Speaking of Christmas, though… people have got to stop hanging out inside my head. It's unhealthy. For everyone. My parents bought me, in no particular order, a new TV, a couple cordless phones, Garth Brooks's newest CD, a new sweater, and things I'm leaving out because i'm too lazy, don't remember, don't want to think, or some weird and wonderful combination of all of the above. It bordered on awesome. So I came back home yesterday, hooked up the new TV, watched part of the game (writeup on that one if I remember when I get home), and then stuck Short Circuit (another christmas gift) into the only thing we could get to play a DVD last night–my ever so kick ass computer system. Ironicly enough it was during that that I decided next year, I'm staying the hell in Ottawa. And it was before that that I decided, with a tiny bit of encouragement from Trish, that I don't plan to be sober come new years night. Oh darn. And All I can really say is I hope 2008 is half as eventful. I couldn't handle 2007's equal in that department. *flops over tiredly*

And speaking of fun… oh, the plans that are being had for today. Put it this way–I'm leaving here in about an hour at the earliest, and I don't expect to see this place for more than an hour until after tonight's fireworks. And oh, there will be fireworks. There will be loads of fireworks. Which… is actually why I came back. Nothing against Pembroke's display or anything, but–enough's enough already. It doesn't get any better. Time for a different location… a little closer to home. Parliament buildings with cousins it is. If I post again today, it'll be in tomorrow morning's wee hours. But it'll be awesomely fun, and such. And… I've been rambling somewhat pointlessly now for about 10 minutes. Time to go do stuff.

And in other news… I officially kick myself for picking the apartment I did. There's gonna be a fair bit of walking involved in finding my bus stop. Not good if you're a lazy fuck, and well, I am. And it's gonna be a uber bitch come the days of 20 below. Ah well, can't have it all. Good job, good apartment, decent city, so of course the location's gonna turn out crappier than it looks. Then again, that's why they invented carpooling. Or I can always, you know, take my own advice and stop bitching, suck it up and walk, dammit. But, no. It's my blog, I'll bitch if I goddamn well wanna bitch. Then I'll suck it up and walk.

This unusual combination of topics brought to you by boredom. Screwing people out of being distracted/entertained for longer than I care to guess at.

And now, I go finish getting ready to go to a cousin's birthday party… *mutter mutter mutter* 20 freakin' years old, and she's still been reminding everyone for the last week and a half that her birthday's today. Did she expect 50 screaming kids and a birthday party, perhaps? I guess I aughta make a showing, anyway. Since it sounds like not many people are gonna be doing that. Mm, maybe I'll get lucky and at least one other person will have the hockey game on that I'll be missing otherwise. Why couldn't her birthday be on Tuesday…

So, we're looking at one of said kitchen sets, when my cell phone rings. Now, this is like 7:30 or 8:00 at night, mind you, so I'm thinking it's nothing too terribly important–just someone wanting to shoot the shit, that kinda thing–and am about ready to tell them I'll talk to them probably online when I get home. It's a good thing I didn't, though, because it was the phone call that pretty much cieled the deal. I am now the proud rentee of an apartment in Ottawa. The lease gets signed this Friday. Two weeks from then is moving day. And in between now and then, I still have a whole shitload of things to do. I may decide at some point to probably pilfer one of Stacie's ideas, and throw a to-do list up here at some point, just so I don't end up forgetting something. O'course, that doesn't guarantee I won't forget anyway, but at least the next time I look at this thing then I can soundly kick myself for forgetting, and then go about the business of remedying that situation. I'm going to have quite the busy couple weeks… and it's all gonna start tomorrow. And the once half empty can of coke is now empty, which means I should be attempting sleep. Good gawd, the prospect of having something akin to a routine is gonna kill me.

Him: How is it my dog managed to get into so much garbage without you hearing him?
Me: Simple, really. It's not my job to mind him.
*silence*

Ah, lessons learned with live demonstration. No guarantee it'll be successful, of course, but at least this time he knew better than to argue with me.

Scratch that. He just tried to tell me his dog was better behaved than our two. Of course… the mess on the floor caught him in the biggest lie of his life. I love it when he makes kicking his ass in a conversation easy.

Before I get into anything, though, I'll say right now anyone who tells me being up and actually on the road for 15 hours is fun deserves to be shot, pissed on, and strung up by their hair. Now, with that having been said, getting up at 6 to be in Ottawa by 9 for an interview that started at 1 is no fun. Fortunately, mom had an appointment she had to get out of the way, so we were able to get that done and still had time to swing by a decent restaurant for breakfast (by the way, Cora's (probably misspelled) is bad if you expect to eat a light breakfast). Then it was to the interview, which was a whole adventure in itself. First off, the directions we got were a bit misleading, so we thought the place I had to be was actually closer than it was. To look at the directions, it looked like the office complex was kinda right on the corner of two streets, in an area where, you know, it'd be hard to miss. Wrong answer. So we ended up guessing at exactly where the place was. We weren't far off, though, so it only really took us, maybe, about 5 minutes longer than it should have. And 3 of that was finding a place to park (visitors' parking is just not heard of in Ottawa, apparently). So we finally get in there, and keep in mind I had to be there 15 minutes early for the interview, I guess to give me time to clear the security checkpoints and such, and the first thing they want me to go through apparently is a manager's meeting. Okay, so no problem. Figure it'd take that maybe half an hour. Well, it did. Unfortunately, it took 10 minutes longer than it should have for it to start–I was there on time, but where was he? God only knows.

We finally got that out of the way, though, relatively painlessly, and he ended up asking me a lot of primarily technical/work experience questions (since when the hell do we still use MS DOS on a regular basis, anyway?). I think I did alright with that, though, considering the oddness of some of the questions. Then I waited another 5-10 minutes (they do like their waiting games) for the HR person who set up this whole thing so we could get onto the customer service assessment/simulation/thing, whatever the fuck it is you wanna call it. To say that was brutally tedius would be a grose understatement. I mean, I know the job itself calls for some degree of tedium, but that was just… over the top. It started alright enough, though, with anywhere from 150 to 200 questions related to the kind of person you are and work experience/preferences, that kinda thing–think personality survey. I think I did alright with that. Then they put me through 7 simulated customer service situations, 1 via a simulated chat environment, and 6 pre-recorded script-driven calls, or somesuch, for a fictional GPS tracking company. If you've never done call center/customer service work, I'll warn you right now–bring a notebook or a good memory. That was a simulation for an interview and I still had a hell of a lot of crapola to memorise. I managed, though, considering I only had 5 minutes to memorise it, and the only particulars I had to look at were the minor, customer-specific things, for obvious reasons. I think, with the exception of 1 or 2 where I know I kinda fubared the answers a little, I did alright on that section. We shall have to see, though. It was pretty rappid fire–you'd get done one simulated exchange, then they'd sorta quiz you on it. Then you'd move right into the next one. So at least in that regard I didn't have time to think about where I could have maybe done things a bit differently.

All told, the interview must have lasted a good 3 and a half hours, easily. Officially the longest interview on my personal record to date. I'll hopefully hear back, the HR person told me, in anywhere from 5 to 10 days, so… we shall see. 'Twas a learning experience, though, if nothing else, and definitely showed me that's something I'd at the very least like to learn more about doing, if not make a career out of it. It seems to be a bit more… I dunno, relaxed than what I thought, which is kinda a good thing. In between meetings, I was sitting in the front lobby talking with someone who's doing the same job I was being interviewed for, just kinda killing a few minutes before we had to go do our own things–apparently, he was applying to move to a different position–and I'm guessing they don't try to enforce a strict average call time. Either that or he just got unlucky… we were both rather amused over a call he took the night before that took him 3 hours to resolve, and it ended up being something rediculously simple–the laptop the customer bought had a network card his router wouldn't support. That'd be a kick in the teeth… 3 hours just to be told to replace the card or get a new router. So that was a decent distraction, anyway.

Of course, after the interview was over came the mandatory 3 hours of boredom–my mother and my aunt, in the same vehicle, in a city with at least 6 malls, maybe more. You can see where this is going. Lots of wandering through stores I have no interest in, and no actually buying anything. So after that interview, I got to try to stay awake for 3 hours while they browsed supposedly decent-looking art work, and other asorted pictures, then went clothing/jewelry shopping. My uncle, who had an appointment at the same time as my interview so at least they had something else to do while I was occupied, was probably less enthused with the idea than I was, and he can see the damn things. We'd planned to swing past my cousin's place, but apparently there was no one home… so we ended up going out for supper (by the way, Montana's is just bad, period) instead, then we headed home. And then I caught the last 5 minutes of a hockey game (rant about that mess to follow in a few minutes), thought about updating, half-ass attempted to update, and passed out. And now, I shall stay home today, and actually inside, unless I absolutely have to leave… because it is fucking *freezing* out there.

And, because I'm due for a random topic jump, more positive news. My brother's gone to basic training in…. *checks* 33 days. I'll get into the specifics of hours, minutes and seconds when it actually gets decided exactly when he's being kicked out. In the meantime, though, the countdown begins! Maybe he'll come out of basic a bit more mature…. eh, one can always hope. I do have to kind of feel sorry for my mother in a way, though. With him going to the millitary, my dad usually on the road and me hopefully getting this job, there doesn't exist much company for mom, who'll pretty much have the place to herself when we all clear outa here. And the girl can't even go anywhere because someone still needs to stick around and make sure the bills get paid, and such. But, on the bright side I suppose, she'll have more reason to spend her days off in, say, Ottawa. Or Quebec. Or… take a couple weeks' vacation and go travel with dad. Ah, who am I kidding? She won't even notice we're gone. Much.

We got all that out of the way, though, then went for dinner to kind of cellebrate, I guess, the fact my brother managed to pass the.. uh, physical assessment thing they do as a prerequisit for getting into the millitary. This made me realise two things. He's actually trying to get back on his feet, and getting into a job he'll actually enjoy, or at least not get himself fired from within 3 months. And, holy shit he's trying to be semi-mature. I thought that impossible 6 months ago. Of course, that was when he was all unemployed and borrowing/spending more money than he had coming in, and generally being a pain in everyone's ass. I was almost tempted to flat out ask him who the fuck he was and what the hell he did with my brother. And his girlfriend was actually conversational for a change, rather than just being all stuck-up and bitchy. Surprised the hell out of me. She may yet turn out not to be the sister-in-law everyone wants to strangle. We shall have to see about that, though. As long as they don't end up getting married before I do, I could really care less. If they get married at all, that is. Well, okay, so I could care less either way. I think if they ever get married at all my mother's gonna have a heart attack. He is not the marrying type… he'd have to actually settle down first. Not gonna happen. But, he hasn't run like hell away from the possibility yet… just as long as I don't end up an uncle within the next year. Neither one of them is in a position for that. And I'm doing all sorts of jumping all over the place here so uh, finding something else to do now.

And it just so happens that I could use our network as an example. Until about 15 minutes ago, it was crawling at about 1/4 of a turtle's pace on the computers we have up here. So, to prove my point, I had mom go down and turn off my brother's laptop, as I know damn well he's been downloading and/or uploading crap all day in spite of not being home. And, of course, as soon as she'd shut it down, our DSL connection that's supposed to be 1MB/s actually *was* 1MB/s. I love it when demonstrations are so easy to pull off. I just hope she actually caught on… or I'll be explaining the concept to her again the next time he does it. In other words, tomorrow morning when she wants to pay her bills.

What got me on that train of thought was my cousin and her husband stopped by for about 15 minutes, before they headed back to Ottawa, just for the sake of shooting the shit. I hadn't actually heard from them in a few months, so it was nice. Now, if we can just get them to remember my phone number *can* be called from Ottawa…