I wrote a sample page for Gidget, showing her what I thought would be a better direction for her personal website/resume.
She liked it. In fact, she handed over the writing of the entire project to me. Sounds like a good Sunday afternoon project.
You see? She's a friend of mine. She can bum cigarettes or ask me to donate 5 hours of my personal time writing web pages for her and I'm happy to be useful.*
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* Also, of course, she's the person who got me several of my last jobs. So I owe her. But I'd have helped her even if I didn't.
Posted by AnneZook at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)Much as I like the Extreme Peacefulness of my new position, I have to admit that there are days when it pretty much crosses the line into mind-numbing tedium.
Wednesday I spent a large chunk of the day entering email leads into a spreadsheet for end-of-month reporting and analysis. It's a necessary task, but I'd give twice my own hourly rate to someone else to do it for me. Type the date. Type the Argonut ID code. Type the lead source. Repeat ad nauseam, 700+ times a month.
I'm still enjoying the new job, though, in spite of the extra duty penalties I'm suffering for having volunteered to help them out when they were in a bind.*
Much of what I'm doing is still like a game. Like last week, when I was running reports and looking to see how some of our advertising campaigns are doing. I was feeling a bit guilty about wasting company time dinking around that way when I was abruptly shocked to remember that that kind of "dinking around" is part of my job. I mean, wow. Not only work I don't mind doing, but tasks that feel more like play than work!
The boringness factor, though. Contrary to what Gidget says and Vela believes, this is not rocket science. It's fun, but not taxing. It's even a bit--I won't say demeaning, but I will say it's rather less intellectually challenging than the kind of work I'm capable of.
Still, for the money they're paying me, and I'm very grateful for the regular paycheck but it's not that big, so for the money they're paying me, they're getting about as much of my brain as they're entitled to.
I fell off the diet wagon directly into a vending machine accident yesterday. Sigh. Even if it was only half a package of salted peanuts, it's a demonstration of self-indulgence that is just disgraceful. Shakes head regretfully.**
I gave in and printed out a list of the country names I feel I should be able to remember. Of the entire list of 235 (I think), there were 163 that I thought I should be able to name at the drop of a hat. I'm going to study the list before I try the game again. It may be cheating, but I prefer to think of it as "studying." (If nothing else, I may learn to spell Liechtenstein, right?) (It's the first e. I can never seem to remember the first e.
There will be a pause while I slurp coffee and sift through my brain for something interesting to say....
Not interestingly, but aggravatingly, while I was off doing phone relief, Skylla crept to my desk and dropped a fiver onto it. I refused point-blank to take money from her for cigarettes before and advised her to buy her own if she planned to smoke regularly. But, she explained today, it works better for her if she just borrows from me.
It's a significant difference to her, you see, that she's not "buying" cigarettes. (I don't think she realizes that she's not less of a smoker just because she doesn't go into a store and pay for her own.)
Previously I also refused point-blank to be responsible for showing up every day with enough cigarettes for both of us. She feels that giving me money will take care of that potential problem.
Gidget advises me to buy an extra pack with Skylla's money and just leave it here for her, but that's basically just me buying her cigarettes for Skylla, which puts me where I don't want to be.
I haven't been able to find the words to explain to anyone how badly I don't want to be part of this situation. If you're my friend? Bum a cigarette. Snag a pack. Borrow a carton, I don't mind. But Skylla is not a friend of mine. She makes nice at me because she wants cigarettes.
Also? Now, today, before she falls off the non-smoking wagon she's clearly been on, it's time for her to face the fact that you either smoke or you don't. If she's fought the battle this far, she needs to not smoke and she's not "not smoking" just because she's not carrying the fiver into a store on her own.
I wish I could find the words to say that to her.
I'm noticing that I'm not as serene as I was when I started this post.
"Time flies like an arrow," goes the old joke. "But fruit flies like bananas." If you have some interest in speculations in cosmology, you might enjoy reading about this. I did.
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* As I stop to think about it, I'm not sure why I complain about it so much. I mean, yeah, it means an additional 8-10 hours of work every couple of weeks, but it's not like it's hard work. And some MSFP experience will look good on my resume. But still I complain.
** Except that I'm doing a little better than that, having dropped 4 lbs so far.
That's about all I can say for today. It's Tuesday. The long weekend has passed and I expect that this "short" week will, like most 4-day workweeks, drag on forever. It was gray and rainy yesterday, it's gray and rainy today, and it's supposed to be gray and rainy tomorrow.*
I don't think I've mentioned them to you before, but a small outside company handles the Argonaut's behind-the-scenes website functionality. There's a pair of software programmers assigned to our account--Tootles and Smee. Tootles is the boss and he's got one of those good ol' boy faces you wouldn't be surprised to see in company with a tractor. It was a bit of a surprise to me to discover that he's a very talented programmer. I'm frequently guilty of being appearancist. (Made-up words are the best.)
The other one is my old buddy Smee. I worked with him for seven or eight years, back in the technology heyday of the 90s. he's another of the same kind--got a face you'd expect to see on a guy living on a street corner, and a brain the size of Jupiter. (Remember when "computer nerd" automatically generated an image of a weedy, bespectacled little runt?) He's going on vacation. Six days in the desert outside Moab to contemplate his ommm or something but before he left, he wanted to make sure we actually wanted what Gidget asked him for.
And now I'm wondering if I understand this company at all because it turns out that of all the Next Level Plan ideas that Gidget and I put forth to Jason and the rest of TeamChaos, one item has floated to the top. The blog. Jason wants us to move on the idea quick-quick-quick.
I don't know why. My original idea for a CEO blog (they're all the rage these days) limped to the nearest drain and swirled out of sight ten seconds later, but the overall blog concept seems to have inspired a wave of enthusiasm that, quite frankly, astonishes me.
I mean, I don't understand why they're excited about it, or why they want to move ahead with it instantly. In a company where three years of strenuous and deliberate effort finally produced a company newsletter as devoid of personality as a faded beige rock, they're all hot-to-trot for a blog?
Doesn't make sense to me. I only made Gidget include it in the Next Level Plan because I knew it was the kind of thing that's light-years ahead of the normal thinking around here and she'd been challenged to be "cutting edge."
I'm not sure, to this moment, whether or not any of the Argonauts actually understands what a blog is or that it's supposed to be, you know, entertaining and informative. (Shaddup. I mean a company blog should be.)
Looks like while Smee's off contemplating the whichness of what, I'm going to have to lay out some ideas and guidelines, so I'm ready to launch whenever he gets back and gets the sw (a .net drop-in of some kind) up and running.
When they finally hire a communications person, rules, regulations, and content will be his/her problem, but it doesn't look like we're all wanting to wait for that.
Anyhow, since I'm a big believer in "start as you mean to go on" I'm happy to start with some rules. (I love rules that other people have to follow.) If I have to manage this fool thing, there need to be some guidelines. (I wish, oh how I wish, "don't be terminally boring" could be Rule #1.)
I have to edit it, too. That's a scary thought.
I'm sitting here, shaking my head, and wondering what kind of world it is when I'm not only the go-to person for technology, but the Supreme Grammar Guru and Punctuation Princess? As you all know, my interest in good grammar is intermittent at most and what I think works best for punctuation is if I just throw a bunch in and you mentally put it wherever you'd most like to see it. I proofread only under pressure.
I wouldn't put me in charge of anything that requires attention to detail or timely follow-up is all I'm saying.
And also, while I'm still producing the Newsletter O'Faded Beige and working with Gidget to help her write her own resume-website**, I don't really have the time to take on another huge project.
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* I think my blood sugar must be down. I actually had a fabulous long weekend with much going and doing and frolicking.
** It's sad to say that I remember her as a great writer of marketing material but I'm not seeing that reflected in what she's writing these days. I don't know if she's selfconscious about this resume-website or just couldn't find the right angle to pull all of the info together, but the pages I've looked at for her have been a mess.
It's hard to find a polite way to say to a friend, "It's a mess," you know? Especially when what you really want to say is, "delete the entire file and start over.
Looks like I'm being "adopted" by no-doubt well-meaning coworkers who are concerned that I'm so quiet during the day. They keep coming by to say howdy and to ask if I want to go for out for a smoke (but that's just Skylla, who'd better start buying her own) and whatnot. (Either they're being friendly, or they were assigned to check on me at random points during the day to see if I'm working or not.)
I don't come to the office to make friends. I have plenty of friends. I come to the office because if I show up and look really busy, they give me money every two weeks.
I'm working, people! I was hired to do a full-time job even before they added on an armload of other stuff, and now I'm doing a significant percentage of Penelope's full-time job while they interview for her replacement.
Also, I'm on a diet and that makes me cranky. Down 3 lbs, 7 to go. Grrr.
So, I'm knee-deep in the first newsletter and being grateful that Penelope had it almost done before she abandoned ship to take a better job for more money. (I think it's important for you to understand that while she sent it to me 95% "done," around here, "done" means I've gotten 40 emails about it so far today. I shudder to think what producing one of these from scratch must be like.)
It's not the coding--even though Penelope forgot to send me the "template" and I'm using an old copy of the newsletter and learning Front Page at the same time--it's the content. Two hours into this and I'm already seeing why a bi-weekly newsletter and a handful of other "communications" documents are a full-time job. This thing is supposed to go out tomorrow, it was supposed to go to TeamChaos yesterday for approval, and I'm still waiting on content from--wait for it--TeamChaos! Thank goodness Vela is as good as her word. She's taking point as much as she can on forcing content out of people. I'm staring at my draft and mentally double-checking everything I do so I don't commit some ghastly faux pas.
But right now, I'm eating lunch, so I don't have to worry.
Under the heading of "does a body good," I can't believe I missed this jewel from Keith Olbermann last week.
President Bush has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and mass manipulation of an administration and public life dedicated to realizing the lowest of our expectations.
Heh. Sometimes I honestly think I stopped politiblogging because I was running out of non-profane words to use to describe my bone-deep fury with not only the willful stupidity of the Bush Administration but the determined blindness of most of the "mass" media and the American public.
Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created, includes "cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives?" They are those in — or formerly in — your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.
Such a satisfying thought, but it will never happen.
Four hours later....
For ten minutes there, I thought I'd run into the brick wall of my own limitations, but it turned out to be a lack of information. I'm going to need an ftp client to upload these newsletter files to the right place is all. Whew!
Well, that was 'way boring. How am I supposed to write up notes of a conference call where, to the extent that I understood the conversation, no one said anything?
I was going to ask the ChaosManager leading the call for a copy of the previous call's notes, so I'd know what kind of thing to try and extract from my own scribbles, but I don't know who she is. I suspect she doesn't work out of this office. At least, when I walked around and looked at doors, none of them had her name on it.
It's a pickle, that's for sure.
Mmmm. Pickles. Potato chips. Port wine cheese spread. Sour cream. Sausages!
Sigh. 2 lbs down, 8 to go.
Doesn't it seem that I should be entitled to a reward for having lost 2 lbs? That's the problem with food. If you reward yourself for depriving yourself of food by giving yourself food (because if you haven't had food, what you pretty much want for a reward is food), pretty soon you weigh 200 lbs. This is a dangerous cycle, which is why I'm not allowed any food that tastes good. (Ed.You had Chinese food twice this week, you big fibber.)
Got an email from Her earlier today. Today was Her last day with Bernie. From what She says, he hasn't hired anyone yet, although he's interviewing.
I wish I could think of something interesting to say. I'm very happy, in a peaceful, uneventful kind of way, if that matters.
I guess I could make up lies. If I start posting stories of improbable adventures and narrow escapes, will you still respect me in the morning?
Some days, I could just smack Microsoft. Also, corporate executives and network gurus.
I just spent 20 minutes Googling around to find out what some of those blasted programs are that sit there sucking up my computer's processing power all day.
I've identified four or five that I can just routinely go in and shut down in the morning. Since this is the fourth time I've had to do this to stop my computer working on it's own projects instead of on mine, I made a Naughty list and posted it up. So annoying. Of course, the really annoying ones, like svchost.exe, the ones that run eight copies of themselves, can't be shut down because they're "critical" processes.
I tell you what. It's critical to me that I work on a computer that can move at least as fast as I can.
So, this week has been interesting. (No. Really.) I've barely had time to get bored with my Real Job, which is pretty cool.
I've had a couple of hour-long training sessions about taking over the bi-weekly Argonaut Newsletter. Because I hate being trained and can't be taught, I told everyone I already knew Front Page (I don't) and that I'd used it before (I haven't) and that I didn't need much information in that area. Penelope spent 15 minutes on it in one of the training sessions and I'm sure I have all the information I need to do what needs to be done.
Seriously--even considering Microsoft's annoyingly code-heavy approach to html, how hard can it be? It's just software.
I've already started the training manual (for producing the newsletter, not for using FP, although I'll include the necessary information w/screen captures for that portion of the project) so I can hand it over to whoever they hire who's job this will be in the long term. I'm the world's worst trainer but, even if I do say so myself, I write a good manual. Anyone with an IQ that goes into triple digits should find them clear and comprehensive.*
I've also spent a fair amount of time helping Gidget tweak the navigation for the new website. Turns out that the basic layout I submitted passed muster. If only I'd had any understanding of this place's actual products and services! But I didn't, so my drafts of the drop-down menus were much mocked and now I have to go back in and change all of the menu items around, add the things I forgot or didn't know about, and remove the things that are sidelines and not "core" businesses.
I tell you. It's a battle. Every day I have to fend off some TeamChaos member who wants to move the non-marketing content to a sitemap ghetto (SEO, dammit!) and once even Gidget lost track of what we're doing and suggesting sticking all of the new content in some back corner. No one's got my back on this one, but I'm sticking by my guns anyhow.
And then there's the Argonut who wants what he does, regardless of the fact that it's against the rules and no one else does it, featured prominently on the corporate home page.
I have to argue with people who want to use industry jargon--explaining again and again that you have to use the words your customers use.
No one wants to be the one who writes the blog. I'm so glad they're hiring the Penelope-replacement quickly. Whoever it is (scheduled to start 6/1), may wind up writing the entire thing.
This morning I lost a battle to get two items, add-on services, not core services, merged into their appropriate categories instead of featured on Page One.
No one asked me to, but I'm going to start writing content today. Even if I can't write "marketing" material, I can make sure that the draft everyone else starts with includes the critical words and phrases that we want repeated frequently across all the pages.
Anyhow. It's all interesting in its own way. Better than combing through the Webnetter software eight hours a day, looking for things to tweak, anyhow.
And now, it's time for me to log onto a phone call with a group of people I don't know, who plan to discuss an initiative I've never heard of. I'm taking notes, in lieu of Gidget, who got called away after she volunteered to take over for a member of TeamChaos who is unexpectedly absent today.
Excitement!
P.S. My Name the Countries score is up to 60 today! I'm learning them!
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* Yes, I know, we all know, that She found herself unable to do my job with the manuals She had, but you have to remember that I didn't write most of those, they were in place when I arrived on the scene. And the ones I did write, She always claimed not to be able to find--neither the hard copies in the binder marked, "Manuals" nor the electronic files on the computer's hard drive.
Also? Any software program so easy to use that I can sit down to it cold, learn it, and writer a user manual for? Anyone else should be able to sit down with and figure out too. At least, enough to do the basic tasks with it. Hmph.
Today I got up to 55 countries in the how many countries can you name in five minutes game. Shamefully, that's my personal best. Part of my problem is spelling--I can never remember how to spell Luxembourg. Or Belarus, which looks easy but I persist in believing it's spelled Belarusse. Even if I remembered Kyrgyzstan, I wouldn't be able to spell it.
And I forget weird things. I don't know why I can remember Qatar but not Chile. Nigeria is easy, but Ethiopia always escapes me. I usually waste several valuable seconds trying to spell Czechoslovakia, instead of remembering that it's called the Czech Republic nowadays. Morocco I can get, but Liechtenstein lives in my memory only as, "the country with the castle." The odds of me remembering Djibouti are pretty slim, but I should be able to get Cuba.
Too many dinky countries, that's the problem. And they change their names. Like in recent news coverage. For a week, all you read about was coverage of the Myanmar flood. Suddenly, yesterday, all the news outlets were talking about Burma. What was that all about? (By the way, did you read that "officials" in the country are being accused of selling, not giving away, the relief supplies they seized?) (Maybe because they are in denial about the scope of the tragedy in their own country?)
Even Haiti. I watch for news about Haiti. I talk about Haiti. Why can I never remember Haiti when I'm playing this game?
I've thought of cheating, of course. Printing out the list of the top 150 or so countries that I should be able to remember and studying, but I can't bring myself to do it.
It's wrong to cheat.
Except, now that I've typed that, I wonder if I shouldn't focus on the "studying" part of the concept?
How many times have you played the states game? You know the one--the one where you have to write down the names of all 50 states. It's surprisingly difficult to do. It's embarrassing, in fact. Why does my brain not retain Mississippi? Why does Indiana hold no place in my heart? Why is Kentucky so often forgotten?
Embarrassing.
As you can probably tell by today's entry, my resolution to Blog Interesting didn't last long. Never does, does it?
For the past couple of weeks, I've been watching and being utterly enthralled by Masterpiece Theater's latest offering, Cranford. I turned it on for Judi Dench, of course, but I've been so glad I did!
I've never sampled any of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels. I wonder if I should--or if I should be warned off by the idea that three of her works were merged to produce this one marvelous production?
Posted by AnneZook at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)I've been out terrorizing the bunnies. They like a warm day and you can usually find two or three of them sunning themselves on the grass beside the building whenever possible. And they're not too skittish--they don't head for the hills the minute you come into view or anything, but they don't want you closer than ten feet or so. Unless you keep an eye out, you can find yourself in the middle of a panic of running bunnies.
Most days I give them a wide berth. Some days I play the opposable thumb card and stride arrogantly through a pile of them, scattering bunnies far and wide.
The Argonuts across the cubicle wall are cooing and gooing. At least, the male portion of them are. Someone just booked a job for a movie maker (initials FFC) who did some of those glorified crime family/cop drama movies that men inexplicably find so riveting. (Pop culture is not my strong suit.)
I am, as are most of you, one assumes, watching the news about the China quake. I found an interesting table on the BBC site. It didn't show today's quake, but I've added it in:
May 2008: 7.9 quake in Sichuan - at least 8,500 dead, an unknown number hurt
March, 2008: 7.2 quake in Xinjiang - damage limited
February 2003: 6.8 quake in Xinjiang - at least 94 dead, 200 hurt
January 1998: 6.2 quake in rural Hebei - at least 47 dead, 2,000 hurt
April 1997: 6.6 quake hits Xinjiang - 9 dead, 60 hurt
January 1997: 6.4 quake in Xinjiang - 50 dead, 40 hurt
Domestically, I'm watching the news about the weekend's twister toll. Something I've been noticing in the past few years is that they're starting to talk about the ecological consequences of these storms. You never used to hear about that.
Locally, I'm remembering that when I was out Saturday, it was alternately sunny, raining, hailing, and snowing. It's gorgeous today, but we're supposed to get more rain or rain mixed with snow tomorrow. This is unusual for us. While it can snow in the mountains during any month of the year, mid-May usually signals the end of any danger of snow for the Denver metro area.
Weather worries me.
Closer to home, maybe you're wondering about Gidget's get-together with Jason and the fate of the Next Level Plan?
Remember that, after asking her for a comprehensive plan, fully footnoted and with web references, and then not bothering to read it before they met to discuss it, Jason agreed to read it and give her his actual feedback on Friday?
Well, that didn't happen. But rumor has it that he did actually read it this weekend and they were scheduled to meet today to finally discuss it all because, as Gidget was told, he had "a lot of questions and comments."
Now we're told that that's not going to happen, because now Jason's telling her she gave too much detail. He wants her to prepare another document, a spreadsheet, that just lays out the steps, the timeline, and the costs at each stage.
What. A. Tool.*
In the meantime, Vela is acting like the plan got a 100 percent go-ahead and, from what OpieGirl told me, is using it in interviews to explain what the position she's filling entails.
It's all very weird and schizophrenic. It's almost like Gidget gave Jason exactly what he wanted, but he just can't bring himself to say so.
Anyhow. Speaking of get-togethers, I had one myself this weekend. Brunch Saturday morning, then an afternoon of good and bad videos. The cream of the crop was Corner Gas, a little Canadian sitcom that charmed me and made me laugh right out loud.
In closing, let me encourage you all to try something for a week. Reset your browser's home page to Google news but make your default some other country than the UsofA. (Go to news.google.com and check the bottom of the screen. There are a variety of countries to choose from.) Because we all need a non-UsofA perspective on life sometimes.
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* As I have admitted before, I'm a passive-aggressive type with lousy people skills myself, but at least I'm fairly careful not to put myself into jobs where these character flaws can actually bring a company down or drive some coworker to drinking straight from the bottle, okay? So I figure I'm entitled to throw the occasional stone.
But she did. The R.C., I mean. Told me on the phone a little while ago that, had I not already had plans with friends tomorrow, I could have been with her--at the Colorado Chocolate Festival!
Willie Wonka is going to be there! And there will be TONS OF CHOCOLATE to sample, buy, and wallow in! Life can be so unfair.
I mean, yeah, sure, I'm really happy to see my friends. Just--you know. Really, really happy.
Sigh.
Skinitizer. That's one that occurred to me a few minutes ago. All of those "no water needed" hand sanitizers? Skinitizers! As opposed to scanitizers--those security machines in the airport that puff air at you to see what you've stepped in if you're a suicidal terrorist. Earlier today I was webitizing graphics for the internet!
I don't usually spend my work hours making up words, but today I got stuck doing "phone relief" for the receptionist twice, an hour each time. Mostly I did work, honestly, but my mind did wander occasionally.
Why, you might wonder, was Anne's mind wandering?
Well, you've heard of "vaporware," right? It's imaginary product. Sales people refer to any product they're being asked to sell that isn't actually in production yet as "vaporware." And what do programmers call software that either doesn't have code written or is written but does not work? Vaporware, of course. I think software developers invented the word.
Today I've been working on my own version of vaporware--a vaporsite. I was asked to write up a site map for our new website.
Now, since we're still fighting out what our core products and services are, we haven't gotten the go-ahead for the Ask A Question or blog features, I can't find any two people who agree of what our major markets are and/or should be, and the new "customer log-in" section is more of a concept than a plan--well, as you might imagine, I'm having a little trouble putting together a flow chart that lays out the site's content.*
We don't have any content. I have four amazingly nonspecific "keywords" and a lot of differing opinions on what it is the Argonuts actually do--or should be doing.
Anyhow. I designed (hah!) a layout so that I could stare at the imaginary menu bars and theorize on what kind of conceptual content we might eventually decide to maybe include.
I wrote. I crossed out. I played around with graphics and font colors. I rewrote. I changed all the line spacing. I highlighted. I drew lines from one place to another. I wrote "whatever" in four places. I got a fresh piece of paper and wrote it all out again. I crossed out more stuff. I added new sections. I stared at it all for a while.
Then I made up words for twenty minutes while I ate lunch. Sadly, I was unable to come up with a suitable combination of "vapor" and "itizer" to describe the process. The closest I got was "vaporizer" which has the disadvantage of being a real word already and, if you think about it, sounds ominously martial anyhow.
This afternoon I have to turn all of my smoke-and-mirrors into a tidy flowchart that can be used to convince a casual (and hopefully inattentive) audience that we not only have a Major Plan, but we've made Significant Progress on it.
I swear, if it wasn't for the fact that writing about nothing at all is one of my major skills? I'd be sitting under the desk crying softly by now. (And there's no need to try and be "interesting" in a site map, so I'm golden all the way.)
Happy Friday!
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* No, the current site does not have a site map that I can copy and alter appropriately. They've never done a site map before.
It's one of those days. Nothing's precisely going wrong, but things aren't really sailing smoothly, either.
This morning, just as I was knee-deep in a particularly tricky bit of a report I was creating, Penelope dialed me up for the training call I'd forgotten about. I couldn't think of any questions to ask her (although I did take a moment to diss her for quitting just when I'd taught her how a few things about correct comma usage) because every time I let my control go for two seconds, I realized I'd been staring at the screen thinking about my report, instead of listening to her talk. To be honest, I have very little memory of what she talked about.
The next time she calls, I'm going to have to turn my screen off.
Then I had to run home at lunch to grab something I'd forgotten. I usually lunch from 1-2. I arrived back at the office at 1:50 only to discover that I'd completely forgotten today's second conference call, an all-department meeting irregularly scheduled for every other Thursday. I think I've actually remembered that call twice since I've been here. From what I hear, Vela (my boss's boss) was roaming around the office searching for me. So embarrassing.
I particularly wanted to listen to NPR at 2:00 today. On their "World" program, they were doing a special on 1948, interviewing people about the establishment of Israel and covering both sides. (Few stories told in the UsofA include anything about the local population callously displaced by the high-handed establishment of a "Jewish state" on occupied land.) I remembered to bring my walkman, and the conference call, fortunately, ended a bit early at 2:15. But you know what?
NPR's signal isn't strong enough for my walkman to pick it up at my desk. (Yes, I know, I can stream it from the website when I get home this evening, but I had other plans for this evening. I wonder if you can capture a streaming audio file for later playback?)
I haven't lost an ounce but I'm still cranky from being on a diet. Mostly because I didn't have any breakfast today. I didn't see myself making it through the day on my 200-calorie lunch, which is why I had to go home at lunchtime.
I need food and I want junk food. I feel no enthusiasm for tonight's dinner of 4 oz of roasted turkey breast and 1/2 cup of mixed broccoli-cauliflower.
I want nuts. Crackers. Onion rings. Chips and cheese and salsa. French fries and French onion soup. Guacamole with a side of sliced avocado. Baked potatoes loaded with sour cream, chives, and butter. Bruscetta and garlic breadsticks. Corn on the cob, dripping with butter. Spaghetti and meatballs in a garlic red sauce. Cheeseburgers with grilled onions. Artichokes, with each little leaf-spoon glistening with butter. Biscuits and sausage gravy. Nachos, loaded. Chip and dip. Hashed browns. Bacon.
Sigh. You know the diet is working when you start having food hallucinations.
In less-caloric news, today's rainstorm is moving out, leaving the cars in our parking lot thickly sprinkled with pink flower petals from the flowering trees.
And this year's Gardening Experiment is already starting to produce results. The R.C. and I each planted some seeds on Sunday and we already have little sprouts!
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* Don't wig out. I'm not starving myself. It's a pity-party, so I'm not mentioning the carefully measured snacks I have at intervals through the day.
After being threatened with rain every day this week, and enjoying days of balmy 75 degree sunshine, precipitation finally materialized yesterday evening. Today it's gray, cooler, and rainy. I don't mind. We have a serious need for moisture.
That little bunny I saw huddled under a bush, looking drenched and depressed, might not agree. It's his own fault. If he'd moved two feet to the left, he'd have been under a perfectly good tree with needles thick enough to keep it completely dry underneath. If he'd moved two feet to the right, he'd have been inside the edge of the parking garage, shielded from both rain and wind. But he just sat there, looking pathetic. Rabbits are so stupid.
Gidget and TeamChaos are in a tizzy today. Someone discovered that a competitor is running Webstrainer ads with our name in the title--so when you search for our company, their ad comes up, looking like they're an affiliate of ours. People are sending out emails right and left, demanding that this practice cease and desist. (I'm having a little difficulty explaining to TeamChaos the difference between using someone else's trademarked name in the title of an ad and using it in your search keywords. There's a subtle, but legal, difference.)
And now, Gidget is in with Vela and Jason, presenting the Next Level Plan. I'm on a few tenterhooks and won't know how it went for at least an hour.
OpieGirl is having her interview today or tomorrow (Gidget wasn't sure), so I'm rooting for her and sending positive vibes her way as well.
I have so many fingers crossed today that it's hard to type.
Dum-dee-dum-dee-dum.
I've reviewed so many of the Argonuts' accounts already this week that I can't touch any of them again until at least Friday and next week sometime would be better. I have 30 minutes worth of leads to enter into the monthly spreadsheet. I can fritter away an hour or so loading the Argonuts' campaigns up with new search words I thought up this morning.
Other than that, I'm pretty much at loose ends for work that needs to be done this week.
I have an analysis of the web traffic generated by search engines for each of the Argonuts' websites that I could stare at. I'm not sure what, if anything, there is to be learned, but if nothing else I might be able to produce some kind of chart or graph from the material--something with the sort of colored bars and lines that convinces the recipient that they've just received valuable information. I loathed chart-making back when I first started working on computers, but that was Lotus on DOS. Today's Excel makes charting fast and fun!
Which reminds me--prepare for a depressing moment--they're upgrading us to Office 2007 next week (which is not depressing) and there are "training classes" to explain to all of us mouth-breathers what the differences are and to reassure us that we'll survive the transition (which is). If I have to sit through a class on how to use Word or Excel with a bunch of clueless novices? There may be bloodshed.
I sent Bert an email, declining to participate. We'll see what happens.
I'm working hard today to find things to actually say today. I hope you're noticing, because maybe bunnies and boredom aren't riveting reading (serenity can be blah for the spectator), but I do think effort should be acknowledged.
Oh! But! I almost forgot to tell you! (I'm! So excited! And exclamatory!)
I got an email from Her this morning. She found herself a new job! (She can call it "getting into the health and healing industry" if she wants, but a receptionist is a receptionist and a spa is hardly "health care" to anyone outside of Boulder or Berkeley.) Bernie is going to have to move fast to interview and hire someone--she's giving him a strict two-week notice.
And did I mention before that he was talking to her about closing up the office (to save money) and moving it to the basement of his house? I wonder if that's still his plan? I mean, he actually landed a couple of decent-sized jobs late last year. Unless he went completely mental and bid each of them for $10/hour or something, the company should be doing well financially.
Gossip, gossip, gossip. I can't wait to find out--I should call Her or maybe Buehler and see what the news is.
I'm seeing friends this weekend, but from the fandom side of life, not the mundane side. I'm sure there will be gossip and goodies, but I don't anticipate drama.
I think I'll experiment with my writing style. For the next few entries, I should compose all of my text for dialogue--vocabulary and sentence structure to be spoken instead of read.
I don't know why. Maybe just a passing urge to use this blogging time in a more productive way?
Posted by AnneZook at 11:21 AM | Comments (2)Wandering around outside a little while ago (Okay, yes, I was smoking. Get over it.) I saw that the dandelions are coming into bloom and I found myself lost in a memory from long ago. My father used to pay us each a penny for every dandelion we dug up in the yard and presented to him. A whole penny! That was back when you could buy a candy bar for a dime or my preferred sunflower seeds for a nickel a package.
And I remembered a day when I snuck off by myself, carrying my newest library book, and sprawled out in a meadow near our house. Close enough to the creek to hear the water but far enough away to escape the dragonflies, I soaked up the sunshine and lost myself in--I don't know what faraway fantasy land it was that day, but somewhere far, far from Kansas.
I still read that same way--with complete abandon, inhabiting fully the landscape of the story. I can dodge cannon fire as a soldier of the Napoleonic era, face the deafening wrath of a hurricane while aboard a frail sailing ship, or chase along after a detective as he turns over and absorbs clue after clue.
Any of my siblings would be delighted to explain to you just how flawed my memory of my childhood is. I find it difficult to hold onto bad memories. When I look back, I see an endless stream of golden, sunlit days dotted with butterflies and bowls of freshly churned ice cream. And sometimes, very rarely, there was snow.
With effort, I can remember some of the other days, but I can't relate to them. They carry no emotional baggage.*
I'm actually very much at peace with that.
Some things I do remember emotionally.
Kennedy's assassination. Maybe I was six and I didn't really understand what was happening, but I have a distinct memory of the black cloud of desolation that seemed to fill the world around me.
Kent State. That was a shocker, even though I was several years older at the time. I didn't understand how American 'soldiers' could shoot American people that way. It just--I could not relate to it, on any level.
Man landing on the moon. Little or no impact from that one. By then, I'd been reading science fiction for many years and my attitude was, "Of course we're walking on the moon. Get on with it already--Mars is waiting!"
I arrived at work at 7:45 again today. Lacking anything better to do, I went ahead and started working. Used to be, you had to drop a building on my head to get me out of bed in the morning, but not these days.
I mention this uncharacteristic earliness because I think it's a sign of how well-rested I am these days, after the Long Hiatus.
Also because it tends to make for very long work days. Like many of us, I eat lunch at my desk more often than not. And while I always have big resolutions of using the hour to catch up on my personal email or my web reading, the knowledge that someone here once turned me in for playing solitaire on my lunch hour tends to inhibit me. So mostly I just keep working while I eat. (Intermittent blogging aside, you can't say I don't give good value for my salary.)
If you're looking to see what my Words of Wisdom are for today? I advise Googling to find out how many calories are in 1/3 of a chocolate-frosted cake donut before you eat it.
I really should stop blogging without a purpose, shouldn't I?
_____________________________
* The time I was walking home from school with a friend and a strange man pulled his car up and called us over, inviting us to "pet the puppy" in his lap.
The first year trick-or-treating was restricted in our small Kansas town, because of rumors that someone was handing out apples laced with razor blades.
The time we were out on a magazine/newspaper drive for our scout troop and a man gave us an entire wagonful of incredibly explicit pornography. (I'm going to be honest--that one left a mark.)
And also Bert, our IT guy. When the internets went down, he sent out an email to tell everyone about it.
The mind just boggles sometimes.
I was trying to get some Real Work done. I came in today to find a series of storm signals (I call them that because they're copied to the Argonut whose campaign is affected and inevitably result in a series of panicked phone calls and emails), showing that I'd made some small but significant errors in about 30 ads. Wincing. I got them all cleared up and am now waiting hostility from the six people who are going to want to know why I'm so stupid.
But no internet access, so no emails! Hooray!
At the moment, I'm working on my Everything You Need To Know About Your Internet Marketing Campaign presentation. Fortunately for me I'd already done the screen captures a week or so ago. Now all I need is pithy but informative text to go with each graphic. Then I'll turn it all into a PowerPoint (does a company exist in the USofA that does not use PowerPoint, however inappropriately, for each and every presentation it does?) and send it off to Gidget for demolition.
Oops. Internet is back! Better go work....
Posted by AnneZook at 12:37 PM | Comments (2)If you go here and search for "Chile" in the search box on the right, you can get to a video of the Chile eruption. I've been wondering if this is connected to 2007's earthquake. (I mean, something must have triggered an eruption from a volcano that's been dormant for millennia.) I think there's audio, but I don't have a sound card in my computer here at the office.
There are a lot of cool videos on the National Geographic site. (I don't know why I have a thing for volcanoes. I just do. And floods. And tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. Natural disasters have a weird fascination for me.)
No disasters, natural or otherwise, these parts at the moment. Gidget is still scheduled to present the NLP to Jason on Wednesday. In the meantime, her boss, Vela, has requested a budget and a list of the things that we want done in May, so she can start implementing them. (I guess her mind is already made up.)
And our communications person quit, leaving a position open that's right up OpieGirl's alley, so Gidget's having her send a resume in to Vela. Vela's already interviewing a couple of other people, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for OpieGirl. She really wants to get out of her current crazy employment situation.
The weekend was gorgeous. Weather was threatened but didn't really materialize. I didn't really do anything, but on the plus side, I spent very little money! headscratch I remember eating lunch on Saturday and stopping by Target for a few necessities, but other than that, I'm drawing a blank. I walked over to Whole Foods and didn't buy anything. I did three loads of laundry and cleaned the bathroom. I gave myself a facial and a pedicure.
What happened to the other 42 hours of the weekend is anyone's guess.
I suspect that having spent an inordinate number of hours playing Phantom Hourglass on the Nintendo DS has a lot to do with my Lost Weekend. I haven't found a new game I enjoy as much as I'm enjoying this one in a long time--years, maybe--so thank you to the R.C. who purchased and recommended this one.
I got my latest box full of amazon.com indulgences on Friday, but I'm in the middle of a series at the moment and haven't stopped to read any of the new ones yet. (I did pause to gloat over the luxury of new books several times during the weekend.)
Workwise, my Original Job Responsibilities are all under control. My Add-on Job Responsibilities are humming along smoothly.
This is all fortunate since, last Thursday, I was handed a whole pile of Brand-new Job Responsibilities that have nothing to do with my current job, current job title, or current list of skills. Sigh.
It's because the communications person is leaving. Management realized (in a panic) last week that they have no one here who can produce the monthly Argonut-targeted newsletter or the sporadic client-targeted bulk emails. Somehow, my name always seems to come up in these situations.
They don't want me to write these things, of course. No, they just want me to learn the software so I can generate them. Here I am, brain the size of a planet full of nothing but opinions and they're giving me a pain in my diodes nothing more interesting than shoving someone else's stilted prose into a pre-fab newsletter template.
I am going to have primary responsibility for the company blog when it's up and running but, again, they want someone to handle the software and keep the sp*mm*rs at bay. Only the Serious Employees with lame stories about packing and shipping weird items will be allowed to write posts.
Seriously, I probably wouldn't let me write my newsletter either. Or my blog. Doesn't mean I'm not going to hold a grudge about it, though.
Brooding.
Yesterday? Sunny and a balmy 82 degrees.
Today? Snow and 45 degrees.
Spring in Colorado is manic depressive.
I've been on the diet for three days. I'm starving of the hunger and haven't lost an ounce yet. So typical.
Last Thursday, I spent two hours doing really arduous work--a smattering of web reading and then writing a two-page description of what a blog is, how you do it, and why it's a good idea to have a company one. (And a few of the pitfalls.)
Friday was twice as arduous. Five hours spent researching and writing a five-page document on why we should redesign our website, what new features we should have, and a mockup of a new home page with a new design, describing colors, layout, and functionality. (They won't use it, and they shouldn't. I'm anything but a designer.)
The point is, I got paid for roaming around online, reading bits and pieces of interesting things, and then creating a document repeating and condensing the ideas.
Some days, this job really doesn't suck.
This week, we're bearing down on the deadline for the Next Level Plan, and it's all not quite so much fun, but it's still pretty cool.
Gidget's working from home today, finishing up the last bits and pieces of the NLP.
I think she's getting pretty tired. She's passing out compliments. First, she mentioned that Penelope thinks I'm a "great writer." (From the draft of a marketing plan? How easy is she to impress, anyhow?)
Then she said that it looked like we were going to be sailing with the Argonauts for a while and that she "loves" working with me. That's so sweet!
I mean, considering that I never got the "new-hire evaluation" there was so much talk about. But feedback is feedback, right? And, all sarcasm aside, it's very nice to have people say positive things about you.
And now I've been writing this entry for 20 minutes and I'm getting twitchy. Because I'm also a little wiggy about blogging or blog-reading from the office. I suspect they're using a keystroke capture program of some kind.
Posted by AnneZook at 04:50 PM | Comments (2)