Apple Foot

Transitional State

Because of the whole merger "process", our corporate web site is currently in a "transitional state", which is to say that no one's happy with it. The person who had been running it wrote everything in FrontPage; the site had no style sheet, no semantic markup, and a host of other issues. My boss decided to move the site as-is to a new host with a CMS. Trouble is, since there is no style sheet, no semantic markup, etc., the CMS is much more cumbersome to use. So the other staffer longs for FrontPage, and I long to blow the whole site away and start from scratch.  Which doesn't even touch issues like the navigation scheme, or the power struggle between staff factions (by which I mean, me and the staff person who used to run everything in FrontPage).

Oh, and management has hired a graphic design firm to do "really neat stuff", which likely means that the struggle between form and function will tip heavily toward form. So a complete redesign is in the offing, meaning the godforsaken current site will only exist another couple of months. I had told my boss that porting the site to the CMS was making a silk purse of a sow's ear, but she insisted. Now I'm waiting for her to realize that we've gained no value from the move. Also, it's a couple thousand dollars we didn't need to spend.

I feel really sick about the whole fiasco, and I've got lots of other fiascos to deal with right now.

Help Desk

User description of problem:  "My internet's all messed up."

Actual issue: the "use Word as editor" setting in Outlook had been toggled off.

Employment

I can no longer put it off (although, as evidenced by the existence of this post, I'm trying). Tonight I must apply for my job.

Thanks to the recent merger, everyone in the organization is being asked to re-apply for their jobs. I have not updated my resume in more than five years. Technically, all I have to do is fill out a very basic one page application form, but I'm pretty embarrassed that I don't have a resume to attach, so I'm punishing myself right now, trying to work one up.

It's pretty much a sure thing that I'll be hired for the position, so in a way it's low stress, but I'm making it more stressful on myself. And my head is killing me.

Getting to Know You

Monday we're having a staff meeting with everyone involved in the upcoming merger. A business school professor will be leading exercises so we can get to know our teammates. We've been asked to bring an object that symbolizes a past achievement of which we're proud:

The point is for the object to help tell your story. People will be asked to spend about two minutes talking about the meaning of their artifact.  Your story should include: (1) what was the situation? the challenge? the opportunity?  what background information will help us to understand the context? (2) what did you do? what action did you take? (3) what was the outcome? (4) what skills and attributes enabled you to be successful?

Setting aside the fact that this sounds like a show-and-tell job interview, this is precisely the kind of activity I go to great lengths to avoid. What the hell am I going to bring and talk about for two minutes? Maybe:

This key symbolizes how proud I am not to be in prison. As a white female from a white collar family in a small town in New Jersey, I was never an at-risk youth, but I still had the opportunity to make the right choices in my life. I chose not to commit any felonies. As a consequence, I am free to leave my bedroom at any time of the day or night, and I do not have to worry about communal showers. My common sense and perseverance helped me avoid prison. Not to mention, I'm a people person.

Seething Rage

I can't decide whether it's because I missed a dose of my anti-anxiety medication, or because it's perfectly reasonable of me to still be grinding my teeth nine hours after a conference call. Three people on the other end of the line basically agreed that the severely broken process under discussion made perfect sense, and that it's just ridiculous that our software isn't configured to handle this. Now I've got to go to the vendor and try to explain to them that despite the fact that what we're doing is stupid, we really think they should amend the program to accomodate it. I'm also completely ape shit over the fact that my boss (who was on the call) got pissy with me because she "asked that question two minutes ago", and I didn't answer it then because (a) I was stunned by the question, which showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the software, and (b) she kept talking before I could answer.

I've been to my lesson and then spent four hours distracting myself by reading my feed subscriptions, and I'm still mad as hell.

ETA, Wed AM: All better now.

Trash and Treasure

At the office, we have been asked to save trash for a program coming in the fall. The kids will be making fashion (accessories, etc.) out of trash. "Trash" is a pretty broad term, of course, so the staff person in charge of the program specified some items that might be particularly useful (fabric scraps, egg cartons). I suggested bottle caps, and was told that was a good idea, so long as these were not from alcoholic beverages (I guess we don't want to give the kids craft materials that say "Bud Light" on them).

I'd really like to see what kind of clothing kids can make from the two most common items littering the city's sidewalks and gutters: cigarette butts and losing scratch tickets. Unfortunately, I'm sure these 'adults only' items are banned, along with nip bottles.

Another day, another buck-fifty

For the last month I've been the only person in the IT Department at the office, which means that longer-term projects have seen no progress at all while I deal with "it won't print." Fortunately, this week a new employee came aboard to help out. Unfortunately, today (her third day with the organization) she had her first squirrel encounter.

You see, the infrastructure at our branch office is largely powered by squirrels in wheels.  All the squirrels at our branch office stopped running on several occasions this summer, mostly when thunderstorms occurred. Today the telecomm squirrels went on strike. Luckily, their brothers in the power squirrel union opted not to honor the picket lines (intra-squirrel politics are unbelievably complex and capricious). After urgent calls were placed to three different vendors, the telecomm local went back to the job, but they're still staging a work slowdown, resulting in no outgoing voice traffic. You would not believe the cost of the medical benefits they're demanding-- rodent dental coverage is not cheap.

We're one of the last businesses in the area using squirrel-powered systems; when we first started using them, back in my great-grandma's day, whenever word leaked out that the squirrels were trying to unionize, the company would just call in Pinkerton bulldogs. Nowadays, you've gotta call lawyers and publicists. I suppose it's a more civilized system, less violent; still, the old way was nice and simple.

So, between this and a couple meetings, I got nothing done again today. Tomorrow I have my first supervisory meeting with my boss since the new employee came on, and I just know we're going to talk about the fact that in three whole days, I still haven't gotten any work done.

Restful

I should be enjoying a four day weekend, completely free of charge (the office is closed Monday & Tuesday for Independence Day). However, the other day my boss and I toted up my pending projects and she gravely told me that I need to put in some extra time this month. Mind you, during the same conversation she was urging me to make sure I use up all my vacation days before the use-it-or-lose-it date at the end of September; when I suggested I'd take one of my personal days in a couple weeks when I have an eye doctor appointment, she said, "Why don't you take a sick day for that?"  Uh, because I'm not going to lose any accrued sick days in September, that's why.

At any rate, I put in 3 or 4 hours today and will do another 5 or so tomorrow after I've made a platelets run. And I was thinking about my time off, and my time on, and what I can get done when, and I thought, "Oh, and I don't have lessons this Tuesday." Then I wondered if I'd have lessons next week, counted forward on my fingers, and realized that my teacher's husband's birthday doesn't fall on Tuesday. It happens that a few years back, she cancelled a lesson because it was his birthday and they had plans. Why do I still remember what day his birthday is? Because it is also the birthday of my high school crush. Not even my first boyfriend or anything like that-- the kid I had a hopeless crush on. Do normal people remember stuff like this? Because it seems to me like remembering my high school crush's birthday is a sign of how pitifully thin my personal life is.

Platform dependence blues

As a matter of general principle, it kills me that my place of work has a web-based application that requires IE v6.  Web-based apps should be platform-independent, for many reasons.

Also for many reasons, mostly economic, I'm currently stuck with said application.  It's a pretty good application, as long as you use IE 6, and we've put that requirement in big, bold letters throughout the documentation, on the login page, etc.

Deadline for data entry by a couple thousand users was Friday, so my week went like this:

User: [Application] isn't working!  I keep getting [error characteristic of browser incompatibility]!

Me: Are you using Internet Explorer?

User: Yes!

Me: What version are you using?

User: How do I tell that?

Me: Go to the Help menu, then choose About Internet Explorer...

User: I don't have any About Internet Explorer!  There is an About Mozilla Firefox-- is that it?

Why DPW employees are rich

We have a couple people at work who think that "Deleted Items" is where you store emails you wish to go back to later-- as in, months later.  Would you put your important papers on the curb for easy reference?

It's been a difficult couple of days at work-- not because of management nonsense or poor cash flow or anything, just because things keep breaking down.  Mission critical databases, the CD-ROM on one of the servers, our DNS Server (non)refresh.  I'm so glad there's a long weekend coming up.

And, unfortunately, that's all I've got the energy for posting today.