Things I used to forget before I had a place to write them down...etc.

Randall Morrison

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About the Author...

Name	Randall Jeffrey Morrison
Born	June 18th, 1984 (age 25)
Residence	Montgomery Calgary, AB, CA
Sex	Male
Height	6' 1½"
Weight	148.0 lbs.
Religion	Atheist
Zodiac	Gemini
Occupation	Facility Operations Maintenance Clerk
Vehicle	2004 Dodge SX 2.0
Website	Et cetera

Randall Morrison (born June 18th, 1984) is, among other things, a Canadian person, musician, writer, tournament director, smasher, part-time webmaster, full-time envelope pusher and retired Fun Expert from Calgary, Alberta. He is also taller than he would like to be, enjoys espresso from time to time and can do a back flip under most circumstances. Also, he is me.

Hi. Welcome to the About the Author section of Et cetera, the part where I get to take up excessive amounts of webspace trying to explain who I am as a person to my millions and millions of readers who are just dying to get inside my head. Please! Stop with the fan-mail! My secretary's secretary simply can't take it anymore.

Introduction, &c.

I've tried to sum up my own biography many times (and in many different forms) without ever being able to convince myself that what I had written could sufficiently and accurately explain who I am to a total stranger. And because I'm a realist, I don't really expect to ever find that magical format; I know that people are far too complex to be stored in any paper or electronic form. But I will say this: the electronic form gets you a lot further than the paper does. Especially with this wiki interface.

The brilliant thing about MediaWiki software is the fact that it finally offered me a way to store large chunks of text in a streamlined database that was navigable by the viewers, as well as the editor. So essentially, this website as a whole is actually one big "About the Author" article that could potentially get quite detailed. The reason this suits me so well is because it fits pretty well with the way that I think about myself and what traits are the most important to recognize in order to know me best. With things like Categories built into the wiki, it allows me to filter and sort pertinent information based on whatever subject matter I'm writing about, as well as offer inline links to related articles when something is particularly contextual or requires more clarification for the average user. Compared to what I've been able to do in the past with Et cetera, this is by far the most information I can offer to attempt to be understood as clearly as possible.

That said, I also realize that communication is 10% words and 90% delivery....and most of the delivery is body language and tone of voice, both of which are more or less absent on the internet. But I try awfully hard and I've spent a lot of time toying with English words and phrases to avoid misinterpretation; the real kicker is that even if someone was reading me perfectly and understanding what I was saying, I'd have no way of knowing unless they were somehow able to communicate that back to me. More often though, the problem is that I occasionally use too many words or modifiers in an attempt to clarify something and then I just end up confusing the issue because nobody knows what "esoteric" means. I'd like to say that's true because I've been spending a lot of time in the company of teenagers, but I'm afraid it's all the way up to people in their early thirties. It's also not my problem if someone can't understand what I'm saying because of "big words", so I don't really care.

As you can see, this is already getting quite lengthy and I'm just sitting here explaining (and revealing!) my insecurities about internet communication so as to give myself some sort of buffer zone of protection against the harsh, judgmental eyes of the viewing public. It's nothing personal, you certainly aren't responsible for sending me on these tangents. Nah, it's that social pressure fed from the collective you as a young person that demands you show no weakness! It demands that you go to university and get a good job, it demands that you have a driver's license sooner rather than later, it demands that men don't cry and it demands that women want men who don't cry! Societal pressure makes it impossible to live your life up to the set standards, yet the standards stay there just to add that continuous stress and pressure that everyone always complains about.

Well, this biography isn't going to paint a picture of myself that will meet up to the world's standards. In fact, it doesn't even meet up to my own standards as a person, because I've never been able to be the Randall I wanted to be. Not completely, and who gets that chance, really? No, this is an honest biography. Honesty is one of my most potent strengths and it ties hand in hand with my passionate hatred for stress. The only way to fight the societal pressure to be someone you are not is to deny it and be completely honest about it with everyone you know. Because everyone is the cause of that stress (not individuals) and the truth is strong enough to fight it. So I came to be okay with my follies of the past, the worst of my mistakes, my guiltiest of pleasures and my most embarrassing humiliations.

Everyone expects so much out of you as an individual, even in the simplest of situations, and then they'll hold a grudge if you don't live up to their expectations. The best example is when you're in a car and someone is signalling to get in your lane, so the driver lets them in kindly. Then they don't wave--watch the driver of the vehicle you are in! (or maybe you are the angry driver!) If you know the driver well enough, he'll probably make some snide comment like, "You're welcome, buddy" , thinking that you're on his side (which you probably are). Or maybe he'll just make some grunting, dissatisfed sigh, but either way, the vast majority of drivers (at least where I'm from) react negatively like that. And obviously I don't mean they're flying off the handle having a huge, loud temper tantrum in their car because someone didn't wave politely in gratitude, but the grudge is still there. You know how I know? Well, it depends how long you have to follow that guy in your car. If he happens to be driving 5 km/h slower than your car or he makes some wonky right turn like everyone does sometimes, the driver of your vehicle is going to be thinking about that wave and how he's "gotta get around this asshole" or "glad to be out of the way of that idiot." Well, you know what that idiot thinks about it all? Nothing. He's busy, he's got his own life, you are NOT the centre of the universe. So he forgot to wave, big deal; he's not an asshole. It's a one-way argument and the only reason you have any ammunition at all is because the other driver can't hear you.

So listen, I can't hear what you think about me upon reading this biography, but if you plan to judge me harshly, know that you are wrong and I don't care. Sticks and stones may break my bones and all that jazz. Realistically though, the only people who will actually read this are either people that care about me, people that know me and people that are bored and have been bored on the internet for long enough to read all of it, but probably not long enough to also write and send me an abusive e-mail detailing what a loser I am.

The Basics

This includes the portion of my biography that centres around things like vital statistics and the raw information like name, date of birth and work history that is likely already stored in some government database somewhere. So, this isn't the only place you'll be able to find this information about me, but it's probably the best place for the full personal take on certain bits and pieces.

Name

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Government-sanctioned proof that this is my real name!

My full name is Randall Jeffrey Morrison without any decorative suffixes like "Jr." or "the Third" tacked on to the end of it. I suppose that might make me Randall Jeffrey Morrison the First, but it would be very presumptuous of me to assume that I actually had a right to claim the name for my own.

Definition

Randall means "Shield Wolf," roughly translated. Apparently it refers to totemic shields with wolf-like carvings and designs in them, but the name and the implications associated with it don't really describe me that well. However, I can't deny that it would've been a suitably appropriate and cheezy gamer alias to choose for online video games when they were at the pique of their popularity in my life. Alas, I didn't do the research until I had long settled into an obsessive-compulsive routine of selecting complex and thoughtful names for my fictional characters, as well as strictly using one screen name for all internet accounts related to me.

Other Randalls

My first name is relatively uncommon and although I have met other Randalls, I've never known one, so I have no basis of comparison as to just how Randall-like I really am. Furthermore, most Randalls that I have met go by "Randy," with the exception of that one bartender from Jr.'s Billiards that I'm fairly sure I've never talked to when not ordering something.

Then there's the famous people named Randall--of which there are a surprising few! Probably the most widely known Randall in pop culture today is Randall Cunningham, the NFL Quarterback who probably deserved a Super Bowl but didn't get one. There are plenty of famous Randalls who go by "Randy," like Randy Rhoads, but if you ask me, the minute you tell people to call you something other than your name, you're no longer a Randall. That's like being Randall Cunningham and telling people that you were a professional linebacker, when you weren't even on the field for a defensive play for your entire career--just on the sidelines!

Also, a fun little fact that's been following me around since I first read Stephen King's The Stand is that this popular horror author repeatedly uses the name "Randall Flagg" in that novel, as well as several others, to describe a savage and typically murderous supervillain character. Then Steve Buscemi had to go and lend his voice to the computer-animated Randall Boggs from Monsters, Inc., further perpetuating the notion that Randall's are all disagreeable individuals and shouldn't be trusted with power, responsibility, or anything for that matter.

School

This section is a stub, which essentially means that I have more to say on the subject, however I have prioritized fleshing out other content before this one. If you want to see more content in this article, please say so on the talk page and I will move it up the queue by request!

Work History

I have worked a lot of different jobs. There is plenty of people who have worked far more jobs than I, but considering the type of person that I am, I've had far more jobs than I ever dreamed I would've had when I first broke into the work force. When I was younger (and simpler), I had always approached the concept of work without considering all the variables and figured that so long as I could get a good job every once in awhile, I could probably work at it for several years and switch to something else when I felt I needed more money or was getting tired of the work. This way, I reasoned that I wouldn't need to work more than nine or 10 jobs until retirement.

Most of the factors that I failed to consider include things like the inflation of the cost of living and, of course, the unanticipated expenses that seem to come up out of nowhere that your parents always talk about in ways that seem to indicate that they don't exist. Above all factors, however, I learned that money is not a necessary ingredient in order to be happy and began to view my jobs as more (or perhaps less?) than just a way to make money.

I suppose the first company that actually employed me and paid me directly was Flyer Force, as I did do some chumpish flyer delivery when I was 13 or so. The pay was so pitiful though (somewhere in the range of 4 cents per flyer) that I wouldn't feel right calling it my first job.

Ton of Fun

Ton of Fun is (or was) a chain of kid's amusement places based in Calgary and was the first "real job" I ever worked. Over the year and some that I worked there, it eventually bore a different name (Let's Play) and a different mascot in the form of a small white bear. As a result, it happens to be the only job that I've worked at that began with a pretty stupid company name and finished with an even stupider one.

Unlike venues that are often lumped into the same category (such as: Chuck E. Cheese's), the primary attraction of Ton of Fun/Let's Play was not so much the arcade portion, or even the birthday parties, but rather the play structure. The building had a very high vaulted ceiling and the majority of the square footage was consumed by a massive maze of climbing equipment, tubes, ball pits and other varieties of indoor play equipment. I was one of the few staff members who was both nimble and brave enough to scale the exterior and clean the particularly hard-to-reach pieces and that was one of the most challenging and rewarding tasks I've been entrusted with in the workforce to date.

A&W

Phoenix Fence

Zellers

Young & Franklin

Southern Music

Alberta Games

A Helping Hand Staffing Services

KLM Music Ltd.

Formerly Guitar Lessons In Your Home, this was a small company run by Mike Little and Hugo McLaughlin that would turn into a pretty darn successful service for both in-home music lessons as well as backend services and equipment rental.

My role as an employee was largely self-sufficient. By e-mail, I would receive "leads" that included information about customers who were looking to have themselves or their children enrolled in regular guitar lessons. These e-mails would usually have the number of students involved, the age of said student(s) and the area of the city in which they lived. Using this information, teachers were required to build their own lesson schedules to account for using your time as efficiently as possible. Since the teaching itself required you to travel, it wasn't always easy to schedule students that lived within a close proximity of one another. Partly due to the availability of students in some areas and the gradual, slow process with which you would build a catalog of students to make the initial travel worthwhile. However, I suspect this would've been easier for me if I wasn't working three jobs and taking two classes simultaneously for the majority of my paid teaching time.

Although a lot of people (including myself) once believed that teaching guitar was an ideal job for me, I had to quit prematurely following a nervous breakdown in 2005. As my interests and activities expand, it becomes clearer to me every day that I probably won't be pursuing a career in music instruction. However, I still intend to take a formal course in music myself at some point.

Discount Car & Truck Rental

I worked at Discount as a "Service Attendant"--you know, one of those titles that just screams "bottom of the food chain." I was responsible for vacuuming and washing returned rental cars in preparation for a new rental and then occasionally driving said vehicle to a customer's house for pick-up service.

While I was taking evening classes at Mount Royal College, I had it worked out with my superiors (read: everyone) that twice a week I would be able to leave about an hour early in order to make it downtown and hopefully not get screwed out of my Land Administration certificate by something as silly as traffic.

I'm not sure when they decided it was a problem, but they certainly didn't discuss it with me to find a workaround solution or anything. They fired me in a cold and impersonal way. Rosalie Bowen was the manager of our branch of Discount, but she was only maybe a couple years older than I was and clearly new to managing. A higher up figure in the company turned up to hand me a letter of termination. The letter was a very obvious template for any random firing and it opened like this:

"Due to your unsatisfactory performance..."

This is a huge piss-off for me, even still (and I was considerably less stable then). My gripe is that my performance wasn't the issue; it was my availability. I take a lot of pride in performing my jobs very well and this one was no different. The tasks were menial and a less-than-perfect job would not have had a significant impact on the success of the business. But I swear, I cleaned the interiors and exteriors of those cars to an obsessive-compulsive level and gave everything I could to that job; which wasn't all that much considering my role.

There was no dramatic freakout from being fired or anything like that, mind you. As frustrating as it was for me, I was beginning to learn to roll with the punches and would soon find this pattern of bad luck bemusedly comical.

Superstore

At Superstore I worked in the electronics/photo lab department, which are apparently the same thing in large department stores. I didn't get around to a whole lot of actual photo developing, but I did spend a lot of time trying to find lost rolls of film.

I only ever had one work uniform from Superstore and it wasn't the standard one you'll find there today. You see, I started working there on Saturdays (just Saturdays; working 3 jobs and taking two classes simultaneously proved difficult) right when they began promoting their big "Blue Menu" pro-nutritious anti-carb menu of products for a healthy 21st century lifestyle. And even though their were no "blue" products sold in the electronics department, all staff members had to wear these hideous blue long-sleeved t-shirts. It's not like it's a nice blue, either. Imagine the worst blue you've ever seen; that's it. Bright and gaudy. I still have the shirt and use it sparingly as pyjama wear.

I was also working there in the month of March 2005 when the Sony PSP was released and being in the electronics department, we had demo copies to try out along with demos of some of the other superior handheld systems of the time. Did you know that the Sony PSP broadcasts sound in Dolby 7.1?? You know, just in case you have a seven-speaker home theatre setup attached to your headphones while playing it on the bus.

Don't be fooled. The PSP does blow. I promoted it poorly and worked at Superstore for about a month under the suspiciously industrious management of a big strong woman named Agnes. This was one of the first jobs I actually quit and didn't get fired from for once.

Earls Restaurant

I was a dishwasher at Earls, but I don't think I was ever a really great one. Restaurant work demands a kind of physical perseverance that I can't seem to achieve without devoting my life to it. It also stands as the only job that I have ever been loudly yelled at by a supervisor, but it's like a common language amongst back house kitchen staff and happens all the time. I didn't react well to it because I didn't deserve it, but it's my fault that I wasn't prepared for the kind of abuse they dole out all the time back there. Being a quiet dishwasher, you kinda lurk in the back while everyone's going crazy on the other side of the kitchen yelling at the top of their lungs just to get their voice to carry over the sounds of broken plates, simmering grills and furious kitchen leaders commanding people around.

Despite not exactly being a high-profile character amongst the Earls staff (half of them don't even recognize me when I go in to eat nowadays), I still felt welcome within the community. Kitchen culture and the comradery it seems to carry are very much pieces of a two-sided coin. The price of industrious physical kitchen work is a boisterous social community of people who all carry the same work-related burden and therefore have no qualms about drinking their faces off with co-workers after a shift.

If you can survive in a kitchen, life is always fun and exciting. I just don't always want fun and excitement enough to stick with it for an extended period of time. Talk to Jon about that.

TELUS

For what city and province please??

City of Calgary

My office, such that it is...

Working as a Facility Operations Maintenance Clerk, I do the kind of office work that all my co-workers at former jobs used to long for and complain about "us slackers." Their complaints were justified, but you take what you can get.

The Not-So-Basics

In my past attempts at biographing my person on to a website, I always drew a distinction between the basics and the not-so-basics. The basics are basically composed of raw data--information that is alterable between people. Everyone has a name, everyone's name likely has a meaning, everyone has a work history, everyone went to school somewhere (yes, I'm using "everyone" loosely, what of it?).

However, the not-so-basics are the features of someone's personality that I am most interested in because they vary wildly in subject matter. This section is a much better insight into who I actually am than all that information above because it deals more with how I think about and interpret those basic things about my life, as well as what I choose to do with my time, rather than what I am forced to do within the confines of the modern world just to stay alive.

Hobbies

It's obvious that web design is one of my hobbies, but it's something that I've just sort of picked up along the way while pursuing my other hobbies. As we become more dependent on technology, almost all of my interests are better enhanced with a working knowledge of how to use a computer. By knowing how to navigate my way around one of these machines, I've been able to write, print and bind entire books; write, record, create and publish CDs of multi-instrumental music; record and edit footage for relatively pro-looking video shorts; and the list goes on.

That said, I don't have a whole lot of love for computers, they just happened to be the best platform available from which to do everything that I want to do. Essentially, I divide my hobbies into two categories: creative pursuits and social wellness pursuits. The first is much easier to explain because it usually deals with projects and material objects. The second is probably not best described as a "hobby," even though I do think about it in that way. Rather, they surround the bettering of myself as a person; ironing out my personality faults, social awkwardities, inhibitions and public relations.

Creative Pursuits

Arts

Music

I spend more energy on music than I do on most other hobbies, though that doesn't necessarily mean that I spend more time. I've always had an interest in being able to produce a piece of music that at least a few people can identify with and it probably started back when I was trying to coordinate a Wendy Tettleton album in elementary school called Till Tomorrow using a cheap microphone and an even cheaper 30-some-key keyboard on an even cheaper single-speaker cassette tape recorder. I don't think that project was ever completed, but it paved the way for a more substantial interest in music later in life.

I took piano lessons for awhile as a kid; my mom was a piano teacher, but she actually felt it was better to sign me up for lessons with her former teacher, and I agreed. However, I feel as though those early lessons kind of poisoned the notion of playing music for me. I certainly learned a lot of valuable things, especially in terms of musical ear and muscle memory--getting a feel for the keys early would prove beneficial later as well. The problem was, I just wasn't that interested in taking piano lessons--they weren't fun, and if you don't enjoy doing something like that, you'll never be able to learn much of anything.

It wasn't until about May of 1998 that I began to develop my own ecclectic taste in listening to music and then eventually adopted an interest in being able to create it. I owe a lot to the song "Mouthful of Cavities" by Blind Melon for creating a relatively simple acoustic guitar riff that, to my nubile ears, sounded like multiple guitars and it rang out so nicely on the recording that I resolved to purchase one and learn it. Usually, I coupled the announcement of this purchase with a jocular disclaimer stating that I only planned on learning one cool-sounding song so I could at least give people the impression that I knew what I was doing, when really, I didn't.

I was too young to have any supplementary income with which to buy a really decent instrument, and wouldn't have known a thing about what a decent instrument was anyway, so I took the pawn shop route. I waltzed into a Cash Converters one day and decided to check out their used guitars. Incidentally, there were no acoustic guitars available at all, never mind one in my severely limited price range. But, being a spontaneous person, I figured: "Well, maybe I'll just get one of these electric ones instead." And I did. I bought a black Vantage-brand electric that was obviously a Stratocaster knock-off in terms of design. It only had five strings, but that was no matter--I'd just have to get a sixth string next paycheque.

=Albums=

Here's a list of the albums I have published in a tremendously non-professional and unofficial fashion under my name:

The Lighter Side of Indifference (2002)
Fractals (2003)
The Darker Side of Indifference (2009)

Otherwise, I've done additional work under the totally non-existent Pro Impact Records label.

Writing

Media

Social Wellness Pursuits

When I say "social wellness," I'm referring to being a good person in the eyes of as many people as possible. In fact, the ultimate goal of social wellness is to have friends with whom you have strong friendships, acquaintances that all want to have strong friendships with you, and enemies who respect you despite their animosity. It is unrealistic to assume that you can live life without making enemies and to think that you could ever possibly develop strong friendships with everyone you meet.

"Pleased to meet you, I'm Randall!"

In 2007, I wrote a lengthy e-mail that covered more or less everything I've done since high school and takes it to an unconventionally personal level. It was very therapeutic for me because it allowed me a chance to clarify a lot of things about me for the people whose opinions I respect and care about. It also helped my own self-esteem because I was able to cast aside any fear of shame and insecurity about my past. By e-mailing it to pretty much everyone I know and not caring who would get a copy, I was able to be completely honest with myself and everyone about the mistakes I've made and the things I've accomplished along the way. Through writing it, I unknowingly began living under a policy of no shame.

The text, like most of my personal musings, depreciated significantly in meaning and quality for me over the years, but it is held here for posterity.

External Links

Retrieved from "http://www.proimpact.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Randall_Morrison"

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