Shouting at Anne day, I might add.
Buehler shouted at me because, following established procedure, I sent an e-mail to the e-mail address the developers set up for communicating with the group and asking questions. I asked a question about a software update.
One of the developers is in the office today and it was Buehler's perspective that I should just have bypassed procedure and asked the developer.
Buehler is under the impression I was just being too lazy to walk the ten steps to ask the question.
I am under the impression, (a) that I was on the phone, on hold when the question occured to me so I just sent out a quick, one-line e-mail; and, (b) that I'm sick to death of these, "he said, she said" conversations and that I want to get answers to my questions in writing.
I do feel sorry for the Stooges, though. Two of them were here when Buehler shouted at me and they seemed to think it was a major deal. They slunk away to the conference room and haven't come out since.
I don't feel sorry for the Third Stooge, He's the "project coordinator" and he also shouted at me (in e-mail) this morning.
They're a software development company. I asked if they were bug-testing a piece of software that they had asked me to "take a look at."
(Now, mind you, I know they probably aren't because they either don't have the staff or don't have the interest in bug-testing properly, as witnessed by the fact that everything we've released so far has been full of bugs, but if asking me to "take a look" at something means they're later going to blame me if there are bugs, then I want to know that up front.)
He wrote back and said if I had any questions i should call him.
I wrote back and asked, quite reasonably I think (okay, it was potentially inflammatory, but I used a smiley), if that meant they weren't bug-testing, and then he shouted at me and said they had "QA'd the changes you asked us to make" which, if you think about it, is hardly the same thing as bug-testing the entire piece of software. Then he "shouted" that what he meant was for me to call him.
I think, again, I think I'm being quite reasonable to say that if he thought my question needed a phone call response instead of e-mail, it would have been simple enough for him to pick up the phone and call me. (It's a local call, after all.)
I think he forgets that my company is, in fact, the client in this situation. Checks, when they are written, flow from my company to his.
I think him shouting at me was obnoxious. I think Buehler shouting at me was obnoxious.
Just obnoxious, though. Not scary-making. Generally I'm pretty freaky about being shouted at. I have weird and inexplicable shouting issues.
For some (good) reason, this morning's shouting didn't actually upset me.
I mean, I'm wallowing in a self-pitying pond of self-righteous indignation even though I'm well aware that I was partly to blame for both situations, but I think that's just human. Right?
The good news is that I'm demonstrating my snit by working twice as hard (my brain is an odd place to be) and I've gotten more done in the first four hours of today than I did all day yesterday.
I'm not calling the Third Stooge, though. If he wants to talk, he can pick up the phone. Until then, his project and the payment for the same can just sit in limbo.
It's good to be passive-aggressive.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:34 PM
Argh, dammit
Extension 17 is pissing me off today. He pisses me off every time he's in the office. He only comes in one or two days a week (the rest of the time he's "working from home" even though he's an hourly employee and should be here, under supervision) and on each of those two days a week he deigns to show up, he gets an estimated 20 personal calls from his family.
We don't have a receptionist, okay? I pick up the phone when it rings because I work with people in healthcare and when they have 60 seconds to return a call to me, I want to be able to talk to them without making them fight their way through our phone system.
Nothing pisses me off more than picking up eight calls in a row in a three-minute period and having them all be for Extension 17.
Okay, it's Friday, which is good.
But the phone started ringing early this morning and I was bouncing between trying to reschedule an installation and a netmeeting to troubleshoot at two different practices because the entire town where my tech guy lives had lost power and he didn't have a computer to use, while fielding a call from someone I've been trying to get hold of all week, when someone knocks on the office door.
(When I'm here alone in the early morning, I don't unlock the door when I come in. It's a security thing.)
So, I'm on this one call for about two minutes and during the entire two minutes this person keeps knocking and banging and (I think) kicking the door on the average of every once every 10 seconds.
Turns out it’s the guy who rents office space from us and who never brings his key (I have to let him in every day) and he just says, "hi" when I finally get off the phone and go to open the door.
I said, "I'm sorry, I was on the phone" and he just walked past me, without another word.
I don't mind opening the door for someone even though I feel like a freaking doorman at a hotel for Keyless Joe. I've let him in almost every day for a year, but if he can't wait patiently for a few seconds when the door doesn't magically swing open when he arrives, I'm done being nice. I know he has a key because he's used it at least half a dozen times in the last 18 months, so it's just some kind of congenital idiocy and I'm done with it.
From now on, Keyless will be waiting to be let in every day until he buys himself a clue.
If I were a mature, rational person, I'd just tell him to bring his key, but I'm not, I'm passive-aggressive and I'm mad, so I'm going to make him work out this complicated key concept for himself.
(The phone just rang. The Tweenybopper picked it up, something she usually doesn't do. It was for Extension 17.
Technically the Twennybopper is the closest thing we have to a receptionist but her direct boss told her she didn't have to pick up inbound calls if she didn't want to. He made this decision, you understand, in direct response to her complaints about the number of personal calls that arrive for Extension 17.)
I've had a bad week. Did you ever get PMS that lasted for a week? Because if you did, you know what I'm going through.
I don't think it's a mood swing. I don’t think of a mood swing as something that lasts for five solid days.
It might have something to do with the diet. I put four pounds back on so I went back on the diet again. I'm back down 3-1/2 (or I was, before this week, when I haven't had the nerve to weigh myself) but I'd thought about going ahead and dropping another five or so, as long as I was dieting anyhow. I actually stopped about five or six pounds short of my goal when I quit dieting last fall.
Now I'm not so sure. About losing more weight, I mean. As I recall, I was eternally pissed off at the world for about two weeks the last time I started the diet, too and this time I'm really too busy at work to be able to indulge myself this way right now.
Not that I've been that productive this week. I've worked about 2-3 hours a day in spite of having an easy 10 hours a day worth of work in front of me, so I've got guilt to add to my burden.
A really bad week.
Also, I see blogger changed their interface and I hate it. I hate the perception we all need cartoon pictures to navigate our way around a webpage because we've all become such idiots we can't read. I hate losing the preview window.
And, as I just discovered, if you click "view blog" to see what your unpreviewable post looks like, it takes you out of the blogger software and to the actual blog. Coming back to the blog, it took me several minutes to figure out how to edit a post.
This is a real step backward for blogger. They should be embarrassed.
I hate everything.
Posted by AnneZook at 01:24 PMThe other day, I took one of those, "what is your "virtual" age, versus your "real" age quizzes online.
It pretended to evaluate my "age" as a result of personal and family health history, exercise and eating habits and then tell you how "old" that virtually made you. Stupid quiz said I was, in essence, 15 years older than my biological age.
How much you wanna bet I won't be allowed to retire early on the strength of that assessment?
I also took a "50 general questions about fandom" or something test. I knew 20 answers is all. And I have doubts about two of them.
So I'm old and stupid and I'd like to thank all of the "friends" who sent me URLs for quizzes in the past couple of days.
I so totally need new friends, don't I?
Actually, considering those results, I think it's my friends who need a new friend.
The Stooges have not yet ceased to annoy me on a variety of levels.
At one point Moe mentioned that they have not yet moved into the empty office they were clearing out the other day because their haphazard approach to "clearing out" left handfuls of nuts, bolts, bent nails, and paper scraps, on the floor. It was the clear inference that it's in some way my job to crawl around that room on my hands and knees, finishing the cleaning job.
The really mind-boggling part of that is that Moe had said he had a "shop vac" which is, we're to understand, a vacuum cleaner that will tidy up such debris that he could use.
He was actually Standing. In. Front. Of. Me. Holding. The. Vacuum. Cleaner. In. His. Hand. when he said that, in his view, it was our job to clean that room up for them.
I mentioned that in Anne's World, them what makes the mess cleans it up.
He agreed that that was a sensible view.
And then he Left. Without. Vacuuming. The. Mess. Up.
There are days when I really do think the world would be a better place with a helluva lot fewer men in it.
Also? I think my computer, this one, here at work, is dying on me. They wiped the hard drive and re-installed everything from the OS on up, but it's getting flakier and flakier. I'm desperately trying to remember what data I have backed up and what data I need to find a home for. Because I work with a bunch of criminally insane lunatics, their "network" system consists of shoving shared files in bunches on one or another of our computers, meaning there's no real "back-up server" you can safely store anything to.
Because I am, I really am trying to stop whining about everything that's going wrong, I'll spare you the saga of the clumsy, poorly designed, user UNfriendly software program I'm struggling to win user acceptance for.
I'm just saying. If you should find yourself saying, "Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to hear from Anne"? No. It wouldn't.
I'm crabby.
Posted by AnneZook at 11:48 AM