As I was cleaning up a spare computer to give to a friend yesterday, I found a cache of old files that I thought I’d lost to a hard drive failure years ago.
A lot of those recovered files are individual daily entries in what these days I’d probably call a workday liveblog, but which at the time I referred to as just “the worklog”. I wrote it at my desk, on an aging Palm IIIc cradled in a small keyboard peripheral for easy typing, making little time-stamped sub-entries throughout the day. At home each evening, I’d sync the text files off my Palm and upload them on some (terrible) custom blog software I’d written for myself.
My job at the time was as a “phone technician” at the (now-defunct) local call-center for one of the big market research companies. I made out-going calls, mostly cold calls, to try and either conduct or arrange for a time to conduct market research surveys with a mix of consumers, small business people, and IT folks at larger businesses. I did not like that job very much at all.
I don’t know why I started writing the worklog. But I kept at it for months; I haven’t checked, but I’d estimate I wrote somewhere on the order of 100,000 words.
This is the first entry in the worklog, from June 2003, unedited. I had been at this job for about a year at this point.
6/12/03
7:20 am
I’m pretty tired of clarifying with people that I’m not selling anything. Pretty much every time I talk to a receptionist, I say hi, blah blah blah, and they say, but we already have a contract for our printers, and I say, no, when I said market research I meant MARKET FUCKING RESEARCH, and they say oh, hold on, I’ll transfer you.
7:28 am
It bothers me when part of the work I do involves trying to suppress my natural reaction to another person’s reasonable statement.
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