XTC - SENSES WORKING OVERTIME

Hey, hey
The clouds are whey
There’s straw for the donkeys
And the innocents can all sleep safely
All sleep safely

My, my
Sun is pie
There’s fodder for the cannons
And the guilty ones can all sleep safely
All sleep safely

And all the world is football-shaped
It’s just for me to kick in space
And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste
And I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to take this all in
I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to taste the difference ‘tween a lemon and a lime
Pain and pleasure and the church bells softly chime

Hey hey
Night fights day
There’s food for the thinkers
And the innocents can all live slowly
All live slowly

My, my
The sky will cry
Jewels for the thirsty
And the guilty ones can all die slowly
All die slowly

And all the world is biscuit-shaped
It’s just for me to feed my face
And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste
And I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to take this all in
I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to taste the difference ‘tween a lemon and a lime
Pain and pleasure and the church bells softly chime

And birds might fall from black skies (woo-woo)
And bullies might give you black eyes (woo-woo)
But to me they’re very, very beautiful (England’s glory)
Beautiful (a striking beauty)

And all the world is football-shaped
It’s just for me to kick in space
And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste
And I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to take this all in
I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to tell the difference ‘tween the goods and grime
Turds and treasure
And there’s one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to take this all in
I’ve got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime
Trying to taste the difference ‘tween a lemon and a lime
Pain and pleasure and the church bells softly chime

Very doubtful I’ll be able to make it out to see Eddie Spaghetti and Jordan Shapiro at the Bar Deluxe tonight … and I’m extremely pissed off about it.

Eddie and Jordan don’t go on until 11:00 (which is another rant … why do bands always start so late?) … but I have to be at work tomorrow at 7:00 for tax training on mandatory overtime … this is a training I’ve taken every year since 1999 when I first started working for my company.

I know what an ordinary dividend is. I know when the deadlines for delivering 1099s are (January 31, unless you’re granted an extension, which we have been the past couple of years). I know that 1099-OID (original issue discount) forms will be updated multiple times before they must be finalized in mid-March. I know that you have until April 15 to make an IRA contribution for the previous year. I know that you have to start taking your required minimum distributions from IRAs in the year in which you turn 70 1/2, and if it’s your first year, you have until April of the following year to do it (i.e., if you turned 70 in October 2007, you don’t have to take your first RMD until April 2009, BUT it’s still a good idea to take it in 2008, because you still have to take an RMD for 2009 as well, and you really don’t want to take distributions for two years in the same year if you can help it).

I know all of this shit, and still my boss is insisting I show up … to pay me time and a half to sit around for 6 hours and listen to some schmuck trainer dumb down all the information enough so that the new hires can understand it … when we could really go over any changes there might have been since last year in about an hour.

I’ve already taken the friggin’ quizzes they want us to take at the end of the training, and scored better than 95% on all of them. What’s the point of wasting the money … why spend the $300?

Oh … it’s because we’re about efficiency and “World Class Service” … but we don’t give our customer service representatives enough time to follow-up on issues because answering the damned phone to reset some dimwad’s password is more important than following through with the varous Ops groups in New York to find out why this $100,000 trade in a client’s $15-million dollar account didn’t get processed properly … so the branch service teams have to back-up the customer-service teams, and the premier/elite teams have to back-up the branch-service teams, and Operations specialists like me end up doing everything in addition to cleaning up the messes left behind by the frontline instead of focusing on our projects because everybody else is busy telling clients they only have $1,500 available on their debit cards because we’re fee-ing them to death to try to get rid of them, because they should really be at a discount firm rather than a full-service firm when they only have $10K to their names.

I’m still trying to figure out how that is “World Class” service … when we leave our big-dollar financial advisors and clients hanging for a couple of days because it’s more important to answer the phone to reset a password. God forbid the little guys we really don’t even want as clients because we actually LOSE money on them have to wait for 2-minutes (instead of 15-seconds) to get their question answered.

Since when did efficiency become more important than effectiveness? What good is it to be able to answer X number of phone calls in a day if you can’t actually accomplish something because you’ve got to get the current caller off the line to answer the next phone call? You’d think a white-shoe firm would know better.

Life in the cube-farm fucking sucks.

Train knows what I’m talking about.