Bought a paddle

Tonight’s “B Team” workout was actually a paddle tryout. We had a representative from Brača-Sport with about a dozen different paddles, and both the rep and Dan were doing a pretty good job of matching us up with paddles that are good for us. In my case, they suggested I try the Brácsa II, the VI and the VIII, but they were sure I’d like the VIII the most. And I did. The VIII has a very long and narrow blade, and it gives me a very gentle catch. With my big fat wide Big Spoons paddle, paddling hard gives me a big hard jerk when I first put the blade in the water and start pulling, but this one seems to ramp up from less drag to more gradually.

Dan, Lars (the factory rep), and several of the other paddlers remarked on how much better my stroke was with this paddle. Being a wing paddle, it comes out of the water as it passes my body almost on its own. And it’s light as a feather.

I’m really excited about this paddle – as I’ve been ramping up the amount I paddle in preparation for the Long Lake race, I’ve been getting more elbow pain, and I think the more gentle catch will go a long way towards alleviating that pain.

Funny story: the company is called Brača-Sport, but the paddles are called Brácsa. That wasn’t intentional – but after they made their first lot of paddles, they sent them out to be silk screened, and they came back with this typo on them. They had spent all their money on the carbon fibre, and had none left to fix the problem, so they shrugged and changed the name of the paddles but not the company.

History to repeat itself?

It’s always been said about me that I can irmprove a workplace by leaving it.

Several years ago I worked at a small start-up called “Blue Lobster Software”. I’d accepted a salary about $15K less than I should have, along with stock options, thinking I was going to make it big on the stock options like so many people were doing at that time. After a year and a half or so, they got bought by SAGA Software, a former division of “Software AG”, a German company (SAGA originally was an acryonym for Sofware AG America). “Finally”, I thought, “it’s going to pay off”. Well, the first disappointment was that the stock options ended up only being worth about $2K. The second disappointment was that the new owners immediately made us sign new contracts with them, at exactly the same salary as we’d been making before (but no stock options this time). I said “that’s bullshit”, and immediately left, getting a job at Global Crossing within a few weeks.

As soon as I left, SAGA sent out a memo to all the remaining employees saying that the initial contract we’d signed was just to tide us over until they could review salaries, and within a week or two they’d given everybody who stayed big raises. Nice of them to tell them that *after* I’d jumped ship, eh? A couple of the developers thanked me for pushing them to give the raises sooner rather than later.

So flash forward to the present, where there are 4 or 5 of us on contract here at Kodak who’ve been getting jerked around over getting permanent offers, and getting our contracts renewed month to month at the last possible minute. And I’m about to jump ship, coincidentally to Global Crossing again. Who wants to bet that before my notice period is up, they find a way to make permanent offers to the other people who are in this boat?

Is this a first?

I bet there aren’t very many other people out there who have turned in a resignation letter at their job the day they went to pick up a new car. Well, I’ve just done the resignation letter, and I pick up the car in a few hours.

Update I forgot to mention: as well as the offer from Global Crossing, I have another offer from Paychex. The Paychex one surprised me, because I’d only had a phone interview with them and I’m not used to getting a real offer without having a chance to meet people face to face, look around the facilities, etc. Because I was expecting it to lead to a face to face interview instead of an offer, I didn’t ask enough detailed questions about unimportant things like “where are you located?” and “what will I be doing?”

I’ll never understand the thought processes of stupid people

I got an email to the mailman administrator account from somebody claiming that the previous owner of his email address must have been a pilot, and he wants to be unsubscribed from the mailing lists because “they clog up my mailbox”. I run a bunch of lists for pilots, but none of them average more than one message a month, so I wasn’t initially inclined to be kind to him.
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