This week, I’m feeling only 20% depressed and navigating life in a new reality—one where most of my time is spent working. After over a decade of freedom (read: depression) to pursue personal projects, adjusting to the 9-to-5 grind has been challenging. In this episode, I break down my typical week, share insights about my new job, and discuss how I strive to let my light shine for Jesus in the workplace.
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Full Transcript:
Hi folks, this is James. Welcome to the GOK, formerly the Gospel of Kenneson, now called Overcoming Depression. I haven’t done a show in a few weeks, and sometimes that means I’m sad, but what it really means now is that I’m so busy with having so many hours of the day taken up by a job that my whole schedule is thrown off and I’m trying to learn how to get things back on track. Okay, so I get, I’m about 80 to 90% not depressed, but there’s still that 20 to 10% that is, And that means my energy
level is lower than normal. So when I get home, I wanna go lay down. And I do. I do, I take a nap. And then I get up. And then I try to accomplish things. So I’m supposed to record these on Sunday nights. It is Saturday night. I’m trying to get ahead of it because I have a brand new computer, thanks to the wonderful donators from that story show that stepped up and helped me to purchase this machine. And I’m copying over all the files from the 8 addled 1 to the new 1. And that has
taken up most of my week last week and the weekend for that matter, because it took me nearly a week to get the thing built and running. And I even skipped recording that story show this week because I couldn’t do both. And I guess it’s partly energy, lack of energy because of the 20, 10% depression. It’s also just the ability to multitask. When you’re depressed, you have to focus on 1 thing at a time, because everything becomes a task. Every single little thing becomes its own individual task. And I’m talking about showering, getting dressed, eating breakfast,
finding out what to eat, you know? And so when you’re less depressed, that doesn’t change. And I couldn’t build this computer and get everything put together and still do a show and have this work day that goes from 8 to 430 every single day. It eats up so much time. And I know that is normal, okay, for most people. But it was not normal for me for like 10 to 12 years while I was struggling. And so this is new. I created a life that involved me having a lot of free time. And before the job,
I was doing 3 podcasts. I was doing that story show. I was doing this show. And I was doing 1 with my wife called, We’re Both Right. And now I’m finding it difficult to just do The 1, that story show. Let me go through my week. Monday nights, there is, well, let me start with Sundays because Sundays we go to church and then we go to Costco. We go to eat and go to Costco because we’re that kind of white people. And then we get home and I have to have a Sunday nap. I have to,
because we got up early on a Sunday, what the heck? And then I sit and edit video for that story show and I try to make clips to post to social media throughout the week. Didn’t do that this week because of the dumb computer. Mondays, I come home at 5, get off at 4.30, get home at 5, and I take a nap. And I get up and I don’t know what I do. I probably should work on show notes, But I try to just take that day off, that evening off, and get something fun done, because
Tuesday is show prep day. Because it’s the only day that I can do it. And it takes a while to do show prep. If you wanna know the inside stories, I have to go through the inbox Because, okay, so emails come in from the website and they’re tagged in the subject line because they come through a web form. And I put everything, even voicemails, into a subdirectory called nlcast unused, okay? And when it comes time to do the show, I open up the show notes in Google Docs, I make a new copy and I label it
for the next episode and I just go through it section by section, opening story, news nuggets, about 4 or 5, 6 stories, and then recap stories, or not recap stories. That’s the bonus content, stuff that didn’t fit on the show, is what we call it. And I do 2 stories for that. We do recap stuff. And so I have to go through the inbox and I start at the bottom. So I don’t miss anybody. And I read every story, decide if it’s good enough for the show. Most of them are, and I have to do that.
And it’s work, it is work. And sometimes I don’t feel like doing it. So that’s why I was saying I should probably do some of it on Monday, But not only do I read through every story, and some of them are quite long, some of them require some basic editing. Some of them need to be punched up a little bit. So I do that. I do that. And matter of fact, if you go to our terms and conditions that you agree to when you submit to the form, you agree to allow me to embellish the story.
That’s why every movie that says it’s based on a true story says it’s based on a true story, not that it is a true story because they modify it and they change it. And I don’t do that to every story. Some come in exactly the way they need to be, straight from their mouth to your ears, but a lot of them do. And so it’s work. And then lately I have been writing the recap songs and that takes energy and skill and I’m not even sure I have, but I feel a lot better about writing them
rather than trying to ad lib them because even though I can ad lib a little bit, I can write a whole lot better and the rhymes always hit and everything that I wanna say gets put in there. So that takes time. So getting ready for a show is a big deal. And sometimes when I’m not feeling good, when that 20% becomes a 30% badness, It can be a lot. It can be more than I can handle. And so the other week, for instance, I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it. And I said, John, can we move
the recording from Thursday night to Friday night? And he said, let me get back to you. And then he said, yes. And so Wednesday night is date night. And I can’t do anything to mess up date night because it’s my and Jen’s time to go out. So Thursday, instead of recording the show, I did show notes. And then Friday night, we recorded the show. But typically, I do show notes on Tuesday, date night on Wednesday, recording on Thursday. And when I say recording on Thursday, I get off at 4.30, we go live at 5. I get
home about 4.55. So I got time to pee and turn on everything. And the night before, I come down here and I got the show notes up. I got the notes for the recap song because I don’t want John to read the recap song. So I have a separate 1 for that. And so I literally turn on stuff and open up, you know, take off the screensaver and, and go live on YouTube. And as long as we’re live on YouTube by 05:00, I’m happy. So we record the show and then we talk and hang out. We
record the show, then we do stuff that didn’t fit on the show, which can sometimes be longer than the original podcast. It’s happened more than once and it’s so much fun. I really hate that there aren’t more subscribers. And it is the first thing I do now when I can’t record a show as I go back and I release 1 of those episodes because they are so much fun. I don’t know, we just let our hair down and it’s loose format. It’s not as much about telling stories as it is about John and I just hanging
out. So after that is done, then we sit and talk. And so though we start recording at 5, it’s 7.30 before we get done. After we’re done, I take and record, I move the recordings off of the recording machine onto the desktop. I also download the video from StreamYard to get it ready to be edited. And then Friday, I edit the audio version of the podcast and I get it up for the patrons, the supporting listeners, and I get the bonus content, the stuff that didn’t fit on the show up on that so they can download
it early. And I get it posted and ready to be released on Tuesday for everyone else. So, and then I spend if I’m free on Saturday, that’s when I edit and Sunday, I edit video. Now there’s 2 sets of editing video. There is video that is the entire show that I release on YouTube. And then there are video clips that I make on Sunday that are stacked and vertical format so I can release them as YouTube shorts. What is it? You know, every platform has its own version of reels or shorts or TikToks or whatever. So
that’s where those go. And if I have the time and energy, I also will set those up to be auto released and I make captions for each 1 of them, you know, posts for each 1 for Twitter and so on. I also make, I pull out quotes from each show and I make little graphics out of them to be released on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. So just trying to get the word out about the episode. And I spaced them out to where they release on release day, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then Friday. I don’t know why I
don’t do on Thursday. I just don’t want to hit people up every single day. So I didn’t do any of that this week because of this computer. But that’s what a typical week is like. And the Saturday night we go out. That’s our second date night. And we do that to stay connected, to make up for lost time, for times that I wasn’t available, for times that she was working. Because when I got super depressed, she got super into work. And that was her way of saving us. And I tell her all the time, you’re the
1 that saved us. You’re our savior. You’re the savior of our family because you kept us going in the only way you knew how. And that is the providing for your family. So That’s kind of a week of what’s going on. This week’s totally different. I’ve had so much free time in the evenings because I haven’t done the show. You think about it, I don’t do the show and every night is open except for Wednesdays and Saturdays. So what I’m doing currently, I’m actually looking at a dialogue box that is showing me copying over all of
the music from 1 computer to the new 1. And when I say music, it’s not my old iTunes library or anything, it is all audio from the podcast. All the edit, you know, the editing side of it and the actual raw WAV files that come in and the MP3s that they eventually become that you download and listen to. So I just verified that all the photos made it over. And when I say photos, pictures, I don’t mean pictures of my family. I mean all of the images, the editable images and the final images for all of
the podcasting stuff. So when I say that this new computer is a podcast machine. That’s exactly what I mean. It is a machine that is used for editing, video, images and audio for your general listening enjoyment. And I’m having a blast doing this today on my Saturday. My wife just asked me if I wanted to go out with them to Costco and I was like, no, that’s what we do on Sundays. But her father’s in town. So they wanted to go get that cheap gas. Let me tell you about 1 of the things I’ve been doing
lately that’s pretty fun. I have been leaving reviews on Google. So let me back up and say that I tried to use an iPhone for a while because I wanted to connect with family. Some of you who listen to the show regularly know that I thought it would just, me matching my phones with my kids’ phones would mean we would connect more. Well, that hasn’t happened. What it did is made it impossible for me to use any of my Google stuff because I am totally in the Google world. I use Google Keep for my notes. I
use Google Tasks for my to-do list. I use Google Docs for show notes and stuff like that. I use Google all the time and I really missed my phone. And so I sold my phone to my son. Well, he just took over payments and we got a really good deal through Costco. So he got it for really cheap. And I got financing through Google store, and I got myself a Pixel 9, and I’m back on Android, baby, and I’m loving it. And what started, I don’t know, on Google Maps is they started asking me with my
new phone for, for reviews. And so I don’t know why, but It has become a new hobby of mine to leave reviews for all of the places that Google asks me to review. All the places I’ve gone and I’ve had a blast. The other day I was at Costco and I moved all my prescriptions to Costco, by the way, because I don’t know if you heard that, but that was my father-in-law dying upstairs, but he’s coughing. He doesn’t smoke or anything, but he sounds like he does, so he should have, I suppose. No, I got my
pharmacy stuff moved to Costco because I figured they’ll always have a person there that can act, a pharmacist. Because I moved my prescriptions from the city to the county, right? Because I was having troubles getting my prescriptions filled in the city because some of them were controlled substance and I was having issues every time because they thought I was a druggy, I guess. And so I moved him out of the county thinking, hey, I won’t have as many problems. But then the the freaking Walgreens that I sent them to, I guess their pharmacist doesn’t come in
all the time. So I would drive all the way out there for there to be a sign in the window that said, sorry, pharmacist isn’t here, we can’t legally give you anything. And so I’m like, you know what, at least at Costco, I may wait in line, but there’ll always be somebody there and they’ll always have my crap there. So that’s exactly what I did. And I was getting my prescriptions and I said, you know what? There’s nobody here, cause it was right at 5. Now at 5.30 there’s going to be tons of people, but I
get off early, I get off at 5 or 4.30. So I was there at 5, nobody’s there, I bet there’s nobody at the new gas pumps. So I went over there and there wasn’t anybody, but old people. And I pulled right up, I got all this gas, I don’t even know how much I saved, but I saved money. I had never gotten gas at Sam’s or at Costco before. And so the stupid phone wanted me to review the pumps at Costco. And I just think that’s hilarious. Not Costco, the gas at Costco. So I wrote the
following. I said, if you’re trying to pick up a thrifty boomer for a date, this is your joint, 5 stars. And so I’m having a blast reviewing restaurants and parks. Like, I went to a park the other day because my son runs cross country. And it said, what do you think about the park? And I said, I don’t usually have strong opinions about parks that I visit, but today my son really did good on cross country. And so I guess I feel really good about this park because of that 5 stars. And then they asked me,
what about dogs? Literally said, what about dogs at the parks? And there was a blank space. So I wrote dogs are peeing everywhere. They can pee anywhere they want. And then I submitted that. What else did I do? They want me to keep, I refuse to review grocery stores because they’re all schnooks and all the schnooks are horrible because they messed it up. They don’t have enough people checking out people. And so the line is to the back of the store. They won’t pay for people to come work there. And it’s ridiculous. So I refused to
review a business I can’t give 5 stars to. There was another 1. It was Joey’s place. I don’t know. It’s some pizza place that my daughter took us to. I wasn’t thrilled with it, but I said, I said, you know, it was good. Pizza was good. Service was good. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t see Joey because I imagined that Joey was a mascot dressed up in a costume that I would get a photo with but other than that it was great. 5 stars. So I’m just having a blast. Not the funniest stuff in
the world, but I’m trying to be honest with people and really, you know, share from the heart. So I’m having a lot of fun with that. Maybe next time I’ll read some more because there’s more that I’ve done that were a little more entertaining than the examples I gave you, but I’m pretty proud of my reviews. But in general, we’re doing good. The family’s doing good. My daughter came and surprised my son on Wednesday and she brought her doggy and he is getting so big. His name is, her name is Georgie. Gosh, don’t call her a
he. She’s getting big and she’s got scruffy fur, which I love, which means that most of it is short, but some of them are longer. So it’s like Lady and the Tramp up in here. It’s so great. And I love that dog so much. It’s a real dog. It’s not some little prissy dog like mine are that don’t like to walk on grass, you know? This dog rolls around in the grass and gets up under the porch and stuff. And he reminds me of a dog Jen and I used to have called Doji. Doji, everybody loved
that name. They thought it was, is it, is it Native American? Like, no, say it slow. They’re like, D-O-G. Dog! And I’m like, yeah, yeah, that’s what his name is, DOG. But DOG was awesome. He had amazing blue eyes and had This brindle coat. The only problem with Yoji is he was such an outside dog. We got him from some kids that we ministered to out from under their trailer. And he just wanted to be free. He wanted to run and go. And that was the thing. If he got outside the house, you could not catch
him. And we lived in the city for a while. And if you wanna make my wife laugh to tears, remind her of the time I chased him around the city, him running out in front of cars, in front of major traffic. And I finally caught him. And I was so mad that I picked his heavy butt up. He’s the size of a German shepherd. I picked him up and walked him back home. And my wife says he was the happiest he ever looked and the maddest I had ever been. And so yeah, if you want to
make her laugh to tears, remind her of the time I had to carry that dog and she will do the rest of the work for you. You don’t even have to tell the story. She will start telling it. You were so mad and he was so excited. He was so happy. Like I wanted to kill that dog. But anyway, Georgie reminds me of Doji because he’s just friendly and stupid and wonderful. And it’s the way dogs should be, not prissy and weird like my dogs, the dog I don’t like and the dog I hate. They should
be just wonderful, loving creatures who think you are the best thing in the world. So it was good to see Jenna. It’s always great to see Jenna, but I’m glad she brought the dog because that’s my grand dog. And I never thought I’d be that person, but I am. I would buy a t-shirt that said, I’ve had a picture of Georgie on it. I’m like, Georgie’s grandpa. I’d freaking wear it. Work has been going really well. It’s been a while since I talked to you. I think I just got the job when I talked to you
last time. For those that don’t know, I work for a printing supply, a screen printing and digital printing supply company. So we don’t do the printing. We don’t do screen printing or digital printing. We provide, they manufacture some of it and then they are a reseller for Epson and Prestige and other companies. And we have sales teams and people that service this stuff and go out and set up shops and things like that. So it’s pretty, it’s pretty intense. And I simply run their website And it is a mess. It is a mess. There have been
a lot of web designers involved in this website, and everybody did their parts differently. And a big part of my learning curve has been looking up and trying to figure out how to edit some part of the website. Did they do it in code? Did they do it in this plug in? Did they do it through a template or did they do it directly through the actual WYSIWYG editor? WYSIWYG means what you see is what you get. And luckily I can do all of it. I just have to remember what part things were done in. So
for instance, the pages, there are pages in this website, Kind of like WordPress. WordPress has posts, but it also has pages. And pages are for stuff that doesn’t necessarily change. Like a post would be, hey, you know, I got a new episode of the podcast up, here it is. But a page would be, here’s how you contact us. Here’s how you submit a story. Here is all about us. Here are photos of us from Narthex, those are pages. But for some reason, all of the stuff that should be pages are blog posts. And I don’t know
why they did that and there’s no real reason for me to make it a change so I just reformatted them all to look like pages instead of changing them to be pages because then you have to deal with what they call 301 redirects, where when people type in the old domain, I’m sorry, the old web address, it forwards 301 to the new 1. And I don’t want to deal with all that. There’s so many 301 redirects already that it’s absolutely out of hand. It’s crazy. But there’s problems with the navigation, there’s problems. Okay, so this is
1 of the most obnoxious things I do. And I commit about an hour and a half to it every day. For some reason, they decided to take all of the alt tags for the images. Okay. Okay. So alt tags for images are what blind people read. That’s what they’re intended for. When they wanna see what an image is, it’s supposed to describe the image. And so if you post an image, it should say, like a podcast image, it says what episode it is, and maybe a description of what’s on the image so they can get the
gist of it. A man holding a dog or whatever. But it also gives you a tiny bit of SEO cred. Okay, SEO means search engine optimization. So what these guys did probably 5 to 10 years ago is they took every image and they filled it up with the name of the company, the products that we offer, and all this kind of stuff. Hundreds and hundreds of characters. So if and when a blind person comes and uses a screen reader on our website, every image is going to say, first of all, what it is. And then it’s
going to say company name provides body, body, body, body, body, body, blah. And then the next image, same thing. Oh, this is a printer company name, body body body, blah. So what I do is, you know, it, it, It does no good for SEO to do that because the engine is not stupid. When it crawls the website, Google does not say, oh, wow, there’s a lot of company name, blah, de, blah, de, blah in here. We’re gonna make sure we give them credit for all that. No, what it does is this is repetitive data. We’ll read
it once. And then after that, we ignore everything else because it’s not unique content. But a million years ago, the way websites worked back in the day, keywords were it, man. You would spam keywords and it would make you the top thing. But Google did away with that. So I commit an hour and a half a day to changing alt tags. And it is as obnoxious and as repetitive as it sounds, but I am doing wonders. So I delete the company name, keyword stuff from every image, and then I try to make every image unique. So
product pictures are mostly what I’m dealing with. So I’ll do front view, side view, angle view, eye level, open, closed, back view, console close up, control panel close up. You know, just, I don’t know. Cause there’s people that use screen readers that are legally blind that can see but might need a bit of a description to see what they’re actually looking at. So I’m trying to make it better for the blind. And we still get SEO credit if there’s unique alt tags for each image. So I put the product name and leave that, but then tried
to make it unique. I just imagine that if I’m using a screen reader, what would I want out of this image? And that also, when you do that, it automatically makes it good for SEO. So my primary goal is for the blind. Secondary goal as a result you get blessed by the SEO police. So that is a lot. For instance, I keep track of where I’m at and I am in the year 2023 in April. That’s how far back I’ve made it. And I just update my to-do list and I tell it where I’m at and
then I have to go to all images and I have to scroll back in time until I hit that date and then I start at the next product and start updating alt tags and it’s going to take forever which is why I do it every day. Just a little bit, just as much until I get so sick of it, I can’t stand it. And I don’t know why, but some are easier than others because switching products helps. Like product images, there’ll be about 4, 4 to 6 images. But then when we get on ink colors, and
it’s just cyan, red, magenta, yellow, green, red, purple, that kind of stuff drives me insane because it’s 3 dozen products that they did in 1 day, and you just page after page of images of just buckets. And it’s like, what do you do? How do you describe this? So, that’s not most of what I do with my day, but it is 1 of the things I do. Most of the day I spend fixing problems, finding issues that they don’t know exists and trying to convince them to change the menu, the main navigation. Without getting into too
much detail, I’ll just say that it’s set up with a lot of sub menus and some of the sub menus are, 1 of them is clickable. The first 1 is clickable. Say you click on service, it opens up, you know, several sub menu options. So you see an icon that you wanna mouse over to, so you do, but the mouse over hits another subdirectory or sub menu and it automatically selects that 1 and takes away what you were trying to mouse over to. Okay, that is a usability issue, it’s huge. Back in the day, there was
a book called Don’t Make Me Think. It was a very good book in the early days of web design. It was trying to get people away from the way folks did web design back then. Cause back then, people loved to use what was called image mapping, where you would just draw a big picture. And even Southwest airlines did this on their main website, they made a service desk image and you would mouse over different parts like a like a like a click point and click image adventure. And you would mouse over the computer and text would
pop up and say, make a flight registration or whatever. And you would mouse over the clock that was on the wall and check departure times for your flight. And you would basically have to hunt through this image to find what you wanted. And that was considered cute and the thing to do. Well, this book, Don’t Make Me Think, really railed against not only that trend, but also the concept that If you want to sort your data, you have to do it like a store. And this was mind-blowing at the time, but they said when you’re looking
for peanut butter, you go into the main door, that’s your main menu, and then you find a sub menu, and then you find the area that that is in, and then you get to select amongst the peanut butters once you’ve found that area. And so they were basically talking about what we call breadcrumbs. And it happens in your browser, on websites, it happens when you go to Internet Explorer on your PC and you drill down if your menu structure’s good. Like my menu for podcasts is podcasts, and then it has the name of the different podcasts,
and then it has the episodes, and that is it. Actually, that’s the menu structure. And so I can always find what I’m looking for because I have things set up right. It’s the same on a website. When I want service, I’m gonna click on service. What kind of service do I need? I need equipment service that I bought from this company. Then they should be able to get there instantly and not mouse over another sub menu that takes them away from what they were trying to get to. Don’t make me think the minute. All right, here’s
another example in real life. How many times have you guys been walking out of a grocery store or a mall and you push the door and it said, then only then do you notice that it says pull. That’s a problem, Right? Because when you go into a store, you’re supposed to pull. When you go out of a store, you’re supposed to push. That’s a usability issue. That’s not, you’re not supposed to stop and have to think. You’re supposed to just be able to leave this door, right? And here’s another example about doors. When you see a
vertical handle on a door, what does that mean? It means pull every time. So if you have to push at a vertical, it makes you think, it makes you have to do it wrong and then do it right. When you see a horizontal bar on a door, what do you think? You think, push, I’m going to push this. But then, oh, what if it doesn’t push? Then you have to stop and think. It’s a usability issue. And so anything that’s like that on a website where you click and you don’t get what you want and you
have to use a search engine or you have to hit the backspace key or something like that, it’s a usability issue. And so I’m currently arguing so hard to get our menu structure, our navigation structure changed. And I’m also wanting to get a giant search bar added to the main menu as well, because I think when people come to a website, they want it like Amazon. Amazon’s the most successful website in the world. And what do they have? A big giant search bar, because I think when people come to a website like ours, they already know
what they want. If they don’t know what they want, they still search. But maybe they would use a drill down menu where they would say, okay, I want a UV, you know, printer, a DTF printer. And so I’m gonna look under UV DTF printers. Oh, there they all are. I don’t know which 1 I want. I’m gonna look at all the prices and all that. So they might go to a collection of printers and that’s fine, that’s great. We have that set up, but a lot of people come for supplies. Our repeat customers come for ink
for these printers and for paper and film and all the things that you wouldn’t think of. But they do. I have proof. We keep track of all this stuff and they’re mostly coming for supplies and they know what they want and they need a search bar right at the top that’ll give it to them. And so 1 of the things I’m doing to make this more attractive to my boss is I’m fixing the search plugin that we have because you’ll search for a specific printer and it will list all of the things that go with that
printer. And then about 16 down is the printer itself. Now I know that’s partly because people are coming for equipment for these things and refillable stuff. Like I said, inks and printers and films and stuff like that. But you still want the printer to be the first thing on the website. Like when you search for that story show, you want that story show to be at the top of Google, right? You don’t want an article about that story show to be the top thing. So I’m working on the search engine, trying to make it better, trying
to prioritize products. They also have another plugin that is, on Amazon, you know how you scroll to the bottom, it says customers also searched for, and it gives you products that might be a little cheaper or a little different, or a different color, and you might not have known that. We have a plugin that does that, but it’s based on sales. And what’s funny is our printers, we don’t sell them online. You have to call and get a quote because there’s a lot involved. There’s shipping costs, there’s taxes, there’s what part of the country do you
live in? Are we gonna have to travel out there and set it up for you? So there’s a lot involved. So the plugin doesn’t even work because it’s based on what else did customers buy. And so when you look up a printer and you go there and you scroll to the bottom, it gives random stuff. It doesn’t give refilling or… So I’m going through and manually adding all of this stuff as I see it. So that’s another part of my day that I submit stuff to, submit time to, is I go through and falsify this stuff.
Cause What we should have is a related items plugin instead of a customer also bought. Cause that way it would be based on tags and we could set up tags. Hey, this is for the Roland blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it would say, oh yeah, we know it. The machine would know, okay, this is some other Roland products that go with this thing. So, you know, don’t get me started. I’ve talked about this way too much, but it is my job and I do it. I also am a graphic designer and That’s what they
hired. They hired a graphic designer to do web design. And so I’m improving the usability and the look of the website by updating graphics. And there are a lot of bad product photos in that thing. And they are all enlarged because a lot of this was brought in from an older system and a lot of the older products have really small images because people had smaller screens and smaller resolutions And now they’re being blown up to be in 800 pixels wide and they don’t look good. So I get to use, well, sometimes I retake the photos.
I’ll go downstairs to the parts place and they’ll say, hey, can I get photos of this, that, and the other? And then I get to edit the photo and upload it and tag it and put proper alt tags on it and all that kind of stuff. But sometimes if it’s a good picture but it’s just too small, I get to use AI. I go to an AI image upscaler because I don’t know if you know this, it’s a boring fact, but if you take a raster image, that’s what a bitmap image, your phone takes pictures in
raster and if you zoom in enough on those raster images, you will see pixels, right? Little tiny pixels, little squares that make up the colors. It’s like for us old people that got really close to our TVs back in the day. And if you got close enough, you could see RGB, red, green and blue little slits that made up the image of our television show. Pixels, when you enlarge them, they make those squares big and you can see it. It’s like zooming in. That’s why on CSI, when they enhance video footage, zoom in, enhance, zoom in,
enhance. We graphic designers all laugh because the information is literally not there. I saw an episode 1 time where they zoomed in on a guy’s eyeball and enhanced and they could see the reflection of a person that they were looking at in his eye and On the original photo his his eye would have been like 2 pixels wide The information is not in those 2 pixels. It’s not there when you enhance and enlarge it would just be 2 giant squares. So I use an AI upgrade, not upgrade, enlarger, and it does its best to make a
nice clean updated image. And for most of these products, I don’t think it would work well for a photo, but for these old photos of, and when I say photo, I mean a person photo, but it does a really good job of updating these things. So I run them through these AI enlargers and I put them back up on the re-upload them. So a lot of care. I also have to deal with SEO stuff, making sure 404 errors aren’t happening. That’s when you click on a link and it says 404 page not found. I tried to
enhance ours because surely people are gonna run into them anyway, but the goal is to do 301 redirects to where people don’t hit those. And we have a plugin that tracks every 404 that hits. And I either repair them or ignore them based on how severe they are. If 6 people, 12 people are hitting those 404s that means we messed up. If it’s 1 person hitting some link from 10 years ago, I don’t really worry about it. What I did do is I put a search engine on our 404 page. And so it says, didn’t find
what you’re looking for, search here. So it gets them right back into the website. So anyway, I am doing my job and there’s a lot more to it than I ever thought there would be. And it’s very enjoyable. My bosses are great. I don’t have crazy bosses. You know, the coloring book place had a crazy boss. The cap design place had a bully boss. And then My boss from the sign shop was borderline personality disorder. I mean, you guys heard all about that. This time I got a great guy. He’s about 36. He is young, but
He knows his stuff. He’s very busy, but he’s friendly and he has gone out of his way several times to compliment me and He doesn’t need to because I’m just good with kindness, you know But the other day he said something I said I was nervous about fixing something with MailChimp. And he said, James, you’re really smart. You can do this. And I’m like, okay, but I’m nervous. I’m just telling you, I’m only doing it because you think I can handle it. And he’s like, okay. So, but I went home and told my wife, he’s not
always smart, you know? So that’s all I needed, you know, was all you have to be is not mean, but being nice on top of that is bonus. So those of you that pray for me, thank you so much. Your prayer has been answered. I got a decent job And I could see myself staying there for a while. Everybody’s old, just about. And I love it. They’re nice people. My generation are older and they’re just good. We mix together well. And I brought in donuts, okay? For everybody. I found out, because people bring in donuts, but
they just bring them in for the office workers. I found out, I said, how many people work on the floor? Cause we have a factory floor. People construct things down there. And I found out how many, I went to the nicest donut shop in our area, in the city. And it was in Sular, it’s called David’s Donuts. And I ordered 4 dozen, actually I ordered them in advance and they were ready for me when I went to pick them up on Monday morning. 4 dozen mixed donuts and I put 3 of the dozens downstairs and I
brought 1 of the dozens upstairs to the office people and they were mostly gone. Like 2 boxes were gone for sure and then 1 was almost empty And I had so many people come up from the floor. Are you the donor guy? You know, thanks. And so now I’m friends with all the working class guys. And I love that because I’ve been the working class guy. And, you know, office people, you know, you always feel like they’re looking down their nose at you and I just wanted to make a good impression. And so what I figured
is once a quarter, I’m gonna bring something in. Like next time I think I’m gonna try to do a coffee bar, like I don’t know how, but I would wanna bring maybe 2 pictures of coffee. I’m sure that Starbucks or something would do this or some coffee place where they just have a carafe of some kind, you know, and then have some cream and sugar and just kind of keep it simple, but give them some, they have coffee makers down there, but why not, you know, give them fancy coffee, you know, or something like that. Another
1 would be to provide a tray of fruits, like a big tray of strawberries and pineapple and blueberries and cantaloupe and all this and just have it all laid out. I don’t know if I could get that done somewhere. I don’t know if my wife would wanna do it, but because the only negative comment I got about the donuts and it probably would have broke me, but the secretary lady downstairs told me about, because I was asking her about how many people. She said, I’m bringing donuts. She says, well, the boss is gonna come in and
make a joke about, what are you trying to give everybody heart attacks? Because he’s really into health stuff. And he sure enough did. He’s like, are you the donut guy? You’re trying to give everybody a heart attack. And that’s his idea of a joke. I was prepared for it. I didn’t take it personally. I didn’t get upset. Didn’t hurt my feelings. I was just like, nope, that’s him. That’s just the way he is. So I, but it did make me think, could I do something to win him over too? And I would be probably the first
person in the universe to bring over fruits and veggies for people to snack on throughout the day. And I’d have lots of toothpicks probably and somehow set it in a tray of ice so it stays cold and keep it covered with a plastic lid. I don’t know. I just have ideas. I just want to be a light in the dark. And I have found working that when I communicate, I am done trying to hide the fact that I was a pastor. I call myself semi-retired. I said, I work because I want to work. I’m semi-retired from
my career. I was a kid’s pastor for 13 years, 10, 15 or whatever. Yeah, 13 years. And I said, I work here for fun and I enjoy it. And I’m glad to do it. And yeah, the other day I was talking to 1 of my coworkers and we were talking about how quiet the office is and how we need a white noise generator or something like that. Because I can hear all the ladies going to the bathroom. The ladies bathroom is right next to my desk. And ladies aren’t supposed to go to the bathroom. I’m sorry,
you’re not. But I want a white noise maker. I begged my boss, please buy me 1. Cause if he doesn’t, I’m gonna buy 1 anyway. And we were talking about how quiet it was. So I talked about the time that we were at church and that we would pray before work. And this female pastor would come in with her coffee. And I know she was trying to be quiet, but she would take a sip and you couldn’t hear the sip, but you could hear her swallow. I mean, just this kind of swallow. And I said, Oh,
it had nothing to do with the fact that she was female. It’s just that she was female and she was making such a loud noise, made it extra hilarious because she was trying to be so quiet. I said, you know, I asked, can we start playing music while we’re praying? You know, or something like that. And yeah, I just, I’m just trying to be a light. And you know, people know that I’m a Christian and I’m not being a bud about it. I actually had a guy ask me about my politics. He’s like, and I was
like, is politics, you know, a thing in 1 of your hobbies? He says, no, just the way people think are, you know? He said, you seem like a pretty thoughtful dude. And you know, I just like to get your opinion. And so I shared with him some of my thoughts and where I stand and how I consider the kingdom of God to be more important than the kingdom of this world. And that I don’t focus a lot on politics. I don’t follow it that much. I said, Christ didn’t, you know, other than given to Caesar, the
things that are Caesar and God, the things that are gods. So I pay taxes. I said, I’m not, I’m not a guy that doesn’t vote. You know, I don’t think we shouldn’t be involved. I said, I just don’t get as concerned about it as a lot of my peers do, because I said, a lot of my peers, a lot of Christians have combined their faith and their politics to where they’re inseparable. And he said, yes, yes, yes. I said, now the far left has done the same where they claim not to have a belief structure, but
they do. And he said, no, absolutely. And so I said, this sounds like something I said, I gotta get back to work with. I’d love to have lunch with you and talk about this kind of stuff. And he said, absolutely. We only get a half hour for lunch and we have to eat at the shop because there’s nowhere, because it’s in an industrial area, there’s nowhere you could go and come back in a half hour, much less eat. So I’m finding it interesting how I used to be so scared of Christianity and how when I’m just
normal about it and just chill about it and just matter of fact about it, people don’t blink an eye, you know? And I think the donuts helped. So what do they say? They don’t care how much you know, till they know how much you care. So I’m trying to be a good employee, trying to be busy, trying to be helpful, trying to be loving. And so I think people will do a little more listening. I’ll tell you, this is the last thing I’ll say on this podcast, cause it’s somehow gotten to 55 minutes already, is the
lady that sits behind me is the only person that sees my screen all day. And she’s only there for half the day because she does 2 jobs, because we’re down a person. And she made a comment the other day and I don’t remember how it started, but I, oh, because I mentioned like I did earlier about how I didn’t think the job would be this busy and involved. And she said, well, we’ve had a lot of people here doing it. And most of them have just been on their phone all day. And she says, basically she
said, I haven’t seen that from you. And I said, really, really? They did that. And she’s like, yeah. I’m like, holy crap. And I said, thank you for saying that. That really means a lot to me. Cause I really do try to stay busy. I try to, you know, cause there’s no way I, matter of fact, if you see me on my phone, I’m either checking the website through the phone to make sure it looks right, or I’m generating images, because like for instance, if I need a t-shirt blank to put a image on, I’ll generate
a fake logo, and then I’ll generate a black t-shirt, and then I’ll put them into Google Photos, put them into Photoshop, merge them together, and I’ve got a t-shirt for an illustration that I need for a class about printing black t-shirts. So I use AI generation constantly as a tool. But no, it really blessed me that she would say that. And she likes me. So I like her. She’s great. She’s a dog lover and she’s very sweet and opinionated. And that’s an odd mixture to have somebody that is sweet but opinionated. Cause I think a lot
of times to be sweet, you have to be oblivious to some of the things in this world, you know? But she is not. And for her to be able to have strong opinions about things, but still be nice, that’s a gift. That is an awesome thing. So I’m really getting to know my people and I like them. And so be happy for me. Guys and girls, that’s it. Usually I like to end with some sort of advice for people who are struggling with depression. Advice sometimes comes across as judgment because it seems so easy for people
to say things to you. You know, just start scrapbooking. That’s what I did. Just start writing down your blessings. Just pray more. What’s your private life like? What’s your devotions like? They have all these solutions. You just need to do what you need to do. As long as it’s not hurting you, as long as you’re not being self-destructive, just do you. Do what you can when you can, so that when you can’t, it’s not a big deal. And people understand. Prove that you’re trying to get better by doing what you can when you can. I don’t
know. I ended up giving advice, but at least you know, it’s from somebody who’s lived at dad and who’s 20% depressed right now. Anyway, God bless you guys. Thank you. Support the show if you can, patreon.com slash G-O-K. We love our patrons. We love all of you, but we love them just a tiny bit more. We’ll see you guys next week. Maybe if I can figure my life out and my schedule. Bye.
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