And, the Celebration Carried ON....

Basically, what started as my idea to drive a cab part time for a few weeks to ease myself gently out of my security job has transmogrified into "HOLY CRAP, let's get this off the ground as quickly as possible."

Translation: I put in my two week notice for my security job today.

Security is a profession that, by nature, doesn't necessarily recruit the best and brightest to its front ranks. And unfortunately, not only do people who run the business understand that, but the people who hire individual companies also get it. The hypocrisy of that business is the fact that when both the service provider and the service buyer both know that there's a case of providing inferior product and receiving inferior product, they tend to joust around each other until someone like me shows up refusing to have a bad day of work in uniform. Then, guys like me get used until we either find better security gigs or something else that strikes our fancy.

My last two days in class over at Yellow Cab confirmed for me that my general horsesense, refusal to sell out to the general negativity of the "veteran drivers" who somehow haven't driven a cab in more than 10 years and have been lured back by the even-handed computer dispatching system instead of having their fares swooped, customer service abilities, and just plain smarts have told me that I'm going to do well at this. I still have two more classes to take, and I have to integrate those around my existing 12 hour work days. Considering the sleep-dep crunk I dealt with the last two days because of having to do that, making those two classes last two weeks is just fine with me.

My boss at the security company is taking me up on my offer to write post orders for the place I'm leaving, so any future generations can ultimately learn how to work there instead of guessing what people want done out there. I've written post orders before. Christ on a stick, what haven't I written yet? Honestly. You tell what you want written, and what voice it needs to speak in, I'll write the shit. And that leads me to...

True mobile...

Give the folks at Cricket some credit... they're building their network capacity in Houston out to where people with some of their better cel phones are starting to not have all the dropped calls that they used to. It still isn't perfect. However, it was enough to convince me to try the mobile broadband they're offering instead of trying to get roped into another 2 year commitment to AT&T for something I'm not that sure of. The idea, in my mind, is that during my cab driving experiences I can use the mobile broadband connection, in concert with Houston's Transtar website, to determine where the asstastic traffic on certain highways might be. Also, I scored a power converter for a cigarette lighter socket to run my laptop on. I tried both of those in concert this afternoon and I got decent bars on the broadband in a couple of different places where my Cricket calls used to drop and the power converter was just fine and dandy at keeping power running to the lappy. So the one step up from that is when I get my owner-operator vehicle (some time next month from the looks of things), I go one better and score a laptop mount so I'm not reaching down to the front passenger seat. Otherwise, I'm technologically ready to rock in the manner I'm accustomed to.

Also there will be the advantage of using my Dreamweaver installation to update my cabbie site on the run and let folks know whether or not I'm still on-duty for a particular day. When I go O & O, there will be business cards and a website which will integrate this blog and other things.

Finally, I did a little celebrating today when I realized that the right thing to do was just go ahead and cut the security job loose. On those days, I can probably make better money driving the hack during the daytime and getting back to doing what I do best sleep-wise... do it at night. I have to admit, as much of a night owl as I used to be - and I still insist on working nights in the security business - my body just likes it better when I sleep at that time of day. I took myself to the local PF Changs and rocked some double pan fried dan dan noodles with chicken, slivered cucumber, carrots and celery. GRUBBIN. And, I followed that up with two cheesecake shots. Totally bad for me. Totally loved it.

Also, some time in the near future, I should be getting my copy of Melissa Plaut's book HACK. My heart goes out to those guys and gals in New York. They're over-regulated and just plain beat on at times. In any case, I want to dive in and check out the war stories. My own book about my time in the anime business, There's Always Room For a Good One, will probably have some of the beginnings of my time in the hack business since this is where things have transitioned to.

Closing this out for now, it's not like I think my time in anime has come to a close like I had panicking a couple of weeks ago, but I've definitely accepted this time as a huge slowdown. Slow enough, in fact, that I can look at the previous 6 years as the real gift, a time in which I was privileged to make a contribution that may have actually been slightly greater than the talent I brought to it. Honestly, the longer of a perspective I look back at this at, the more I realize that there were far more people with far greater experience who made smaller contributions. I'm pretty sure the only reason why I got a shot at doing what I did and as often as I did it was my own damned stubbornness and insistence on never taking the first "no" (thanks for that Rocket-man, it made me work that much harder) for an answer.

-Manley