Sailing/Wrecking on the Intern's Sea/Reef

Oh yes, not everyone has a manager who is as savvy and friendly as mine. Some call him Saint Linden. I however refrain from such oddities however refer to his as master splinter. Take for example my amigo and pal Chris who sits opposite corner from me. The last time he saw his manager was when he came in and barked at him for not filling out a time sheet. Before that he hadn't seen him in person for almost a week when he did the exact same thing afore mentioned. What is this intern's current task at hand? Planning an IT wide picnic. Put that on your resume.

Then there is the female intern who is sitting behind me and hopefully not reading over my shoulder named Kate. Some believe I have the hots for her (LUKE AND HANNAH) because I called her "this intern girl-friend that I have at work". The reason I originally specified that she is a female is because I have very few female friends that I keep in touch with on a regular basis outside of church folk. In fact there's pretty much zero. Also note the use of the dash, separating friend and girl. Very much different than "girlfriend". There is a point at the end of all this senseless babbling: Sarabeth Centner is the only woman for me and I love her tremendously. Now, back to the stupidity!

This so called, "female friend" is the clueless brunt of Chris' (my co-hort in crime) and my remote trickery. We have amused ourselves with numerous activities such as closer her Internet Explorer 3 times in a row. This is the clutch part, because she will ask us, "Are you guys having problems with Internet?" (Note the lack of the indefinite article "the" Internet). Now comes the hard part where we have to avoid laughing. We hold back, and occasionally inform her that we are fine and instruct her to run a full virus scan, because viruses are bad. Closing her Outlook, and opening 32 notepads on her desktop is a classic. My elderly friend (that's 60+ year for those of you political people out there) Mark put it in a different light: "What's the use of flipping a blind man the bird?"

But not this intern. Oh no. This intern is learning hand over fist about the IT world, building virtual machines, remote process execution (thanks Kate), Server Management Systems administrator tactics and tips, wise scripting and SQL database querying. If you understood what I said and could carry on a conversation about each of those items, my hat is off to you. In fact, today the main server that our group uses burnt through a RAID controller, (aka it's down) so we can't to 80% of our work. Right now I'm testing Vista Beta am very excited for it's release. Will I buy it right away? Heck no. I'll wait a few months a least, most benchmarks are showing way underscoring XP for gaming as well as high end applications. Plus mucho $ unless you
have a UAkron ID.

This has been another intern lunch hour broadcast, thank you for tuning in.

Greetings!

Do you know about the people that record a voice mail greeting over and over and over again until they get it right? I am one of those people and this is my story. I recorded my voice mail greeting on this Monday. It was the day where everybody called off because it was the day between July 4 and the weekend. So I sat alone in my cube with not a sound on the entire floor with the exception of my Mr. Coffee 4 cup pot.

It was now I decided would be a good time to record my greeting, because I could do it over as many times as I wanted without being embarrassed. Herein lies the problem, my brain doesn't function at 100% before I have coffee in the morning. So I picked up the phone with confidence and slumbery gusto preparing in my mind what I was to say to all the callers who wish to talk to the ever important intern Joe. I recorded the message, then listened to it. It had cut off the first 3 seconds of my message, so it didn't sound very professional. It proceeded to cut off every one of my messages making them all sound very stupid. After the 15th try I hung up the phone and said whatever.

It was today that I discovered my blunder. I received a voice mail and called the lady back, and when she answered she told me how my voice mail message was...askew. Apparently what was going on while I was recording the voice mail greeting before was that I was appending to the previous message, instead of deleting it completely like I thought I was. I immediately listened to my own voice mail greeting in horror as I heard the following:

"Hi you've reached the desk of Joseph Clarke please lmeave me ah....crap.[Beep] Hi you've reached the Desk of Joseph Clarke, please leave me a message after the tone. Right, and if there's no tone? [BEEP] Hi you've reached the desk of Joseph clarke if you would like to leave me a messagenoo, they already know they're leaving a message you dumm-[Beep] Hi this is Joe Clarke's voicemail, please leave a message after the answering....(sigh)...[BEEP] Hi this is Joe Clarke, please do leave a message...that's retarded [BEEP] Hi this is Joee....Hi...delaying still? Hmmm we'll see [BEEP] Hi..Hi..This is Joe Clarke, please leave me a message and I'll get back to you..[CLICK]"

Just awful. But don't take my word for it.

Sweetest Dunk Ever

The funniest part is at 0:37 he says, "Get a medic!"

Blogging from the Office

Hey guys, this is Joe coming at ya live from Ohio Savings Bank, the corporate office. I'm on lunch break and thought of all you people just itching to read my next blog (yeah right). Anyway I thought I could tell you all a bit about how my summer is going thus far. I've been living at my friend Aaron's house with his family, because his dad drives into cleveland the same days I do, and works the exact same hours. To make matters even better, his building is just as close to his parking garage as mine, so that's a prety tight little conicidence. The job? Wow. It's pretty awesome, I never thought I would have as much fun or learn as much as I have here in the past few weeks. As I type this I'm upgrading 2 computers in Florida. Kinda cool huh? It's like these guys know everything about computers there is to know, especially from a management side. Working here has totally changed my view on computers, because I used to think like HOLY COW A NEW COMPUTER YESSS, and now it's just referred to as a box. A tool. One of the weaker links, that the important thing is really the software on the PC. I guess that's the mentality you adopt when you manage 5000+ machines. The intern flak isn't as bad as you'd think, although they were a bit upset when I brought in my own coffee maker. Especially when they saw that the pot was only a 4 cup caraffe. They haven't made me get them coffee yet, although they always talk about it; kinda like a lame mother who always threatens to ground their child and never does. I've been having a great summer, seeing my wonderful girlfriend Sarabeth almost daily, playing guitar, staying in a workout schedule, and what would a summer be without late nights of BF2? I know not. Speaking of which, the other day Chris and I had scores of 83 and 79, and the highest on the other team was 7. Wow. That's basically what my summer has been so far. In 2 weeks I leave for West Virginia with the Youth Group, for camping, white water rafting, rapelling, spelunking and a high ropes course. It's gonna be awesome. Sorry I haven't blogged more, but when 12 hours of your day constitutes work you don't have too much free time. I'll try to keep it up!

Cedar Point with CAB