9:10 a.m.
How is it possible for a day to be going so wrong, when I've only been here for an hour and a half?
I showed up bright and early today, all rested and happy after a leisurely and peaceful weekend. Brain and body both perky and alert from the extra hour of morning sleep. Venti latte in-hand, ready to face the challenges of the workplace.
That lasted an hour.
Now I'm elbow-deep in the remnants of Thursday's and Friday's disasters, facing a new round of whiny e-mails about how people on the road can't get into the network and wondering if they expect me to be doing something about the VPN, fending off calls from the phone people who are insistent that the "urgent" network changes we need to make and that they notified us about five weeks ago really need to be done soon, e-mails from Buehler who wants me to handle some of his tax and accounting stuff while he's out of town (not going to), rebooting servers, etc., etc., etc.
9:11 a.m.
Okay, that was yesterday. The day didn't get much better from there but I'm happy to report that it was marginally but noticeably better than the days I had last week.
This morning, so far, hasn't been painful. I've been here for an hour, gotten some significant stuff...if not done, then on other people's desks for review, making it all SEP for a little while.
There are distinct empty spots on my desk. This means I'll have time to get to the long list of things that really, really needed to get done last week but that I wasn't able to address.
Friday I sent Bernie a long, bitchy e-mail about how Things Must Change and about how neurotic client behavior is causing most of our Issues. Monday morning he sent back a note saying that I'd promised not to quit before the end of the year.
I wasn't quitting. I was bitching and moaning. I pointed this out to him. We had meetings for an hour or two, putting me even further behind on my schedule but he wanted to say that if the client bails on us because we were desperately trying to meet their needs on a schedule 1/8 the time-frame than we normally require, then good riddance.
Anyhow.
Last weekend? I did essentially nothing. For two solid days. It was lovely. The weather was gorgeous and I got out in it a bit, but mostly I piddled around the apartment, playing with things, reading things, and generally letting the stress of the work-week evaporate.
I'm pretty sure there was a reason I started talking about that, but I've already forgotten what it is.
Mood: Dieting and crabby because of it.
It doesn't take much to set me off in the morning. I am not a morning person.
Someone driving with annoying slowness in rush-hour traffic, one of those stupid SUVs in front of me with a back windshield angled just right to blind me with sun-glare. Sometimes it's just stupid little things and I know I'm being silly.
But I don't think it's unreasonable to be annoyed if my phone rings first thing in the morning and there's a machine on the other end - a machine telling me that it has a call for me but that all of its humans are busy, so could I please hold on.
Working from home (which I did yesterday, because of the storm) is not the picnic it seems to be. If you can't VPN into your office network (and I can't), then mostly all you can do is respond to e-mails or phone calls. I got 48 actual business e-mails yesterday and today I'm trying to fight my way out of the pile of problems those generated, along with all the other work I needed to get done yesterday but couldn't get to until I was back in the office.
The client that's been being the most annoying recently (did I mention that yesterday they sent us yet a third job that just had to be done before noon today?) continues on form. The information I'm supposed to have no later than two weeks before their event, meaning this past Wednesday at the absolute latest, is not here, in spite of the fact that I started bugging them about it in mid-September.
Also, I made rather a blunder this morning. This same client responded to an e-mail I sent, giving them some stats on a program we did. They hit reply and said, 'this is working well, let's try it again with a new title and send it to the same people." And so I redid it with a new title and sent it back out to the same people.
Except that the client actually meant let's send, not this program, but the one we did yesterday, and not to these people, but the ones we wrote to yesterday.
My inability to read minds is sometimes a real handicap in the business world.
Then Bernie called up in a panic because he hasn't told this client we're using a new system and he didn't want me to tell her but the client had already called me and since I didn't know he was stringing her along, I told her that part of the problem was that we're using a new system (true) and that I wasn't completely familiar with it (true). Not over-informing her in catastrophic detail, but borderline. He spent fifteen minutes arguing with me about the only thing the client has not complained about this week, then fifteen minutes explaining in excruciating detail how I should call her, what I should say, and how I should answer if she asks any of a dozen questions. I gave the matter some thought, then dropped him an e-mail and told him to call her himself.
Also, Bernie's database idea is not working. He doesn't seem to have allowed for the fact that our clients' client lists change on a daily basis. (Scooby, the guy he hired to build and maintain the database on a free-lance, part-time basis, is actually only available every other weekend, and then part of the time every other week.) If comprehensive, up-to-the-minute client databases were easy, everyone would do them. We need to be able to pull an updated mailing list any time we need one. And we need to pull one for every job. Scooby is not available every day, leaving me, doing it manually, as the only real option. And if I get one more project that involves maintaining the mess instead of doing some actual work, I won't be responsible for the consequences.
By now I'm well into midday rage and things show no sign of improving.
P.S. If you're looking for me, my personal e-mail is down due to a server crash. Their web note says it may be tomorrow before it's fixed.
Aarrgghh.
You know what drives me bonkers? My boss calling me at 8:28 in the morning to report that we have "phone problems" because I wasn't here when he called at 8:10 a.m. He dialed and it just rang, you see. No one answered. (Weird how that tends to happen when a company isn't open for business.)
He was also annoyed because he didn't get my voicemail. I could have pointed out that if he wants to get my voicemail, he needs to dial my line, and not the company's main number, but whatever.
He showed up at about noon today and said, "So, how's it all going?"
"I quit," I said.
I am very calm. Please understand that I am very calm.
Okay, I didn't really quit, but I threatened to go work in a cave that offers nothing more technologically advanced than a rock to carve messages on.
I am very calm. Communication is overrated.
A client sends two projects in two days, when they normally send one a week, each of which project normally requires 72-hour turnaround, and says do them both in 24 hours or we'll replace you?
I am calm. Of course I have no other work scheduled for this week and we can do things six times as fast as we normally do them, and still remain error-free, even if the client starts sending changes faster than we can code the original documents.
A client has been waiting 11 days for report results so that they can close a deal with a prospective client of their own, and there is no sign at all that we will ever be able to produce said results?
I am calm. They didn't want to sign that new account anyhow. Clients are a lot of work.
I send Bernie an urgent e-mail asking him to approve the tech's time to help work on the problem, and he fails to respond?
I am calm. We don't use this software program for almost every client we have or anything. And the server it lives on will certainly begin to function again, just like magic, the next time we do want it. In about two days.
I am asked to proofread Bernie's version of a survey against what the client asked for and find so many discrepancies that I can only assume Bernie lost his mind in the middle of the job and that the five hours I spent coding his version of the work is just a write-off?
I am calm. I had three hours to waste last week and two hours to waste yesterday. I have nothing better to do than to waste time coding stuff that turns out to be garbage because my boss is doing his job with about 10% of his brain.
Our e-mail has gone insane?
I am calm. Communication. Is overrated. If your clients cannot e-mail you, they cannot drive you insane.
Our internet access keeps going out, so that I cannot upload the data I need to upload in order to make the pushy client's two jobs happen in 24 hours?
I am calm. I hate clients.
I lock myself out of the office and I am, as so frequently happens, the only one here?
I am calm. It's a nice hallway. Quiet. Peaceful. No clients.
"I hate this place," I told Bernie. "I hate our clients and I hate everyone here."
"I'm with you," he said.
It's a good thing he stopped wigging out on a regular basis. I don't think I could have taken it.
Ommmmmmmmmm
Late Afternoon Update: It seems hard to believe that things could get weirder, but they are.
So, this weekend I tried a new chili recipe. Just some random thing I got off the internet.
I don't like cooking with beer. I know the alcohol cooks out of the mixture, but it still smells like beer and since the recipe specifically called for "Budweiser" it polluted the apartment with the stench of cheap-and-nasty beer for hours.
Today I am trying my new chili for lunch. I can still smell the beer.
It's a good recipe, th0ugh. I'm going to try remaking it without the beer. Or maybe I'll just try beer that doesn't stink so badly.
I spent four hours making this chili, if you include the "simmer" time, when I was just stirring every 30 minutes. I cut the recipe down and in the end I wound up cooking for four hours to make two servings of chili. Not, perhaps, my most productive move ever.
I had to cut up meat, onions, chilis, and garlic, and I'm proud to say I didn't cut off a single finger in the process.
(On the other hand, I did bang the previously damaged finger hard enough to make it start bleeding all over again, so I'm back on thick bandaids and antibiotic ointment this week. In retrospect, this one probably should have had stitches.)
On yet another hand, I have no idea what I did to the inside of my left elbow, but it looks like the aftermath of a junkie coming off a binge weekend. Clearly I was carrying, lifting, or banging into something, but I can't remember doing anything that hurt badly enough to cause two dozen tiny bruises. It's weird.
My happy, clean, new lunchbag I bought on Saturday doesn't have a handle. I can't believe I didn't notice that. I also can't believe I didn't notice that the breakfast yogurt I dropped on the floor this morning had split. By the time I discovered it, my happy, clean, new lunchbag needed to be scrubbed.
I was trying to code logic statements to control jumps in the software this morning and Bernie kept doing annoying things like coming in and complaining because the e-mail he said to send out "just like last time but with this new subject line" went out just like last time but with a new subject line. Turns out he hadn't re-read last time's e-mail and there was something that should have been changed.
So, in the future I am to understand that when he says to do something "just like last time" that means I'm to do it like last time but make "common sense changes" (his words), which means any and all necessary changes he would have made had he been doing his job.
I didn't say anything, but I was certainly thinking things.
Things like, "Yes, well, okay, and if I had back any of those 13 hours I spent on "tech" stuff last week, I'm sure I would have been happy spending them doing part of your job instead of part of DiamondGirl's job."
I hate databases, but that's a different topic.
I just noticed that I have the strangest comment in the world on this post on the other blog.
CASUAL SEX WILL CLAIM YOU OUT!!! It masculinizes women (as does hip hop), makes them cold and deadens them, and prevents them from achieving a depth of love necessary for many women to ascend.
But, later:
The gods will use today's style of animation, which I call "manic animation", to justify hurting children, the decendants of the disfavored left behind.
And now mostly I'm wondering why I'm supposed to want to ascend if the Otherworld is inhabited by those who want to hurt kids?
I am so out of the loop. I didn't even know that animation (i.e., cartoons) is the tool of evil gods!
Clearly it's some weird spam, but I think I'll leave it up anyhow. The bits I read amused me in a weird and masochistic sort of way.
Heeheehee.
Posted by AnneZook at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)Not that I haven't had my own moments of stupid this week. I fought one of our proprietary software programs to the wall because the program I coded wasn't working. Turns out I mislaid a comma in a logic statement. Color me embarrassed.
Still.
Buehler, who doesn't normally annoy me at all, wanted me to print stuff for him today because he doesn't have access to the color printer and I'm all, "okay, no problem" until he gives me the URL, at which time I informed him that it is no part of my job to print out his porn, even if it does look better in color. (Who knew that http://www.supermodelinc.net/ was a site to buy doggie beds?)
Later he required more assistance because the pages did not come out of the printer. I investigated and explained to him that, while it would be a cool feature, printers do not yet make their own paper as they go and it is necessary to load blank paper into the little bin in order to get the machine to produce copies.
I spent 45 minutes writing up instructions so that the genius program developer would know how to get into the server to look for my missing data. If he can't get into the server without my assistance, I have little faith he'll be able to work technology magic and retrieve my files.
Our e-mail continues to come and go, choke and relax, at irregular intervals throughout the day, just as both it and our internet access have been doing for the last ten days. I'm pretending not to notice.
I've spent 12-3/4 hours on "tech" stuff this week, not including little interludes like the one mentioned above - significantly more than I've spent doing anything for any client.
Should I manage to free myself from the coils of technological malfunctions, I can always put on my Human Resources hat and go out and find myself a new insurance provider. Bernie's wanting to switch to his wife's policy on the first but he's not sure if our current carrier will let him have a small business policy with just me on it. If they won't, he says it's up to me to find my own insurance carrier and he'll pay up to the dollar amount he's paying now.
Failing that, I can put on my Office Manager hat and go find heavier boxes for shipping our products since those last two shipments came back crushed. Or find stickers we can run through a color printer that are permanent when applied to cheap plastic and have transparent backgrounds. Or return product components we bought that didn't work. Or hassle the building management because our suite isn't getting vacuumed and we pay for cleaning.
The one thing I can be fairly certain of about today is that I will have no time to work with any of our actual clients. My actual title, if anyone was wondering, is "Account Executive." I was hired, if anyone cares, because I have ten years of account management experience. Because working with clients is what I'm good at.
Naturally I'm thrilled to spend my time on hardware repair, software troubleshooting, and office supply ordering.
In fact, I'm just thrilled.
It's naughty to be late. They've trained us to that from kindergarten, on.
At least, they tried. With some of us, it didn't quite 'take'.
Me, I'm casual about times when it comes to work. I make a reasonable effort to show up on time but I don’t always succeed.
(It's always been my opinion that an employee whose main claim to fame is that they're "never late" isn't worth an employee who strolls in a bit late from time to time but is also available to work through lunch or on weekends or in the evenings when necessary. Those who punch the time-clock in in the morning are likely to be the same ones who insist upon punching it out promptly in the evening.)
This morning was not a success.
That was a long, boring, and unnecessary way of saying I was late to work this morning, wasn't it? (I'm not even sure why I felt the need to tell you.)
This week has been Technology Hellweek.
A software program we use (proprietary, need I add?) that lets a DOS-based program on a portable box interface with an internet-based .asp reporting program ate about 35% of a client's data this week.
Bernie assures me this has happened before (I remember hearing about it in my training) and that DiamondGirl can wrest the data from the server, but....
DiamondGirl doesn't work here any more and while she said she would have done it for us, free-lance, she's going to be out of town for the next four days for her actual job. The client not surprisingly wants their data now, so I turned to Moe and send a half-begging e-mail. He would know how to do it.
In the meantime, the "just in time" data that the clients are supposed to be able to see within 24 hours of doing their jobs has now been AWOL for five days.
The servers have been acting up, one of them won't let us in at all, the machine we use for the really, mind-numbingly boring process of scanning business cards has the sulks, our internet access is like molasses, our e-mail has been and continues to be giving us fits, and something in the server closet beeeeps in an alarming way at least once a day.
The last two jobs we did for one client spawned a flurry of e-mails and phone calls as they tried to decide if it was our tech or Human Error that caused some odd problems (it was tech, but their tech, not ours), and the oh-so-eager-to-help "help desk" at the new email provider's office disappeared abruptly as soon as they got our check.
I dunno. I'm thinking there might be some kind of connection between these events and my unwillingness to roll out of bed this morning. What do you think?
Yesterday was the capper, though. Bernie was in here discussing the Mysteriously Eaten Data with me and looking at the boxes (under the assumption, one presumes, that I was too stupid to read the screen and recognize that it actually said, "Responses: 37" instead of, "Responses 00").
He asked if I'd tried a different button in the reporting program (yeah, because that's going to magically fix it) and if I'd tried a different software program entirely (what part of, "Responses: 00" sounds like the box is just kidding?) and various other well-intended but idiotic things.
Eventually he picked up the box, looked at it, and asked me, quite seriously, "Have you tried looking at the chip?"
It's not an engraving, okay? I can't get out my magnifier or my little chip-reading glasses and see the data on the chip.
Eventually I figured out that Alvin, who has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, a Masters in statistics, and an I.Q. of something like 175, was able to access the data on a chip through other means occasionally, back when the program was all DOS-based. (Alvin invented the boxes. There is little or no magic he cannot work.)
I, with my degree in English Lit, find myself unwilling to attempt to duplicate this feat. Even if my own I.Q. does go into triple digits.
Bernie's next suggestion was that I ask Poodle Boy, who has a degree in Marketing, if he could look at the chip and do whatever it was that Alvin used to do. (Bernie and Alvin don't speak any more.)
To be entirely honest, I find myself unwilling to call Poodle Boy and ask him to do "whatever it was Alvin did eight years ago to magically retrieve data when we used a different software program and using a full set of electronics gadgets and with physical access to the box, none of which I can offer you."
Moe's little company helped design the on-line part of this software, which is the part that's giving us trouble. He says he might be able to help me tomorrow.
In the meantime, the server that isn't responding to our attempts to communicate with it? Bernie finally decided the problem is there's no picture. He decided to hook a monitor and a keyboard up to it so he can look at it. He was, yesterday, entirely convinced that all the problems would magically disappear if he could just see a picture.
I solved that one by asking him to "wait a second." Then I walked out of the room.
Eventually he called after me to ask what I was doing and I said, "I don't want to be involved. If you're pushing any buttons on that machine, I don't want to be in the room at the time."
Since I had previously forced him to view the e-mail trail from last fall of what we not laughingly call "tsunami day" when a server error causes us to spam a client's list with millions of duplicate e-mails, he took me seriously. He grumbled, but in the end he didn't push any buttons.
It's hard to be sure if it's the tech or the attitude of the other people in this office toward the tech that makes my head spin the fastest.
Update:
DiamondGirl took pity on me and walked me through the hour-long process of getting the non-responsive server to respond.
We did, at least, get it to boot up and now we can access it from the 'net. I can't actually get into it (Bernie's all-important "picture") from the server closet, but that's because the box has decided that keyboards are the devil's playthings.
I just don't care any more.
There is much I could be doing. Much I should be doing, when I remember that I lost almost three hours to various technical problems yesterday, but the caffeine level in my blood has not yet reached a level that inspires me to productivity.
Gorgeous blue, sunny skies today.
Stupid weather. We were supposed to be in the middle of a major snowstorm. Maybe even enough to (whee!) give us a snow day. Instead we got half an inch of ice-and-snow, a bit of rain, and now we're having sunshine.
The weather never sucks when you want it to suck, does it?
For those interested, and even for those who are not because it's my darned blog and I'll talk about anything I want to talk about, the finger is slowly healing. Thanks to the magic of antibiotic ointment, a substance I don't think I've ever used before (an odd admission from someone who damages themselves as regularly as I do, I know), it's not even sore. It's pretty ugly, though, so I'm keeping a band-aid on it.
I have not yet achieved Final Boss Monsterdom in my latest game. I played for a while Monday evening but by the time I got through the Final Dungeon to where, one presumes, the Final Boss Monster is lurking, I was tired.
Studio 60 continues, forgive me, to suck just a little bit more each week. This depresses me. I've loved all of Sorkin's other efforts and I had high hopes and much enthusiasm for the idea of a new show from him.
What we seem to be getting is a mess of ideas without a central theme, a lot of interesting characters being nudged to the sidelines in favor of spotlighting the badly cast and essentially very boring Jordan, and a show that, I swear, I can see fighting with the writer(s) for identity.
There's a darned good show in there somewhere. I can't figure out why Sorkin seems to be trying so hard to write make it into something else. I've done that, most writers have, and we all learn quickly that the story will be what it is and that trying to shove it down a different road usually means you wind up at the city dump.
I really, really, really wanted to like this show. There's a fine cast of amazingly talented actors. It's an interesting premise. Sorkin's a great writer when he's on his game. Why am I bored?
Oh, well.
I very nearly succumbed to the lure of politiblogging again earlier this week. Sometimes I have to forcibly remind myself that I'm over that, that I'm moving on, and that the idiocy of elected officials and wannabe elected officials is no longer of interest to me. I have done the serious thing and I'm looking for a new shtick.
Also, like researching, politiblogging is easier than real writing. All that's required is to be annoyed.
I wish real writing were that simple.
The novel continues to be amusing, as long as I ignore the manuscript itself. I've decided that I need a bit of forest and possibly some mist. Which means I now have to go learn about climates, micro-climates, and eco-systems. This is all new territory for me and I'm very excited about it.
I think it's vital to call in sick to work every so often. How can they realize how much they rely on you unless you're not there to be relied upon? How can they miss you, if you're never gone?
I called in sick one day last week and I was a more cheerful person the next day for it.
You might think I'd feel guilty about calling in sick when I wasn't suffering from a bodily ailment, but I didn't. In the normal run of things, I never call in sick. I just don't miss work. But every so often...once a year, maybe twice, I take a mental health day, that's all.
It wasn't anything in particular, except maybe the server in the closet that was still whining like a jet engine stalled on the runway. (I rebooted it on Thursday and the shrill whine finally ceased. I have no idea why rebooting the server made the fan happy. One of life's little mysteries.)
It wasn't Bernie. He's been trying very, very hard for the past five or six weeks, not to wig out or have psychotic interludes. Granted, experience suggests it's all just building up inside of him and one day soon he'll throw a major tantrum, but he might not. He's been making a sincere effort not to be a crazy man and I appreciate it.
It was lovely, having a day off. So lovely that for two cents I'd have called in sick again today, which is supposed to be our last day of Indian Summer before we get snow on Tuesday and Wednesday.
And today I actually have an owie. Thanks to a recalcitrant potato and a peeler that was sharper than anyone's experience of my household's edged implements would have suggested, my right forefinger is swathed in antibiotic cream and a bulky bandage. Ugh.
This had better turn out to be some damned fine soup, that's all I can say.
Still. Slacker I may be upon occasion, but I can't see staying home from work because I peeled my finger. (The R.C. told me last week that her immediate supervisor has been known to call in sick for a headache. Not a migraine, you understand, but a headache.)
This week I'm facing using the new bulk e-mailing program for the first time, as I add yet another of DiamondGirl's tasks to my own pile o'things to keep doing. I messed around in it last week and I don't anticipate having any trouble using it but I'm still a bit annoyed.
It's one thing when a company "downsizes" an employee and everyone left gets more work on their plate, but it's quite another to be the last person standing in an office that once had seven staff members. The only job I didn't wind up with at least a bit of was computer programmer.
I had a gorgeous weekend.
Did a bit of shopping. (The frugality thing is proving to be problematic. I'm spending less in the stores I habitually shop, but that means I have time to shop in more stores in one day - I don't think my total expenditures have decreased much.) A new shirt (lavender) and a new pair of pants. (Not black! I can't remember the last time I bought Not Black Pants.) Miscellaneous other things.
Did some tidying up in the hall closet (a perpetual disaster area) and considered tackling my closet (ditto) but decided to think about it for a while first.
I didn't quite get around to doing laundry, so I'm not wearing my new clothes today. Didn't get the dusting done, either. I did get the bathroom cleaned before the Great Peeler Debacle, but after that, in spite of still having two hands and nine functioning fingers, I decided that I was too wounded to do chores.
Fortunately, the GameBoy mostly uses thumbs, so I wasn't hampered there. Tonight: The Final Boss Monster!
I have plenty of work to do today. It's the 10th, which means Bookkeeping Day. And I'm about as excited about it as I usually am.
My apologies for the Long Silence. I get into moods. (That's usually how I describe finding something more interesting to do in the evenings than sit online for hours.)
Today, we have a grab-bag of thoughts.
First, hooray for geeks! Specifically the kind of game-geek who tries to be the first to finish some new video game, whether Nintendo, GameBoy, or whatever, and to post cheats, helps, and tips online. Thanks to the intervention of one kind GameGeek last night, I've made progress in Tales of Phantasia for the first time in over a week. I will not now have to delete my file and start over, without having faced the Final Boss Monster. (He's still a bit in my future - I was stuck at the point of the third-to-last Boss Monster.)
This game has a dozen side-quests, none of which I chose to investigate on my first time through, so as soon as I do beat it, I'll have to start over. (I understand this is one of those where certain features only unlock on your second round.)
Second, the R.C. is out of town for three days. I'm not sure how I missed knowing she had this trip planned, but when she mentioned it last Friday, it came as quite a surprise to me. The R.C. and I do very well together as roommates (something which still occasionally surprises me), but a bit of alone time now and then is a very nice thing.
She'll be getting her own peace and quite early in November, when I'm in Sacramento. Ugh. One of the drawbacks of having agreed to stay here through the end of the year is that I can't get out of this trip. (Could be worse. I could be Bernie. He has to go to South Dakota later that month. Right now he's trying to choose between a $700+ airline ticket and driving for nine hours.)
The laptop continues to have Connection Issues, making it doubly hard for me to keep up with my personal reading online. I'm about ready to break down and call a ComputerGeek to come in and uninstall the old wireless network and restore the original Comcast box settings, then install and configure a new wireless router for me.
I might be able to do it myself - I set up the last two wireless networks we had at home, but I can only do it if nothing goes pear-shaped. I'm willing to take chances with the laptop and being able to connect with it or not for a few days, but not the PC.
Hmmm...what else?
I spent some time researching my novel this weekend. I love researching instead of writing. Researching is so much more interesting. And so much easier.
I dug out the notebook with all of my information in it, reviewed the World Map (which might need a bit of changing) and realized that I hadn't quite fleshed out the different cultures of the world quite as thoroughly as I could have. So now I'm creating history and back-story. (There's so much less pressure writing the stuff that will never make it into the actual novel.)
I'm missing a fundamental source of conflict. There are minor conflicts between the different societies, based just on their differences, but I need a larger one as well.
I amused myself for hours on end this way, but in the end, I found myself wondering if I shouldn't be doing something more productive with my time. So I sewed buttons and worked on an afghan I'm making to donate to charity. And thought about the novel, instead.
Inside my head, I'm still quite interested in this project, but I haven't quite found the hook...the event or the character that I'm passionate enough about to drive myself from planning to writing. This suggests that my hero isn't ready to step onto the stage yet, I think.
I was quite surprised (stop me, or just skip this bit, if I'm repeating myself) when I discovered that the central conflict of the novel was going to be played out in terms of religious fundamentalism versus, well, not being a bigot and hating anything and anyone different than you. Aside from my comparatively recent dislike of organized religion, inspired by our current "leadership" (I laugh), I haven't my life bothering about religion. People's superstitions are their own and as long as they're not using them as an excuse to toss women into ponds to see if they sink, I don't care that much. I wouldn't have expected to find myself writing a novel around that theme, and most especially I didn't expect it when it happened, being, as it was, a year or two before I really started paying attention to the Bush Administration and their weird supporters.
That's probably about all you really care (and more) about that topic, isn't it?
Apparently it's Circus Season again. I've gotten a dozen calls in the past week from people with heavy Spanish accents, wanting to buy tickets to the circus. I wish the circus would get a new phone number, one that's not one digit off of this company's main number.
And, last but not least, I'm back on the diet. In a manner of speaking. I haven't gone back to buying the supplements, not feeling I can afford $10/day in "special" food, but I'm back on a diet of chicken, eggs, yogurt, seafood, turkey, limited carbs, and eating six times a day, but very small quantities each time. I have three pounds that I put back on that need to be banished and once I get rid of those, I'm thinking maybe I'll lose another five or six. I'd love to be back down at the weight where, back when I was young and vain and depressed because my figure didn't resemble Twiggy's, I used to consider myself grotesquely obese. (For the record, that was pretty much any weight where you couldn't count my ribs.)
Okay, I've rebooted the server four times, cleaned out about 50 MG worth of message attachments from my account, and now I'm trying to clean out the spam catch-all account, but I can't keep the server running for long enough. I'm also running disk clean-up on the server to see if we can compress it any further and free up any space.
This is not my fault. I cannot fix this and the next person who asks me, "what should we do" is getting trouble.
I told 'em and I told 'em and I told 'em this was gonna happen.
Exchange is down today - which means no e-mail.
Bernie and Buehler keep asking me what to do and I keep repeating, "I don't know." I tried to explain to them, back when they did it, that getting rid of all the tech people would not magically turn me into a network administrator, but they insisted everything would be peachy-keen and it wouldn't be a problem. They could hire someone, they said, if necessary. A company that could come by and help us if we had problems. But of course they never quite got around to it. And now there are problems.
I can, of course, reboot the server. And I'm doing it. But so could they and what I can't understand is why they felt I was the only one who could push the button? All I can do is push the button and I'm fairly certain their fingers all work just as well as mine.
They're afraid, that's what it is. They want the button pushed, but they're afraid to push it themselves.
Dorks.
P.S. Okay, later Buehler said I was being "pissy" about the problem. I have to say I like how he can be afraid to push the button and it's okay, but if I'm afraid to push the button, I'm "pissy."
Okay, so he's a crazy man and I was twice as crazy to agree to stay.
Fortunately for me, "sanity" isn't a prerequisite for citizenship in this country.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:08 PM | Comments (8)Sometimes you get them.
This morning, in Starbucks, some man told me to, "have a nice day, dear." Not an employee, either. Just some random guy sitting around the shop.
Then I had a serial murderer sitting next to me at a red light. (You can just tell, can't you? Television has taught us that. Stringy, dishwater hair, a cratered face, a battered old truck, and a weird, fixated look in his eyes. That's the profile of a psychopath.)
We'll see what else the day has to bring.
But first, a confession.
Maybe I'm weak, maybe I'm scared, or maybe I'm just lazy, but Bernie and I had an hour and a half long meeting Monday afternoon and I committed to stay until January.
By then, either some of these new clients who swear they want to do business with us will have come through with signed contracts or...not. But that gets the company through all of the signed contracts they have at the moment, saves me from job hunting during the holiday season, or even during the next couple of months, and generally gets me off the hook on having to find an Interview Ensemble for a while.
Yes, folks, it's all about the shopping I want (or don't want) to do. That's what rules my life.
Also? I'm just sick of job-hunting. I was unemployed for six months before Alvin hired me, he passed me to Buehler when I was on the verge of unemployment again, then I was unemployed for five months before Bernie hired me. It wears on you after a while.
Granted, with that one five-month break, I've been here since July 02, so at least I can fudge my resume to make it look as though I've been here for four years, but still. What with Bernie threatening to close the company every 90 days since he hired me (I spoke to him about that yesterday), it's starting to feel as though "unemployed" is something that's been hanging over my head at regular intervals for years.
I've had to promise the R.C. I'll shut up about Bernie already. Since I chose to stay, I've forfeited my right to come home and bitch about what a loonie he is. I'll be taking it out on you guys, instead.
Bored now.
It's 10:00 on Monday morning. And I'm bored of working. Doesn't look good for the week, does it?
I've checked my e-mail and voicemail, redone the giant whiteboard where we track the month's projects (it's sparse this month, compared to September), gotten the weekend mail to make Buehler happy, and answered a couple of foolish questions from Bernie.
The only joy left in my future is card scans - thousands of them from the recent conference. I loathe card scans. The machine goes just fast enough that you can't do anything else at the same time and just slowly enough that you spend several seconds just sitting there, waiting, with each card.
It's a process that generally has me reaching for my letter opener and attempting to open a vein after the first three hours.
I'm awfully glad I spent all of that money to go to college.
This weekend...hmmm....
I shopped. Two new shirts. They are...wait for it...black and white! I swore I'd stop buying black but the stores are full of weird off-kilter shades of purple, brown, and orange this year, none of which I can wear. I was actually looking for something to wear for interviews but I found nothing suitable.
Granted the stores are full of "business suits" for women, but there are so few jobs in Denver where that kind of attire is really appropriate, and even fewer of those are places where I'd want to work, you know? I'm certainly not spending $300 for a "suit" to wear for interviews that I'll never wear again.
We tried a new...well, an old, mall this weekend. A place we used to shop that we gave up on a decade ago because it got so run down. It's been renovated and is actually a very interesting place to shop now. (I loathe both Park Meadows and Cherry Creek, when it comes to clothes shopping. I'm not paying $128 for a translucent white blouse that will last about six weeks.)
Other than that, if we did anything in particular this weekend, I've entirely forgotten what it was. Last week was hard and I think the R.C. and I both just mentally checked out this weekend.
I meant to job-hunt, really clean the apartment, tidy up the hall closet, replace the buttons on a couple of shirts, and run a stack of afghans Mom sent us by the R.C.'s office so her co-workers could donate them to charity.
What I did was read five books, continue to be stuck in my newest GameBoy game, and give the kitchen and the bathroom a lick-and-a-promise wipe-down.
The new season of Doctor Who started Friday night. Hooray!
And new Studio 60 tonight, hooray!