Current location:	Sietch Creare
Current mood:	pleased
Current music:	(500) Days of Summer - Us
Entry tags:	comics, cooking, nanowrimo, pearls before swine, thoughts, tv, work, writing

00781: 14,001 Reasons To Be Giddy
Current NaNoWriMo Word Count: 14,001 words exactly! I'm still about 2,600 words short of my daily target, but I'm still overwhelmed with how much I've accomplished thus far. I just need to tie up this chapter so I can move on to the next story segment. As always, the morbidly curious can check out my work-in-progress at The Gossamer Tower.

It's fun when work throws an interesting problem your way - the kind that really makes you think about how to solve it for practically the rest of your work shift. Last night was one of those days and I still find myself thinking about it. Call centers and other BPO companies are all about mass production - we aim to train agents to do the same job with relatively the same level of skill. If they fail to attain this, we try to coach and train them some more until there's no chances for improvement left. Then we let them go and hope they find a job that better suits their abilities. This particular challenge requires me to figure out a way to totally upgrade a particular group of agents to be totally different than how they started in terms of a job redefinition that we still need to come up with. When you decide to raise the bar, the trick is trying to define just what constitutes that higher level and what are the behaviors that will act as indicators that the desired change has happened. All that while still remaining profitable and working within what limited guidelines the client has provided.

Gods, I love working with really, really intelligent people. Even when they don't quite know how to express what they want.

Anyway, the training professional in me is joining forces with my tinker side and my problem solving side and my trying-to-think-outside-the-box-without-really-leaving-it side. The result is a LOT of interesting ideas and potential paths to take and I'll just have to figure out what to do in time.

Tobie and I did our weekly grocery run today and were shocked at how expensive shrimp is. I guess that just really goes to show what makes it such a special treat. We wanted to try something different this week and the dish that we have in mind is chop suey, or some other variation of stir fried vegetables. We bought a bunch of ingredients for it (thank you 10% off fresh produce Tuesdays!) and hopefully we'll get to run the experiment tonight or some other day this week. I also made sure to have ingredients of sinigang na bangus and of course the pork chops that have become our stable back-up food. Yay for food!

I've kinda forced Tobie to go through the Community episodes rather quickly. I say forced not because he doesn't like the show or anything, but more because he's still a bit shocked at the rate we're watching them. I tend to like finishing things in one go, especially when they come in 22 minute bite-sized chunks whereas he likes to take things a bit slower, giving time to savor whatever it is we're enjoying. Well, almost everything - ice cream melts and floats tend to bubble over, after all. We only started watching the show last Sunday and despite rationing, we're already finished with the 5th episode. Whee! Joel McHale is fun!

Don't underestimate cows!