I like to be talked to.
Bernie is starting his Friday Wig-out early this week. He already sent me and IM and an e-mail with the same question in them. (The question wasn't in any way urgent.)
If it's going to be like this today, I'm going home.
long pause....
Okay, so far it looks like it was a false alarm. He hasn't done anything else. Maybe I'm just getting paranoid?
Have a nice weekend!
Posted by AnneZook at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)Sans punchline.
Okay, so ten days ago, ChaosBoy was wigging out about not getting as much data from one job as we'd hoped and as we should have, due to an error in the product programming that has existed for the past four years but somehow managed to get under his radar until that day.
So, he offered the client 10 free days of equipment rentals for n/c, to collect more data (after we fixed the problem). They only thing they'd have to pay for is the cost of getting a new report generated (we use an outside company for that).
Nothing was too much to offer, no price was too high to pay to fix it all.
Ten days ago.
Today, he's all bitter because they'd had 10 days' free rental and now he has to pay me for 40 minutes to drive over, get the equipment, and bring it back to the office.
Ten days ago, he couldn't offer them enough free stuff.
Today he's mad because they got free stuff.
Today he says to tell them to ship the stuff back but, you know, we always drop off and pick up for this client and the equipment wasn't packed for shipping.
So, tomorrow, I'm going to drive over and get the boxes and not tell him about it. He'll never know the difference. Or, I could argue with him until he does it my way. (That's inevitable since there's no way he'll call the client himself and say that he's now sorry he went the extra mile for them.)
And the weird thing is he's not really even wigging out today.
He's just....
Weird.
The R.C. has instigated a game today. Only positive statements allowed.
I am...interested to find how difficult this is for me. Clearly this is a good game, and one I'm in need of.
(I just spent an hour and a half typing 28 names and addresses into the contact database. I wasn't dinking around...I was just sitting here, working. How could it have taken three minutes per record?)
Today I need to go to the Post Office and the bank. To buy stamps for a mailing and to make a deposit. And it's such a lovely day outside, I don't even mind using my own $2.89/gallon gas and putting miles on my own 15 year-old car on company business!
Being positive is a lot of work.
Last night, the mood was not properly upon me to work on the afghan and I only got three rows done. Tonight I will do better. (Rah! Rah!) It's about half, maybe 3/5 of the way through, thanks to the hours I spent on Sunday. I've bought entirely too much yarn, so now I'm musing on what I can do with the extra. I'm going to have three or four skeins leftover. It's a nice, variegated pattern, (dark green, cream, and dark purple) but it doesn't really go with our living room, so I can't make something for home use. (Not that I could make anything worth having out of four skeins.) (But, yes! I can! I will make...a lap rug! Or a dolly blanket! Something positive.)
The R.C. has found a new hairdresser who managed to cut her hair in less than 30 minutes last night and who only charged $25. And it looks good.
Much as I regret giving up my 10 year association with Clipper, I lust after a hairdresser I can get to by walking across the street from my apartment, instead of driving 1-1/2 hour roundtrip, and I lust after sitting in the chair for 30 minutes, instead of 1-2 hours. Clipper does good work but I find I'm reluctant to make appointments because I have to devote an entire evening to the process and it costs around $100 (for cut and color both). Thus, my hair always looks like hell.
But! Think Positive! No more! This new person (as-yet unmet and unnamed) is going to free me from the tyranny of the Stylist and return to me the freedom of the Haircut!
And! It's FRUGAL, and thus in keeping with this month's Pay For That Cruise Fast theme.
Aside from that, I'm afraid to talk about anything else for fear I might not Maintain The Positive.
Today's timecard really should start with the entry, "Early - 1/2 hour." Not that anyone but me will ever know.
I guess Bernie is "working from home" today. At least, it's 12:15 and I haven't seen him and have only received one, brief e-mail from him today.
In fact, no one but me showed up today. Typical. I was here half an hour early, and there's no one who can confirm that I'm not always late.
I hesitate to say that it's a very peaceful sort of day, because the last time I said that, Chaos Boy had a major meltdown thirty seconds later and I don't want to jinx anything, but....
I've been taking advantage of the peace to do a little work.
Like cleaning out some of the random handfuls of CDs and floppy disks just laying around unloved. Throwing away manuals for things like Outlook '98. Finding a place to hide all of those miscellaneous kinds of "cords" and "cables" that always seem to accumulate around computers. Digging out the wipes and actually cleaning a few now-empty surfaces.
Trying, in short, to make the office look just a little less like a slum clearance area. (I do wish I'd known I was going to get into this mood when I got dressed this morning. I'd have worn jeans and a tee-shirt instead of nice clothes.)
Part of Bernie's bitch-list for the last week (since he laid off DiamondGirl) is that the office looks like no one works here (in addition to looking like a trash dump), so I also tried to make sure the computer equipment and desks that are still hooked up are arranged on desks to look like the person who works with them just didn't come in today or something.
The things I do to try and placate that nitwit.
I found two laptops and two scanners during my foraging. Presumable none of them work, or they'd be hooked up and in use. I have no idea why they weren't disposed of, but I stuffed them in a drawer against the time when I can find someone to ask about them. (Out of sight, out of mind, that's my approach. None of this is my "stuff" and some of it I really can't just throw out without asking someone.)
I also did bookkeeping. Mostly just paying bills and posting stuff and filing.
I tried to teach myself to change the batteries in our electronic boxes, which is another task Bernie has decided should fall to my lot.* This was not so much of a success. I got one done but on the second one, I couldn't get the box to go back together, so I just left it all. If anyone else ever shows up for work around here, maybe they can show me how to reassemble it all.
Damn. I left my desk for ten minutes to get the mail, go to the bathroom, and check something in the shipping room, and Chaos boy sent me 2 IMs, five e-mails, and called me six times.
I should have kept my mouth shut.
_______________
(* Yesterday's new responsibility was learning to upload graphics for our online survey program. Which sounds all well and fine until I explain that for some irrational reason, they don't just use an .ftp program. No, it's a 30-step process involving three different software programs. Boggles. The mind.)
So. Today's timesheet lies start with the entry, "Late - 1 hour."
Sigh. I know I set my alarm last night. I checked it. I have no idea what happened. I didn't go to bed unusually late and sleep through it or anything. It just...didn't go off. Or, yes, maybe I slept through it in spite of not being, as far as I know, unusually tired.
So, of course, when I got in this morning, we had a full complement of workers here. Buehler, Moe, Bernie, and DiamondGirl (in to do a special project). No one is ever here before 9:30 or 10:00, but apparently today they all showed up at 8:30.
Isn't that just the way of things? Day after day I'm here at 8:30 or before, and there's no one here to notice or care. On those rare occasions I'm late, Buehler is invariably here and today, when I'm later than I've ever been, everyone is here to notice.
I wasn't quite as tense about it before I noticed that Bernie was already in. I'm pretty much over it now, though. Considering we escaped a major meltdown on Friday purely through the grace of me refusing to take any of the bait he offered, I think he'd do well to be calm for a couple of days.
Today is the Great E-Mail Switchover, when he's learning that everything he wants to have done could have easily been done if he'd upgraded the Office suite we're using at any time in the last four years. (He gave in and ordered the upgrade. It's not worth upgrading for day-to-day functionality, but for a one-in-a-blue-moon e-mail provider change, he's willing to spend the money.
He's also back to the concept that if I reboot the network internet access router every Friday, that could magically clear up the Qwest-related DSL problems we've been having on the weekends. Today I just said, point-blank. "Rebooting doesn't do anything if there isn't a problem. It's not going to preemptively fix something that might happen an hour or twelve hours later." I dunno what he's thinking. If the 'net is working when I leave, then it's working, even without a reboot. And I'm sure as heck not offering to come in here every weekend and reboot it in case of a problem. If he wants that kind of service, he needs to have a tech person on call and he got rid of the tech staff.
I'm feeling twitchy today.
Part of it's residual guilt for being late. Part of it is because I can't figure out what I'm supposed to be working on. I've been here for an hour and a half and I haven't done anything I can put on my timesheet except check my voicemail.
Also, as sometimes happens when I've had a particularly entertaining weekend, my brain is entirely uninterested in working.
I've been, I should mention, Doing Projects evenings and weekends recently. Deciding that I've squandered too many precious hours just dinking around on-line, I've made a new resolution to start doing things with my free time.
I'm making an afghan. (Has to be done by July 5, it's a gift, so I'm having to make it a priority.)
I dug out my drawing stuff and I'm spending 1-2 hours a day practicing. I've pretty much lost whatever slim amount of progress I'd made last year (use it or lose it!), so I'm essentially starting over from scratch. I know a bit more about theory than I did a year ago, but I'm fumble-fingered.
Cards! Yes, for those of you who receive such from me, it's time for that annual search for this year's Holiday Card Design. I don't know why I make my own cards. I'm not talented at "crafts" things and ideas are hard to come by. And yet, instead of spending $5 to buy twice as many as I could possibly need, I spend about $100 each year buying samples of this and that and trying them out until I settle on something I think I can actually accomplish. And then I spend about 40 hours making the cards.
'Way back when the R.C. and I first started this, the theory was that if our hand were busy with this project all fall, we wouldn't be stuffing our faces all the time in the evenings.
It was a nice theory.
Now, post-diet and having plenty of things to do with my free time, I'm really wondering if I shouldn't just spend $20 to buy really fancy holiday cards and forget the endless hours it takes me to produce something "homemade" by hand.
(P.S. I do wish Bernie wouldn't tell lies. Why would he tell me I need to learn something because the Tweenybopper used to do it, when he can be reasonably certain that DiamondGirl, who has to teach me this thing, will tell me that the Tweenybopper never did it?
Why does he tell these lies? It's so pointless and he always gets found out, even if I'm too polit and too mature to stomp into his office and say, "Gotcha!")
Bernie is 'working from home' today. Since Buehler is out of town on vacation, I'm alone here in the office. It's gloriously peaceful.
I've exported the company's task list, the shared sales contacts, and my personal e-mails into Excel files, preparing for the Great E-Mail Migration on Monday. I'm currently copying all of my docs from the in-office exchange server (which we also use for our network) to my hard drive.
I've done everything I can think of to be sure I can still work on Monday if the entire network crashes around our heads.
The next task on my list is bookkeeping, including filing my expenses for reimbursement for the last three months.
I think I'm entitled to dink around for a few minutes before I face that task. Considering that I haven't even balance my own checkbook in fifteen years, I think it's understandable that I'm not excited by the bookkeeping portion of my job.
(Whoops. There goes my peaceful day. The broadcast e-mail that was supposed to go out at 8:00 last night hasn't gone. Chaos Boy just called, wigging out. I was supposed to check my e-mail last night and this morning to look for it and I totally forgot.
He apparently did check, but didn't bother to notify either me or DiamondGirl that it hadn't shown up and now, fourteen hours later, he's worked himself into a tizzy about it.
Now he's IMing me that he doesn't want me to work on anything else until this is resolved...but there's nothing I can do about this. Only DiamondGirl can fix it. She's not at home, but when I called her, she said she'd head straight home and look into it.
Granted, I accept responsibility for not having followed up (and I assume she will accept the same) but sending e-mails and calling me every ninety seconds and IMing me while he dials the phone or hits "send" on the e-mail isn't going to help.
Sigh. I was going to write a whole, long, lovely post about the interesting things I've been reading recently, while I wait for this massive file-transfer to finish, but I guess I'd better find something like "work" to fill my time.
For those interesting in the on-going saga of my worklife, this week Bernie complained because we spent 30 minutes working on a proposal for a client who wanted to buy our product and that time isn't billable.
Then he pissed off another potential client, complaining because he had to answer questions from a second person after he'd already told our first contact everything he thought she should need to know in order to decide whether or not to invite us to bid on their upcoming RFP.
So, you know. Still crazy.
Posted by AnneZook at 08:40 PM | Comments (2)That's what I've largely been doing so far today.
Having discovered a Magic Trick that allowed me to save projects and tasks out of Outlook and into an Excel spreadsheet, I spent two hours yesterday downloading the necessary software components (I loathe tech people who do not install all of Microsoft Office when they install), doing the export, and cleaning up the document.
This morning I spent an hour exporting the sales contact list and similarly cleaning it up and formatting it.
Bernie isn't going to like being nicked for that much time but he has to pay for how long it takes to do shit. And if he's asking a clueless nitwit to do tech stuff, it's going to take two or three times as long as it should. (Although, to be fair, had the necessary components been installed with the rest of the Office suite, I would have saved at least half that time.)
We're going to be having today's first meeting in a few minutes. High on his list of priorities is the work he wants from DiamondGirl. Even though she no longer works here, her list of "tasks" is similar in length to those he used to give me when she did work here. (In his defense, most of these are things he asked for before she left. But since he also asked her to redo both websites and migrate both of them to new ISPs, she really did have quite a lot to do in her last week. Add to that the fact that our office 'net access was creeping like a herd of geriatric turtles most of the week, and....)
It occurs to me that I defend DiamondGirl more than I should. Probably because I like her and because Bernie annoys me constantly.
Let's be very clear...she was putting in anything but an 8-hour workday for those last two weeks. In fact, she rarely put in a full days' work at all, at least since I started here. We were lucky to have her in the office for 6-7 hours a day, and of that, I'd estimate she was actually working only three or four hours. Which would be all well and good if she was one of those who could put out a full days' work in half the time normal people take, but she didn't seem to be that type.
I know she wasn't interested in most of the work we're doing, and that and didn't like doing some of it, but that's hardly reason to go on a months'-long slowdown.
So, you know, don't run away with the idea that I'm finding fault with Bernie because he wants to get the tail-ends of these last few projects wrapped up so that we can function without her. He's right to do that. Although I'm told she was an exceptional employee in the past, from what I can tell she hasn't been worth much since she returned to the company last October. There were very few days in the fourteen weeks I worked with her when I was impressed with her output or her attitude.
So. Just to be fair.
Because I rag about Bernie quite a lot and it's not right that you should all think he's the villain and DiamondGirl and I are the angels. (Right now, for instance, I'm supposed to be prepping for this meeting, but I've spent 15 minute typing this blog entry instead.)
Of course, he's no jewel. Yesterday he sent me a pissy e-mail wanting to jack up the price of our product for a client because it was costing him money for me to spend time sending them a bid.
So, you know. He's still crazy.
Thank goodness Chaos Boy is 'working from home' today. If he didn't do that a couple of times a week, I don't think I could take it.
He got progressively wiggier yesterday, until by the time he left, we were both on the ragged edge of a meltdown.
He's one of those people who doesn't think he's getting through to you unless you have some OTT emotional reaction to what he's saying, so he keeps winding himself tighter and tighter trying to make the people around him as upset as he is over...whatever is bothering him at the moment. No amount of, "yes, I hear you, I understand you, and this is how we might be able to handle this" works.
And, although I informed him in short, clear words that the likelihood of me responding with any kind of emotional outbreak of my own was zero ("That isn't going to happen," I said. I think that's pretty clear.), he continued to whip himself into an ever-greater frenzy in an attempt to get me angry over some stuff that wasn't done last week and which he now things we're dead without.
No, it wasn't, but no, we aren't. It will take 30 minutes to fix. Unless you continue to fan the flames of your insecurity and ignorance with diatribes about you've been robbed of the money you paid your employee because she spent the time working on the other five "critically important" projects you handed her last week. Because if you continue to do that, no one on the planet is going to be willing to work with you and you're actually going to be screwed, business-wise.
(Maybe my return to fandom is less about having found a new fandom than it is about me needing a place to hide from Ugly Reality again, for the first time in a lot of years? Do I have to be suffering the miseries at work to generate the emotional energy required by fandom? For someone who's as much of a fluffy bunny, fandom-wise, as I am, that seems very odd and unlikely, don't you think? And yet...here I am, with a lunatic boss for the first time in seven years and here I am, dabbling in fandom again for the first time in seven years.)
Anyhow. I think I figured out what part of Bernie's problem is. He doesn't actually want to be the boss except in the sense that he wants to be able to tell people what to do.
He doesn't want to make the decisions or take the responsibility or follow-through on anything. He wants to just tell someone what to do in the sketchiest possible fashion, and then have it magically happen out of his sight and without costing him any further thought.
And, you know, I can totally operate like that but not until I really have a handle on the stuff that needs to be done.
Except...I can't, because he laid DiamondGirl off and it's just ludicrous to think that any tech work we need to have done can be done by outside contractors who also have other commitments.
I mean, yeah, they can, but one of Chaos Boy's big hot-buttons is having things done Right When He Wants Them, which you can sometimes get from employees and almost never get from contractors. You can't suddenly decide you need to build a 15-screen flash-based web presentation for a client meeting in two days and be sure a contractor will have the slack in their schedule to do it.
All of which would worry me less if he'd actually hired someone to do the website-related work we have for our own site and for the client sites we dink around with, but he hasn't so far.
Oh. And the famous database person he's contracting with to do the db stuff DiamondGirl couldn't do? Apparently he worked here before and was let go on account of extreme flakiness. Which I found out from DiamondGirl yesterday. So that's already another problem brewing.
As it happens, he's already informed me that the motley collection of contractors he's cobbled together will be my problem to manage. Considering that he wigged out over how I was spending too much time managing DiamondGirl because fifteen minutes a day was spent talking with her about tasks we were both working on, I can just imagine how he's going to respond to a time-card that shows six hours a day trying to coax this bunch o'nuts into forgetting Bernie's tirades and focusing on the money he's paying them.
And, yes, of course I will now be managing five contractors in addition to being the office manager, bookkeeper, HR person, coding surveys in both pieces of proprietary software, handing box inventory, shipping and receiving for clients and repairs, and...wait for it...learning to do some of the simple repairs myself so he doesn't have to pay the repair people to do them!
Okay, maybe it's just me, but this is insane, right? Am I crazy, or is this sort of a lot of hats for one person?
All this in addition to the job I was hired to do, which was to be the account manager for all clients. Yes, I'm also the sole point of contact for all clients on all projects. Once they've signed a contract, Bernie doesn't want to talk to them any more. (That's what he does, by the way. In this scenario, he gets them to sign a contract. I am, thus far, unable to discover any other jobs that he's got his own name on.)
Okay, I'm just not going to think about it. Because last night I dreamed about the data servers in St. Louis and worried over how they were labeled. And if I'm dreaming about servers, I want them to be an entirely different kind of servers, if you catch my drift.
So, today I have to swing by a client's on my way in and drop off a power adaptor. (I was at the client's precisely at 8:30, my nominal "starting time," so don’t' run away with the idea that I took advantage of needing to do an errand to sleep in or anything).
After that, I drive back and I'm pulling into the office parking lot when my cell phone rings. It's Sassy, telling me that Buehler (who is supposed to be on vacation in Mexico today) is wigging out because he can't find me. Seems that Buehler's business checking is on the verge of an overdraft and he desperately wants me to check the weekend mail, find the check that's supposed to be there, and rush madly to the bank and deposit it for him.
I check said mail, said check is there. I call Sassy back and swear an oath that I'm taking off to deposit it instantly. As long as I'm going, I prepare the deposits for my company and take them with me. Temperature is already skyrocketing and both banks are in Cherry Creek, parking hell, but I eventually manage to find two spaces (the banks aren't close enough together to walk from one to the other unless you have an extra half-hour or so to spare.
I'm finally here, at my desk, and ready to "work" at 10:02 a.m.
It's going to be a rough day. I'm not good at mornings under the best of circumstances and driving madly all over town doing unexpected errands is going to throw off my rhythm for hours.
Update: Bernie's been in my office four times since arrived 20 minutes ago.
Once to say he wants to show me what he did this weekend. (He was cleaning boxes. Does he really require a formal meeting so I can praise him?)
Once to ask if a software program will work without one of its components. (Ummm...no.)
Once to take a communication base & serial cable from my computer so he could use them (any normal human being would have just picked up one of the 50 bases and one of the 100 cables in the shipping room, instead of crawling around my office, dismantling my set-up) and once to return said items when the serial cable turned out to be...well, a serial cable, not USB.
I hate Mondays.
Update 2: I cannot believe this. I just dashed by his office (I'm trying to get everything he needs packed for a client delivery on Wednesday) and he's sitting in there with Windex and a paper towel, cleaning the screens on the boxes. He's just...sitting there. Waiting for me to come in and look at the boxes before he can let it go and do some work.
My boss is a very sick person.
Update 3: Now we had an hour-long meeting that started out being about the tasks that didn't get done last week and wound up for the last 45 minutes being about how the office isn't tidy or well-organized. Considering that it's looked like this since 12 years before they hired me, I can't feel that I am at fault.
Update 4: We have had another meeting. Apparently my 'tude is bad.
His feelings were hurt because when I told him I was in the middle of something and asked him to give me five minutes, he came back fifteen seconds later and wanted something else and I was annoyed and it showed.
I have agreed, with all solemnity, and not promised to work on it. If he wants me to play bookkeeper and HR person, he has to live with the idea that there will be moments when I'm laboriously tracking the path of some document and simply not available to give him a paper copy of something he has on his computer but is too lazy to look for.
DiamondGirl is gone, you know. Friday was her last day. Today she's IMing me and laughing at me.
Posted by AnneZook at 10:04 AM | Comments (3)There is a small possibility that I have my underwear on backwards. It seems to be making intimate with a part of my anatomy that I prefer my underwear to cover, not cuddle.
You might think this isn't something that would be hard to figure out, but depending upon the cut and style, it's not always obvious. Front versus back, I mean. And if you cut the tags out, as I frequently do because they scratch, that makes it even more difficult. (Tags bite.)
Still. I'm Pink And Pretty All Under today. That counts for something, right?
If I get in an accident, I have nothing to worry about. Not like the last time I got in an accident. (That day, I'd have just been glad to be wearing underwear, regardless of fit.) (I have to say, that little incident certainly cured me of going smokeless.)
Recently, the R.C. and I were out shopping and saw a woman helping her young daughter buy a pair of white pants. Now, leaving aside my dislike of white pants in general, I have to say that, had I been the R.C. and had I been the unwilling auditor of their conversation, I think I might have spoken up.
"We will," mother said, "have to buy you some more white g-strings."
#1 - Call me hide-bound and conservative, but I don’t think a 12 year-old girl should be wearing g-strings. In my day, only a stripper or a 'ho wore a g-string.
#2 - Only a lunatic wears white underwear under white pants. If you must wear white pants, wear beige, or whatever darker color of undergarment is appropriate to your skin tone. White will show through.
The key with underwear, for those of you who never really got the hang of it, is that no one should be aware what choice you made that morning. It is enough for those around you that they accept, should they care to think about it which most of us do not, that you are wearing underwear.
We really, really, really do not wish to know what color and cut.
And, if you had any sense, you would really, really, really not wish that 40 year-old man walking down the street behind your pre-teen daughter to know. (To give the 40 year-old men of this world credit, the vast majority of them do not want to know.)
Sadly, I can't think of anything to say.
For those interested in the on-going saga of my software woes, I should report that yesterday, PoodleBoy finally shared the secret of the sekrit, invisible, buried code with me. Now I can create my own sekrit, invisible, buried code whenever I want!
PoodleBoy seems to be recovering his normal equanimity. (Did I tell you about PoodleBoy? Did I tell you about when, on a day when I was really, really, really busy and stressed and needed to make very second count, I needed some information from him and had to spend 20 minutes on the phone with him, sympathizing because one of his dogs had dug a potato chip bag out of the trash, got its head stuck in the bag while playing with it, fell in the pool, and drowned, and then find nice things to say about the picture he sent me so that I could see what the dead dog had looked like before it was dead, before I could get him to focus on work? I'm not sure I told you that bit.)
I am not a pet person, okay? I care about the pets of the people I care about because I care about the people.
Also? I have no way to code 20 minutes spent talking about a dead dog on my timesheet.
This timesheet things continues to present problems to me. I can't quite get the hang of what the R.C. assures me are the tacitly understood "timesheet lies" that everyone uses. (I've never really done timesheets and in the past, the one time a company tried to make me, I just drew a line on the paper every day and wrote, "working" next to it.) Apparently, no matter what you do or how long it takes you, the understood minimum time that any task will take is 15 minutes.
Finding myself unable to code 15 minutes to a single phone call, I wind up with entries like this:
1 hour - Misc - Inspect boxes w/Bernie, e-mail data storage provider for quote for storage and back-up, find previous quote for back-ups, mail invoices, e-m repair company about testing batteries, etc.
Mostly, you know, I'm working. I can either watch the clock every second of the day or I can get shit done. There isn't always brain power for both.
Moving on, let me add that we're still having Internet Issues here at the office. For the past week, e-mail (and IMs, oddly enough) works just fine, but trying to get on to any actual internet page is an exercise in frustration. Yesterday I was shipping a package via the UPS website and it took a full 12 minutes, when you factor in the time it took for pages to load. (You only have to go through four pages to ship a package.) Today, the internets seem to be running just fine, but trying to do anything on our network is mind-bogglingly slow.
Right now, I'm considering breakfast. It's not particularly diet, but if you choose your fast-food breakfast carefully, you might not entirely blow your diet. I didn't bring anything with me today, so I'm thinking of walking across the street to the mass-produced burger joint and seeing what they have to offer.
P.S. UPSteve just came in to pick up my package. He says that the bank downstairs told him the building has been sold and they're going to tear it down.
That's going to provide some...interesting logistical problems for these guys.
Bernie wanted a quote from the server farm for running back-ups on our servers. DiamondGirl was full of explanations for why they don't do that.
I sent them an e-mail and got a quote in 30 minutes.
Bernie wanted four spreadsheets cleaned of duplicate records. DiamondGirl was full of reasons why that was going to take hours and hours and hours and hours because we don't have an automated program for doing that. (We do, but she'd have had to spend 15 minutes setting the file up.)
I did it manually myself in 45 minutes.
On a personal level? I'm very, very fond of DiamondGirl. But I hate working with the kind of person for whom every task is just too hard. She's massively burned out and I'm growing less sorry by the day that I'll only be working with her for three more days.
Well, okay, the whole livejournal thing has not been proven to be a success. There seems to be a tone, an approach to writing in LJ that I can't quite master.
About the fourth time I find myself changing topics in the middle of a LJ post, I start feeling self-conscious. In the end, I think I'm more comfortable posting my stream-of-consciousness ramblings here on the ol' blog. (It might have worked better, had I had any actual fannish conversation to share.) (Although, yesterday I made three sort-of fannish posts. But none of them went anywhere and they were all more about things I was thinking of posting about than actually about anything.)
So, what's new around these parts?
Well, DiamondGirl's last day is Friday. She may or may not continue working on a free-lance basis until fall. It depends on a job offer she's hoping to get. (Me, I'd like to have her helping us because it would make life easier for me, but I think it's better for her if she doesn't.) She's had offers from all over the country. Sadly, the Denver job market isn't that exciting.
Bernie is predictably twitchy even though he hasn't actually exploded for a couple of weeks. He keeps insisting on this total knowledge-dump as though, (a) either he or I actually understand what we're being told, or (b) we'll retain enough of it to pass it along to someone if the need arises.
Whatever. What I really care about is the lack of explosions. I still think we're going to be in deep shit with no technical person at all in the office, but I just work here. (At least he gave up the idea of the free tech call to dismantle the network.) (I think. He hasn't mentioned it again, anyhow.)
He finally decided that we're not going to New Orleans in two weeks. Which is nice and I certainly wish he'd made that decision a month ago. I'm trying to find a chunk of time for my niece to come out and visit me this summer and him waffling around about these travel dates is making it very complicated. Right now, I'm looking at the weekend of July 8 - 11 or so. (I hope she'll stay a few days. There are many stores we need to visit and many restaurants we need to eat at.) I'm going to write her tonight and ask.
She has allergies and suchlike, so I'll have to give the apartment a really good cleaning before she arrives. If it wasn't for the occasional overnight guest, that place would never be really scrubbed. (When my mother stopped making annual visits, the level of housework really fell off.)
It's been hot. I get home after work, turn on the a/c, and still spend the rest of the evening trying not to move around too much. (In the best of all possible worlds, the temperature would never rise above 80.) I'm not really amazingly physically active after work under normal circumstances, but the heat (and humidity) take it out of me to an extra extent. I have several personal projects that require actual thought that I'd like to be dealing with, but I go into mental hibernation in 95 degree weather.
(I'm still blaming the easy chair. If I didn't have such a comfy chair to sit in, I wouldn't just spend the evenings curled up in it. I'd be doing things.) (Well, it's a theory, anyhow.) (I used to sit in a very uncomfortable chair. I was still pretty inert in the evenings.) (I didn’t say it was a viable theory.)
Recently I've taken to typing don't' instead of don't. Apparently I have an unused fund of apostrophes, all just dying to get into print.
I want to be writing. I want to be drawing. Sadly, I only want to be doing these things when I'm at work. My next apartment? Is totally going to have central air. I will laugh, laugh at 90+degree temperatures.
The lottery is at something like $86 million for tomorrow's drawing. I should buy a ticket, shouldn't I?
If I won $86 million, I'd rent myself a bit of office space somewhere and furnish it with proper office equipment. Somehow, probably through decades of training, that's the environment my brain functions best in. I've written hundreds of thousands of words in offices.
I didn't actually have anything to say today.
The entire office building is marked, "No Soliciting."
Our office door has a "No Soliciting" sign on it.
Neither of these signs say, "Unless it's you, because you're special and we'd love to buy cookbooks from your church group or listen for an hour while you try to sell us a new printer we don't need or answer annoying questions about our business's internet access."
Posted by AnneZook at 12:43 PM | Comments (2)I have 3 lbs to take back off and another 7 I'd like to lose on top of those, so 10 lbs total to lose.
I celebrated the start of the diet today by forgetting to bring my breakfast, and then throwing half my lunch on the office kitchen floor.
I hate dieting.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:28 PM | Comments (2)As I discovered today, the reason I can't quite get our programs coded precisely as they need to be coded to work properly?
Is because there is secret, invisible, buried code for the program, that I wasn't putting in.
Mind you, have anyone told me that there was secret, invisible, buried code, I'd have been putting it in, but noooo. It was a secret.
Drives. Me. Bonkers.
Posted by AnneZook at 09:05 PM | Comments (2)So, today's tech meeting starts with Bernie asking, "What is a network, and why do we have to have one?"
This, in a nutshell, explains why this company is so unsuccessful at selling tech products.
Then he demanded and was promised access for both him and me into our SQL server. His perception seems to be that with access, we can do whatever we need to do in the SQL database. Never mind that neither of us would recognize SQL if it came sprinkled on a salad.
He rounded off the meeting with a scheme to call a network-support company that offers, "first tech call free" and get them to come in and do the work of dismantling our network for that first, free call. Then, you see, we can move everything to a professional hosting service for free!
Umm..Bernie? A "hosting service" hosts your website. They do not replace your entire office network with secure, instantaneous access for $10/month.
What about shared printers? He decided he could send all his print jobs to me.
What about shared files? He decided we could e-mail everything. And anyhow, we have the server we won't be using when we don’t have a network any more, so can't we just back them up to it?
What about internet access? We already have that. Just, you know, don't turn it off when we take down the network.
If my brain implodes, you know whose fault it's going to be.
The internets, they are dead.
At least, if you work in my office, they are. I have no idea what's going on, but for the last two hours, we can't get to anything on the 'net at all. The odd thing is that IMs and our e-mail are working just fine. It's just if we open I.E. and try to go to any page, we can't get on. It could be days, even months, before I get to post this.
There is so little work I can do without the 'net any more. I have an entire list of Tasks To Be Done, only one of which doesn't need internet access. (Okay, actually I have an entire but short list of tasks. The work is really slowing down around here.)
I have one phone call I could make. I have a bunch o'bookkeeping stuff to do but that bores me, so I'm procrastinating.
For those who care (ignoring those who don't), the whole Bernie-DiamondGirl situation came to a head yesterday.
Bernie, who is many things, none of them spelled s-m-a-r-t, sent out an e-mail saying he was sure we could all see that the work was evaporating. And saying he'd meet with me at 9:00 a.m. and with DiamondGirl at 3:00 p.m.
And, oh, by the way, in the meantime, DiamondGirl, here's a list of tasks that Must Be Done today, and I'm assuming you won't notice that these are the precise things that need to be done in order to make your job redundant at 3:00 today.
Unsurprisingly, DiamondGirl sent him an e-mail saying, very politely, that she was available all day and would rather not have his meeting about her future postponed until the end of the day.
After which, he and I did a one-hour conference call with a new vendor. Then he told me that if she asked me I should tell her to talk to him but if she asked me point-blank I should tell her the truth about what was going on, and then he got up and left the office for 20 minutes, pretty much guaranteeing that, yes, she would ask me what was going on and I'd be forced to tell her, relieving him of the responsibility.
Does that strike anyone but me as a tad cowardly?
Fortunately for the sanity of us all, I am not that kind of a coward (my fears lie in other directions) and when she asked me point-blank what was going on, I told her.
(For those still reading, he was giving her two weeks' notice and asking her if she'd like to keep doing contract work, part-time, for the company for the next three months while she looked for another job. So, you know, it's not like he was firing her at 3:00.)
Then I sent him an e-mail telling him I'd told her, and it still took him another 1-1/2 hour to get up the nerve to actually talk to her, face-to-face.
And, of course the moment they stopped fighting it, talked to each other, and agreed they'd be happier apart, they both felt like ten-ton weights had been lifted off their shoulders. They both went around practically singing for the rest of the day.
I, of course, was physically ill for the rest of the work day, from the stress, so it was nice to be them, but not so much me.
Today, lacking anything else to be mad about, he's mad at our clients because they don't want to pay for what he wants to provide. And he's determined not to just provide what they want to pay for.
Oh, internets. Why do you not love me today?
Suddenly, for reasons probably known only to the fates, I'm in a psychotically bad mood.
There's a thing I need to do, a phone call, to make Buehler get off my back. And then I need to do another thing, fill out and fax a form, to get Bernie off my back. And I'm so psychotically irritated at both of them that I cannot, no matter how I struggle, overcome the mental roadblock preventing me from doing these two things.