NERD RAGE!

The last week has been like a giant flashback because of the weather.  All week long, it’s been raining, almost entirely without end.  Takes me back to those days living in Murfreesboro when it would sometimes rain every single day for three weeks at a time.  As much as I hate to get rained on, I missed that feeling.  Well…maybe didn’t miss it, per se, but was given a definite feeling of nostalgia over it.  It was nice and familiar, let’s say.  That is, until I had to drive to Memphis in it on Friday night, ERRR, Saturday morning.  As in, we left after I got home from working my ferkin’ ass off Friday night.

Ah, Friday night…  Let me tell you, Friday nights at the Comcast call center ALWAYS suck.  There are never enough reps on the floor (thanks to my own department, sadly), video on demand is always overloaded (thus appearing to break, but not really breaking), and everyone who can’t figure out something on the internet wants to call us and ask about it.  This past Friday treaded into the rarified air of Quadruple Suck.  First, where I normally would have someone else on my team with me, I was alone.  The only other night-shift worker besides Heather and myself, Ward, had been out all week, so Friday was no exception.  So I know my night is going to be hard enough trying to man the command position, as it were, on my own.  Secondly, for about half of the night, there were no supervisors in the building.  None.  What does that mean?  You got it….Dave’s in charge!  I was, quite literally, the only person in the building with any kind of special access and privileges for nearly half of my shift.  Basically, this means a non-stop barrage of questions and requests for help.  Third, there were a lot of reps who called out, thus lowering the number of people answering phones even more.  Yay.  And, to top it all off, something like 20 channels went out in a fairly large (and, shall we say, Well To Do) area of Metro Nashville.  For over FOUR FUCKING HOURS.  And you can always tell when something has broken in the richer sections of the service areas, because those mother fuckers don’t stop calling until the shit is fixed.  What did this mean for me?  Oh, just 25-35 calls sitting queued for the entirety of the outage….which I know these people could hear me telling them was out at least three times BEFORE THEY EVER SPOKE TO A REP.  It was a goddamned nightmare.  And, yet, I will still tell anyone who asks that I do love my job, despite all else.

Now Playing in Dave’s Mental Jukebox:  "Careless Whisper" by Seether (fan-fucking-tastic Wham! remake….I know….those words I said…I’d feel dirty if the new version wasn’t so goddamn awesome), "The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning" by The Smashing Pumpkins (it’s the song in the Watchmen trailers…Watchmen on DVD in late July!), and (to round out this horribly parenthetical version of the M.J-B.)  "Actions and Motives" by 10 Years

I will never understand why people feel like cable television is a right, not a privilege.  This is what kills me about the rich people who continuously call in when  something is broken.  They get so outraged and indignant.  They want to be credited for the outage (even if it lasts for 30 minutes, thus netting them a credit of precisely $0.02).  People act like it’s the end of the fucking world when they can’t watch TV or get on the internet.  Seriously?  You can’t go without for like, an hour?  Call somebody!  Read a book!  Fucking go somewhere!  ANYTHING!  ::heavy sigh::

I get worked about this kind of thing sometimes.  Can you tell?  It just feeds into the hatred of stupidity I’ve long held.  People, by and large, are just goddamn stupid.  Idiotic.  Any other damn word you can think of.  The levels of dumbassery I hear about every single day never cease to amaze me.  I’m sure there will be more and more examples as this journey continues.

Moving on…  How about I get into nerd stuff?

I think I mentioned it briefly last time, but Heather and I saw X-Men Origins:  Wolverine (which, for some reason, my fingers always wants to type as "Wolvering"…yeah, I don’t know, either) the night it came out.  What a piece of shit.  It was basically a pointless prequel that did things just for the hell of it, pointlessly introduced as many characters as possible (some old, some new, some Patrick Stewart), made us all wonder how Liev Schreiber became Tyler Mane, basically murdered the awesome character that is the comic version of Deadpool, and left perhaps the most gaping plot hole ever known to man.  Ok, so, I get that Cyclops had his eyes covered the whole time he’s anywhere near Wolverine (so as to explain why he doesn’t recognize Logan in X-Men 1), but what of all the other kids Xavier rescues?  Don’t they ever mention their metal clawed, mutton-chopped savior to the Professor?  Can he not see Wolverine in their minds?  Because he sure as fuck has no idea who Logan is when he shows up at the school in X-Men 1.  See, like I said, gaping plot hole.  And to think they want to make a sequel to this bullshit.  And a spinoff!  Deadpool?  Really?  You think your shit version of Deadpool could possibly make for a spin-off?  If so, then where does he end up by the time X-Men 1 comes around?  I’m sure I’ve said this before, and I know I’ll say it again, but I fucking hate prequels.

Now, of course, for the exception to that rule:  Underworld:  Rise of the Lycans.  Awesome movie.  From the flashback scene in the first movie, we knew the story of Lucian and Sonja would be epic…and it was.  As a movie, it was the best of the series.  I’m still partial to the first one (setting up the mythology and all), but it was just fucking great.  Michael Sheen (Lucian) and Bill Nighy (Viktor) continue to be the true backbones of the series.  I’d get into more detail, but I haven’t seen it since opening day in the theater, though I will be picking up the DVD sometime this week.

Then there’s Watchmen.  What a nerd’s wet dream.  Now, truth be told, since I’m kind of a newer comic book fan, I didn’t read the comic until just before the movie came out.  But, unequivocally, the comic is a fucking masterpiece.  Characters, plot, pacing, art…it’s all there, and it’s all just goddamn brilliant.  As soon as I finished the book (which I read in about ten hours over three days in late February), the first thing I thought (well, after, "That was fucking awesome") was, "There’s no way they could do that justice in a movie!"  Come March 6th, I got to be totally shocked.  Why?  Because t

hey didn’t just do it justice…they absolutely fucking nailed it.  What a masterpiece.  I can’t wait for the Director’s Cut DVD to come out to see the full three-hours-plus version.  I was saddened at the slow box-office for it, but I wasn’t surprised.  It’s not exactly the normal, lighter comic book fare.  I had hoped it would find a way to appeal to a mass audience, but shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when it didn’t.  But, oh well.  I loved it, so fuck anyone who didn’t.

What a great philosophy that is…

I guess that needs to just about wrap it up.  I’m really starting to enjoy this again (in case you can’t tell by how much I’m actually getting in here).  There’s a few things I want to do (like jazz up the front page a little, have some comic books nerd-outs, y’know, the usual) and I’m sure I’ll get around to ’em soon.  And, Pink, I’m glad to see you’re still hanging around.  I’d have left a note on yours saying that, but I can’t get to it (yeah, I basically purged my old friends list a really long time ago….sorry).

Anywho…  Time for me to skedaddle off to the land of…something else….yeah….

Sayonara.