people. Extroverts replenish their social energy reserves by being around other people – making them sort of social perpetual motion machines – but we introverts need time alone to recharge before we can go out and do stuff – even with people we like.

This was brought home to me particularly this weekend. By Friday my energy reserves were approaching critical and I intended to spend a quiet weekend in doing chores, chilling out and recharging. Then Fabes called me up and suggested we all (that is to say me, him, Ryan and Paula) get together on Saturday. Against my better judgement I accepted – not to say that it didn’t sound like fun, it’s just that I really needed time off from people.

So I headed over. We had a great time playing Munchkin and running through an really old Dragon Warriors RPG scenario (I controlled a surprisingly intelligent Scottish barbarian named Grignr and an apparently mute Sorcerer named Zzardoz, while Ryan ran a very English Knight named Sir Spiffington and a Mystic by the name of the Comte Merde de Gallo). We then hung around for ages watching late night TV (including the end of The Core which we mocked mercilessly and a promo piece on the Commonwealth Games in Delhi which we also mocked mercilessly then felt guilty about).

Now the plan was to spend the night and head home in the morning but by 1:00am my levels of social energy had completely crashed. As a result I was overcome with an intense need to get the hell out and retreat to my own territory, so I called a cab and bailed.

I spent most of Sunday asleep, getting up only to walk down to the village for some laundry detergent and to watch a couple of episodes of the Boosh (Trapped in a box by a cockney nutjob! ‘ave a cup a tea!). As a consequence my energy levels are now sufficient to see me through the working week, but I’m going to have to spend this weekend being totally anti-social to get back up to an acceptable level.

So, I guess my reasons for recounting this tale are to apologise to the gang for my sudden and rude departure, and to make a plea for understanding and tolerance for all my introverted kin out there. It’s not that we don’t like you – we just need time to recharge!

Not Dead

You see?! Lies!

Today’s Wondermark is almost as good as Tusky McMammoth.

I survived Christmas more or less intact. More updates soon.

I’m getting too old for this…

I didn’t even drink!

Had a great night up at Fabes’ place last night with Ryan and Paula, playing cards (Gloom, Che Geek, Munchkin and poker) eating pizza and bawling songs at the top of our lungs into the iPhone audio memo app. I didn’t get home until 3:00am.

It’s just gone 2:00pm and I’ve only just stumbled out of bed. I feel like death. I think my body is trying to tell me it prefers a warm mug of cocoa and a bedtime of about 9:00pm on Saturday nights.

*sigh* I’m getting old.

My crushes, let me show you them…

It’s all just bitch bitch bitch! ;D

Ah, crushes! Where would we be without them? A lot better off if you ask me.

I don’t know about other people’s views (hey, that’s pretty much the definition of aspergers 😉 but personally I find crushes really inconvenient. They’re like a lingering cold. They show up out of nowhere, make life difficult, and take forever for you to get over. If there was a vaccination against them I’d get it.

I currently have quite a collection of crushes. None of them very serious – it’s been a few years since my last really bad one – but all of them just strong enough to be tiresome. Let’s see…

OK, there’s the redhead on the morning train who’s always dressed in black. There are three on the morning bus – the tall blonde who gets off at the hospital, the brunette geek who gets off at the dental college (although I haven’t seen her for a while) and there’s the very classy looking redhead who carries on towards the university. There are two women at the office – details of whom I’m not going to include lest anyone at the office reads this. There’s the sweet and friendly strawberry blonde at the sandwich shop, and her asian colleague. And there’s the shorter blonde on the afternoon bus.

The only two of these women that I’ve ever actually spoken to are the ones at the sandwich shop. They’re both very nice girls – insofar as I can tell from buying rolls and salads from them. The strawberry blonde and even talk a little bit now and then. Nothing major, just general small talk while she’s getting my change. Mind you, that’s falling off a bit recently because I can never actually think of anything to say to her. That’s one of the problems with being a socially inept aspie – you’re not much use at holding up your end of a conversation.

So she says something friendly, I’m lost for words, and I end up slinking away feeling lower that dirt. As a result every trip to the sandwich shop is a roller coaster of anxiety, stress and disappointment, only slightly mitigated by the fact that the food is pretty damn good.

This is what crushes do to me. Can you see why I’m sick of them?

Can on a String

Bah!

I’d just like to say that Vodafone suck.

Well OK, maybe I suck a bit as well. But the end result is a big ball of suck which is rather pissing me off, and as Vodafone are the bigger target I’m going to blame them.

A while back, after a dinner date with a friend was almost totally screwed up by the fact that I wasn’t contactable, I reluctantly bought a mobile phone. I went with Vodafone for reasons that I can’t quite remember, but seemed sensible at the time, and until recently have had absolutely no problems with them. But a while back my credit card expired, and a couple of weeks after that my phone ran out of prepaid credit…

To use a credit card to top up your Vodafone prepaid credit, the card has to be registered with Vodafone. No problem, except that it’s apparently impossible to register a new credit card when you’re out of credit. Making a call – even one to a Vodafone support number – on a creditless handset diverts you into Vodafone’s recharge system, from which it is completely impossible to get to any option allowing you to register a new credit card. Attempts to do so throw you into an endless loop of account options, the only way to break out of which is to admit defeat and hang up.

After dealing with this nightmare a few times I had the bright idea of calling customer support from my landline. This worked up to a point – the point where I was put through to an operator with an accent so thick I could barely understand a word he said (I think he might have been a Romanian who was taught English by a native Irish Gaelic speaker who learnt the language from Billy Conolly DVDs).

He asked me a series of questions, starting with the basic name, date of birth and address. Then he asked me for my PIN number. Now, sure, this is something I really should know, but I don’t – which is the reason I was calling up customer support rather than going online to register my credit card number in the first place.

This wasn’t a problem, because there were a bunch of other questions he could ask to confirm that I’m who I said I was. For instance what “fodo-eyed” did I use to register the sim card? After some backing and forthing I figured out he meant “photo id” and told him I used my passport.

He checked his computer and said sorry but I didn’t use my passport – which came as quite a surprise to me since it’s the only photo id I possess.

But that was OK, because there were other questions he could ask. Like what were the last three numbers I called? I checked my handset and discovered they were to my parents, and to Vodafone’s support number. He checked his computer.

No, apparently those weren’t the last three numbers I called.

But that was OK, because he could instead ask me what plan I was on. I said I had no idea but it was the basic prepaid one. How much did I pay the last time I recharged? I said I thought it was about $30. How much credit did I get from that? I said about $100. And when did I last recharge? I said I thought it was some time in August.

Apparently none of that matched with my account. But that was OK because there was one more question he could ask. He brought it up on his computer…

…and then couldn’t ask it because the computer wouldn’t tell him what it was.

Having exhausted all his options he said the only thing I could do was to take the handset and some photo ID into a Vodafone shop and they could register my new credit card there.

Fantastic. So I now have to drag myself in to a Vodafone store and produce identification just so I can pay them money. Hooray!

Honestly. I’d be better off with a can on a string.

Fly Season, Beetle Season

Biological controls for the win.

The fly season is on us again.

Way back before Europeans screwed things up, Australia didn’t really have a problem with flies. Water being scarce down here, animals didn’t waste it on excrement – kangaroos and other native animals generally produce small, dry pellets unsuitable for flies’ purposes. The only place flies could breed was in animal carcases and while there were enough of these to keep the flies in business, there were never enough to let them breed up to plague proportions.

Then the Europeans turned up and brought with them all those water squandering northern hemisphere animals like cows and horses and sheep – which wandered around the continent dropping big steaming pats everywhere. The flies thought that they’d died and gone to fly heaven and Australia became a place where you couldn’t open your mouth in summer without three or four dozen of the damn things plunging in and trying to claim your lungs in the name of all flykind.

After decades of this kind of thing the government finally decided to do something about it. They engaged in years of trials and careful testing (we at least learnt a lesson from the cane toad fiasco) and eventually a species of small, inoffensive dung beetle was imported from Africa and distributed across the country. Confronted with massive piles of excrement that the ecosystem was totally failing to deal with the beetles thought they’d died and gone to beetle heaven and got on with what they do best – rolling it up into balls and burying it.

Result? Fly numbers plummeted and summer became bearable again.

Except for October.

You see the flies start breeding in late September. The dung beetles don’t start breeding until late October. This means that for one month of the year the flies are back in force and we all suffer.

But hey, at least we can comfort ourselves remembering that all of summer used to be like that.

Blast from the Past

Like sands through the hourglass…

Dingalings do stupid things, they don’t think of others at all,
They’re dopes and bullies, see the trouble they bring? That’s what we call dingalings!

If you’re now wondering about my sanity then you obviously didn’t grow up in Perth in the 80’s…

Dingalings
Vitamins
Nutrition
Dirt and Germs

I stumbled across a Livejournal page linking to these while searching for info on the old Ascot Water Playground. This was a favourite summer destination when I was a kid and I only just discovered that it’s all shut down and derelict. I cycled over today and scouted it out for Abandoned in Perth. I’ll probably get a proper expedition together later on.

It was a great place Ascot Water Playground. You had a big pool at the bottom, a sort of concrete bunker halfway up with fountains and slippery metal ladders (which were a death trap waiting to happen frankly) and two smaller pools at the top linked with locks. Locks! Like on a canal! A paddling stream ran from the top pools all the way down the hill to the bottom pool and one year (oh the excitement!) they opened a new pool with water slides. And admission was whatever you decided to put into the tins at the gates!

One of the defining moments of my childhood was at Ascot, the day when I finally summoned the courage to climb the deathtrap ladders all the way to the top. All the other kids (including my younger brother) who’d been clambering up and down them with abandon for years kept mocking me mercilessly about my cowardice, and on this particular day I decided I was going to conquer them even if it meant I fell to my death on the concrete below. I waited until there was no one in the bunker (both so the other kids wouldn’t figure out how badly their mockery hurt me, and so that if I chickened out at the last minute there’d be no one to see) and hauled myself up the slippery bars and over the top onto the roof. Then I clambered back down and wandered off, quite happy with myself.

(I only ever climbed the ladders once again – the next time the other kids started mocking me. I climbed up and down once to shut them up, and then never risked it again. Honestly, I’m amazed no one was ever killed on those things.)

But – back to the modern day – run off from the park into the river was apparently getting out of control (the site is right on the riverfront) and there were all kinds of liability issues (those ladders I bet), so the playground had to shut down about five or six years back. Another irreplaceable childhood memory gone – although at least it’s gone in a way that provides me with something to clamber around and take eerie photos of.

The Livejournal page I stumbled across has a bunch of other musings about Perth in the 80s, including a reminder of the plastic tugboats and space shuttles you used to get Red Rooster in. How could I forget those!? They were made of extremely thin and brittle plastic (that crumbled after only a few hours exposure to Perth’s harsh summer sunshine) and you got a sheet of stickers to personalise them with. Great days!

I’ll have to write about my memories of Atlantis Marine Park and Dizzy Lamb sometime I suppose…