Driving, Parking, Bookkeeping, and Facebooking

Don't let the pretty skyline fool you.
Denver=parking nightmare.

  What a week! I'm totally ready for a weekend, though a vacation would be nicer...
    The bf left for Europe this week, and I was the lucky one to drive him to the airport. Airport is a lot farther than I thought! I was in the car for about 3 hours straight, and it was right at the heat of the day. Miserable.
    Plus, I was low on gas so I didn't want to push my car harder by running the AC. It's September, Earth--you're supposed to start cooling down more in this hemisphere at about this time!
    Wednesday was by far the roughest day, though. I just discovered that the SBDC offers classes for small business people, many of them free, and decided to sign up for their Quickbooks seminar. I have been turned down for several jobs now for not having Quickbooks experience, so I wanted to take a class to at least get the basics.

    It was VERY basic, but it was only $35, so what could I really expect? On a sidenote, I'm talking to you, employers, if they're hiring an administrative assistant, you can't really expect them to also be the accountant/bookkeeper. Those are two separate positions and having one person do both can lead to doing one job better and the other worse. Overlapping positions can be really stressful for the employee. I know--I was the executive assistant/receptionist/content manager/editor/writer/technical support/sometime project coordinator/etc.
    Also, if Quickbooks is so important, don't say "helpful". "Helpful" makes it sound like you're willing to train. If you aren't, say "required". Then I won't bother applying. Except now I can, because I do have experience, albeit minimal.
    Anyway, that class set off a shitstorm for the rest of the day: they didn't give any info on parking, and parking in Denver is an effing nightmare. The class was supposed to be 3 hours, but all the parking lots/garages/meters only allow you to stay 2 hours, or the max you can pay for is 2 hours and then you have to pay for the whole day ($10). So, after searching for spaces for about 15 minutes (making me that late for the class), I finally parked and paid for the whole damn day.
    Turns out, there was a 20 minute break in the middle of the class, where I could have gone down and just paid for an extra hour or something. Furthermore, the class got out about 45 minutes early, meaning I probably could have gotten away with a 2 hour pass in the first place. In short, blarg.

If only I had Coca-Cola's resources,
maybe I could get some more attention
to the Facebook page I manage...

    I had also signed up for another class, FREE, up at the north SBDC later that evening to learn about Facebook fan pages, but my day was shot after I ended up getting an interview at 3:30. Still didn't stop for gas yet because I was so ticked off about the parking when I left Denver, I made it to the interview three hours later. The gas light came on just as I pulled up.
    The interview went all right, but when I went to gas up the car, I didn't have any King Soopers points and had to pay full-price. Then, I ran over a median, despite desperately trying to avoid it. Why are there so many medians? They seem to exist for no other purpose than to damage the undersides of cars whose drivers either didn't see them or have terrible depth and distance perception like me.
    The evening class was one of the only redeeming points in the whole day. I actually learned quite a bit, and felt more comfortable around some techie/internet people in a college campus classroom than a stuffy conference room in downtown Denver. There's a lot more to Facebook business/fan pages than I thought, and now that I know what else I can do to improve the page, I feel a little better about moving forward with it.
    So glad it's finally Friday. I got to visit my friend from my old job and work on the redesign of my other website (super-excited!). Plus we had totally awesome Indian buffet for lunch and free wifi at the public library. Today makes up for such an awful Wednesday, and semi-crappy Tuesday airport drive.
    It's nice that there are always good days to make you feel better about the bad ones.

It's the freakin' weekend!

Quit Being Part of the Problem

S.E.P., for those of you who are not ubernerds like me and have not read the third book from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, is what is known as "somebody else's problem". The SEP is a staple of American life. If it's not happening directly to us, for example, some knucklehead in a Subaru cutting you off in traffic, it's not our problem. It's somebody else's problem. Natural disasters, war, social movements, environmental movements, these and other things are often considered to be SEPs unless they are occurring on our doorstep.
    An unfortunate reality, because if we were to begin noticing the SEPs out there, and make it our problem, we wouldn't be so concerned about the fate of the world, and we might actually have some optimism about the future. Bad economy? That's somebody else's problem. War in Afghanistan? That's S.E.P. too. Climate change? S.E.P. When we all give ourselves permission to say it's SEP, it stifles the world and smothers the possibility of finding a solution.
    So, stop being part of the problem, and start being part of the solution. Stop saying it's S.E.P. Stuff like climate change, the economy, and natural disasters are ALL our problems, whether we like it or not.
I'm being a little preachy today because some nut thinks today is the end of the world, and I figure I'm allowed, being sane. But in the case that the world is still here tomorrow, a good piece of advice moving forward is to eliminate the mindset that everything difficult or ugly or unpleasant is S.E.P. Things are only going to get worse with that attitude.
    So, dear readers, if we can work on a little compassion, or empathy, even if it's for our own selfish reasons, maybe we can push out the date of the actual end of the world. And, make the time until then a little better for everyone. Preachity preach preachy. Apologies. But I think since this is positive, solution-oriented, and non-prophesying preaching, maybe it's not as hubristic (I know that's not a word, but maybe it will be now...) as this dude who's predicting the rapture will occur today.
    As far as I can tell, Saturday morning cartoons still aired, my horoscope was pretty optimistic, playoff hockey is still on, there's even a bit of blue sky out my window, and I haven't heard anything particularly ominous on the news. But of course, there are still about 11 hours left of the day in my timezone, so I suppose it's a wait and see. But again, Skynet isn't self aware, no zombies are marching stupidly on my street in search of brains, and the Poudre isn't flooding. So, I'm thinking we'll just have to wait for 2012, or for the next attention-seeking nut who decides he knows better than anyone else about the end of the world.

And.... Tampa Bay just scored. 3 TIMES! All tied up! Hell didn't freeze over just yet!