Inefficient consumption

First off, thank you for your comments on my last post – it gives me some comfort that you all acknowledge that I have some difficult decisions ahead of me, it’s not just some ridiculous issue in my head. Life and love, eh? Still, I wouldn’t ever opt to have the future made far easier by not having met the Gilb…

Anyway, today’s topic is something that although arbitrary, has disturbed me for years. Perhaps I have a somewhat Calvinist inclination, but I like to believe that anything you buy for consumption can indeed be consumed in entirety.

There are quite a few things, however, that you buy and acknowledge that some portion thereof, will not be used – ever. If I had a day to myself, I’d sit down and find a way to overcome this shortcoming and become a millionaire in patenting improved, more efficient designs.

Below, a list of some of the things that annoyingly can’t be used until finished. Feel free to add to this list of poor functional designs (or submit ideas for improvement that I can pilfer. Be generous, folks, you know I’m going to be jobless at the end of next month J). And in brackets, my estimation of the percentage of the product that can’t be used:

1. Clutch pencil lead refills (20%)
2. Normal pencils (20%)
3. Erasers (10%, depending on original size)
4. Soap (5%. If you’re my father, you glue the 5% sliver of soap to the new soap bar by squishing them together when they’re wet and then using them as a single bar. Looks like it’s clear where my Calvinistic tendencies come from…)
5. Any expensive facial product in a plastic tube (up to 10%, depending on the size to volume ratio. This, I’m convinced, is no accident – the less you’re able to use from a tube, the quicker you’re going to have to replace it. With my expensive eye cream tube, I now cut the bottom end off the tube when I can no longer squeeze more product out, and then proceed to extract the remainder of the contents as needed. It lasts about 4 weeks extra that way!)

That’s all I can think of off-hand; strange that everything I listed has a stationery/toiletry theme…

Pin the tail on the donkey

I look back on my last past and think that perhaps it’s a tad melodramatic – the world won’t end after all, just because I’m temporarily without a job.

In truth, the angst I’ve been facing has just received a much-needed kick up the butt towards resolution, because I can’t now drag and delay my decisions along forever.

See, the million-dollar question is this: I’m with a man I adore, we’re almost upon our five-year anniversary. We’ve never lived together, and in fact, in September (our 5-year mark) 43% of our relationship will have been spent long-distance (I was in Cape Town for 9 months, he will have been in Secunda for 17 months); every month we continue in our present situation will only serve to increase that percentage…

So, what does a loved-up lass do in the situation? As I’m ever so fond of doing, I created a list of all possible options:

1 – we continue as is. Despite the fact that I largely enjoy my life in Joburg and he enjoys his in Secunda, this is no longer a viable option. Beyond December, I really don’t want this to be the case without a damn good reason. Why? Because I’m almost 27, and life and love must move forward or cease, whether you want it to or not.

2 – we live in one of these two locations or halfway in between (Delmas: have you ever been there? Nope – you blinked and missed it) and one of us / both of us commute a fair amount. As wiser friends have pointed out, the strain of moving in together for the first time coupled with the daily trials of traffic and rude driving will not make for an easy, or dare I even say successful, relationship. Plus, the stress of worrying if the Gilb made it there okay every morning with mist, single lanes and blind rises to battle against – nope, I could not live with myself if any terrible accident were to occur on account of my need to move in together.

2 – I move to Secunda. Which I wasn’t overly charmed at the idea of, despite not having an overwhelming aversion to the place – yes I’m a self-confessed city whore who enjoys the pleasures of international boutique store shopping as much as the next metropolitan maiden, but Joburg is only a 2-hour trip away. The real reason behind the lack of enthusiasm is more for the fact that I’m a bit of a career lass, and my concern that my career moves after a ‘step-down’ in Secunda might be limited (yes, Rev, I did also look into the delicatessen thing, Secunda doesn’t know what a decent bakery/coffee shop is – but maybe that was what was missing from my plan – beer and boerewors!). Two things have happened since: I’m beginning to question whether I shouldn’t be re-evaluating my goals: do I really want fame/fortune over love? And, 2: my mighty arrogance has been somewhat humbled. I took it as a given that I’d be granted a job at Sass-hole upon submission of my pretty cv, but they gave me not so much as a call-back. And I submitted it twice, for two different positions, and even pointed out that one of their new engineers might leave their company if I couldn’t find a place there (it’s strategic for Sass-hole to employ the partners of their engineers, it’s a retention thing they do to hold onto their scarce and precious employees). So this currently puts Secunda out of the question.

3 – We move to a place where we can actually both live and work in the same city. Pet faves right now are Dubai (big and growing, with plenty of scope for work for engineers and financial services people alike – High in Dubai has rather good things to say about the place) and the obvious UK (more jobs for someone like me, who is also endowed with an EU passport).

Thing is, as we’re making some earnest attempts to make moves in this department for the new year, I can’t help thinking that I’m demanding a hell of a lot from the Gilb: leave your newish job (which you enjoy) in your recent(ish)ly relocated town (which you also enjoy) and all your friends (who you adore) and family (less of a big deal) to go overseas because your girlfriend’s pestering you to, just so that you can live together in the same house and see whether you were meant to be together or not… I would really like some opinions on this – from people who know neither of us, and therefore cannot be biased towards/against either one of us.

It’s not like I don’t ask the Gilb repeatedly “Are you sure you want to do this? You’re not just doing it because I asked you to?” it’s just that I’m not convinced his positive response is completely honest. Yes, he is one of those people who prefer to follow rather than lead, but how far can I actually lead him down this path, in fairness? Moral dilemma, you see…

4 – I say f@ck it, to hell with my life in SA and with the Gilb, and I do the trek alone. Reminding you of what I said earlier (“I’m with a man I adore”), you see why although this is the logical – and least disruptive – path to all concerned, I am having exceeding difficulty in committing to it. Sigh…

I don’t know what to say or think about it any more – I’ve run through the scenarios again and again and again and still have come out none the wiser. I have the distinct feeling it’s one of those choices you have to make by blind-folding yourself and throwing a dart at a board, and then sticking with it.

For glory

So. My company’s closing. Finished, kaput. It hasn’t been a real surprise; by coincidence I sit in the same area as management does, and I would have had to be completely blind to ignore the body language.

Ironically, the same challenge is faced by my father’s company at the moment – I imagine one of the top (if not the top) reasons small companies fail is a clash between key senior people in the firm.

After a three-year stint with this company (out of a total 3.75 year permanent working career), it’s time to reflect on what I’ve learnt during my time here:

1 – It takes a special breed of company to look beyond your actual qualification and rather at the person behind it. Some things can be learnt on the job as required, and all that is required is a bit of brainpower to get there – the Deloittes/KPMGs/Braits of this world can’t seem to get beyond the need for a physical qualification as proof of your capability.

2 – Small new companies can only dare to take on their mighty competitors when they have the people who are brave/arrogant/bloody-minded enough to do it. Mavericks at the helm, if you will. Without this bravado, the big guys will always win – why else would people opt to work for small companies? It isn’t the money or lifestyle that makes you go for small over large and established, after all – it’s the promise of glory because as long as you’re hungry for it, there’s only one way to go: up.

3 – Bearing in mind point #2, the vision of the few guides the crowd. There’s no executive board, no shareholder AGMs, hell, not even company guidelines, on how to deal with conflict within the upper echelons. At some point, a disagreement spurs a desire for a critical employee to leave, and because of its small size, the critical person carries enough mass with them to tear apart the fabric of the small organization.

4 – Small companies deliver a superior product – they have to. They don’t have the brand to charge as much as the larger companies do, and they have to deliver something more interesting to convince the client that they’re actually better than the large guys out there.

5 – As the owner of a small company, you have a bloody difficult task convincing everyone to pull in the direction you want to pull. Individuals are so much more important to the small company than they are to the large ones, and the good ones are that much harder to replace. A legacy is left behind by each and every person.

Enough waxing lyrical. There have been bloody exhilarating times, but bloody hard ones too - it’s now a time to move beyond reflection of why things happened the way they did, and into the realm of “what next?”

I can no longer use my favourite excuse “But I have no time to think about myself” to bury the soul searching that has lurked beneath my surface for some time now. The questions of Where? What? With whom? now need definite answers… in December I pre-emptively labeled this year as the ‘Year of Change’ and my recent actions have set in motion big wheels that cannot be stopped. I might not like the forks of the paths these wheels choose, but I have accepted that choosing any one of those paths is more important for me right now than remaining in the present rut.

Here’s hoping that I have greater resilience than I believe to possess, because I will need every spare ounce of it to make the decisions that need making in the next few months.

Fuel for thought

If you’re at all like me (and yes, in this instance you are), you’ll moan about the fact that the petrol price keeps rising. Either the price of Brent crude’s increasing, or the Dollar’s gaining on the Rand, they always tell you. But even when the Dollar weakens against the Rand the price still rises.

Now, for an un-economist like me, this confusion is downright frustrating and smacks of excuses and refineries lining their oily pockets with even more absurd profits. So, I’ve done a little check on historical prices (using data from here and here) to see whether there’s been one mother of all consumer rights cock-ups, and, the answer is that I’m undecided. (The real truth is that I had to manually redraw the graphs below, so didn’t have the actual figures to convert the y-axes to equivalent scales, where a fair comparison could be made, so all my conclusions are based on visual estimation of the figures rather than on the actual figures themselves).

Warning: I really must warn you that I have as much Economics training as a pistachio, so feel free to ignore/correct me, peeps.

First, I present for your attention Graph A: the Dollar/Rand exchange rate plotted against Brent crude price per barrel. Because I don’t have data going further back, I can’t tell you whether there is any reasonable correlation between the two statistics – 9/11 was an anomaly which will have caused substantial disruptions to either or both figures (for example, demand for fuel fell as people lost their appetite for travel by aeroplane). At face value though, one might assume that there was no significant relationship between the two.




Next, I present Graph B: Brent crude price per barrel versus petrol price. Now this graph is more the stuff of statisticians’ wet dreams, because one can draw some conclusions off this: our petrol price is quite strongly correlated with the cost of Brent crude, which while being marginally inconvenient given the uncomfortable inching up of the barrel price on a daily basis, is also reassuring in that it sort of says that the stuff we fill our gorgeous Mini Coopers with is actually mostly fuel (without too many diluting cheaper substitutes like refinery fat-cat urine). I’ve even added pretty green circles to highlight the lag in changes in Brent crude price affecting the local petrol price.



But wait, there’s more… I’ll omit the third permutation of the above data (local petrol price vs Rand/Dollar exchange rate) because it’s much like the first graph (what with the close pattern between local petrol price and Brent crude price), and skip straight to the combined graph, where all three variables are plotted on one graph:




Now again, I warn you that the scales used on the y-axes are not comparable, so visual comparison is actually not going to be that accurate, but I’ve tried to estimate the actual values for more accurate comparison than just looking at the differences from the pictures. The first pretty green circle shows an increase in the Dollar’s value against the Rand of around 70%, with the arrow indicating a corresponding 40ish% decrease in the Brent crude price over the same time period. What happens to the petrol price over this time? It remains constant on average. i.e. the smaller change in the Brent crude price appears to buffer the larger change in the exchange rate. Now look at the second green circle: this depicts a 35% drop in the Dollar: Rand value over the period, while the arrow depicts the 150% increase in Brent crude price, and the corresponding 80% increase in the local petrol price.

If the impact of the percentage changes were like for like, then the first green circle scenario should result in a (70%-40%) = 30% increase in the petrol price (as opposed to it remaining roughly constant), while the second should result in a (150%-35%) = 115% increase in petrol price rather than the actual 80% experienced.

So what does this all mean? I can think of only four options:

1) Government is lying, they’re using the exchange rate as an excuse to hike up petrol prices to fund their (social) parties (I’m thinking Zoolander parties where they spray each other with “expensive” petrol for shits, giggles and cheap thrills)

2) The lag in the exchange rate’s effect on the petrol price is out of sync with the lag of Brent crude’s effect (i.e. the major impact on the petrol price is not seen until later than Brent’s price’s impact, so we’re comparing the wrong time periods for each graph against each other)

3) Government chooses to subsidise partly the effect of the exchange rate on the petrol price, but doesn’t feel the need to do so for the effect of Brent crude’s change in price

4) I’ve got something grossly incorrect here and am now spreading a groundless conspiracy theory, in which case I humbly apologise, Big Brothe…

Mood of the month

Up here on the blogosphere, where ordinary people gets to express their personal thoughts and day-to-day diatribe, much has been said about PMS, and therefore perhaps one could be excused for assuming that an irate woman is behaving as such only because she’s about to have her period.

So, in the interests of dispelling this myth – or, perhaps to confirm it – I’ve done a 5-minute research effort (predictably, Wikipedia is a primary source) to uncover its truths.

Before starting, I’ll point out that I’ve never made a mention of having PMS on my blog, largely because I don’t believe I suffer from it. I’ve even looked back through my blog posts over a one-year ahem, period, to see if I could identify any correlation between my apparent mood when writing vs my menstrual cycle, and I can confidently say I haven’t found one. Sure, some months the pre-menstrual discomfort is greater than others, but I can’t honestly recall a time when this might have put me in a bad mood – I do believe I become more scatter-brained than usual at this time, and if I’m ever irritated about anything around my period, it would have to be this aspect – but again, irritated not irate. And irritated with myself, not anyone else. Discomfort, not unbelievably crippling pain.

So, what do the experts say?

Apparently, somewhere between 70% and 95% of women suffer from some PMS symptoms (that’s not a particularly helpful statistic. Either 1 in 4 or 1 in 20 don’t suffer any symptoms at all…), and to varying degrees. The level of discomfort can vary from month to month (the article doesn’t say why), and the most commonly reported symptoms include:
Weight gain from premenstrual water retention
Abdominal bloating
Breast tenderness
Stress or anxiety
Depression
Crying spells
Mood swings, irritability or anger
Appetite changes and food cravings
Trouble falling asleep (insomnia)
Joint or muscle pain
Headache
Fatigue (medical)
Acne
Trouble concentrating
Social withdrawal
Body temperature increase
Worsening of existing skin disorders, and respiratory (eg, allergies, infection) or eye (eg, visual disturbances, conjunctivitis) problems
Out of the 17 symptoms listed here, I experience seemingly random combinations of between 2 and 5 each month.

The Wiki entry goes on to report that 14% of women between the ages of 20 and 35 have such debilitating PMS that they have to miss work on some days, and that an unfortunate further few suffer from even more exacerbated symptoms, and this condition is considered to be distinct from PMS, labelled ‘premenstrual dysphoric disorder’ (PMDD).

The most interesting thing the entry points out is that “there is no laboratory test or unique physical findings to verify the diagnosis of PMS”, and that “a number of medical conditions are subject to exacerbation at menstruation, a process called menstrual magnification. These conditions may lead the patient to believe that she may have PMS, when the underlying disorder may be some other problem”.

Perhaps this is the reason for the discrepancy of the figures provided above – i.e. about 4 in 20 people believe they are suffering from PMS when it is actually masking some other potentially serious condition, such as depression, migraines, seizure disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, stress and asthma.

There is also a school of thought that believes PMS is a socially constructed disorder, a product of a ‘hypochondriatic culture’ – a view that actually cannot be refuted scientifically because of the vast lack of study of the syndrome.

This last fact, coupled with the poor diagnosis of PMS versus other conditions, alarms me because it has, in my mind, only negative consequences:

- Women who are suffering immense pain for around one solid month of the year may have had no cause to suffer, as their symptoms have been casually labelled by the blanket term ‘PMS’ when other treatable conditions are the cause of majority of their pain. This in turn affects their productivity in the workplace, and perhaps contributes to a perception by some that women are weaker/less ambitious than their male counterparts, because they have to take a day or two off work every month to cope with their symptoms

- The lack of scientific diagnosis leads to a social misunderstanding, one that indiscriminately labels all female unpleasantness as ‘PMS’ which is belittling because women have as many rational menstrually-unrelated reasons to get pissed off from time to time as men do (and of course no lesser tendency to display irrational anger from time to time), without their anger being dismissed for existing only because ‘it’s that time of the month’.

The point of this little piece? None really – I guess I’m just expressing my gratitude at not having to deal with the severe monthly trauma that people like Peas have to – from my side, I hail the coming of my period as a fantastic confirmation that I have not accidentally fallen pregnant. Until, of course, the day I perhaps decide I do wish to fall pregnant, in which case the onset of a period will potentially cause me far more anxiety than any period pain ever did.

Please [fucking spastic bastard] sir, can I have some more?

Being generally angry has its funny moments, you know. Like the other night, when I was infuriated at the prospect of loooooong work hours with stressfully short deadlines, and I was working with a few colleagues in the office.

At 6:30pm we placed a dinner order with Mr Delivery, from which I’d ordered the exceedingly simple dish of ‘fish of the day’ with side salad plus Appletiser. We all ordered from Ocean Basket to facilitate “speedier” delivery – even the poor vegetarian who was with us succumbed for convenience’s sake.

At about 8:30pm, the food arrives. At this point, Ant is quite furious – slides taking longer than expected, stomach grumbling, so the fact that the delivery dude walks in without apologising for his lateness puts him on a bad footing already. Ant digs through the bags, opening all the food containers to find the alleged ‘poisson du jour’ (noting, along the way, that the poor soul who ordered sushi was going to have to reassemble the delicate Japanese creations, their contents flung to each of the eight corners of its box). Prospects of a happy meal (and no, most definitely not of the McD type) rapidly decline… Could this be the box, I thought, reaching a decidedly two-dimensional container right at the bottom of the bag?

The R60 content of the box was a piece of hake with dimensions of about 10cm x 5cm x 1cm, crumbled into unappetizing little pieces. “At least the salad will be decent – that never fails” I thought. Except, there was no salad to be found. The dimwit had not brought me half of my meal, which was destined to be puny from the outset.

Social etiquette collapses at this point.

Ant [yelling]: where is my salad, for fuck sakes?

Dude [nonchalant]: what salad?

Ant: the one I ordered, the one I paid for, the one I waited 2 hours for!

Dude [still unconcerned, fumbling with the invoice]: oh. It’s not here, they didn’t pack it.

Ant [high-pitched screaming]: I don’t care what they did, I’m not Ocean Basket’s customer, I’m your customer! Don’t you check the orders before driving over at a snail’s pace? Don’t you care that they might get it wrong and you won’t earn your tip?

Colleagues back out of the room to avoid the awkwardness of the situation. They’re already tucking into their complete, albeit deficient, meals!

Dude [finally registering my earnest fury]: … … … …

Ant: You didn’t even apologise for arriving late! Give me the name of your manager right now!

Dude [still no apology, hands over the number]: … … …

Ant: Mr Manager, I am shocked at the pathetic product and service I have received [blah blah blah, rant, scream, swear etc]

Mr Manager: I’m terribly sorry, I will have [incompetent fuckwit] deliver your salad immediately.

Ant: By “immediately” I trust you don’t mean two hours.

Loud crashing noise of the phone speaker/mouthpiece thingy being slammed back into its cradle.

After sending the dude off (still with no apology) I had a rethink about how badly I wanted delivery dude’s sperm/snot/urine in my digestive system, and concluded that the salad might not be worth it. Mr Manager, how ever, did not call his driver to tell him not to return, but when he did, I was ravenous enough to overcome the vulgar thought of eating this man’s excretions, and hey, I’m still here to tell the tale.

I’ve noticed a lot more cooperation in carrying out instructions from my juniors who witnessed my attack – so all things come to a good end, I suppose.

Aside 1: on leaving the office last night, the security guard told me to ‘have sweet dreams’. Bizarre man, bizarre. I didn’t, by the by.
Aside 2: on Thursday evening, I have a slim chance of being voted in as the Vice Wop of our Wop society – Woplanders beware! Mwahahahahahahahaha!

R U disrespectin’ moi famille?

In keeping with the latest fashionable social trends in Hollywood, a tale of “frienemies” follows – though the protagonists are unlikely to yield terribly high hit rates if their naked partying photos were splashed across the Internet a’ la Lohan/Hilton/Spears…

There’s something that has been bothering me for ages around the issue of friendship. I’ve been unfortunate enough to witness the phenomenon twice, and this time I vow I will not allow it to happen again.

Last night, my father’s company’s shareholders (originally he had 50% shareholding and his partner, his best friend at the time, had the other 50%) called a special meeting to attempt to resolve what currently appear to be irreconcilable differences. It’s been ten years since they bought the business together, and huge differences of opinion began to appear very shortly after that, and then thankfully his partner’s family emigrated to the UK to try and establish a branch of the business there. (This was disastrously unsuccessful, so they shut that business down, though the family continued to live there, relinquishing management control to my father to be simply shareholders).

Then, a few years ago, my Dad’s best friend/partner died of cancer, leaving his shareholding split equally between each of his two daughters, and out of friendship my father agreed to have the wife draw a salary equal to his to support themselves. Now, their family wants to come back to SA and run the business with my father, which everyone can see will be a disaster from the outset – they know each other too well, both my Father and his partner’s widow are strong-willed stubborn people who know how to push each other’s buttons, and use every available opportunity to do so. Ag well…

I observed this whole process right from the beginning, and thought that I’d learnt a valuable lesson: friends and business (and probably family and business too) don’t mix.

And then, a year ago, a friend asked me for a favour: please introduce him to my company in the hope that some vac work could be negotiated so that he could get some work experience (his varsity degree being a colourful patchwork of marks varying from the very good to the downright horrific). My boss loved him – he is an intelligent and knowledgeable fellow after all – and agreed to have him on board. Now, our friendship has always been based on argumentative banter at the best of times, so it shouldn’t have been particularly hard for me to imagine that our working relationship might have been less than ideal. But that thought hardly crossed my mind, as keen as I was to help out a mate in need.

The ‘one month’ turned into three months, and without getting into the nitty gritty, all I need say is that every moment of interaction between us was unpleasant. I believed everything would be alright in the end, because he had a ‘finite’ term of engagement with the company. Not so, because his contract was eventually converted to a permanent one, and we’ve had to accept that ‘working’ together is a daily reality. Of course, I’ll tell you here how it’s all his fault for the fighting and bickering, but to attempt to present an unbiased opinion I’ll also have to tell you that, judging by the way he has treated me in the office, he must think me the greatest idiot ever to walk the face of the planet. Perhaps I am, but in that case I used to be the greatest idiot ever to walk the face of the planet who was also a recognised good friend of this particular dude.

And, at a point about two years ago, I would have listed him as one of my closest and truest friends. Today, it’s safe to say that we’d both avoid attending the same social engagement if we knew the other was going to be there.

How is it that such great friends can drift so much apart, on the basis of what happens in an office, forfucksakes? We barely have to engage with one another, and yet always manage to find a fight to pick. And as for my father’s situation, well… the partner’s daughters are technically my oldest friends from the diaper days, but family alliances will dictate that they stick to their side of the fence while we stick to ours.

This leads me to draw one of the following possible conclusions, although being the greatest idiot to walk the face of the planet, I am unable to conclude which is correct. Some help from your side would be much appreciated:

1. We’re fundamentally different people in work contexts as opposed to social contexts – the biggest ruthless bastard in the boardroom might be the most chilled oke around the braai. If this is true, it’s in everyone’s best interests never to discuss work in a social setting, in case you let on what a punkass rat-race screw-over bitch you are in a pinstripe suit and how easy it would be to imprint your stilettoed footprint on one of your friends’ faces if ever the occasion arose. This intrinsically implies (I think, being the simple-minded moron that I am) that most friendships, if put to the test in an office environment, would falter. And, perhaps, that those people you dislike in social settings might be the ones you find most common ground with in the workplace.

2. Your best friends are those you meet at work. Why? Because you know what they’re like at work and can deal with that, and yet you’re also able to transpose that commonality out of the office and into the Baron. That means that you should judge all your friendships that have never been tested in the office with natural skepticism as to their true strength, even if many of those friendships go far further back than those from your workdays do. I don’t like this conclusion, because while I do have some very close friends I met through my jobs, a greater number of close friends stem from school/varsity days, and these are certainly not friendships I’d like to regard as ‘handle with caution’ – we’ve been through too much and shared too much for that to be a satisfactory conclusion.

3. As human beings, we’re too complex to define by our behaviour in any specific context (e.g. social circle, work environment, living environment) and we have sometimes very different ways of behaving, depending on what the activities are we expect to engage in. Given that everyone is uniquely different (similar on some fronts, different on others, but as a whole package, totally unique) it is ridiculous to expect that you should find commonality in every facet of your life. So you should enter any newly shared facet of your life with an existing friend (e.g. sharing a house with them, or starting to work with them, or starting a romantic relationship with them) with extreme caution, because the high expectations of enjoyment that you inevitably have at the beginning, will quite likely be dashed – perhaps irreparably, along with the friendship – before the party’s over.

PS: I’m not really sure what’s wrong with me at the moment. I’m moody and reflective and questioning everything that I’ve come to accept as a given. Best I consult the astrology guides to see what the hell is up with Virgo lately. Star sign swap, anybody?