Do you know owls don’t have teeth so they swallow the whole mouse; their digestive juice in stomach will pick out the meat so later they just spit out bones and hairs? Do you know Male Darwin frogs hatch eggs in their stomach and shoot baby frogs belch out of their mouths when they are ready? Do you know tapeworm can grow up to 60 feet in your intestine? I didn’t know any of these until we saw “Animal Grossology” exhibit at Science Center today. It’s our special event to celebrate father’s day–not a poetic one, but certainly a fun one! Fifi has the greatest father in the whole world-he turned down his advanced career opportunity at Boston and decided to stay on in Seattle so we could enjoy quality family life. We are so lucky to have him around and so happy we don’t need to move to cold Boston.
I consider myself a pretty smart gal and to some degree tech savvy, but recently I found that I could not figure out a lot of things without checking manuals or “help and support”. The first sign of tech-neuron degeneration showed up, actually, a couple of years ago-when a friend reminded me that I could actually fast backwards and forwards the music/podcast using the skip buttons on iPod, which I was not aware at all for a very long time (so I either listened to a podcast from beginning if I missed anything or I missed the part forever) . Well, you can’t blame me, I don’t read user manuals, and I never know pushing a same button longer or shorter can trigger different functions. Now this button thing is even more confusing with the Jebra Bluetooth headphones-on top of the mysterious single “main button”, the speed of the blinking lights can also mean different things. Since I’m never able to remember what’s the difference between each 3 seconds or each second, every time I push the button, it feels like playing with a slot machine, you never know what lights will comes up. Regarding mobile technologies, I still haven’t figured out how I can dial numbers like 1-800-DISCOVER on a Smartphone, since alphabetic and numbers don’t show up on the same buttons anymore.
Speaking of dialing 1-800 numbers, I can’t help to share my long journey of cracking Starbucks code for their free wifi connection. I owned a gold card over 6 months now, but was never able to enjoy free wifi as promised until recently, when I was determined to claim my “exclusive benefits” so I can resumed my happy Starbucks working hours I started from my dissertation era. Since there was no way I can log in to Att account on the default homepage, I decided to ask customer service for help. I translated 1-800-starbuc on the back of my gold card to 1-800-782-7822 and type it on my Moto Q9C, and listened through a very long and strange menu including options like “press 4 if you have business ideas” and “press 7 if you want to buy a large quantity of coffee” (sounds like some secret codes, no?). Finally I was led to “press 4 if you want to use Att wifi for the first time”, but the instruction was read in such fast monotone that I had to listen to three times before it makes sense to me. When I was asked to type in my card number as shown on the back of the card, I could not find the 16 digit number until I accidently tilted the card to a certain angle where the 3pm sunlight struck on a series of digits that I could not see otherwise. While I almost felt like Robert Langdon who solved all the puzzles that lead to the door of some secret society, I wondered if I there is a possibility that I am too dumb as a coffee house consumer. It took me 6 months to get to this door and it hurts my ego at the thoughts of that Starbucks may actually considered an average gold card holder are capable of redeeming this “exclusive benefit” without going through much trouble. Maybe I’m two Standard deviations from the average consumer. Yeah, that hurts.
I can be very cynical about my recent job loss and my last employer, like my good friend Matt said “hey, it’s good for you. You should thank them for letting you go”, or as I would comment “among all things they did to me, the layoff was the nicest one”. Yes, that’s how bad I felt about working on my last job, which lasted for 10 months, and about every two weeks, there would be some stupid/nasty happenings that made me think “things could not be worse from now on”, but the company has the talent to unfailingly top the precedent. The fact that they ended the job for me, in one way, was the worst that could happen to an employee, but on the other way, was quite liberation for their employees. I had been stuck in a dreadful job in the worst economy ever, living in the fear of losing my job. And when the moments come, humiliation was all I felt. Unfair, unfair, that’s so unfair, that’s all I was thinking at that time. 4/22, that was the day, Bin flew to the East Coast, I cried to him before his flight took off, and then put on a smiling face to attend the Fun Party at Fifi’s daycare… IT’s only been a month or so, but all felt like a blur, including the whole 10 months of ordeal, the dim office stuck in the Mezzanine level, countless deceptions and disappointments, sleepless nights in front of computer working against deadlines… Totally burnout, I felt like survivor- the irony is that it was the evil’s hand itself that pushed me out of the fire, and retuned me to life. Experiencing the pain of losing job like millions of Americans do today, the healing was actually brief and pain free- I got to do so many things that I missed out while totally being consumed, physically and emotionally, by my last job. I got to live my life for a while, and I felt blessed and stronger. Now I am back to work as an independent consultant. While still doing work that I like, I don’t need to deal with stinky office politics like the last one for a while. Will see how this phase of my career plays out- there will be bumps on the road ahead, that’s for sure, but I am a phoenix rising from the flame of death(=hellish job + layoff), I am fearless.