Getting to Know You -- Sept 2019

[ratsmitglied]

1 hour ago, Sibling said:

I have never technically broken a rule, but I have a knack for workarounds  I'm just about completely out of those though...IT spends a lot of time making life difficult for people like me who kind of sit between business and IT and so we are not allowed to do a lot of stuff and they lock it down, I usually manage to figure out a way to continue to do my job.

That sounds like my job...although technically we are business...last thing we did was manage to get a dev server made available for us to run particular scripts on because the systems couldn't do what we needed.

[Inarah]

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

[Argentee]

1 minute ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

The weather. It's also what my husband hates the most. 

[Doug Sundseth]

2 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

 

Weather, proximity to beautiful terrain, nice people (though those are nearly everywhere as long as you treat them as if they are), good working environment.

 

All of these can be found elsewhere, it's the combination that is important to me.

[Crowley]

2 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

The food. I don't know if there's anywhere better in the world for food than NYC. Cookies, fresh baked, delivered to your door at 3am? $1 pizza slices? Any cuisine you can think of, and a bunch that you'd never have thought to consider... There's always something new to try. 

[CashWiley]

23 hours ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 26: Describe a time when you had to break the rules to get the job done. 

Back when I was in a band, we'd often have to take side jobs to make ends meet. I was working for a timeshare, conning people into going up to Lake Tahoe for a reduced rate so the salesgoobs could harass them into a bad financial decision. The gig was these marks would fill out contest entry forms in Tahoe, and they'd send them to us as leads.

 

The manager thought he was far more clever than he actually was, he spent his day obsessing over his scripts. They were really lame and I felt they were ineffective. I was doing horrible and about to quit when I saw a box labeled "NI" sitting behind the secretary's desk (she'd hand out the leads to the phone goons). It stood for "Not Interested", people who either nicely declined, slammed the phone down, or something betwixt. I asked about the box, and she said state law said they couldn't be contacted for a year. So I took everything older than a year.

The phone goons jot down notes on the leads, to help personalize the calls. So I used that, throwing out the script entirely. I'd call, tell them directly what we were doing, with a minimum of decoration (I just called it a "promotion" we ran through the year with different deals). Basically, I'd say we're running another promotion and wondered if this time of year worked better for them. If they said no, I'd say we ran promotions throughout the year, would a different time work better. Then I'd categorize the leads by interest (ski, gamble, shows) and time (month, holiday, etc).

My sales started to slowly grow...until we hit ski season. Then I became top sales by about tenfold, because I was calling back people who told me to call them, often giving me the exact week they wanted to go. I'd give them the promo rate, tell them to sit through the 2-hour presentation, and off they went.

Fired the next month for not following the script. I got a kick out of figuring out how to make the system work better and getting fired for it by a small-minded ego.

[Corsair]

6 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

It is in the area of Illinois that is least corrupt! We moved here 33 years ago because of family, now with all of the family either moved or passed away, we are just waiting for my wife to retire next December and then we will vacate the State too to once again be with family!

[Jasper_the_2nd]

8 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

I'm going with where we are moving to, where I've been living in an apartment the last few months.

And really the answer is: that's where my job is.

I'd have never considered moving here otherwise.

But since I've been here: the selection of stores.  Coming from a town area to an actual city, we now have an actual good selection of stores for just about everything.  We could use an Ikea but that's about it, and there is one an hour away.  There are even 2 gaming stores, up from the 1 tiny one I had before.

Same with food.  Much better selection, and most of the interesting stuff is within walking distance of the office.
I really don't know what is available for entertainment, cultural stuff, as I've been driving home every weekend, but that will be fun to explore.

And I've only really lived through one season of weather so I can say summer was bit cooler (which is a good thing for me). We'll see how the winter goes....

 

[Xiwo Xerase]

15 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

It's where my friends are.  I could go on about how it's a pretty area or that the weather can be nice (can be, not is) but, really, it's because my friends are here.

 

If I moved somewhere else, I'd probably turn into even more of a hermit than I am now.

[malefactus]

43 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

 

It doesn't snow in Texas...at least not yet. Otherwise I would love to be back on Long Island.

[Disciple of Sakura]

36 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

There's a lot of fast food restaurants really close, along with several retail locations and my work. Overall, it's pretty nice.

[Thoramel]

25 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

 

A lot of things. It's a walkable neighborhood close to my office. There are numerous restaurants, bars and small businesses in and around us. The homes are large and unique with an abundance of trees, which is a rarity for a downtown neighborhood. There's a lot of great art and history everywhere you look (and in one spot, where an old Thomas Edison power plant has been turned into an artist's studio, both).

 

But my absolute favorite are the people. I moved here about 12 years ago after having lived in small towns and out of the way places my whole life. It was a bit nerve wracking moving to a place that had more people squeezed into a few square blocks than the entire population of the last place I lived. But honestly, I've never felt more of a sense of community. I've gotten to know a lot of business owners and artists who live and work here. People wave and smile at me when I ride my bike down the street. There's multiple community gardens, who knows how many Little Free Libraries, and just down the street a private resident bought an empty lot and turned it into a park for everyone's use. Our neighborhood festival is one of the happiest, most diverse crowd of people I've ever seen. If we get heavy snows I like to get up early and go shovel out the cars of a few seniors who live nearby. I've never felt like doing stuff like that anywhere else I've lived. Even the owner of the local head shop organizes a neighborhood watch. Really, just a splendid bunch of people to live near.

 

We're currently undergoing a demographic shift as this area has apparently become ground zero for rich people wanting to live downtown. And that's causing a slip in the friendliness of the area (I guess if you paid well over a half million for a cheaply built house you feel you have the right to tell others how to live). But I'm hopeful that as these new people integrate into the fabric of our neighborhood their attitudes will change and they'll become more friendly. 

[Gargs]

57 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

Leaving it. 

 

Seriously though, it's family and the house I own. We'd probably move but for having all the family nearby and the difficulty that would arise in getting a similar job at a similar rate elsewhere.

[Werkrobotwerk]

59 minutes ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

it hasn't caught fire and sank into the swamp yet

[Cranky Dog]

1 hour ago, Inarah said:

Question for Sept 27: What do you like most about the area where you live? 

The weather is far better than anywhere else I've lived in.

 

Sure, the winters can get real cold, but it's much dryer than the southern places I've lived in, so the temperature is much more bearable, and I get many more sunny days due to less cloud cover.