Category: Uncategorized

I ordered something from an online retailer that I’d never used before and when the tracking information appeared, it was for a local courier company that I’d never heard of before. When I Googled them, I read a raft of terrible reviews. Most of these complained that the company would update the tracking with “delivery attempted” when no one called, knocked, or rang the buzzer. One person actually obtained security footage from their lobby and watched the delivery person get buzzed in, walk into the lobby, and then do a 180, taking the package with them. The package was then marked as “lost”.

In general, the whole “delivery attempted” BS happens with so many delivery companies. About a week ago, I had another item that I purchased be delivered by another local courier. I got the whole “delivery attempted” update but I was home all day and no one called me. The next thing I know, my package was on its way back to their shipping depot. Now I’m not sure if it helped but I sent a message to them immediately that they better try to attempt to delivery my package again and not give me that garbage ultimatum where they tell you you gotta go to them to get your package. Now, the next day, my package mysteriously wound up at my door. Oddly, no one called nor did anyone buzz me. How did they get access to my building then? Now for some of the bigger companies like UPS, FedEx, Canada Post, and Amazon, they get a dedicated fob to help expedite deliveries but this company was not one of them. If they somehow already had access to my building, why didn’t they just delivery it on the first day?

Anyways, with this latest package, who knows when I’ll get it.

At least in the Vancouver area, as soon as the time change happened, that coincided with several days of sunny weather. So not only did the sun set later, it was very much a sunny day that ended later.

The weather has been quite nice for several days. I went out around noon for a walk and I didn’t wear a jacket, I just had a thin t-shirt on and some pants. The official forecast said it only got up to 13 degrees but it sure felt warmer to me. It was warm enough that I wish I had worn shorts. In Vancouver, you gotta worry about being fooled by “fake spring” though. A few sunny days and warmer temperatures makes you bring out shorts and t-shirts but then what follows is weeks more rain and cooler air. Indeed, the sunny weather is supposed to go away by Wednesday, to be replaced by rain. The highs are supposed to remain the double-digits though, so maybe it’s not all that bad.

In a previous post, I wrote that management at my place of employment told us that some people on my team would be affected by layoffs and they would make those layoffs happen within the next thirty days. Today, we had a team meeting that was scheduled with twenty minutes notice. Now if you’ve been around as long as I have, you know that meetings that involve the whole team, scheduled with short notice, near the end of the day are not meetings that usually end up with good news.

I didn’t know it at the time, but if at the beginning of the meeting no one had already given you bad news, you were not affected. For me, it was very much a normal day, until I got the meeting invite, so I was luckily ok. I won’t divulge many details from the meeting but I will say management was very honest and forthcoming. They told us why the cuts had to be made. Also, we were told that they’d do their best to place people in other parts of the company, so for some people, they wouldn’t actually be laid off. Though, there’s no guarantee that would happen for everyone. Indeed, some people might just decide to leave no matter what.

When the meeting ended, I wasn’t sure who got affected but in the days to come, I’m guessing the news will start to filter out. It’s a total bummer that some of my co-workers will be out of a job. Our industry has been rocked with layoffs for more than a year now and we’re all wondering when the cuts are going to end.

Last week, I ordered pizza for dinner for probably the fifth, maybe the fourth time in the last ten years. I really don’t get pizza delivered very often. There’s enough pizza places within walking distance that delivery makes no sense.

This time, however, I ordered from Panago, which doesn’t have a location close to where I live. This was the first time I ordered from Panago in years, maybe more than a decade. If you’re not from this province, Panago started out as a local pizza place, which grew in popularity enough to have close to 200 locations.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Panago was pretty much the only place I ordered pizza from. At that time, I was still living with my parents at their detached house. There was a Panago location about a two minute drive away. To save on delivery fees, I’d pick up my pizza from the store. I went there often enough that the people working there started to recognize me. The owner of this franchise was there a lot and he often cooked many of the pizzas I ordered. He was very friendly and once in a while, he threw in a side order of something for free. When I was lazy and did order delivery, it was common for him to deliver the pizza himself. Those pizzas were always delicious and kept me satisfied, chubby, and well-fed.

Eventually, my parents moved slightly farther away to a smaller townhouse and I left for UBC to go to grad school, so the orders for pizza were much less frequent. When I ordered a pizza and a salad last week, it brought back a lot of memories. It also reminded me that I still like Panago pizza and their salads are fresh and actually well-made. Everyone jokes that salads from pizza joints are terrible, but this salad was better than any pre-packaged salad I’ve had from Safeway (and cheaper too).

I’m not sure if I’d order Panago every week (like I almost did way back when), but I sure am gonna consider it more now.

In about three weeks, my building will be doing their annual fire alarm and smoke detector testing. Some dude is gonna have to come into my apartment and take about sixty seconds to test everything. If they had to do the testing tomorrow, I’d be embarrassed because my apartment is a tad too messy for guests. Is it like an episode from a hoarding show in here? No, definitely not, but I probably have too much recycling piled up and a large pile of laundry on my couch that needs to be elsewhere. I probably need to vacuum as well. All told, nothing a few hours of cleaning can’t fix.

Of course, if I did the cleaning this week, I bet everything would be messy again in three weeks. The key to being lazy is to keep everything a mess until right before you need it clean, so you don’t have time to make it messy again.

Despite knowing the clocks were going forward on Saturday night, I stayed up way too late. That was a problem because I couldn’t sleep all day on Sunday as I had things to do and a schedule to keep. By the time 6pm rolled around, I was exhausted and wound up falling asleep on my couch. I napped for about 20 minutes, which is a good amount of time for a nap.

I think the combination of the time change and a lack of sleep was a double-whammy because I got so tired that I had to take another nap, this time around 9pm, which really isn’t a good time to nap. I really was quite tired though.

I also have a 9am meeting tomorrow morning and my body will still think it’s 8am, which will make that meeting suck even more. That said, this is the way the clocks need to stay permanently. When I finish work tomorrow, it will still be daylight, which is the way it should be.

One of the pet peeves I have that will probably never change is needing to poop less than thirty minutes after getting out of the shower. I had this happen today. I got nice and clean, which included my butthole, and was still enjoying the shower fresh feeling when the bowels made an unscheduled request.

I didn’t really feel like taking two showers back to back so quickly, so I didn’t. If only I had delayed my shower about an hour, I would have been more clean throughout the day.

It snowed on Sunday night, which was surprising, since it’s March and we usually don’t get a lot of snow in that month in Vancouver. Luckily, it wasn’t a lot of snow and the subsequent rain on Monday morning washed it away pretty quickly.

I would say it’s been colder than expected recently as well. I believe the low tonight is -4 degrees Celsius which is chilly for this city. For comparison, the low in Toronto tonight is supposedly 8 degrees. For Vancouver, the freezing weather is going to stay until Friday at least. This weekend is when we’re supposed to move the clocks forward, signifying the approach of the spring season. I hope the weather cooperates with that.

Last week, my employer announced that they will layoff 5% of their workforce or about 670 people. Some of those losing their jobs have already been told but for some unknown number, it might take up to 30 days for them to find out.

Just to get it out of the way, the odds of me losing my job are probably very slim, but you can never rule out anything when it comes to business. Instead, we should focus on the fact that for the majority of the people who are getting laid off, their ability, skills, and intelligence had nothing to do with them losing their jobs. I have no doubt some of those people could actually do my role better than I could. My point is that sometimes, I guess most of the time, in the games industry, a person getting laid off has nothing to do with how good they are as a game developer. That’s the part that makes it so frustrating. Your career sometimes hinges on sheer luck.

I don’t know where all of this is going. I read somewhere that just barely three months into 2024, we’re already reached half the number of people laid off in the video game industry in 2023. How many more people can lose their jobs before we see just a handful of games released in a year?

Over the decade that I’ve lived in my apartment I’ve had numerous fire alarms go off while I’ve been home. I’m fairly certain that this evening, for the first time, I had the alarm go off while I was naked and in the shower.

Now if you’ve lived in my building for any amount of time, you’ll realize that false alarms are a way of life. So when the alarm went off while I was cleaning my genitals, I didn’t even think once to end my shower early and proceed out of the building.

The alarm ended a minute after it started, which indicated it was indeed a false alarm. People, myself included, will go back to sleep if the alarm goes off in the middle of the night. If we ever get a real alarm, we’re all gonna be in big trouble.