Having a Bad Day?: Get 'yer Hugs here!!

[Briar King]

Issued. It's getting power it just is refusing to turn on. It actually humming really loud to. Ugh I've got it 70% full of shows I still haven't had time to watch

[Kaymyth she/her]

Issued. It's getting power it just is refusing to turn on. It actually humming really loud to. Ugh I've got it 70% full of shows I still haven't had time to watch

 

Dangit.  And my experience with the company-issued DVRs is that if something goes bad, they either can't or won't transfer your recordings over.  And it's not easy to tap into those hard drives; they encrypt everything.

[RippleGylf she/her]

So, today I was treated like dirt by about half of my math class. Naturally, I've been depressed all day as a result.

[Orlion Blight he/him]

I've been having a bad night with my parents and I just offloaded it all to my friend.

I just feel worse than before now.

Friends will usually understand... It's actually one of their important functions! A quick "I'm sorry, but my parents were particularly grendelish yesterday" is all that is needed, if even that!

That sounds awful, Ripple, what happened?

Edited February 17, 2016 by Orlion Determined

[RippleGylf she/her]

Well, there is a sizable group of somewhat immature boys in my class who, when I went up to explain how I solved a question, clamored for one of their own to go and explain the same exact process. Apparently they didn't notice me crying for the rest of the period, and neither did my teacher.

[Orlion Blight he/him]

I'm sorry Some people are petulant narcissists that must be the center of attention. It's not a reflection on you, but as you noted, on the immaturity of that group.

It's hard to ignore, so I won't suggest that. Just remember you're awesome!

[Briar King]

Yep I lost it all... Then to top it off my replacement dvrs hdmi signal wasn't going to tv so I had to go back and get a second replacement....so pissed off

[Kaymyth she/her]

Yep I lost it all... Then to top it off my replacement dvrs hdmi signal wasn't going to tv so I had to go back and get a second replacement....so pissed off

 

Blech.  And, of course, it's getting nearly impossible to run a homemade DVR on cable because of their encryptions.  We only manage it because we dumped cable completely and just record off the local channels via antenna.

[Mistrunner]

Well, there is a sizable group of somewhat immature boys in my class who, when I went up to explain how I solved a question, clamored for one of their own to go and explain the same exact process. Apparently they didn't notice me crying for the rest of the period, and neither did my teacher.

<hugs>

Man, I get having large groups of immature boys in classes and such. It's awful. They're awful. And really storming hard to ignore. Hope you feel better, Ripple. Have some cyber chocolate.

<hugs more>

[Left he/him]

I've had a really bad headache since ten this morning. It just won't go away, and I've done just about everything that normally helps me.

Oh, and I have opening shift at work in the morning, so I get to wake up at 4.

[Briar King]

Sigh... The cutest most lovable stray black cat showed up last night. I caved and gave him food but I can't take another animal. We have 5 animals now. He's probably 3-4 mths old.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

I just love how when it comes to distribution of resources in this house, I'm at the bottom of the priorities list. Like with the fans. My room gets hot at night--hottest in the house. Everyone knows this. But all of the box fans that I COULD put in my window to cool the place off at night are needed in rooms that actually get adequate cooling, apparently, and when I put my standing fan outside because it scares Bruce, my sister--who has a fan and much better cooling than I do--snaps it right up. And I'd be extremely surprised if she ever gives it back.

[Kaymyth she/her]

I just love how when it comes to distribution of resources in this house, I'm at the bottom of the priorities list. Like with the fans. My room gets hot at night--hottest in the house. Everyone knows this. But all of the box fans that I COULD put in my window to cool the place off at night are needed in rooms that actually get adequate cooling, apparently, and when I put my standing fan outside because it scares Bruce, my sister--who has a fan and much better cooling than I do--snaps it right up. And I'd be extremely surprised if she ever gives it back.

 

I'd say you should buy your own box fan, but someone would probably swipe it and your mother would back them up. 

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

I'd say you should buy your own box fan, but someone would probably swipe it and your mother would back them up.

Probably. I stole one from one of the upstairs windows. I'll put it back....later.

[Orlion Blight he/him]

Does your house use a swamp cooler? Those things are awful.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

Does your house use a swamp cooler? Those things are awful.

 

No, we actually have two AC units—a smaller one for upstairs, and a more powerful one for downstairs since the downstairs area is bigger. But running them too much drives up the electricity bill, and since we need them almost year-round, my parents don't keep it as cold as any of us would like.

[Kaymyth she/her]

No, we actually have two AC units—a smaller one for upstairs, and a more powerful one for downstairs since the downstairs area is bigger. But running them too much drives up the electricity bill, and since we need them almost year-round, my parents don't keep it as cold as any of us would like.

 

A central AC heat pump would probably run a lot more efficiently.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

A central AC heat pump would probably run a lot more efficiently.

 

The setup came with the house….which my parents bought as a short sale….knowing that it was filthy, full of garbage, and had walls and doors full of holes and a pool so disgusting we had to bring out a professional cleaner, and a yard with grass so dead we were genuinely surprised when the grass grew back on its own. All that damage had a sad story to it—the owner went through a very messy divorce when her horrible-excuse-for-a-human-being-husband left her for another woman, her kids began acting out, kicking walls and doors and leaving holes, and the bank finally foreclosed on her—but that didn't make it any easier to clean up.  

[little wilson she/her]

I work in internet marketing, for an SEO firm. For those who don't know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, so basically, we create keywords for clients' services/products and optimize their site for those keywords, which in turn helps search engines rank those sites higher for those particular keywords. To break this down even more, if you're searching Google for a plumber in Geelong, a site that has "plumber in Geelong" in specific areas on their website will rank higher than a site that doesn't, even if they're both plumbers in Geelong. The reason for this is that search engines have things called "spiders" that crawl sites and index them, making it super-easy and super-fast to pull up sites that have the words you're searching for when you search. Different search engines will rank sites differently, based on their individual algorithms to give you those results that you see. The goal for SEO firms is to get their clients on the first page of the results, since very very few people ever go past that first page. My company uses Google. We don't care about Bing or any other search engine. Google is God.

 

Now, there are a few things that Google really likes when it comes to ranking sites higher. One is the number of backlinks to the site. How many other sites are linking to this site? Are these other sites related to this site? For example, if you have a plumber and they've got plumbing, construction, and home improvement sites linking back to them, that's going to look a lot better than a plumber who has a bunch of travel or literary sites linking back to them. So the quality of the backlink matters. The more "authority" a site linking to you has, the more that link will help your site. So getting a link from a site like National Geographic is a lot better than a run-of-the-mill blogger. Google also really likes quality content--both on the site itself and content that the site shares that relates to their services, or content that is placed on other sites that links back to the original site.

 

Basically, Google likes quality. Whether that's with great content or authoritative sites, it's all helpful. But quality is very important to Google.

 

When it comes to SEO, there are basically two different types of ways you can go about it: honestly or dishonestly. In SEO jargon, that's white hat versus black hat. White Hat SEO is building SEO organically--you write quality and it gets shared. You provide quality services and other people link to back to you and gain rank through word-of-mouth and things build from there. It spreads naturally. Black Hat SEO is.....the opposite. Link farms to give you a bunch of links, spamming blog comments with links, outsourcing guest blog posts to non-native (and very terrible) writers and posting those guest blogs on bad sites, just because it's got a link that refers back to the client. Stuff like that. Entirely unorganic and just bad.

 

I've been working for this company for almost three years. It'll be three years in June. The first team I was on created an in-house blog network, with literally thousands of different blog sites geared for a specific topic (from construction to industrial, to real estate, to home and garden. You name the topic, we had it, and if we didn't, we would create it), and we would outsource short articles to post on these blogs that would link back to the client. Google eventually found about 5000 of these blogs and de-indexed them because--surprise, surpise--they didn't like the idea of an SEO company with an in-house blog network that would unorganically give back links to clients. Sure, it's not totally black hat, but it's very grey.

 

The next team I was on was guest blogging. We'd have 3 hours per article, to write, research, and contact sites to pitch the articles to them and publish them. 3 hours was plenty of time to write a really good 600-800 word article and get it published on a decent site. While I was on that team, we used site criteria like Domain Authority and Page Rank to find sites to post on. The higher a site's DA is, the better the site is, usually. We couldn't contact a site unless they had 30 or higher (DA goes up to 100, I think). I made a goal while I was on that team to get my posts on sites that averaged 50 or higher. Because that's higher quality. Getting a link on that site to refer back to the client will help the client more.

 

Then Matt Cutts, Google's Director of Spam, made a blog post about guest blogging. This was 2 years ago. He said "stick a fork in it, it's done." He was basically saying that while guest blogging initially had some great uses, SEO companies use it now to write crappy articles to post on crappy sites and now guest blogging has deteriorated so much that it's just useless.

 

My team wasn't doing what Matt Cutts said. We were writing very high quality articles and posting them on good sites (I got published on some sites that no one at this company has been published on before, though they were under aliases so I can't actually lay claim to those articles, sadly). But after that, our time got cut from 3 hours to 2 hours and a week later, it got cut to an hour and a half. They wanted more articles. And let me tell you, writing and researching a 600-800 word article in an hour and a half is bloody hard to do, especially if you want it to be well-written. The ironic thing is that when they made these changes, they were like "But we don't want quality to go down," and I'm sitting there like "Wait, you've just cut the time in half, and you expect quality to stay the same? With half the time? Are you insane?"

 

Fortunately, I got moved to a different team about a month later. Back to my initial team, in fact (and it was during this second time with them that Google then de-indexed 5000 of those blogs). That team got dissolved about 6 months later, and I got transferred to a team that actually works on the client's site. So, for the first time, I was doing honest work.

 

I've noticed, however, that the quality of the work that comes through my team isn't that great. It's not terrible, but our productivity is based purely on numbers and how many tasks we finish in a day, which means that we're not writing to the best of our abilities. We're not spending a couple extra minutes looking at the client's site to make sure we're gearing what we're writing particularly to the client. So we get tasks back to rewrite them. And no one really cares, because that's just a number to boost our productivity. And this isn't a problem unique to my team.  This is a problem that afflicts all of the content side of this company.

 

The focus is not on the client. It's not on quality for the client. It's on quantity for our own selfish reasons about productivity, because the executives make things so much about productivity, but they won't create a way to make things measurable from a quality standpoint.

 

I'd hoped that maybe this was because they just didn't realize the issue. I mean, after all, when the changes were made to guest blogging, they didn't want to sacrifice quality, right? Maybe the fact that they're not writers meant that they didn't understand that you can't cut time and keep quality the same. So long as productivity is based on numbers, you're never going to produce the highest quality work.

 

So last week, I emailed the head of my department. He's an executive. I see him almost daily. He knows me by name. I told him about what I'd been noticing and gave him some examples, and I'd hoped that he would want to discuss this further. But he hasn't. He hasn't even responded to the email to acknowledge the issue. Which makes me think that the executives are very well aware of what's going on and they don't care. They probably think that because they're doing more, it will make up for the fact that it's not as good.

 

But Google wants quality. They know this. And yet they're fighting against Google, insistent on focusing on quantity rather than quality, despite Google constantly changing their algorithms to give quality content higher rankings. Once Google succeeds with that endeavor (when, not if), all the work we're doing right now will be pointless at best and hurtful at worst, because it could end up affecting the client's rankings negatively. But no one really cares. Because it's not actually about the client.

 

I never thought I'd come across people who disparage quality like this. I never thought I'd work for people who don't care one whit about actual good work (though they'd never admit that). I never thought I'd work for someone who says they care about the client but everything they do says otherwise. And yet, here I am.

[RippleGylf she/her]

Well, there is a sizable group of somewhat immature boys in my class who, when I went up to explain how I solved a question, clamored for one of their own to go and explain the same exact process. Apparently they didn't notice me crying for the rest of the period, and neither did my teacher.

 

 

I'm sorry Some people are petulant narcissists that must be the center of attention. It's not a reflection on you, but as you noted, on the immaturity of that group.

It's hard to ignore, so I won't suggest that. Just remember you're awesome!

 

 

<hugs>

Man, I get having large groups of immature boys in classes and such. It's awful. They're awful. And really storming hard to ignore. Hope you feel better, Ripple. Have some cyber chocolate.

<hugs more>

 

Thank you.  

 

Of course, today the teacher points out aforementioned immature boy will likely be one of two students in my class who will actually go on to the most advanced math class next year. 

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

Yaaarrrrrgghhhhhh. I'll be really glad when this move is over because it's really messing with my head. One of my contacts still hasn't responded to my email, and I'm sitting here wondering if she secretly hates me, if she thinks I'm an idiot, if she's ignoring me….I know, in the back of my mind, that she's probably just caught up in something, but I still can't silence the brain weasels. 

[Kaymyth she/her]

To a fellow person at Redacted, Inc: 

When, on a conference call, someone asks a question, they do not want to hear you going on and on about what a good question it is, and how it makes sense that they'd want to know the answer to that question.  What they do want is for someone to answer the rusting question.  Which I did.  After having to break into you blathering on about the qualities of said question.

 

I also had the opportunity to get a bit snarky yesterday.  See, our former team lead shifted over to a different division, and eventually I wound up replacing him as lead.  Except when I moved into the position, they bumped it up to full supervisor level (which we really needed).

 

Former team lead came over yesterday and started asking one of my reps questions.  Which was fine; they were reasonable questions to ask.  What was not reasonable was when he started trying to tell her that she was doing her job wrong.  (She wasn't, but that was beside the point; if he had an issue with that, he should have come to me, not her, or our team's manager.)  She rightfully pushed him off, telling him, "Go talk to my supervisor."  And I popped up and said, "Hi, <formerlead!"

So he comes over around the cube farm to talk to me, and (loud enough for everyone to hear) only half-jokingly said, "How do you deal with these yahoos all day?"

 

Now, I know this guy pretty well.  He's a friend, but can be pushy and annoying and he knows it.  He also has a pretty good sense of humor, and is actually going to respect you more if you're willing to give him crap.  So I knew that I could get away with my response:  "Much more delicately than you ever did."

 

There were a lot of "ooooohs!" that rang up the aisle, and my manager thought it was the funniest thing she'd heard all day.

 

 

ETA for Twi:

 

Edited February 19, 2016 by Kaymyth

[Seonid he/him]

Yaaarrrrrgghhhhhh. I'll be really glad when this move is over because it's really messing with my head. One of my contacts still hasn't responded to my email, and I'm sitting here wondering if she secretly hates me, if she thinks I'm an idiot, if she's ignoring me….I know, in the back of my mind, that she's probably just caught up in something, but I still can't silence the brain weasels. 

 

Sorry Twi. Brain weasels are no fun at all.

 

Right now, I've got a hardcore case of them about my worldbuilding/writing stuff. Even after everyone on the forum who's said that they're excited and think the stuff I write is amazing, I still find it difficult to believe that anyone would be interested if I posted anything. Oddly enough, the more I write, the worse it gets in some ways. Like, it used to be "Nobody will be interested in that, it's not fleshed out enough yet." Now its "gosh, you put waaay too much detail in there. Even in the unlikely event anyone was interested in the first place, putting out so much is going to dissuade them."

 

Logically, I know that they're wrong. But it's not about logic.

[+Slowswift]

Cat was lost.

 

Cat came back.

 

Cat has hurt paw.

Edited February 20, 2016 by Slowswift

[Orlion Blight he/him]

Cat was lost.

Cat came back.

Cat has hurt paw.

Poor little guy