Work / Workplace

Where have I been?

As the title suggests, this is about what has been going on since I last posted anything or even interacted with anyone on here. I think my last blog was over a year old and my last story was like two years ago at least. I guess to paint a deeper picture on how I ended up where I am now I need to go back to when the Covid Pandemic started.

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Opinions Welcome (Needed)

In a previous life (BC) I was an executive recruiter for over 35 years. I actually got into the business by accident when as a struggling CPA, I spoke to a recruiter to help me find a new position. Instead, he suggested working along side him at a place called Source Finance. It turned it to be a job and industry that suited my skills to a T.

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It’s been awhile…

Warning: Don’t read this if you’re squeamish there’s a lot of nasty things that are going to be said. If the moderators think I’ve went too far in explaining what has happened to me then they are free to remove it. I just wanted to get this out into the open.

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Big Closet Renovation (Or: What Do You Want?)

First things first: I have no official affiliation with BCTS as a business entity. Outside doing a few stories for Hatbox/Patreon and the occasional cover, I have zero input into the goings-on or function of our site.

That said... I love BCTS, and want it to succeed. I've been an official member for almost 16 years, and I've picked about for longer than that. I've been a member of this community for longer than I've been able to legally drink!

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The Mods of BigCloset

I feel like a lot of people around here expect a lot of the moderation and maintenance staff here at BCTS, but that they don't tend to get nearly enough recognition for all the hard work they do.

As such, I would like to take a moment to list them all, so we can all show each of them the love they deserve.

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Update: Thank You!

Hey everyone. This is an update and quick thank you (to be updated in the morning.).

As of right now we have met our immediate needs and that combine with a loan from a friend of BC will go a long way to some of us getting some needed sleep.

We aren’t 100% out of danger but we will likely be ok and have a better idea of what the immediate dilutive for BC looks like.

HuGs,
-Piper

There have been an awful lot of begging letters going out of late, and the most recent ones, I have to say, are solely my fault.

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Hatbox In the hole again - please help

We're down to less than $300 in company accounts with some bills coming up.

And I personally am down to about $150 with my bills ahead of me.

Piper has $1100 in expense to keep her vehicles running which may hit on Thursday if a plan is not in place.

In a few days we start getting money coming in from our regular places but we are in a tight corner here.

Please, if you can help, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Hugs,
Erin, Piper, Cat, Amy, Jamie and the elves.

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Some Downtime Ahead. . .

This blog is intended to be a heads up.

TLDR:

  • Hardware Upgrades "soon" but actual date unknown
  • Database Upgrades even sooner, within the next 2 days

After the recent downtime where I had to do way too much data recovery, we put in plans for new infrastructure upgrades and improvements with help from a QnEZ Customer.

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OucH THat hurts!

Firsr off please escuse the atrocious typing, it will be explained later. I live in the cold blerry midwest, specfically Davepoirt, Iowa. After our normqal meeting on Skype to let eveyone know what eveyone else would be doing, I welt to get on my car and go to anotehr school building that keeded my attention.

'
For thosie not familiar with the weater in the upper midwest of the can be quite bitter. it's not unusual to see it drop to -25 F or even lower this time of year. I apparetly found a very slippery spot on the ice and did not make it to my car.

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Coming out

Today is the happiest day of my life. I want to share with you guys how my day went from feeling like it would ruin the rest of my life to being so Happy I broke into tears. I finally came out to an actual person In Real Life In Person with complete transparency that I was a Transgender woman in the closet for fear of scrutiny and scandal as well as fear for my life. The new pastor at my church. I was worried how he would react.

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Hi Everyone,

Hi everyone,

Sorry I haven't posted any new chapters lately. I've been busy with my family and the the farm over the last few weeks. It seems that my oldest two daughters and their husbands all thought it would be a great idea to visit at the same time. (July 1-9) Between them being here and working with the 4H Kids plus having to make repairs to the fence line I haven't had a lot of time to write. With my youngest daughter Karen watching me like a hawk I have only been able to get about 400-500 words written per day with the work load.

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Recent Downtime

Just wanted to give everyone (that's not on Discord) a heads up as to what has gone on the last couple days.

About 2 days ago(?) I was told by others that the site was down. I went to investigate and found the "Front End" servers each with a "load" of 200+

I killed varnish, to let the front ends slow down, I did some maintenance, and then I edited the virtual servers to upgrade them from 4 to 8 cores of processing power.

Once rebooted everything seemed to be fine, and even a bit snappier so I was happy with this result and let it fly.

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Remember me?!

While the more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed recent comments from me scattered across a handful of stories, it actually marks a 'soft' return from a prolonged absence (from here - those who frequent the BCTS group on the Book of Faces will probably have seen me quite frequently...) of about 3 1/2 years...

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Sorry for the downtime.

Yesterday when beginning a new project, we introduced an error that caused intermittent errors over-night. We managed to track down the issue before noon, but decided to then do regular Drupal module updates. Un-beknownst to us, these updates introduced several new issues and errors that caused even worse outages that were not very apparent to us.

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SEARCH/SOLR WORKS!

Those of you who log-in to the site might have noticed SEARCH not working. Those who were not logged in, did not notice.

It took quite a while to figure out when/where this action did/did not work (as the logs are not helpful when trying to discern logins and whatnot when the system is as distributed as ours). Once I figured that fact, I tracked down the bad code, and fixed it.

Don't ask more, it was extremely tedious, and my brain hurts.

-Piper

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Out of the mouths of babes

After I retired, a couple of years ago and move to a small town in the foot hills of the coast range in Oregon, I got bored and decided to drive school bus for the local schools. Now, while I don't make any real effort to hide my trans status, I also don't flaunt it. As such, I generally look pretty androgynous. That means, long hair, past my shoulders and and my full size breast forms in a bra every day. My hair is usually pulled back at the sides and captured at the crown of my head with a simple brown barrette. Even so, most people clock me as male.

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Just posted a new chapter

I just posted a new chapter for one of my stories - a relatively long one this time. And though I know it's past 11PM out there, I hope it's not too late.

I've been in the office since 8am, and have been waiting to meet with some contractors. I've been waiting for three hours now, and they're still not here. Anyway, while I waited, I started writing instead of sitting here and stewing. If they don't get here in 20 minutes, I'm gonna be calling their boss. This doesn't bode well for them being hired for the project.

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So an interesting day at work

So I had an interesting day at work today I’m a security guard at a certain building in Texas I just recently transferred to this posting and it’s my second day at the post everything was quiet the first day yet today I had one bomb threat and had to escort a verbally combative individual From the premises he was making threats of coming back tomorrow as I escorted him out so all in all an interesting day 2 Who knows what tomorrow will bring

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The Good and the Bad

The sewer in my basement has backed up... again! Fortunately, I managed to catch it pretty early and nothing important inside the house is damaged, but I did have to go to the laundromat to wash all the clothes that got sewage on them... NOT FUN! The last time it backed up, a lot of stuff got thrown out and nothing important is stored down there. Unfortunately, this time the back up was caused by the main sewer line collapsing. Which means I can't use my toilet or shower or really use any running water at this point.

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Earlier Outage

Sorry about the outage earlier folks. The virtual boot image for one of our front-end servers recently corrupted so I pulled it out of the hunt group while I work on it. Around the same time I decided to process upgrades on the remaining 2 front ends, using the standard rolling reboot pattern that I usually do but with one server down I forgot that we were short coverage while the front ends finish their boot process and really get rolling.

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Everyone PLEASE read! Time to help one of our trusted friends. Need a job for Scotty Bishop.

One of our dear friends, Scotty Bishop has been wrongfully terminated from his job of 12 years. He has been sending out resumes like they were going out of style with no results.

ANYONE who either might have a job or know someone who might have an opening, PLEASE email Scotty [email protected]

His resume is available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottywbishop/

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Corporate Dress Code - New Book, Now on Amazon Kindle

Corporate Dress Code: Reluctant Feminization, Cross-dressing, Role Reversal, Revenge (Terry Moran Book 1)
Word Count: over 80,000

Terry Moran is an up and coming young executive in a male-dominated company. As the youngest executive, Terry proves his loyalty to upper management by reworking the new corporate dress code.

Upper management wanted rules to keep executives looking professional. The head of the company has his own expectations of what people should be wearing to look professional and his views may not be either politically correct or legally acceptable.

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Please read and comment, guys and gals and others.

There are many on here, myself included, who have faced, are currently facing, or will eventually face severe crises in their lives. I think we, as a community of like-minded individuals, should have a contingency plan in place to support and aid our peers. I'd like to, with the permission of the moderators, form a support group where anyone, at any time, could come and safely find the support, understanding, and guidance they need to face life's challenges.

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That big erotic banner

I've visited nifty.org recently and they have the same, or rather the same breastforms site banner as on bcts with one essential difference - you and everyone who looks at your monitor see the banner as below:

hifty_org banner

if you are interested you move the mouse over it and then you see this:

banner hover

Is it very complicated to have the same banner on BCTS site?

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SmallScale DDoS

This is just an FYI. We have detected, and are currently mitigating, a small scale DDoS attack against one of our VPS host nodes. Because this VPS host currently hosts assets for YourBigCloset it could possibly affect the performance of BigCloset as we host some of our VideoAds from YourBigCloset. This is just an FYI and we don't know if it has any relation to Bigcloset.

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Possible Downtime but Upgrades . . .

Hey Everyone!

This is just a note to let you know that we are getting ready to release some new features and upgrades to BigCloset. Some of these upgrades have been attempted in the past and broke a lot of our custom changes to the front page.

So it is entirely possible they will break again, but I promise you I will be working just as fast as possible to get everything working again.

Unfortunately while I've tried to put off these upgrades because of the havoc they may cause, they have recently become urgent.

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Small Business Saturday Success

 

#SmallBusinessSaturday Success - QnEZ Servers partners with CheckItOn.Us
For Immediate Release

We didn't offer any great sales. We didn't run much advertising. We didn't even do anything different than we normally would, however #SmallBusinessSaturday was a huge Success for QnEZ and Janglewood, llc.

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BigCloset Downtime

Hey Everyone.

I wanted apologize for the delay in getting the site back online today.

What happened is that one of our many elves happened to click a wrong button causing all of the "Author Taxonomy" to disappear. That may sound like an easy fix, of just rolling back the database, but in doing so we would have lost a couple new stories, and blogs that we didn't want to disappear.

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That kind of weekend

Well. it seems that several people are having that kind of a weekend, so I might as well throw another log on the fire.n I spent a good portion of early Sat. morning in the local ER. When it was all done with it seems I had a rip-roaring infection so they put me on a fresh bottle of saline to which they added a metric shitload of antibiotics and a hypo of morphine. While the antibiotics are probably the key to my long term health the morphine sure was nice!

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7 Years of College Down the Drain

We live in a society where honest and decent people are afraid to become police officers, teachers, health workers, or firemen for fear of getting caught up in a YouTube moment. I began this year, my first as a teacher, with such high hopes. I felt a strong urge to give back to my community. I wanted to inspire young minds to read and learn and gain the fruits of knowledge in the same way I was inspired.

Now, I am seriously re-thinking my career choice. I owe 55k in student loan debt and am looking at job opportunities outside of the classroom.

Why?

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Patricia?

The warehouse I work out of sells excess pallets to a Hispanic gentleman. I have often helped him load. The pallets tend to get tippy as they come off the dock plate and I helped steady them. About half way through the loading process, he asked, "What's your name?" I answered, "Pat." He then asked, "Patricia?" Since it was work where I try to maintain a male persona, I corrected, "Patrick." He smiled and nodded and went back to work.

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Work want's to know.

We are at the time of year at my job where we can enroll or change our health plans and such. This year they are including a online questionnaire that's supposed to be from the feds. it's supposed to give someone a chance to freely and discretely list any and all disabilities so they know where to send resource's. there is also going to be a part where people can list any sexual and gender identities. it's supposed to be confidential and voluntary. I have spoken with a woman that I work with who is a lesbian. I've only told her that I'm bi.

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T-man at my local Safeway.

I've suspected for some time that there was trans-person working at my local Safeway. The individual has always looked very androgynous. I guess the age to be about mid to late twenties. If this person was male, the lower age would be my guess. Even more confusing was that early on the name seemed to be Holly, but later, it became apparent that the name was Hollister, which I took to be a male name.

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Wearing men's clothing

Those of you who bother to read my blog on a semi regular basis, are aware that I don't wear men's clothes at all, except at work. That doesn't mean that I don't present a masculine image on occasion, such as church and family events. (Not all my family is aware of my trans nature.)

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The Rights of the Community

Two topics:

  • Bathroom use is going to be a major issue, "Bathroom Gate" is back again.
  • LGBT discrimination, and many political issue for those of the LGBT community.

Trans-People's Rights

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Watch Out Transwomen are eveywhere, including the White House

As some of you have heard, those Trans-people are everywhere in the News and on the Streets.

What you may not have read or heard yet is, 'they' (read 'us') are now in the White House, location of much of the Untied States' political clout.

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Money making idea for TG RPG

Ideas and Opportunity.
Money Making Idea ... "TG Fantasy / (Person) Maker"
Tell the Tales of the Closet in the form of a Game!
I am open to the thoughts and ideas of our community.
Who is up for an adventure in non-code, coding?
Hope the people take this idea, and run with it for a Golden Award.
Character closet.jpeg

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