Today I went to my (very) part-time job to score alternative-assessments, meaning I was working on the "No Child Left Behind" tests for students with disabilities. I realize it's a dead-end, but that's what I've been able to get for the moment. A lot of retirees are working there part-time to make ends meet and so the scorers are generally very well-qualified people and also very nice.
I've done my best to be friendly and to make small-talk with those around me, if only to make the experience of wading through the thicket of paperwork that the job entails. By chatting to people about what's going on with me, I was able to make some new professional connections that hopefully will lead to a new and better job.
I also stopped by a place to grab lunch, which is owned by the family of a guy I went to high school with. His dad recognized me and asked about my e-cig as he is trying to get his mother to change her ways as she has pre-symptoms of emphysema.
Finally, my parents are having a group of doctors over to their house for some reason and have decided to (as always) go over the top with the food and so my dad was running around like crazy trying to cook it all, so I gave him a hand.
Best possible outcomes for what I've done today so far are that I am able to use my new connections from my part-time job to secure a better job and move toward accomplishing my other goals. Also, by telling someone where to find more information on e-cigarettes, maybe someone else's life can be improved by switching. By helping to cook for a bunch of doctors and their families, I might be able to do some more networking and find other avenues to accomplishing my goals, or at least learning something about medicine or something related that might enable me to help someone else.
Given what you've done today, what are some the best (or worst) possible results of your actions?
Today I provided businesses with a new revenue stream. Hopefully it will increase the amount of customers that interact with them, also increase the average purchase size and hopefully, in the end be a win-win for both the company I represent and the businesses I called on.
I also spent time with my daughter and made the decision to forgo a couple of calls today so I could sit at the table and have breakfast with her. Hopefully decisions like this will help her to have a good foundation in her childhood so that she can grow up and have a positive impact on the world. That's right, having breakfast with my daughter may be one of the most important things I do for this world. I really believe that.
- Given what you've done today, what are some the best (or worst) possible results of your actions?
Houses will get foreclosed on faster and with more accuracy and less expenses to big banks, and the lawyers involved in the process will get paid a lot quicker since I resolved a bunch of issues in our invoicing systems leftover from a big upgrade last weekend.
I don't work in a glamorous industry...
Well, actually 'more accurately' is very important and not evil at all. There have been so many horror stories of people getting unlawfully foreclosed on. We need control systems to make sure this doesn't happen. If you default on a mortgage, you get foreclosed on; that's the deal we all knowingly sign up for. What we need to ensure is rule of law, however, and if you're software updates contribute to that, I'd say it's a very good thing.
- There have been so many horror stories of people getting unlawfully foreclosed on.
That was a subsidy of my company that we bought years ago. Those stories about "robo-signing" came out of that investigation. My company runs automation software for processing loans, mostly for the purpose of foreclosure. We were investigated by the government and our software was cleared of any malicious intent, and was found to be accurate and contained fewer mistakes than manual methods. So no one was ever "robo signing" at my company. The scandal was from ONE LADY who had her team all manually forge the same signature on foreclosure documentations from this one small branch of our company that started that whole mess. There wasn't that many houses that got improperly foreclosed on, and the ones that did made national news, but there were honestly only a few. But it all came form this one tiny subsidiary out West. The lady who was being charged with it committed suicide in her home the day of the first court hearing...
There were some other companies that falsly foreclosed on homes, but not many. The company I work for has almost every loan in the country right now and does the vast majority of foreclosure processing. We do the processing for all of the major banks currently. I'm all too familiar with all of the bad press, who was involved, and what really happened. Since the scandals broke news, my company was heavily investigated by the government, but has since been cleared of any wrong doing, and our applications have all been vetted and came out clean.
It's pretty easy to determine who I work for based on this with a bit of googling, but I, for obvious reasons, won't put that company name in print and tie it to my username. But our technology is awesome and we definitely don't robo-sign. But still, it's always a little awkward telling people I work for a foreclosure servicer... but I'm just in IT and do the infrastructure architecture for our web apps. But I've had a few people I've met who have been like "Oh, I just had my home foreclosed on..." Makes for some awkward conversations. Oh, and about every week we get threat alerts that someone threatened to shoot our employees in the parking lot... and we're not even their loan holder! We're just a servicer for the banks. Some peoples kids.
This requires me to think about what I did today.
I dropped a friend off at his place before work today. Best case scenario something awesome happened to him within minutes of me dropping him off that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Maybe he found $100 in the street.
I went to work. My work doesn't really directly impact anyone unless it's to get them in trouble. I guess best case from going to work and doing my job is that I can get recognition for doing a good job from my managers and move up the corporate chain? Yaaa...yyy...?
I wrote some poems. Best case, they all become super famous and I become super famous and I become Poet Laureate, first of Delaware, then the US.
Uh... humanodon ... Do these best-case scenarios have to be realistic?