Category: work

Time, Time, Time, See What’s Become Of Me

Remember back in the day when computers were brought to the desktop of every office worker? These funky machines came with the promise of less manual tasks and thus, more time!

More time! What an awesome benefit.

You know how when you get a good raise, you first think to yourself, “This is great! My expenses will stay the same and I’ll bank the difference of this new paycheck.”

But then you don’t. You manage to find a way to expand to use up every single dollar of that new pay.

Yeah. It’s like that with all the “found time” that computers brought to my world.

Right now time is the scarcest and most valuable resource I have.

There are only 24 hours in a day to spend.

I use eight of them sleeping.

Another three or so on getting ready, eating, travel time between destinations, dealing with a yowling cat, hugging The Good Man, etc.

And twelve sitting in front of a computer screen working my buns off on a massive project at work.

Let’s see…twelve plus eight is twenty…plus three is twenty three….

That leaves, uh, yeah, one hour in the day where I can just skive off (as the British say) and have some fun.

One hour to write, and craft, and think, and read a book, and just sit for a moment and look at the sky and daydream.

One hour. Sixty small minutes.

That’s not very much. I’d best use it wisely.

What got me thinking about this today?

The ten minutes I sat, waiting, on an open conference call bridge waiting for my perpetually absentminded sales rep.

I only gave it ten, then I got back to work.

I’m a little bit aggrieved about that ten minutes. Especially since I wolfed down lunch in order to make that call in time.

And now I’m indigested.

*sigh*

This should get better by end of April. That’s a looooong thirty days.





And for all you smarty pants out there, yes, I found time to write this blog post. I used the hour I WOULD have spent on that conference call. Found time! Yesssss!


Photo by Chris Gilbert and used royalty free from stock.xchng.


I Need Some Cheek Salve

Yeah, so I’ve talked a lot here on the blog about my job and working with folks around the globe. I am having a lot of fun and getting pretty gosh darn smart about the different cultures in the regions where I’m working.

But there’s one thing I’m having a LOT of trouble with.

It’s the kiss-cheek greeting thing.

The Euro folks seem to favor this method, and it’s not one cheek, but both. Shake hands, smooch one side, smooch the other side.

Suddenly, I become VERY rigid when I see these supplier reps coming in for a landing on my face. Gah!

Just this week, we had a VERY large meeting where there were, I kid you not, eight people who flew in from London for a meeting. I greeted them in the lobby and had to kiss-kiss all eight of these sumnabitches.

I don’t even know all of them. Hell, I don’t even LIKE most the ones I do know.

But they all stood in line to smooch-smooch me.

Then…when the two hour meeting was over, it was time to leave, and they all lined up to smooch-smooch me on the way out.

I felt a little…mauled…by the time the day was through.

Might I add that I was the only girl in the room of eight external people and five coworkers. There was no kissy-kissy between the guys. No, I got the brunt of the moist greetings.

Damnit! I’m an American! We like a little bit of space in our greetings! Also, I’m no good at the kiss-kiss. I never know where to land the thing. Do just sort of kiss the air? Or do I actually place it? And what if, horror of horrors, I miss and land it wrong?

I did accidentally bump noses with one of the dudes. Is that bad form?

All that aside, it just seems…wrong…to get to get that intimate with a freaking supplier. They aren’t my friends! They aren’t in my confidence! THEY ARE SUPPLIERS and therefore need to be treated at arm’s length to be sure they remember their boundaries.

Then again, maybe this is all a negotiation tactic to throw me off my game. Ooh, if I think about it that way, this kissy-kissy crap seems diabolical.

Mostly it just makes me uncomfortable.



Theme Song

Back in the day, I used to watch that show Ally McBeal. You know, the one about the skinny neurotic lawyer? The reason I got to thinking about that show lately has to do with my job.

I’ve been in the middle of frying pan and also the fire here at work. There is a LOT going on; notably a project that fell off the rails and I’ve had to step in to clean it up. Always fun cleaning up someone else’s mess….

Anyhoo.

What I used to dig about that show were scenes that showed the John Cage character, played by Peter MacNicol, standing in his office or the restroom trying to summon up his theme song. This was usually before a big case or a meeting where he needed courage. Or a date. The theme song changed depending on the situation.

Yesterday I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom trying to summon up such courage. I’d been running late to the meeting, then the conference room my boss booked was too small, so I hoofed chairs from every other conference room so all the execs could have a place for their tushy.

Before we got started, I took a break to the ladies room to quite literally wipe the sweat off my brow, take a breath, and get my game face on. I knew I was going to be the only person from my company who would be a bit fierce with our under performing supplier. My boss told me straight up he is non-confrontational, and so in these cases, I have to do it. Which is fine by me, it just takes a certain frame of mind.

I needed a theme song to summon the courage, but seems the music half of my brain was failing me.

So this morning in a quieter frame of mind, I got to thinking…what is my own personal theme song?

For those times where I got to go in agro, usually the song I pull up is “Headstrong” by Trapt. The hard baseline helps, and shouting the lyrics aloud in the car on the way to a meeting is quite liberating.

They go something like “backoff I’ll take you on/headstrong to take on anyone/I know that you are wrong/and this is not where you belong.”

Yeah. Then I go in all “rawr!” and ready to take on the world.

On the days when I’m feeling like there is a black cloud hanging over my head (more days than I’d care to admit) my theme song tends to flow toward Stormy Monday by T-Bone Walker.

“They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday’s just as bad/Wednesday’s worse, and Thursday’s also sad”

God I love that song, especially the John Lee Hooker version.

Back in the day when I used to have a really, really terrible boss (about five years back) and every day was a grind just to survive his insanity, I used to sing the lyrics to Fighter by Christina Aguilera (who I don’t usually like, but that song worked for me.) It was good to turn my adversity into gratitude.

“Made me learn a little bit faster/Made my skin a little bit thicker/Makes me that much smarter/So thanks for making me a fighter”

Then of course, during those good times when I’m thinking about The Good Man, it’s all about Johnny Rodriguez.

” ‘Cause your love put a song, put a song, put a song, in my heart/Never have I heard this beautiful music before”

Just puts a smile on my face thinking about it.

But for now, no time to be squishy. I’m at work. Back to Trapt.

“Backoff, I’ll take you on!”

Do you have a go-to theme song?





Image found at deviantART.com


Why So Picky?

Each day I drive to my job, located on the main campus of my very large employer. There are a lot of us folks who all gotta make our way into the many buildings that constitute HQ.

To that end, there is a huge parking garage out front for all us minions to pack our chosen vehicle into an allotted space. On any given day, that garage fills to capacity with our minion-mobiles.

Within that garage resides what I’ll call the Awkward Space.

Awkward Space is on the first floor, adjacent to the entry to the garage, right by the exit door. Meaning the location of Awkward Space is pretty good.

Despite the choice location, Awkward Space is also placed just around the first curve in the garage and by a wall. What this means is you gotta make a VERY tight right turn to get into Awkward Space.

The other thing is, Awkward Space is actually a pretty roomy spot. Once in, I have no trouble opening doors on either side of the car.

I guess people either can’t navigate the geometry or their car won’t turn that way, because no one parks there. My ancient Jeep has a smoking hot turning radius, so getting my black beauty into the spot requires hardly any effort. But I’ve also driven The Good Man’s sedan to work and had no trouble navigating the less than stellar turning radius easily into the spot.

If I come in by 8:00, I can usually park in a less awkward and even more well situated spot. But I always keep an eye on Awkward Space. On the days I come in later, I can almost always count on Awkward Space waiting for me with yellow painted arms, ready to embrace my Jeep.

What perplexes me is that people will pass up Awkward Space to drive up to the eighth floor to park rather than try to navigate the turn. It’s really not that hard. But everyone seems to turns up their Mercedes-driving nose at Awkward Space, which makes me love it that much more.

The upside about Awkward Space is that getting into it is much harder than getting back out. For some reason, the geometry works really well in reverse, and that makes Awkward Space a pretty gosh darn Good Space, in my opinion.

I almost feel like I should paint the wall at Awkward Space.

“Parking Reserved for Cars with Decent Turning Radius Only. Bad Drivers not allowed.”





This week’s Theme Thursday is space.


Did You Ever Have The Kind Of Day Where….

Did you ever have the kind of day where you are going ninety miles an hour at your work desk, cranking out the emails, spreadsheets and taking phone calls left and right, all while balancing the Greyhound bus stop that is the chair in front of your desk….

And despite all the chaos and kerfuffle, just in the nick of time, you manage to whip out your one page, beautifully wrought, easy-to-read table that contains the cheat sheet you’ll need to answer every question that will be machine gun fired at you at your 3:00 meeting.

So you send that sumnabitch to the printer and grab your notebook, hike up your pants, run to the copier, and grab that thing off the machine so you can make it to your meeting at something less than five minutes late.

Then you squeal around the corner into the copy room and you are heartened to hear that the machine isn’t working. It’s done. It’s printed your copy.

Only it hasn’t.

The screen reads “out of paper, load tray three.”

Inside your head, you say, “I can deal with this.”

So it’s one of those big industrial machines and to fill the paper tray takes not one, not two, but three reams of ecologically friendly 50% post-consumer lily white paper.

Being a good office citizen, you could throw half a ream in there and call it good, but you don’t. You fill it up to the top, slam the drawer and the machine fires up.

Sweet sound of the Gods!

And the machine begins spitting out page after page after page…..

After page.

After page.

And you realize the guy in front of you must be printing like a hundred copies of his forty page slide deck and it’s HIS FAULT that the machine was parched for paper when you arrived.

Nothing you can do now but watch that machine like a bird dog after a duck, all the while not-my-copy, not-my-copy, not-my-copy shoots out of the machine, perfectly stapled and collated and tidy as you please.

“Ok,” you say to yourself. “I can deal with this.”

Then the machine stops again. The engine winds down.

“Thank god!” you think.

But wait, your copy isn’t there.

“WHAT THE [EXPLETIVE DELETED]!!!” You may or may not shout.

The LCD screen on that machine says “Replace Toner” and provides helpful animated arrows to guide you through the process.

“Ok,” you think to yourself, “I can deal with this. It can’t be that hard.”

So you find a box with a new toner tube and you follow the bouncing arrow on the screen and the old toner comes out and the new toner slides in and now you may or may not have black toner dust peppering your arms.

But you slam closed the toner door and the machine begins to make a noise.

“Warming up,” it tells you.

And you wait for what must be an [expletive deleted] eternity while the machine “cleans the wires” and “recalibrates” itself at the pace of an anemic snail.

Then holy mother of Xerox, the machine starts spitting out copies anew and more and more of not-my-copy of someone’s presentation comes out.

Then, most miraculous! The single sheet that you desperately needed finally exits the machine!

Victory!

So to be helpful you pull the other copies off the machine to lay them aside in a nice, neat stack.

And because you are nosy by nature, you look to see exactly what is the document that held up your progress and made you irretrievably late for a very important meeting, and you come to realize that it is…..

Handouts for someone’s upcoming Cub Scout meeting.

You ever have a day like that?

No way, right? Because that story just *has* to be made up. Unless truth really is stranger than fiction.





Photo by Alex Furr and used royalty free from stock.xchng