Having spent the past eight hours (minus lunch and coffee break) correcting and finalizing the first 112 pages of a report of the UN Joint Staff Pension Board which was due to go to the printer tonight, imagine my feelings upon going to the front desk to tell them that someone on the night shift would have to do the last third(?), only to be ( Read more... )

Every third week, I work nights. It’s no big deal: I come in at 4 (or 3:30 if its just before or during the General Assembly) and leave a bit before midnight. I get to sleep in, reimbursement for my cab fare home, some extra income, and a chance to run errands in daylight. So ordinarily I am not resentful about working when most of my friends are ( Read more... )

I'm at my desk, tipsy from gin-and-tonic, headbobbing to The B-52’s Time Capsule Megamixes.

This should be an interesting night shift.

• I’m mildly disappointed that the Fifth Cylon was neither Tom Zarek nor Kara’s Mystery Raptor. However, I am amused that even Leoben is weirded out by the latest developments.
• I watched the inauguration at work, on a tiny black-and-white TV with an intermittent roll that someone had set up on top of one of the mini-fridges in the lounge.


• Did pretty ( Read more... )

Arrrrrrgh. So two weeks ago I did my first Status of contributions document, which sucked. It was mostly a matter of pasting Excel tables into a Word document, which probably would have been fine if said document hadn’t been over 200 pages long, which meant that whenever I used one of the macros it took a good five minutes to think it over ( Read more... )

The humane traps arrived yesterday, four bright green boxes with spring-loaded doors. They’ve been baited with stale peanut butter crackers and placed near the office’s corners. Although I’ve volunteered to release any captives found during my shifts, I’m betting on the mice since (a) the crackers aren’t all that alluring and (b) Pepito et al like ( Read more... )

We have mice at work. Every so often somebody yelps when they spot one, and I’m told that I missed a full-scale meltdown (“OH GOD A MOUSE OH MY GOD!”) complete with chairclimb. I, of course, am rooting for the rodents, having undergone a lifetime’s brainwashing by cartoons, and have gone so far as to secretly dub the mouse who kept scurrying back ( Read more... )