Ooof, Wednesdays aren't so easy to get a handle on. Desert rain.

Plasma took three hours, more or less. I left here by 10:30, scorching my shorts-clad seat on the seat of the car, and playing hot-potato with the Arizona sunlit steering wheel. I had neglected to set up the Car Fondue properly, alas; I'd been planning on setting a container of chocolate chips in the car and leaving it there all day, but I somehow lacked the general energy to do that. There was an hour wait at plasma for screening, then my pulse was too high, so another fifteen minutes, and then by the time I was properly settled in the bed for plasma, I was almost out of Magic's Promise. The alternative was watching Dodgeball. I started in for an immediate turn-around of a re-read. I didn't start off for home until 1:30, which was not at all in my schedule for the day. Turns out that the nice mid-thirties phlebotomist fellow who kids around with me, the stocky pale guy with the small beard who works the lab, up front, and the floor, not only had a recent birthday, but is also a gamer. One of us, then. *grin* We geeked a bit. That was fun.

The car had gotten grungy from sitting around under places where birds perch, and in Phoenix with pollen and dust in general. I stopped in the parking lot at the designated car wash point and gave the thing a good hose-off. (Did I mention my apartment has a place and hose designated for car wash? How cool is that?) This got my shoes soaked and muddy, and me just plain soaked.

( My plans for a relaxing but productive afternoon had been delayed... )

What. The. Fuck. Eminent domain for a shopping mall?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/23/scotus.property.ap/index.html

Locals, when should we hit the streets? I'm good mornings, weekend evenings, and Mon-Weds.

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Work. Whee downtime. I am on the phones today. Free coffee day for phone goons. The supervisor who broke his back has ret

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Klutz me spilled coffee on floor. Guy on phone was taxidermist. "And what does the job entail?" "stuffing dead critters."

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Oh, thank Heaven.

Countess VorMuir's cervix is completely competent. The attending Romanian doctors were not. The German doctors straightened out all misconceptions, gave the cervix its certificate of competence, and everything proceeds peaches and cream.

Hot Mama

The time/temperature sign somewhere along one of the freeways last night said it was 111°F out. I believe it. Night, mind you. When it's dark, and cooler than it was during the day. Also note that for at least part of the hot part of the day, I was getting into cars that had been sitting in the sun.

Yes, I had water with me.

Yes, Siete has air conditioning. Praise the gods of small things like that.

Today was cooler. Today was also work. Today I brought one of the monster 64oz mugs with me. I only got monitored once. I got praised (mildly) in e-mail for thinking of little details on the monitor-task stuff, because this makes it clear that I am serious about my job and also creative in thinking up solutions to current problems.

The saga of the continuing documentation exercise came to a close a while ago; I finally got my re-re-re-edited (I'm not entirely certain how many edit cycles it did actually go through) exercise returned with a virtual pat on the back for my hard work. And now that I know the format and what's acceptable, I can do things like that.

Today it was the Cute Desk Guy's turn to contribute to my silly work-related comic. "Is the glass half-empty, half-full, or a blunt object suitable for whacking misbehaving phone goons with?" I asked as I wandered in the general direction of the ice machine with my 64oz water mug.

"That's a swimming pool!" the Cute Desk Guy exclaimed. At the end of the shift, I gave him a copy of my doodle of three phone goons sitting, one with a standard-issue styrofoam cup, one with a travel coffee mug designed to fit into car cupholders, and one with an immense monster mug, and a supervisor exclaiming, "That's not a coffee cup, that's a swimming pool!"

I got three replacements on the Dendarii Brewing Company survey. I'm not sure how everyone else did. One of them was the aforementioned taxidermist.

There's a new seating procedure at work. As a check-in, I am obliged to learn it. It looks like it's going to save phone goon time, save check-in time, save shift ops supervisor time, and require maturity and responsibility on the part of the phone goons. It also looks like it's going to make name-to-face correlations for me well-nigh implausible for this new batch of new hires, because the only way I learn name-to-face at work as fast as I do is them coming up and getting booth assignments from me. Reminder to self: post about the name-to-face thing and how I don't do very well on that.

I checked my e-mail after work from the backmost monitor room (my favorite monitor room). The network in there was down. I asked Stressy College Chick if there was any reason it should be down on purpose. She knew of none. I dove under the desk and found the offending equipment: power source fallen out of the network switch. (I cooed things to the effect of "Such a goood little switch, yes you are!" when it brought network connectivity back up without so much as an initial hiccup.) I pointed out the problem to Rules Lawyer Monitor, who was the monitor shift lead, in case there had been problems this shift. She made a note to ask if there was a more secure place that the thing could be plugged in, since it's always getting kick-unplugged.

In other news...