Month: January 2006

WTF weather

It’s 82° outside. That, in itself, is not terribly bizarre for SoCal in January. What’s bizarre is the fact that it’s 15 degrees cooler inside.

Around 11:00 this morning I was seriously considering turning on the heater, until I decided to check the temperature outside. It was 65° in the living room and 78° on the balcony. So I opened all the windows I could. The living room has warmed up, but due to our floorplan, the back room with all the computers hasn’t much.

What makes absolutely no sense is the fact that our apartment has lousy insulation. We would never get this effect on a summer day that reached 78° by 11:00 and 82° by 2:00 when we might actually want it. (Although 65° is a bit extreme.)

Corporate niceness has gone too far

The office is switching to a new payroll company and direct deposit hasn’t kicked in yet, so I stopped at the bank at lunch to deposit my paycheck. I actually ended up at a different branch from the one I intended to visit, since I missed the freeway exit but there was another branch near the next one.

The greeter asked me what they could help me with or something customer service-y sounding, I said I just wanted to make a deposit, and she said, “Would you like to fill out a deposit slip?” while gesturing to the small stand with three different kinds of deposit slips. It was clearly meant as “Deposit slips are over here, fill one out before you get in line.”

But the phrasing — who do they think they’re kidding? And what’s wrong with a simple, “Please fill out a deposit slip.”

By the time I left, I’d lost count of the number of “Have a nice day,” “Have a wonderful afternoon,” etc. types of comments, and I was beginning to feel like I’d been banking in Stepford. It was seriously creepy.

Oh, and the teller thanked me for filling out the deposit slip.

Ugh.

5:00 on a Friday afternoon is not an appropriate time to think to yourself, “All right! I can finally get started!”

Today was Office clean-up day. I junked a bunch of old, unused computer parts, tried to put more memory in my brand-new computer — which refused to boot until I took the memory out again, cut a bunch of wires from our old phone/network so I could get the crap out of my cubicle (some panels and jacks have been sitting in the corner since we installed the new network, still attached to the wires coming out of the column), answered email, installed the WMF security patch on a bunch of computers, updated software on a couple of servers, dusted the artificial plant, adjusted the paper clips holding the real vine in place, put a bunch of stuff into a cabinet, moved papers around so I could wipe off my desk, made tea, looked through everyone else’s discarded junk for anything usable, shredded some of the old papers, spent an hour trying to un-jam the shredder… with the occasional trip to the web for sanity’s sake.

I think I’m going to just have to send what I’ve got on this review document and come in for an afternoon on the weekend to deal with the actual programming. I was going to stay late anyway today, but how much can I really get done in 1.5 hours?

Current Mood: 😡stressed