Life and all of its (annoying) friends

Hello thar. It’s been a while since I last posted. My last post was also a mess. A painful mess that took the blog with it into the bottom of the quality hole. But I’m still proud I wrote it.

Anyway, to the point. I’ve got my Degree (Degree +Master1 for the ones who study in 3-year schools) It’s over. So, here’s how I feel.

Did it worth the time? For the paper itself, only time will tell. Things in Greece are pretty ugly on finding a proper job. So, I’m about to end up doing something completely different than my degree. woo hoo?

Talking on doing something completely different, I found a job. Well I am not WOKING now, since I’m still in training, but that’s what I’ll be doing for the following months.

“hey there, is mr (random name) at home? Are you his wife? I’m calling on behalf of a (not so random company but let’s not say names) for a reduction that you can achieve in your electricity bill.” It’s promotional, outbound sales.

We are trying to be pressing and polite at the same time which is kind of weird to pull off. But then, have you ever tried to talk to a university professor recently? It’s the same thing. But you must face different people.

The customers on the other side of the line may have a bazillion different reactions but they have been narrowed into five.

1. Positive

Especially when there was an advertisement in a morning-zone television show, the inbound calls were ALL like this. Outbound calls not so much but, hey, there are all sorts of people out there.

2. Hesitating

They also want to ask their wives/husbands, want to discuss with someone of trust. The worst case scenario is when, after five minutes of explaining the details, they say “It’s all good as YOU are sayin’ but I need to see it written to be sure about it”. Seriously?

3. Negative

Some of them are polite and say “no thank you” some others just hung up. Others say how annoying it is to call. The worst is when you get a furious one, screaming every curseword of the Greek language.

The last thing I condone is impolite people. Just say “sorry I’m not interested” and hang up the damn thing.

The other two types are everybody’s favorites

4. Answering Machine

and 5. FAX

The training is going fine. The team leader is a cool guy which tries to confort all the newbies, since he was a newbie himself once. Another guy from the higher tiers of the company was also good and fine, trying to tell us not to be afraid of taking new steps in our lives and stuff. Which is, in terms of recruiting new workers, pretty well thought so not to scare newcomers.

Another guy that had to do with the team, didn’t do his best as the others did. He went on a pretty “strong” lecturing inside the telephone center, knowing that there were fresh trainees that he haven’t introduced himself before. The lecturing was also for meaningless things. It was about “not being in the specific program they use to call” while the callbacks aren’t nessesarily recorded by the program or something like that, as the girl working next to me told me.

So, that’s that.

I think that I haven’t made anything funny on this post. Also, I think that I haven’t covered everything that’s going on in my life these days. So, expect a new post soon-ish.

Fabula Nova Random

Here are some random thoughts that I randomly drew.

A four-panel about how Final Fantasy games are produced lately

The characters

The characteristics of the main character

Other characters’ characteristics

Finally, the setting

As shown in FFXIII recently, it’s amazing but makes a no sense.

Let’s move on to the next subject

Pricing of the new portable game consoles caused some rage.

First, the price of 3DS announced:

And then, the NGP came along

So, that’s exactly what happened to our site (http://game20.gr). Apparently we have a lot of Sony fanboys that can’t shut up and just play games.

To finish that atrocity of a post, I’ll express my Issues with John Marston from Red Dead Redemption. This character has two moods.

So, there. John Marston has no emotions other than complete apathy and complete fury. Nothing in between at all!

Apparently you are at the end of this post. Congratulations! You have patience…

{edit}

My crappy English ruined an already ruined post. Able Sondier? In French means “the guy that sings” Maybe Square Enix should consider a Final Fantasy game that’s also a musical! . Also, tslit = slit.

Life with a smartphone

It’s been a while since my last post. That was because I had my head and hands full with various stuff. So, here’s a post, complete with hilarious, poorly drawn stuff.

It’s no secret that I love gadgets. Thus, everything that has a touchscreen, has an actual OS  and connects to several types of wireless connections is a matter of fetish for me. So, After N-gage, wich was essentially a Symbian S60 smarphone in a GameGear form factor, I got an HTC Wildfire. Officially, my second smartphone ever.

I haven’t touched a single Android mobile phone before, so I got me an HTC Wildfire. I mostly wanted to get a rid of my Motorola “whining for no good reason” phones and put them into oblivion as quickly as possible.

The reason I didn’t buy a used iPhone was that it’s too much hussle. It’s A-OK for an iTouch to utilize iTunes for syncing everything and sometimes it’s more convenient than the crappy MPD protocol that requires to copy all the songs to your hard drive everytime.

So, long story short, I jumped into the train of Android.

Loved

This thing has everything. Really. I’m in such a geeky bliss when I use Foursquare to tell people (who probably don’t give a shit) where am I and what I do. Also, Messaging apps made SMS and e-mail on the go much more effortless.

Hated

Protective stuff. All such phones have twice the ways to use them but are twice as sensitive. So I had to buy a case and a screen protector.

the later is utter hate. I will never figure out how to do it properly…

Kinect Calibration Card is the most paranoiac smiley ever created by mankind.

Is it just me, or this thing looks straight into your soul, ultimately absorbing it?

And we have to use it every time we want to refine our play space? It’s going to be in EVERY FREAKING KINECT GAME?

We are pretty f*cked up…

Politics, friendship and consistency

Life is known about throwing random shit at you when you don’t expect it. For example. A friend of mine, she’s going to be a Municipal Consultant in the city I was living from 1990 to 2006. We were from the same school and we were friends. We shared some great LOLS and some views of the world around us.

She never was too popular within our peer group. Nor too attractive too. But she was caring and kind – she still is I think. We shared the same views when we were at school. Especially in politics. Neither of us gave a shit on that topic.

Then real life happened. I’d picture it as a great whale on wheels

And I learned sociology. A.K.A. WHY I hate politics so much.

So, all of my friends know how I feel about politics and the political system in Greece. It sucks badly and just goes downwards. That’s why our little country is in crisis and we will inevitably end up working 12 hours for a souvlaki. If this happens, everybody will move to Athens.

So, despite having moved to another town with my family and my voting rights are in Athens, she contacted me through Facebook to announce me that she decided to go for Municipal Consultant in the next Municipal elections. It left me in wonder. What happened to the little rebel she was during school? I know she may have changed. Grown up, accepted some stuff, but, I changed too. I learned, I made mistakes too. We are human. But, what happened to the consistency of what we say to what we do?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s still a mystery why she wanted to pull this off.

Anyway, she asked me to pass her FB group around and also told me to speak with whatever old friend I have that still lives in the old town. The problem is, I almost lost track of everybody. Plus, I vote on an entirely different municipality. So I told her that I would try. In reality, I was shocked and annoyed all together. But I just couldn’t tell her straight.

I wish good luck to her and be succesful and a good politician (if she chooses to move forward from that) I still have faith in my generation to change something. Maybe…

Till then, here’s future!

The Phone Tandem nightmare

Phones are here to make us miserable and they must go straight to hell. Even though I am quite fond of being able to communicate with people far away without moving my body the slightest, sometimes I swear I want to go back to the time where Bell stole the invention of the phone from Tesla and tell him that he would never EVER have profit of such device.

As most of you probably know, I like siesta. Meaning, sleeping an hour or so after lunch. It’s some sort of powersleep that maintains my awareness through the rest of the day.

So, in my bedroom there are two beds (the other one is for whoever comes as a guest, and a storage place full of computer components and/or cables) Two little counters and my Desk.

The counter near my bed has a brown landline phone that’s muted most of the time. My mobile phone is hung on the window because living in the basement is like living inside a Faraday Cage. Meaning that no GSM reception can penetrate it. Sometimes I have to OPEN the window, put the phone almost outside and connect my wired hands-free in order to have a proper conversation.

When I’m waiting for a phone call I de-mute the landline phone. Then the shit hits the fan.

Yeah it’s never EVER the one who I wait a call from. It’s usually a random friend, aunt or co-worker of my mother, usually having blond hair shaped like a banana peel saying how manly my voice has grown through ages and other stuff I don’t care to hear about. So I shout to my mom to pick up the phone even though she picks it up by herself because 99% of the phone calls are for her, so she has something like an intuition for picking up phones. Then go back to sleep. Alas.

In a weird subsequent tandem, My mobile phone rings. I have a ringtone from Initial D anime and live action series. While I first put it I thought it’s cooler than north pole, now it’s more annoying than a female penguin staging an orgasm.

So, that means that I have to stand up, open up the window, hook my hands-free and put the phone almost outside so I can talk. And it is the one WHO F*ING KNOWS THAT I WANT TO SLEEP. But my sleep is never a priority.

My beautiful nap is ruined. Thank you.

Oh, and don’t ask why I am grumpy some evenings. Don’t-you-dare.

Does this happen to anybody else?

Dear Facebook. I swear this is the last time you screw me up like this.

Also, fuck you.

[edit]

Kind of overdid it with resizing causing eye-destroying blur. Now it’s fixed.