The R.C. gifted me with a nifty new coffee cup today. As I left for work, I found a blindingly white box on the seat of my car and the coffee cup (with the saying from the title of this post) was inside. Isn't that just so me? Heh. I brought it to the office washed it, and poured this morning's latte into it.
It's a bit odd to drink from a cup. I've been drinking from travel mugs for years. I'm thinking maybe I'm old enough to learn to drink from a cup that doesn't have a lid and a sippy hole in it, though.
(I haven't found an anonymous present on the seat of my car in the morning since the day after my 21st birthday, when I found a dozen long-stemmed red roses and no card.)
Well, Bernie may and/or may not be in today. He arrived back home last night but the last time I was talking to him, I advised him not to bother to come in today. :) No, not just because he can be a pain. He's had four plane rides in the last four days, and worked two shows, one of which was pretty large. If my own travel experience is any guide, he's due for a major adrenaline-crash.
Anyhow. I pointed out that anything he needs to do today can be done via phone or e-mail.
So. What else is new?
Today's Big Task involves bookkeeping - I have to try to post expenses (Bernie's and mine) from the last four months. I've posted expenses only once before, many months ago, and I have only a vague memory of the process. I hate doing bookkeeping. So far I've gotten as far as logging into the program but that's it.
The truth is, I have very few things on my tasks list at the moment. After the chaos that was the first three weeks of this month (and last month), my list is remarkably short until at least some of those 130 rentals get shipped back to us so I can offload the data and start doing reports and suchlike.
Since the company is in a slack time, it would be a very good time to start job-hunting, no? Which reminds me that I have not yet gone shopping to buy something suitable for job interviews. The last three companies I've worked for have been extremely casual, to the point where the fact that I almost never wear jeans makes me look grossly overdressed.
So, we got a note from the apartment people that they were finally changing out those irritating electronic locks and we'd all be getting new locks and keys yesterday.
And we thought, "Hooray! No more getting home at 10:00 at night and finding out that the battery in the fancy but temperamental high-tech lock had died and we couldn't get into the apartment!"
Sadly, we were faced with yet another electronic lock and yet another mutant key. Looks like something out of 2001.
Time will tell how well these work. They swore that the batteries in the last ones were supposed to last six months each but a maintenance man, when cornered, admitting that that was based on one exit-entry cycle a day. It's like...they thought we'd leave for work at the same minute every day, come home at the same moment, and sit huddled in our apartment the rest of the time, afraid to go out for fear of using up the battery.
Lunatics.
Not everything has to be high-tech. A decent low-tech lock is still a good security measure.
At the time they began making these changes, they claimed they had a concern with security and being able to track who entered and left the buildings, in case of a problem. They advertise "secure buildings" in all the ads for the complex and, indeed, there used to be security. You had to have a key to even get in the building.
But it's been years since they took those off. You can't lock the front, side, or back doors of the building, doors which are habitually propped open and left that way by the cleaners, and the window to the laundry room not only doesn't lock but doesn't latch, so I fail to see how putting fifty grand worth of locks on the apartment doors is going to be that useful.
I miss my old low-tech key. We had a low-tech key and a low-tech deadbolt and they worked fine. No matter what time of day you came home, no matter how often you went in and came out again, they worked.
Of course, I also miss my old neighborhood. When we moved in there, it was a pretty nice neighborhood, but it's gone downhill over the years. I don't know if it's going to come back or not.
On the one hand, there's now a Wal-Mart and a strip club, down around the corner, which isn't promising. And the little mall across the street...no one can figure out how it's stayed open for the last decade, since it lost its last anchor store. It used to have a fairly high-class reputation but now...the biggest store there is an Ace Hardware. Useful but not upscale.
Of course, they tore down the mall on the other corner and now there's a swanky Whole Foods store, so that looks promising.
Still. I like a proper key.
Sometimes I post just for the sake of posting.
I wrote a humongously long post (for another venue) and then had to spend 20 minutes editing it down to a reasonable size this morning. What with one thing and another, I'm playing Timecard Catch-up, trying to figure out how to code that time.
I am not by nature a liar. I need to either quit blogging on company time or become more comfortable with lying about how I spend my time at the office.
I have a huge envelope full of stuff to send Rapunzel, so I have to dash to the Post Office at lunch, here in just a couple of minutes. I have a check I need to deposit but since I forgot to bring it with me today, I can't. I didn't clean the kitchen floor last weekend and now I can practically feel the germs multiplying and electing a government in preparation for taking over the refrigerator. I need to write my rent check and I can't remember if I've paid my credit card bill or not.
Sometimes I feel as though my indifference to the petty details of life that most adults are conscientious about doing promptly is catching up to me and about to drag me under.
When I'm not bemoaning my inadequacies as a functioning member of society, I've been pondering the previously mentioned NaNoWriMo effort that I was considering turning into an actual novel.
I can't make up my mind. It's a story I'd read if someone else wrote it, but do I have the creativity, focus, and determination to actually write an entire original novel myself?
And, as an obsessive-compulsive personality type, is it really wise of me to get involved in creating a fictional world, involved to a degree that's only going to aggravate my current lack of focus on my job? (Or my probable upcoming lack of focus on job-hunting?) After whining yesterday about how I forgot a work thing I was supposed to do over the weekend, I went home last night and promptly forgot something I really needed to do late in the evening.
It's clear that my lack-of-focus problem is already pretty extreme, so the novel-pondering is really all tied in with my lack of maturity. The fact that I spent a lot of the evening playing with my GameBoy is just icing on the cake, you know?
Life is full of imponderables today.
The problem is that I chose to remain single and childless in my life because when I've weighed maturity and responsibility against having fun at intervals in my life, having fun always seemed like a wiser way to spend the few, precious years available to me.
I didn't actually think of it that way. Mortality is a concept I've only recently become acquainted with.
More accurately, I always figured there'd be time and a reason to grow up at some later date. But now, as I approach the milestone birthday of 35 (Ed. Ummm. Me, Shaddup.), I begin to see that later dates are not in unlimited supply.
I wonder what mature, responsible adults do in their spare time? Or do they have no spare time because doing everything promptly and completely and then keeping an accurate record takes up all their spare time?
(Deleted - interval in which I bemoan how I am a burden on society, in spite of the fact that I'm employed, self-supporting, non-criminal, and intermittently thoughtful of others.)
I was in a good mood a little while ago. I wonder where it went?
I wish Bernie wouldn't call and ask me for instructions on how to use the product. I send him with the same instruction sheet I use. I do not have secret knowledge that I am hiding from him. And, again, I'm mystified by how someone can be president of a company for five or six years and be so entirely ignorant of its products.
He has also finally decided that since DiamondGirl is unaccountably reluctant to devote all of her free time to doing work for this company - work he said we didn't have enough of, we all remember, to keep her on-staff full time for - he will move the last of our major projects that she's been doing to a new platform so that I can do it, instead.
Fortunately my desk is well-supplied with chocolate.
Pause....
Okay, I went to the Post Office.
I deeply regret the loss of my brain. Never more so than when I wander into the office on a Monday morning and am abruptly reminded that I made some commitment to do something for work over the weekend...and forgot all about it by the time I slid into my car on Friday afternoon.
I hate walking into a firestorm, even a small one, first thing on Monday morning. It starts the week off so awkwardly. This time, after I talked someone else into doing a draft of a project over the weekend, I was supposed to read a proof and forward it to the client by Sunday afternoon. I...completely forgot about it. It was all there, in my in-box, this morning. And on my voicemail. So embarrassing.
I never used to have this much difficulty remembering that I'm employed. It used to be a routine thing for me to check my business e-mail three or four times over the course of a weekend.
Should I pretend this is a good thing, that I've learned to focus on my personal life as diligently as I do on my professional life (when I'm in the office), or should I be concerned that this is some danger signal from my abruptly aging brain and start taking quack herbal medications to stave off dementia?
If I cared more, I'd probably be concerned. At the moment though, I'm leaning toward the, "there is only one of me" defense.
Bernie was leaving for two consecutive Conferences and I had Friday blocked out to produce all of that last-minute paper that inevitably becomes critical before such a trip. After producing an estimated 6 inch pile of such paper, and at about 2:00 in the afternoon, Bernie announced that the Project Database (due 9/28) suddenly just had to be done by Monday morning. He e-mailed me 41 files with a request that I convert all the data to spreadsheets and clean it up to go into a database by the end of the day. Project Proof, the one I should be been shepherding over the weekend, slid right out of my brain.)
It's so annoying because this project has very flexible deadlines and I know it. After all, Bernie's been intending to produce the database for the last three years. It would hardly have stopped the sun in its rotation, reversed entropy, and destroyed the universe as we know it to offer to send it to the client on, say, October 2. Just because, after all these years, the client was actually asking for the aforementioned database does not make it an emergency to produce it. (The fact that the client requested it two weeks ago and Bernie forgot for a week still doesn't make it an emergency.)
Of course, this all comes back to the same root. There's no reason we can't do two projects at once except that there is only one of me. With the best will in the world (which I freely admit I do not actually possess) I cannot pretend to be four people. And, since I'm neither 20 any more, nor do I see any incentive to put in 12-hour days or work weekends, I cannot see any reason to product more work than, say, the average two employees can during any particular week.
(If you're wondering? Yes. There was a point at which there were three people doing the jobs DiamondGirl and the Tweenybopper were doing. Then it went down to just the two of them and some of the work just stopped getting done. Now there's just me - I've picked up much of the stuff the Tweenybopper couldn't get done and I'm doing part of what DiamondGirl did. So I am at least two employees every day already.)
And yet...human nature being what it is...I fear the job hunt. I fear the rejection of potential employers gazing at me across the imposing expanse of a paper-filled desk and mentally filing me away as, "too old" or "not technical enough" or "unlikely to be flexible" or "probably won't work hard" because I am not too old, I'm nore technical than most people, and I'm a lot more flexible on the job and work harder than my rants about Bernie would indicate.
(After all, my complaints about it all today aside, I did actually convert 37 of those files and send them to the Database Guy Friday afternoon. The only reason I didn't do them all was because the remaining ones didn't include that that matched Bernie's datamap in any way. ) (And I'm flexible. Of the last four jobs I've had, all four of them required me to learn one or more proprietary software program, most of them well enough to train other people to use them.)
Still. I fear rejection. It came as a very great shock to me earlier this year to realize I'm Very Nearly Getting Old, you know.
Also, I really, sincerely regret that I forgot Project Proof this weekend.
___________________
P.S. I like good bread. You know how I know I'm eating good bread? I'm eating good bread when I like the crusts.
PoodleBoy is getting on my nerves today, although just in a minor way.
I keep asking him to send me e-mails with instructions on doing this and that, because I'm writing an addendum to the user manual for one of our proprietary software products, and he keeps calling me on the phone, wanting to explain it all verbally.
I don't do transcription, PoodleBoy. When I say, "write it down," that's what I mean.
I am irritated by people who think writing something down is too much work. The truth is, if you can't write it down, 90% of the time it's because you don't really know what you're saying. Please don't call me and babble until I make sense out of gibberish. Calm your brain, organize your thoughts, and write it down.
Yeah.
Okay.
And?
The client who thought our demand to have text for their email 72 hours before they wanted it sent out (for edits and coding) was unreasonable, and who swore that if we could give them a 24-hour turnaround, they'd send us absolutely immaculate text in a pre-formatted template?
Has been frantically trying to get their text right and their template functional since yesterday morning. I've received two or three sets of changes and now our contact, who works on a Mac is realizing that their template doesn't display correctly on a Mac.
We tried. They're not getting any more promises of 24-hour turnaround. If DiamondGirl worked on staff and was here all day, every day, maybe we could do it, but she has a real job and she can't keep trying to sneak "rush" projects for us into her work schedule every day. It's just not right to her employer. Of course, we can't tell the client that because we're not allowed to let them know that Bernie's "staff" consists of me and two part-time contract employees.
I'm a bit worried about Bernie. He tried to get me to sit in on a call with that potential new product, the one he's going to be repping. (Needs a name...we'll call it Looney Tunes.)
Okay, so he tried to get me to sit in on a Looney Tunes conference call today, so I'd know what it was all about, and he wants to meet about a new project (with the old product) that's supposed to start in January.*
I think Bernie forgot that I've essentially handed in my notice. He does have a gift for believing what he wants to be true, instead of what's true.
Still. It's MountainMike day. Treats! That's a cheerful thought. (I really need to get back on the diet and drop another ten pounds.) (In the meantime, I bought pistachios and dry-roasted sunflower seeds.)
I sure am glad it's Payday Week. I sent a big check to my credit card company last week and I'm almost broke. I'm determined to pay that card off by the end of the year, though. It's keeping me a bit short of cash but there's nothing I really need to buy and I'm still holding (reasonably) firmly to my new resolution to stop buying stuff just for the sake of shopping.
And I got the last of the surveys boxed up yesterday, ready to ship out today, so that's the last of the huge projects for this month completed. I have a handful of small projects and a new tedious and time-consuming but not difficult project that Bernie handed me yesterday still on my plate, but I'm feeling much less stressed.
Also, now that I've fulfilled what my conscience saw as my duty to stay and get Bernie though the September crush, I'm free to job-hunt. I've dusted off the old resume so I guess I have no reason now not to get on with it.
Except! I have nothing to wear to a job interview.
I'd better go shopping this weekend.
__________________
* Speaking of things that annoy me?
He's bored of our current crop of clients and trying to get Looney Tunes up and running. And that's fine. But our current crop of clients are paying us, some of them a significant amount, and someone has to do their work.
He should stop getting mad at me because I am working on their stuff.
I strongly suspect that he wants to tell me I have to focus on what he's working on and any of my work I can't get done while I'm "being available," I should just do after he leaves for the day. For two cents, I'd explain to him that I am not willing to sit here, being available all day, and then put in a hard eight hours after he leaves at 4:00. (Nor is it possible for me to do all of this when he's not in the office, since he goes mental if he calls my desk and I don't pick up the phone.)
You know, really, I'm not annoyed today. I think writing whiny blog posts is just a habit.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)Okay, so I needed quarters to do laundry this weekend. I took $20 to the bank downstairs and asked for $20 worth of quarters.
The woman (and this was not some 18 year-old child, born into the computer era) actually added my money - a ten, a five, and five ones - up on a calculator to see how much it totalled.
Our society is so doomed.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:59 PM | Comments (3)Even with Bernie leaving me alone, this job wears me out sometimes. Since I've been here, I've been coding about two survey jobs a month. In the first two weeks of September, I've coded five so far.
I'm taking a break at the moment before I put together a survey revision for yet another client whose three jobs, thankfully, aren't due until early November. Two of these are huge - 150 questions +/-, mostly due to the client's insistence on repeating themselves multiple times on successive screens. It's a pain to code that one.
And while I wait for approval from a client whose survey, if approved, I need to load and test on fifty boxes by Tuesday.
And while I wait for a shipment to arrive, from a client who announced today that they need their results in 4 days, instead of the usual ten. (I need to practice pretend-uploading for that one - it requires using a program I haven't used in that way before and, as I understand it, doing it wrong will erase all the client's data. Very exciting to contemplate, no?)
I simply cannot imagine, if I'd gotten in a snit and walked out, I simply cannot imagine how Bernie could have coped.
So, Lotto is up to, what? $137,000,000? What would you do if you won it Saturday night? Would you show up for work on Monday? Would you give notice and work it out (I mean, really work)?
The R.C. and her co-workers have apparently been debating this. Her supervisor is so convinced of her own value to their company that she announced she'd stay to see out the end of the project due in Februrary, 2007.
The R.C. said she'd leave a voice-mail announcing her never-to-returnness.
Me, I'd stay here through the end of September. While I can't imagine finding myself so irreplaceable that I'd stay in a position for five or six months, I also couldn't reconcile it with my conscience not to stay a measly couple of weeks for a company that's in a bind and that has, by and large, been good to me. (Yeah, okay, Bernie hasn't been especially good to me, but let's remember that Buehler owns 75% of this enterprise and he's been very good to me.)
I don't anticipate winning Lotto this weekend, even though the R.C. has actually remembered to purchase a ticket, but I'm hoping to win my own little job lottery next month. Just as soon as I've quieted my conscience (which I'm anticipating will be around September 27), I'm hitting the job sites daily. (Yeah, I could do it now, but in the unlikely event I ran across a company moving fast and they called me in a couple of days for an interview, the bottom line truth is that I don't have time to go on interviews between now and the 27th.)
(For those wondering about today's blog entry and my work ethic? This has largely been written in two-minute intervals while I wait for a program to periodically rebuild. So I'm not wasting company time. Precisely. And if it reads sort of choppy, well, that's the explanation.)
(When did some of us in this society actually become so firmly programmed to believe that if we're not doing at least two things at once, we're not doing anything? Why can I not just sit here, stare at the wall, and ponder Plot Point Problems while I wait for the program to rebuild? Why does thinking not count as "productive"?) (Okay, I consider personal time spent thinking as productive. I just realized that I don't think of work time spent thinking as productive.)
(Apparently I'm having one of my parenthetical days.)
Yes, as a matter of fact, referring back to the opening paragraph of this little entry, you'll see reference to Bernie "leaving me alone." He has, in fact, refrained from annoying the hell out of me ever since the day I told him I wasn't having fun and I wasn't planning to stay.
It's very odd.
It'th altho a thame that you can't bandagth your tongue.
I bit the heck out of mine the other evening and it still hurts.
Every time I see a story about how gas prices are about to fall drastically, I think about how much better PR that's gonna be for the warmongers in power than any mre predictable "October surprise."
November's going to be interesting, no?
(No. I am done with politics! I refuse to care. Not gonna think about it.)
There will be one this weekend as I once again attempt to recreate all of my files and bookmarks.
Stupid laptop crashed last night and I wound up restoring back to factory settings. Everything I've downloaded...gone! Again!
I used to have such good computer karma.
Posted by AnneZook at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)The elevator. A strange and useful contraption, but not without quirks.
Have you ever noticed that elevator-makers are acutely aware of your urgent desire to know how soon an elevator will reach the first floor - there's an indicator for every car showing its current location and direction of travel as you stand in front of the bank - but are entirely oblivious of the desire of those on, say, the ninth floor, to know when a car will arrive to whisk them earthwards? (Or even further skywards.)
When you're standing on the ninth or twelfth floor, you have no way of knowing when or if an elevator will ever arrive to transport you elsewhere.
This is fine for those of us such as myself who wouldn't dream of riding an elevator down for any distance of less than 20 or so floors, but there are those people for whom a flight of stairs, up or down, is impossible. I think the people on the seventh floor, waiting patiently in their wheelchairs, are entitled to know if an elevator is coming to answer their call. They're entitled to know if some inconsiderate slob is standing there on the third floor, holding the door pen as he flirts with a saleswoman leaving his office. They're entitled to know if one of the two elevators in the building is stuck on the fourth floor and hasn't moved for hours.
Of course, I also think those healthy, able-bodied workers on the first floor shouldn't be riding the elevator up to the second to use the bathroom, but that's just me.
I also think that users of the basement level of this building, situated as it is below the parking garage, are entitled to elevated transport out of the dungeon. When you consider they'd actually have to climb four floors to reach to reach an exit door that leads to some other location inside the building, it's even more important. When you consider that the only public conference rooms in the building are in the dungeon, not-infrequently leaving armloads of physically disabled people queued up and waiting for transport, it becomes An Issue.
I'm not a big elevator fan.
I don'tdislike them, it's just that, given the choice, I'd rather ride an escalator. I like to swoop majestically through space, looking down in serene superiority upon those ant-like toilers working their stubby little legs to move from store to store.
It's Friday. Typically, Bernie would be home spreading chaos via phone, e-mail, and IM. Today, for some weird reason, he chose to come into the office. If he starts with me, he's visiting the nearest elevator shaft.
(kidding)
I was going to tell you the story of the man riding the elevator with me today who wanted to push all the buttons for all the floors so we could stop on each one and see if anyone had better carpet in the common area than our floors had, but I'm out of time.
I have the oddest conversations with strangers.
(I was also going to tell you about all the job opportunities the R.C. has been sending me from CraigsList. If half those are true, it seems I could make at least a subsistence living blogging part-time for various groups.
I particularly liked the one who was looking for someone to blog about celebrities. I think I could achieve a sort of snarky-worshipful tightrope writing style that could have been rather popular with the feeble-minded sorts who'd actually read a blog devoted to celebrity-watching.
It's a pity I have a job. I have so many other interesting things I could talk about. Perhaps I will blog my job-hunt when it begins?)
I've been here for 4 hours and so far he's called me 14 15 times.
To be fair, eight of those calls were in one six-minute interval when I was away from my desk for a few minutes.
Sheesh. What kind of neurotic nitwit calls someone eight times in six minutes? What kind of mental block prevents you from thinking that, just maybe, waiting sixty seconds between dialing times might be less insane?
I swear, if I hadn't already told him yesterday that I wasn't planning to stay here, I'd quit.
Yes! We had The Talk.
I hadn't intended to do it yesterday, but he started talking about plans for next year, and about what "we" could do, so I felt it was only right.
I began with great subtlety.
"What would you do," I asked. "If I weren't here?"
"I'd close the business," he said seriously.
I do not respond well to emotional blackmail.
"I'm not staying," I said. (I do find the swift, surgical strike to be, in the long run, less painful.) "I don't find this job challenging, it does not make use of any of the skills I've spent decades honing, and you really don't need to pay someone what you pay me to be a shipping clerk and type data into a software program."
The subsequent discussion went on for an hour or so. While he did not precisely dance about and sing, there were moments when he looked quite relieved. He did even admit that it was progress, of a sort, to have an absolute deadline. (He's threatened to either leave himself or close the company down at least three times since I've been here, and then he keeps letting the deadlines slide.)
In order to avoid giving him a heart attack and being responsible for the death of another human being, I've agreed to stay until Oct 9, which gets us past this month's insanity.
I have also pointed out, with a very pointy stick, that life might be easier over the next four weeks if we made a concerted effort not to get on each other's nerves.
I am many, many things but none of them rhyme with "tactful."
In his mind we will "reassess" things on the 9th. In my mind, that's the date I'm available to start a new job, should one be on offer.
He does know I'll be job-hunting. Presumably he's hoping I won't find anything before the end of the year (the date which, for some reason, his brain grabbed onto as a good date to close the place). I have no particular objection to continuing to receive regular paychecks between now and the time I find alternative employment, but I will be searching.
To that end, I have procured, from DiamondGirl, the name of a really good staffing person who has helped her and others find positions. And I've bookmarked the three (reportedly), most promising sites for jobs in the Denver area.
It's not a bad feeling, realizing that I can continue to be paid while actively job-hunting. Without guilt!
On the down side, I have to keep coming in here every day.
I was this close to walking out on Friday and today I'm rather sorry I didn't.
Today's frustrations included another interminable trip to the veritable borders of Wyoming but, thankfully, did not include me locking myself out of my car.
It cannot be said, though, that the limited time I've spent actually in the office has been either productive or without stress.
How do you explain to someone that not only are you not excited about the prospect of taking over the tech duties of someone who was "downsized" because "we don't have any work for her to do" but that you cannot, even if you were willing and able, accomplish those tech tasks with "an hour here or there" that they think you have to spare in the middle of the busiest month in the company's history?
I cannot begin to tell you how much I am looking forward to the next three weeks. All the more especially since Bernie confessed today that he has "nothing to do this month" if his latest Big Project doesn't come through.
The fact that the color-coded job board is a tsunami of purple (indicating my jobs) failed to make an impact on him as he, with too much time on his hands, interrupted me four times to explain how I can take on one of DiamondGirl's most time-consuming projects in my spare time in the next three weeks.
He went so far as to interrupt me once to discuss whether or not he should call a potential vendor and ask them how long it would take me to learn to do something when I refused to promise to learn it in an hour.
My attempt to explain that I have no spare time was fruitless as he pointed triumphantly to this Friday, where all I'm doing is the invoicing and paying the bills for the entire month, and said I could work on next week's project then.
The fact that it is next week's project because we won't have it until next week seemed, to him, proof that my attitude is discouragingly negative.