Not just the time change
This week has been weird so far.
On Monday, heading to work, all of a sudden I hit a backup on Fabyan immediately past 25. Oh crap. What's going on? Is there an accident? Maybe I should make a U-turn to go up 25 to 38.
...It ended up being a lawn care company blocking one of the lanes to work on a residential property. Nice. Could we perhaps schedule these session after 9 AM, not at 7:30 next time?
Yesterday, heading to work, I was almost there when I got stopped at the main light before my turn. This is right by the school I work near. Up ahead, I could see a school bus in the middle of the street with its flashers on, then back a little bit there was some sort of vehicle with amber lights going. When I got closer to the next intersection--my turn--a car in the opposite left turn lane had its hood all smashed in; the amber lights truck was a community service officer. Someone wasn't paying attention. Granted, it had rained and it was wet outside, but you're coming out of a residential, 25 MPH zone...how could you be going so fast as to damage your car like that? Not only that, but miss the big yellow bus stopped in the turn lane in front of you? The bus, at least from far away, did not appear to have sustained damage. Given the time of day, I'm thinking the bus had no passengers and was returning to the nearby bus barn, so that's good, but yeah. Not how anyone wants to start the day.
And, well, Coach Q got fired. Heard that as soon as I got in my car to leave for work.
My young coworker wasn't having a good day, either. Her friend planned to pick her up to take her voting, but his alarm didn't go off, so she ended up Ubering there (didn't want to drive as she was concerned about parking) and walked back home (close enough, plus she didn't feel like paying for a second Uber), then she had an appointment before work, and when she got to work she was kind of frazzled, plus she realized she'd lost her I Voted sticker. She then noticed that our newest coworker and I both had purple-ish tops on and went, I didn't get the purple memo! Two birds, one stone: We have purple Post-Its, so I grabbed one, wrote "I voted :)" on it, and stuck it to her shoulder. It worked.
We were both a bit off yesterday. I couldn't tell you why I was, because I think I slept okay, but when I got to work and looked in my bag, I realized...I have no lunch bag. I'd forgotten to pack myself a meal. Oh, crap. There is no way I can go until 8 PM on a couple of granola bars, so looks like I'll have to run to the store. Here's the funny part: Back building coworker recently did me a favor, and while he called it a birthday present, I still wanted to do something nice for him, so I had planned to go to the nearby grocery store to get him a gift card. I was just planning to do that later in the week. Well...two birds, one stone once again. I was able to pick myself up a ready-made sandwich plus a gift card, which I stuck in a notecard and snuck back to his workstation today. He and our young coworker go there frequently (him at least once a week), so I knew he'd appreciate it, plus when he came up by us and said he was about to leave for lunch, I snuck back there while the two of them were talking and put it on his desk. Once he got back there, he called and said he appreciated it, so that was nice. I'm sure he did! He didn't have to pay for lunch today!
Now today. My one coworker is on vacation, so he set his vacation email message to have people contact me in his stead. Great. And of course the first person to contact me, she asked me to do something I don't really know how to do. Between my boss and me, we got it figured out, but still. Annoying. And it was time-sensitive, needing to get done before the manager gets back next Thursday, so something *had* to be done.
Before he left, the manager asked me to clean up the computer desktops on the two workstations in my area. They're shared, and drama mama has a habit of creating a ton of files and leaving them there. The monitors have different resolutions, so while my workstation isn't terrible, the other one basically had no blank space left. I do try to clean them up as I can, but some of the stuff I wasn't sure what to do with it. There are also a few files that get used fairly regularly so that they should still be readily accessible, so I put a few new folders on the desktop for those, and I messaged YC and drama mama to let them know, since this will affect them more than anything else. Here's the scary thing: Drama mama is a very visual person and made herself pictograms of how to do certain tasks, taking screen shots of whatever and putting them into Word documents. However, there was one file I didn't find between the two computers, because it was too new and the computers haven't been shut off recently (the way the files get shared). It was one of the most basic tasks you could possibly do at my job. It's pretty much the task you learn first. And, after nearly seven months on the job, she still didn't know how to do that and had to make herself a pictogram of how to do it.
Sigh.
And, AND, this is how I found out she was in last Saturday: I came into work Monday morning for our meeting and went to grab the calendar off the wall. Scrawled all over the entire box for tomorrow was "Happy Birthday to Drama Mama." ...Are you kidding me? Are you 12? We have two other birthdays this month (mine and the newest coworker...he has a doctorate, so I might just call him the good doctor), and neither of us felt the need to even put our birthdays on the calendar, much less make them so obvious. The good doctor is four years older than me, so born in the same decade as me and drama mama...so yeah, we're all in our 40s. (She won't pin down her exact age, but I know her birth year starts with a 7. And I know she's older than me.) Like...what you do on your calendar at home, whatever, go for it. This is a work calendar where we write work-related things. Also, this is no ordinary wall calendar; it's a blotter, so it's like a foot and a half across and the squares are several inches wide. (My boss insisted.) YC took it upon herself to add us--tastefully--to the calendar so at least people know. She also became an auntie for the second time on Monday and made sure to add her new nephew to the calendar as well. That? Totally understandable. The other? Not so much.
Perhaps this was predicated by the weird dream I had over the weekend. I was at a wedding, like at somebody's house in their backyard, and there were three tables set up for the guests. A bunch of people ended up crashing the reception and they had to grab a bunch of tables to put them together so all the crashers (and me apparently) could sit together--we're talking 5 or 6 standard rectangular folding tables. Weird. I then went inside to where the food was, and I remember being in line next to mujina, and basically the first items we came across were meats--including sausages that looked like piglets. It was obvious that they were piglets, but it was obvious that they were a hard sausage, like salami. ...WTH. Where does my brain come up with this stuff? I related this dream to a few people and got asked how the piglet sausage tasted, but I woke up right around then so I don't know.
This doesn't even go into how my weekend has changed. I'll save that for my band post, which likely will happen tomorrow.
On Monday, heading to work, all of a sudden I hit a backup on Fabyan immediately past 25. Oh crap. What's going on? Is there an accident? Maybe I should make a U-turn to go up 25 to 38.
...It ended up being a lawn care company blocking one of the lanes to work on a residential property. Nice. Could we perhaps schedule these session after 9 AM, not at 7:30 next time?
Yesterday, heading to work, I was almost there when I got stopped at the main light before my turn. This is right by the school I work near. Up ahead, I could see a school bus in the middle of the street with its flashers on, then back a little bit there was some sort of vehicle with amber lights going. When I got closer to the next intersection--my turn--a car in the opposite left turn lane had its hood all smashed in; the amber lights truck was a community service officer. Someone wasn't paying attention. Granted, it had rained and it was wet outside, but you're coming out of a residential, 25 MPH zone...how could you be going so fast as to damage your car like that? Not only that, but miss the big yellow bus stopped in the turn lane in front of you? The bus, at least from far away, did not appear to have sustained damage. Given the time of day, I'm thinking the bus had no passengers and was returning to the nearby bus barn, so that's good, but yeah. Not how anyone wants to start the day.
And, well, Coach Q got fired. Heard that as soon as I got in my car to leave for work.
My young coworker wasn't having a good day, either. Her friend planned to pick her up to take her voting, but his alarm didn't go off, so she ended up Ubering there (didn't want to drive as she was concerned about parking) and walked back home (close enough, plus she didn't feel like paying for a second Uber), then she had an appointment before work, and when she got to work she was kind of frazzled, plus she realized she'd lost her I Voted sticker. She then noticed that our newest coworker and I both had purple-ish tops on and went, I didn't get the purple memo! Two birds, one stone: We have purple Post-Its, so I grabbed one, wrote "I voted :)" on it, and stuck it to her shoulder. It worked.
We were both a bit off yesterday. I couldn't tell you why I was, because I think I slept okay, but when I got to work and looked in my bag, I realized...I have no lunch bag. I'd forgotten to pack myself a meal. Oh, crap. There is no way I can go until 8 PM on a couple of granola bars, so looks like I'll have to run to the store. Here's the funny part: Back building coworker recently did me a favor, and while he called it a birthday present, I still wanted to do something nice for him, so I had planned to go to the nearby grocery store to get him a gift card. I was just planning to do that later in the week. Well...two birds, one stone once again. I was able to pick myself up a ready-made sandwich plus a gift card, which I stuck in a notecard and snuck back to his workstation today. He and our young coworker go there frequently (him at least once a week), so I knew he'd appreciate it, plus when he came up by us and said he was about to leave for lunch, I snuck back there while the two of them were talking and put it on his desk. Once he got back there, he called and said he appreciated it, so that was nice. I'm sure he did! He didn't have to pay for lunch today!
Now today. My one coworker is on vacation, so he set his vacation email message to have people contact me in his stead. Great. And of course the first person to contact me, she asked me to do something I don't really know how to do. Between my boss and me, we got it figured out, but still. Annoying. And it was time-sensitive, needing to get done before the manager gets back next Thursday, so something *had* to be done.
Before he left, the manager asked me to clean up the computer desktops on the two workstations in my area. They're shared, and drama mama has a habit of creating a ton of files and leaving them there. The monitors have different resolutions, so while my workstation isn't terrible, the other one basically had no blank space left. I do try to clean them up as I can, but some of the stuff I wasn't sure what to do with it. There are also a few files that get used fairly regularly so that they should still be readily accessible, so I put a few new folders on the desktop for those, and I messaged YC and drama mama to let them know, since this will affect them more than anything else. Here's the scary thing: Drama mama is a very visual person and made herself pictograms of how to do certain tasks, taking screen shots of whatever and putting them into Word documents. However, there was one file I didn't find between the two computers, because it was too new and the computers haven't been shut off recently (the way the files get shared). It was one of the most basic tasks you could possibly do at my job. It's pretty much the task you learn first. And, after nearly seven months on the job, she still didn't know how to do that and had to make herself a pictogram of how to do it.
Sigh.
And, AND, this is how I found out she was in last Saturday: I came into work Monday morning for our meeting and went to grab the calendar off the wall. Scrawled all over the entire box for tomorrow was "Happy Birthday to Drama Mama." ...Are you kidding me? Are you 12? We have two other birthdays this month (mine and the newest coworker...he has a doctorate, so I might just call him the good doctor), and neither of us felt the need to even put our birthdays on the calendar, much less make them so obvious. The good doctor is four years older than me, so born in the same decade as me and drama mama...so yeah, we're all in our 40s. (She won't pin down her exact age, but I know her birth year starts with a 7. And I know she's older than me.) Like...what you do on your calendar at home, whatever, go for it. This is a work calendar where we write work-related things. Also, this is no ordinary wall calendar; it's a blotter, so it's like a foot and a half across and the squares are several inches wide. (My boss insisted.) YC took it upon herself to add us--tastefully--to the calendar so at least people know. She also became an auntie for the second time on Monday and made sure to add her new nephew to the calendar as well. That? Totally understandable. The other? Not so much.
Perhaps this was predicated by the weird dream I had over the weekend. I was at a wedding, like at somebody's house in their backyard, and there were three tables set up for the guests. A bunch of people ended up crashing the reception and they had to grab a bunch of tables to put them together so all the crashers (and me apparently) could sit together--we're talking 5 or 6 standard rectangular folding tables. Weird. I then went inside to where the food was, and I remember being in line next to mujina, and basically the first items we came across were meats--including sausages that looked like piglets. It was obvious that they were piglets, but it was obvious that they were a hard sausage, like salami. ...WTH. Where does my brain come up with this stuff? I related this dream to a few people and got asked how the piglet sausage tasted, but I woke up right around then so I don't know.
This doesn't even go into how my weekend has changed. I'll save that for my band post, which likely will happen tomorrow.