Denver is a good place to live. I mean, where else could you live where it could snow for 48 solid hours and yet you can drive to work on largely clear pavement the next day?
As always, the apartment parking lot and the fifty feet of side road we have to drive to reach the traffic light were the trickiest part of my commute today.
The management company did their best on the parking lot--they had the trucks out plowing three times a day for the past couple of days. However, no one could have predicted Miss Only I Exist backing her tractor-sized truck out of a parking space this morning, then stopping so she could walk around it and knock her 14" of snow off--not onto one of the many the drifts scattered around the lot, but onto the only clear pavement available, the driving lane. In an astounding display of selfishness, she not only didn't apologize to the other drivers trying to creep past her to the exit, she didn't even seem to notice that she was not alone on the planet.
Internet marketing is a good job to have. Not everyone in this city was snowed in for two days but didn't have to use vacation time or lose pay. Me, if I have a computer and internet access, I'm good to go. And I do work when I'm working from home--I got a ton of stuff done.
The R.C. isn't so lucky but she did make it in to her office yesterday--for 3-1/2 hours.
Anyhow.
Everything was fine until I logged into my Webstrainer program to start the day's work.
Ten seconds later, I was buried in a seemingly endless avalanche of poor quality scores. Words that, a mere twelve hours ago, were highly OK or even Excellent are now irrelevant, in appropriate, and inactive.
In fact, yesterday, I was good at what I do. Today, I'm an abysmal failure.
On the "good news, I suppose" side of the equation, I have so much work to do that the time is just whizzing by. Right now, it's less than an hour until the conference call with Mad Boy and the Webstrainer rep.
The snow that is. It's been tumblin' down since about 9:00 last night.
Since it rained for an hour or two before the snow started, the accumulation isn't massive, but the sheet of ice under that 3"-4" is daunting.
They've updated the forecast to say a possible 18" accumulation.
We have food and power, and I have about 200 new ads to write, so I guess I'd better fire up the ol' laptop and get to writing.
Posted by AnneZook at 08:24 AM | Comments (2)I had a good weekend. Saturday I bought three (three!) new books. Sunday, I played in the kitchen. I love playing in the kitchen. I had a variety of ingredients I'd bought with a vague idea that they might be combined to produce some kind of food-like products.
Most of the combinations I tried were--unfortunate. Pre-made, frozen sheets of phyllo dough are fun, but you have to move faster than I move to actually cook with it. (You also need either a baklava recipe or savory ingredients--neither of which I had to hand.)
In the end, I fell back on a tried-and-true cobbler recipe and produced a cherry cobbler that was really very nice. (OTOH, what wouldn't be nice if you dumped half a cup of melted butter into it?) It kept talking to me, though, and since my butt is already quite large enough, thank you, I wound up putting most of it down the waste disposal unit.*
I shouldn't have mentioned the cobbler to Fun Bobby today. He's quite put out with me--he says my cobbler reminds him of the cobblers his granny used to make him out on the farm or something. Even the R.C., who doesn't like cobbler, complained because I didn't save her at least a spoonful of filling.
Yeah, and while I'm thinking about it, I don't want to hear from you cooking snobs about using pre-made dough. I always use it--life is too short to do otherwise. I'm more interested in playing with filling than in making dough.
Although, naturally, the batter for the cobbler was from scratch--there's no other way.
So, what else is new?
Well, I took a day off yesterday. I spent it the same way I've spent every other vacation day I've taken this year--working on free-lance projects. I got it all done, but I'm still uneasily aware that I should be working on these accounts each week, not every couple of weeks. Must. Be. More. Conscientious.
And today, I'm back at the office. Fending off 'Nuts with one hand while I dig through last week's notes with the other, trying to remember what it was I was working on before I was distracted by NewBoss Anais's request for a series of reports--reports that took 14 hours to produce--last week.**
I have accomplished very little today. I keep staring at the campaigns, starting to make edits, then stopping myself because I'm not sure what to do next. In consequence, the day is going very slowly.
The Southern 'Nuts--the S'SWest 'Nut and his Nor'East 'NutNeighbor, are complaining that their forced marketing remarriage is not producing leads. I marched into NewBoss Anais's office and said, "I told all of you not to do any of the things you've done and you did them anyhow and my position from here on out is that I don't care and I don't want to hear about it."
Sadly, she is wise to me and didn't believe me.
MadBoy & his crazy offspring have been quiet--I suspect they're Up To Something. Or, just lurking--waiting for Friday's call and the confirmation of their belief that the world is out to cheat them.
Another 'Nut location bit the dust today. (It's not on my conscience--he didn't have a marketing campaign. His opinion was that he shouldn't have to pay for leads. *boggle*) And, yes, he owed the Argonut Café a ton of money that we are unlikely to collect.
And, speaking of the corporate Café, Fun Bobby just wandered by to confirm my home phone number. They're making contingency plans, in case the snow storm moving in tonight is a big one. He said they'd call me if I didn't have to come in--I said they would be safe in assuming, if we have more than six inches, that I wouldn't even be trying.
Since the current forecast on a local news site is for "at least half a foot of snow" (emphasis theirs) by mid-morning, with more falling throughout the day, I'm already making plans.
Not that I need, you know, actual preparation. With a computer and internet access, I'm good to go.
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* I'm on a diet.
Crabby Diet Girl, that's me today. I want to lose another five pounds, but I don't want it to take two months, because then I can't eat Christmas candy! So, I'm back on tuna salad, yams, turkey, and low-fat yogurt. Bleah. (Okay, I really like yams and I can live with tuna salad for a few weeks and even a strict diet lets me have a single tablespoon of gravy on the turkey to liven it up and low-fat yogurt doesn't bother me. But I can't find a "diet" category of food that would cover cherry cobbler. Makes me crabby.
Anyhow, I'm a grown-up--I can be crabby whenever I want.
** She wanted me to send out quarterly "performance" reports to all of the locations. "Let sleeping dogs lie," I told her. "Don't rock the boat. Don't ask for trouble." No one ever listens to me.
I just had to talk to our Webstrainer rep about MadBoy.
I've been sparing you a rehash of the same old aggravations, but, yes, the idiot 'Nut is back and sowing turmoil in all directions.
It all started about three weeks ago when I noticed that he'd changed his campaign to deliberately target territory that's "owned" by the other two Bowery Boys--the two he used to share a single marketing effort with. Naturally that's strictly against the rules--they sign legal contracts not to do that--so I passed the info along to NewBoss Anais and hoped to remain uninvolved.
For the last three weeks, I've been forced into endless discussions about MadBoy. I've wigged out myself, pitched numerous fits, and flatly refused to be involved in the problem. I've advised my own particular ChaosManager that there is no solution to this problem and that they make a mistake in breaking the rules for this hammerhead, leave themselves open to legal action from other locations, and generally just don't do themselves or the world any favors by not shutting this guy down.
I had hoped that, at the very least, I would be come so obnoxious on the subject that NewBoss Anais would bypass me. No such luck.
As he is prone to do, MadBoy, when approached about his contract violation, counterattacked instantly, demanding (and not for the first time) that we change reality to suit the way he thinks the world should work.
Long, stupid story short--his DIY approach to marketing isn't working, the outside agency he contracted with to do it for him either isn't doing it, isn't doing it to suit him, or weirded him out in some other way, and he's decided that the fundamental problem with his life is that the Argonut Café is in violation of the contract we signed with him because we can't make Webstrainer abide by the terms of a contract they not only haven't seen and didn't sign but directly contradicts their published policies.
(More simply, one of the other Bowery Boy campaigns has better ads, higher quality scores, and spends more money. So those ads sometimes show in MadBoy's "territory." He feels that since we are unable to force Webstrainer to rewrite their software to prevent this, we are in violation of his contract.)
Anyhow, he's demanded and is getting a conference call with one of our Webstrainer reps on the phone. His position, when he's feeling polite, is that I might believe how I tell him--or, rather, how I tell NewBoss Anais to tell him--the program works, but that doesn't mean I know what I'm talking about. When he's feeling slightly less polite, his position is that I'm an incompetent jackass who doesn't know what I'm talking about. But, mostly, his position is that everyone hates him and is deliberately cheating him.
I tried. I honestly did try not to prejudice the Webstrainer rep or say anything inappropriate. She even complimented me on my diplomacy. (I never said I tried to keep the strain from showing.)
It's hard to prepare someone for a call with a blowhard know-nothing who considers themselves an expert and is inclined to scream and curse if contradicted, using only diplomatic, objective language.
Also, I'm crabby because I've been forced to actually look at his POS campaign several times over the last three weeks and several of what I dubiously think of as his "choices" have come close to giving me an aneurism.
Sorry about that rant yesterday. Today I came armed with chocolate. Dark chocolate Dove Promises are my current drug of choice when it comes to dulling my senses against the mundane frustrations of daily life.
One of these days, I'm going to learn the proper use of a comma. It's on my To Do list.
In the meantime, I may start politiblogging again. Or, you know, reading up on quantum physics. Or writing--I could go back to working on one of my novels.
The point is, I've had my little break and my brain is starting to churn in that special way it has when it wants to tell me it's not getting enough exercise.
Getting all ranty because most people are too lazy to think is just a waste of time and not a little unreasonable. I'm frequently very unfair to people who, having dealt with the daily commute, the stress of their job, the challenge of raising a family, and the unwelcome balance in their checkbook, find themselves without the time and/or energy to figure out what the heck's going on in Bosnia or to worry about where this country is headed in ten or twenty years.
I accept--I do not like, but I accept--the reality that most people wouldn’t really care if they were living under a totalitarian dictatorship as long as it didn't change the essentials of their daily lives. Governments are formed to help ensure the daily essentials--food, shelter, entertainment--and survive as long as they don't forget about them.
I include entertainment, yes. Because while most people don't think, and don't care to think, that doesn’t really change the fact that they possess the monkey curiosity that needs to be fed every bit as much as their bodies do. The mindless banality of television takes care of that.
Bah.
The weather continues nice at the moment but they're forecasting storms tonight. Rain, then a mix of rain and snow, and a cold, slippery commute tomorrow.
Posted by AnneZook at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)I think I'll start a new blog and write about nothing but weather.
The R.C. mentioned the long blog-silence to me last week. I thought about it for a while and decided that--mostly--my thoughts are more private than they used to be. Not because I'm thinking anything seditious, obscene, or even mean, but because I don't know anyone who actually cares. I can't even remember the last time I had an actual conversation with someone about a topic of any actual importance.*
Conversation, I've decided, has to stay pretty shallow if you want today's over-stimulated, frantically trying-to-multitask population to even pretend to be engaged. If you find yourself, twenty years or so past your college days, once again ruminating on Kant or with an urge to re-visit the Federalist Papers/Anti-Federalist Papers, you can't really talk to anyone about the thoughts these writings inspire, can you? Or about how your attitude toward them might have changed in the last twenty years. I have an intermittent but long-term interest in quantum physics. It's inconceivable to me that anyone I know has any grasp of the fundamentals, much less is willing to spend as much as 60 seconds discussing the topic.
Brief. You have to be brief.
As time goes by and our society becomes ever-more addicted to the sound-bite, whether spoken or written--texting, Twitter, and Facebook, I'm looking at you--you have to be briefer and briefer if you don't want people to just walk away while you're still in the middle of your first sentence.
Our society has absorbed and internalized the right-wing cult of anti-intellectualism to the point where any display of a depth of knowledge on any subject deeper than the intellectual tapioca of television produces a tsunami of glazed eyes and empty chairs.
People are not only ignorant and uninformed, they brag about it. As though not understanding the world they live in is something to be proud of. As though remaining steadfastly stupid in a world awash with information is a unique achievement. As though, having been gifted with a brain, making the choice not to use it is in some way--in some way a choice and not an abdication of membership in the human race.
So, you know, mostly I've just stopped trying.
The weather, FWIW, is fabulous. It's been sunny and 75-80 for the past few days.
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* I am, as always, dissing the nameless, faceless masses. Not the intelligent and stimulating readers of this blog.
Also, I should point out that this blog entry would probably never have been written if I'd dropped a couple of chocolates in my lunch bag this morning.
Posted by AnneZook at 02:45 PM | Comments (11)