The A is for Abysmal

Well, today is the first day in a very long time that I have run out of things to do at work. I’m not really sure what to do with myself. I have no doubt that something will pop up at 4:00 and suddenly I’ll be working like a mad man and trying not to stay too late. But in case that doesn’t happen, perhaps I should go looking for some work. I’ll give it a little longer and see what else pops up. I do have a giant stack of papers on my desk of things that I didn’t know if I should throw away or not. I could make my way through and throw away or file. Cleaning up around the office is always a great way to seem busy and waste a lot of time.

This weekend is my family’s big golf tournament, followed by Liz’s family’s large get together. Anyone that knows me probably knows about the golf tournament. 80-85 people getting together at my family camp, and 72ish of us going out for a great round of golf at a surprisingly nice course. I have played very little golf in the last couple years. I love golf and wish I could get out more, but it just costs way too much money and takes up a little too much time. I did get to go out 2 weeks ago for the first time in 10 months to get a little practice. I was going to hit some balls before that round, but instead decided just to go for it. I think that worked out pretty well. It wasn’t the best, but I started to find my swing again about 2/3 of the way through. Unfortunately, despite the very little golf I have played, I will probably be an A player again this year. Everyone is ranked as an A, B, C, or D so the teams are close to even. The golfers are for the most part, not nearly as good as they used to be, so we are struggling for A players. Because of this struggle, the general mentality is “once an A, always an A.” I used to be a good A when I played on the school golf team, but that was along time and many terrible shots ago. About 3 years ago, I did win the tournament as an A that set my status in stone for a long time. Though the very next year, I got last place as an A with one of the worst scores in our tournament’s history.

Due to all of this pressure of being an A, it is clear that I need to prepare more for the event. So I did what any player would do, went out and bought Wii Tiger Woods Golf 2010. I have no doubt that I will be striking the ball like Tiger inside a couple days. Even if it doesn’t improve my game, and clearly it won’t, I think it was a good investment. I have been playing a little bit of Tiger Woods 2007 lately and actually really liked the game. The swing is no where near a real golf swing, but the game is a lot of fun. At the same time, Nintendo has released the Wii Motion Plus which is supposed to give you character a much more 1:1 movement ratio. I just bought the game on my lunch break and can’t wait to get home to play. They say it is much more like swinging a real club. I know that is not going to be true, but I think it will be a big step in the right direction. I’m pretty certain you can’t miss hit the ball. If you swing too slowly, you can hit really short, and you can miss hit puts, but I know you can’t miss swing and top the ball, or miss altogether. That would be cool. I do know you can fade or slice easily, and control much more short shots. Apparently there are a lot of added features to the game over the older versions that I am looking forward to. More modes and realistic tournament settings. There is online play to take on other people 1 on 1 or enter tournaments, and you best score is compared against others. I look forward to that. You can also play with real time weather. The wii looks up the weather conditions for the course you are playing, and if it is rainy or windy in real life, it is rainy or windy in the game. That is awesome. Now I really can’t wait to get home and play. I’m bound to be one of the best players at the Running Deer Lodge Open this weekend.

Thanks for reading.

Just Numbers

Working in treasury and finance for a mid size company has put me in some interesting situations. One thing I think of from time to time is the amount to money I deal with or see on spreadsheets on a daily basis. At times I deal with very large numbers. For starters, every spreadsheet I work with is at least shown in thousands. No one cares about seeing the full detail of numbers. If a lot of calculations are being run, people become very comfortable with variances of 5 – 10 thousand dollars. If someone is attempting the very challenging task of reconciling our database with some other list of numbers, and that person can come within 10k, they did a great job. There are times I do high level calculations that are only shown in millions, and if I’m off 1 or 2, it is simply chalked up to rounding errors. It is odd how comfortable I can get with working with such large numbers, and at the same time not be ok with my personal checkbook not tying out to the exact penny.

I oversee the insurance for our company, and consequently oversee the spending of approximately 7 million dollars a year. That is real money that I receive invoices for, review, and submit to my boss for payment approval. These numbers are often regular payments, but occasionally not. Last week I had to walk into my boss’s office with the bad news that some large claims came in and we had to write a check that day for 160k. These thinks happen, and I’m use to it, but from time to time I realize the craziness of the words I am speaking.

The big project I have been working on for that past few months is an insurance claim for a machinery failure at one of our plants. This has been a challenging, partially exciting, partially sad project that I have dedicated a silly amount of time to. All of the manufacturing of this plant relies on this piece of equipment that took 5 months to fix. This essentially shut down the whole plant and just ruined their business for that time and will most likely never recover from all of the customers they lost. For some help, we have an insurance policy that covers such an event. I have done all of the work on this claim and have had all of the contact with the insurance carrier. I have assembled mass amounts of data and presented it to all of our executives for their review before submitting it. After submitting this data, I have had some meetings with the insurance carrier to discuss the details of the claim. The basis of these meetings is another one of those odd moments to wrap my mind around the reality. I am person representing a company asking other people for a few million dollars. Weird right? “Hi I’m Zack, nice to meet you in person. How can I answer any questions, and when can you write me a multi-million dollar check?”

The peculiar part of working with such large sums of money is how comfortable I can be with it. This brings me to the challenging part, how does it relate to my relationship with Christ when I spend over 40 hours a week focused on money. It is my job and we are certainly called to do our jobs well, but when you think about not focusing on worldly things, money is one of the big ones. I’m not saying that I’m living in sin by having the job that I have; these are really just thoughts that happen to be flowing through my head. I could most likely chalk it up to trying to live a balanced life in a fallen world, but maybe I shouldn’t.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the day. Thanks for reading.

Big… Bodda Boom

Greetings to you good and faithful reader of my blog. I have not posted in over a month. I am ashamed and undoubtedly certain that the World Wide Web may have shed a tear in my absence. Where have I been? What have I been doing? Both good questions with somewhat non-profound answers. For the most part, I have been right here, doing much of the same thing I have been doing. The only different things I have done are, being sick for nearly 2 weeks and MAN WEEKEND. Being sick has kept me far from focusing on my computer aside from the work I had to do, and Man weekend kept all of my spare computer use time looking up ideas for explosives, and then making videos. I apologize for my lack of posts, but I dare say the wait was worth it. This post on the weekend manhood definition will most likely spit in the face of my past few posts and be awarded a medal for doing so.

The idea and planning for a man weekend began as a small glimmer of imagination, from the feeble minds of a few good friends. We thought perhaps we could pick a time in late spring for a large group of our friends to get together to celebrate that which every man longs to do… really stupid things. All we had to do was gather the people, pick a setting, and decide what we wanted to do. Gathering the people is surprisingly not an easy task. Picking a weekend that more than 10 people have free is nearly impossible at this stage in our lives, but we pulled off a solid 13 showing. The setting was easy, and deciding what to do what half the fun. We had some amazing food, solid poker (which I add I won both tournaments), good debates, sweet campfires, shooting, cannons, and explosives. Here is a video summing up a good portion of Man Weekend 09.




Upon my return from Man Weekend, I was alas able to tell some more people of the details, since we survived with no serious injuries. Though I questioned my judgment for a moment, I told my boss that I built a cannon from one of our products. Her immediate reaction: “tell me you have pictures.” I of course told her I had videos and she immediately stepped into my office to see the video of us firing the cannon. I also showed her the explosion from some propane tanks and another one of our products. She of course thought the videos were fantastic and exclaimed that I had to show our CFO. I showed the CFO who was thrilled and had me put it on a jump drive to mail out to some of our other offices. RIDICULOUS! I just sent around the video of the cannon, but have since made a video just for our company to enjoy with 2 cannon shots, and 2 explosions. I identified what product it was for everyone. I think they are all proud.

Man Weekend is officially here to stay. Everyone that was there wants to make it an annual event, and I suspect it will be easier to get an even larger group together next year. I’ve already got some calls about what we can do to improve the cannon for next year. The nice thing is, with all the enthusiasm at work, we might just get corporate sponsors for our next event.

Thanks for reading.