Author: kelson

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: šŸ˜”stressed

Hint taken

This morning I looked at the vine that I’ve routed along the top of my cubicle wall and thought it was just getting long enough to warrant a new paper clip to hold it in place. (I have clips at two to three-foot intervals.) Just now it flopped down off the wall to hang in front of my calendar.

Hint taken, plant! New clips are in place.

Seeing the light(s)

Monday night, as I parked the car in the “garage”, I noticed the light looked funny. Sure enough, one of the headlights had gone out. I didn’t have time to pick up a replacement bulb on Tuesday, so I grabbed one last night, picked up some work gloves that weren’t all covered with gardening dirt and plant bits, and called alenxa to ask whether we had any safety glasses since the bulb package had a warning about how it was pressurized and could explode in your face if handled incorrectly.

Now, you probably haven’t noticed this unless you’ve watched me turn into a driveway, but the front left turn signal is white instead of yellow. This is because when it burned out a year(?) ago, the store only had clear bulbs of the right type, and I had somehow gotten it into my head that the glass in the turn signal assembly was amber (it isn’t). I went with what I had, and checked back at the nearby auto parts store a week or so later to see if they’d gotten the amber bulbs in. Once I had them, I let them sit on my desk for a year because I didn’t feel like messing with it, and hey, the signal worked, didn’t it?

So I figured as long as I was replacing the headlight, I’d take care of the turn signal at the same time. Only one problem: I’d bought the wrong bulb. I needed 1157NA, and picked up 1156NA. The bulb was the right size, but it had the wrong number of filaments, the wrong number of contacts, and the pegs on the base were in the wrong spot.

So the car has a full set of headlights now, but the turn signal is still off-color.

Meh.

Christmas Coffee Calypso

I’d forgotten about it overnight, but today was the office building’s annual holiday party. This means that they set up a cappuccino cart, a pastry/fruit tray, and a calypso band playing Christmas songs on steel drums and a keyboard out in front of the building. (There’s also one in summer, not connected with any holidays, with smoothies instead.)

I just grabbed a plate, since I was carrying a travel mug of coffee from home, and the line for coffee was about 5 times as long. Unfortunately this meant I had extra food, which I forgot to put in the refrigerator. Not a problem for the raisin bread, but the yogurt’s probably toast. Oh, well…

Ended up grabbing a chai at Starbucks after lunch (and reminding myself why I usually don’t get chai there), which led to a conversation in the elevator with someone who works on the same floor. This was unusual on several accounts, since I don’t always take the elevator and when I do, I rarely talk with anyone beyond “What floor?”

Work itself involved a lot of frustration, a tale that I’ll have to tell in another post.

Zoom!

For a nice change of pace, I managed to get on the freeway about a half mile ahead of a traffic break this morning.

This meant I got halfway from alenxaā€™s office to mine at about 80, and the rest of the way at 50.

Much nicer than the day last week that averaged 15.

(This has been anoteer Useless FactTM)

Chain of Coincidence

Woke up early (for a weekend) yesterday and went out to breakfast. As weā€™d been out last night watching Harry Potter and alenxa was up even later baking cookies and scones for today, this was a more difficult feat than you might imagine…

Spent most of Saturday helping sekl and non_seqvitvr move, with largely the same crowd as the night before. Chances are most of you reading this were there, so thereā€™s not really much point in describing it. We ended up bailing around 7:00 since my brain was starting to shut down.

The plan for the evening was to grab something at Starbucks, get home, at which point Iā€™d go straight to bed while Katie got in a long-delayed round of Puzzle Pirates. It didnā€™t quite work out that way. First, while packing up the remnants of the home office, sheā€™d found Jim & Stacyā€™s copy of the ā€œOnce More With Feelingā€ soundtrack. So she fired up the iPod on our drive back, and we listened to our copy. Second, I checked the mail when we got home, and found a box from Amazon… containing the Buffy the Vampire Slayer ā€œChosen Collection.ā€

ā€œYou wonā€™t believe what showed up in the mail.ā€

ā€œUm… okay…ā€

ā€œWanna watch ā€˜Once More with Feeling?ā€™ā€

So we watched the Buffy musical. Then Katie hunted for the outtakes (which are only on some seasons, and the booklets donā€™t tell you which special features are on which discs, though you can at least tell which discs have special features by picking the ones that only have three episodes) while the caffeine vanished into the ether and my brain slowly turned off again, and I dragged myself to bed at the (for yesterday) late, late hour of 10:00.

Fogging Things Up

  1. When I got out of bed, alenxa said, “Hey, there’s fog out there!” A half an hour earlier, when she’d gotten up, it had been clear. By the time we left for work, all that was left was just enough haze to maximize glare and make the broken sun visor and lack of sunglasses a problem. We did get a great view of one of the ex-marine base blimp hangars where the near end was perfectly visible, but it faded into the fog so that the far end was completely hidden. (Naturally, by the time I dug the camera out, the light turned green and we didn’t get a picture.)
  2. There’s something fascinating about the high-tech/low-tech contrast in surgery where the instruments consist of a styrofoam cup and a long Q-tip. OK, the cup has to be full of liquid nitrogen, but it just seems so simple.
  3. Last week I got into work and said to a co-worker, “Is it just me, or do people not know how to drive in the rain?” “I think they just don’t know how to drive.” I spent nearly 10 minutes at a turn signal this morning because some idiot didn’t notice it turned green, and the next car was a big two-piece truck with no acceleration capability whatsoever. And then there was the freeway…
  4. Amazon’s shipping decisions just don’t make any sense. Last week I placed an order for three items (so I could hit that magic $25 and get free shipping). I checked the box to lump everything into as few shipments as possible. So of course they decided to just ship two of them. Then they shipped the third the next day. Yesterday, the second shipment arrived, but I’m still waiting for the first. Edit: The first package arrived today. It seems holiday shipping is already in full swing, because the UPS guy showed up around 7:30.
  5. Server room is freezing. This is good. When it isn’t, my boss says things like “You can smell the electronics trying to die!” And things crash. And we have to spend half the day fixing things that crash.
  6. Speaking of things that crash, I’m getting very annoyed at Microsoft’s decision in MFC 7.0 to stop hiding menus and toolbars in Print Preview mode.

Manic Monday? Pfehhh!

While I can’t predict how crazy today will be, I already know tomorrow’s going to be nuts, what with…

  1. The election (all you Californians are planning to vote, aren’t you?).
  2. A deadline at work.
  3. Microsoft Patch Tuesday.

All this means that I can’t stay home with the cold that I picked up on Saturday!

(Reminder to self: must remember to blog when happy.)

Current Mood: busy