Thursday was a blur.

Large parts of today passed in a blur of ordering things.

First I woke up. Then I sort of slowly made my way dressed and breakfasted and to work. I was there in plenty of time to do notes for Carmageddon's call.

Parts of my team now think I am slightly magic because I had secured a certain meeting room on a weekly basis in order that it could be used for a team thing, so it was available for the committee meeting.

After that, I sat down with my manager and started hammering out logistics for an equipment order. I had, cunningly, done a bit of work ahead.

After that was lunch. There was geekery with Purple and the dudes.

More administrivia, and then a committee meeting. I taped a piece of chocolate to local-helpdesk's door on my way past. The meeting involved some brainstorming that I didn't know enough to contribute to, some logistics discussion where Haystack proposed using Slack for internal communication during the thing, and I cautioned that the not!Facebook people are suuuuuper sensitive to internal use of non-not!Facebook products (insert massive eyeroll here, as they're basically trying to say that you should be doing the equivalent of texting via morse code on a walkie-talkie) so that in the context of not trying to start a flamewar...

I said hi to Mr. Zune on my way back.

My yelling about bell peppers on [off-topic] has resulted in one of the usual massive threads about people's feelings about the cafeteria. Some people like it. A lot of people don't. We are basically a captive audience, as unless we want to crash another office park's cafeteria, we get no food until we hit El Camino Real, and then there's no parking. (And there's no reliable transit between civilization and the campus around midday, unless you've got your own wheels.) Someone found a grasshopper in their salad the other day. I've never been able to top the chunk of hairy goat meat.

One guy was having trouble with tea, or lack thereof. I performed some of my yelling-at-the-webpage and soon came back with a ticket

Eventually I felt it was milkshake time. I pinged. lb was dealing with a flaky switch and had fallen off the intranet. radius was otherwise busy. Purple had disappeared into something. So it was just Mr. Zune and me walking up. That was pleasant.

Mr. Zune added to my whiteboard.

I know Purple walked me out, but I remember basically nothing of this.

I got home and did laundry and packed for the weekend. While the laundry was going, I suddenly -- CHIRP!

I looked at the smoke alarm, which had started flashing green around the test button. ( chirp )

Friday was basically a clusterfuck.

I mentioned to Purple in passing that I needed to get 9v batteries this weekend. "Smoke alarm?" he asked, knowingly.

Carmageddon asked me if I could help with a thing, if I had the bandwidth. I looked at the situation and knew it was basically fucked from the start. Some director had tried to set up a customer-facing thing on short notice IN MARCH without first securing the space it was supposed to be in.

Carmageddon saw the clusterfuck starting to happen and asked if I could intervene. By 2:30 we had determined that the first two choices for rooms were unavailable. There are at least three groups who control significant rooms. Two out of the three had nothin'. The third group? At 2:30-ish, I realized that the people responsible were probably already up in the gym for the beer bash of epic proportions.

The discussion about rooms had encroached on lunch; I spent a non-zero amount of my lunchtime responding to email on my phone. Unfortunately the email-to-ticket binding has broken for anything other than the initial query, which breaks mobile such-and-such for hella people.

I cleared up some other stuff and then headed for bash with a couple teammates. This bash was basically the "look! We're awesome!" theme, centered around t-shirts, because this is a company which produces commemorative t-shirts like they were going out of style (but naturally, only in straight-cut unless people yell about it). One of the featured bits of the event was an attempt to catalogue as many as possible of the commemorative shirts, by bribing the first 500 people who showed up wearing an existing commemorative shirt with a limited-edition new one.

I had seen Purple's shirt choice at lunch. The previous night, he'd contemplated wearing the hella neon green shirt with the camel (muddy yellow) overshirt. Sadly, the camel shirt had been a bit grungy, so he went with dark red, which provided a slightly more Christmas-y, slightly less eye-searing contrast. He explained over lunch about the time when he'd been wearing the slightly-less-neon Nvidia shirt with the camel overshirt, and I'd cast aspersions on his color sense, but he'd been doing it on purpose.

I set out walking with my teammates. Knives commented that I was carrying the cane, and she and the other teammate (perhaps I shall call her Huckleberry? she's the one who shares an office with the guy with all the muscles and the Hulk fists) mentioned that I am walking a lot better than I was this time last year. I explained that I still do use the cane and not just for beating: I start out walking OK, but after I've been sitting a long time I break, if I walk too long I break, and sometimes I just fall over.

The line turned out to be literally over an hour long. It was good I had the cane. It was slow enough that I could actually queue up the stairs, as it was one stair at a time for a few minutes. (Even though that's still not a good idea on a regular basis. I'd like to keep my knees, so I should not do stairs. Ever.) The project manager from upstairs brought back some (hard) cider for my section of the line. It was tasty.

And that's where the personal section of the evening started to go off the rails. It was about 3:30 by this time. Lunch had been some time ago. I had more than half finished the cider by the time I got to the photo area, where I confirmed that both the people I know by face who work in the conference center controlling rooms were busy with the t-shirt photography logistics. The event was scheduled to last until 6. There was no fucking way they would be able to find and approve us a room until sometime Monday early. It was a Monday event. Customer-facing. Well fuck.

Instead of going and immediately finding food, I went and immediately found Purple and radius. I did not wind up finding food until at least an hour after I'd started drinking.

The stomach ache did not start until about an hour later.

I had nice chats with several people, including radius, the guy with the sun hat who games and does photography (he's photographing roller derby this weekend), Mr. Zune, someone wearing a very green shirt with an inappropriate statement and telltale signs of having been folded up into a hockey puck (yes, *that* one, which makes just a *super* impression on college women that we're a great place to work), Chicken Guy (who had, hilariously, yelled "CHICKEN BUTT!" on the way past me in line, smacking me in the ass with a rubber chicken and causing me to nearly double over with laughter), Purple again (who took his leave and scrammed to head off to 2600), and then Mr. Zune and I walked back to our respective desks around 5.

While chatting with Sun Hat Guy, I juggled my plate wrong. I'd finished some of the weirdly fried ravioli and the asparagus, but managed to drop the bean-burger slider having only got one bite. I did not immediately go to replace it, my third critical error.

One back at my desk, I swore my way through the helpfully compiled lists of conference rooms all over my campus. The only regular conference rooms that were both large enough and placed so they wouldn't be terrible for visitors were, I only wish I were joking, "Batman", and Batman's counterpart room in the adjacent building.

By this time, the stomach ache was making itself very known. I realized that I would need to do something in order to halt it. I found 7-up and string cheese. This helped some. By this time it was 7. I wrapped up by making sure the equipment orders were updated with the last-minute changes, and doing my hours. (That last was made more interesting by landing on a "wtf, you shouldn't be here" page after attempting to save, resulting in me needing to enter them all again.) Then I left, grabbing some food through a drive-through on my way to the convention.

... Or not. By the time I was halfway home I realized that I wasn't sure if I could actually make it all the way to Walnut Creek without some sort of Digestive Incident, and I was in enough pain to be in no fit state to drive. So I went home, called the hotel to cancel my first night, and curled up in bed with a hot water bottle on my stomach and waited for the pain to ebb.

A few hours of sleep put me right. I'll head to the con in the morning.

My tweets

• Fri, 13:48: Wax snail sculpture on dish return. Artist unknown. http://t.co/1WKx5pM3ya
• Fri, 21:08: feeling not ok & too sick to convention right now. beer before food? honey you're screwed.
• Fri, 22:38: Feeling super vindicated in my decision to go home. If I'm miserable it might as well be my own bed.
• Fri, 22:39: RT @mikesacco: Oh, that guy who thinks he's way better at entering your nightmares and terrorizing you than he actually is? That's Freddy D…
• Sat, 01:04: My fitbit #Fitstats_en_US for 3/06/2015: 4,719 steps and 2 miles traveled. http://t.co/gFMrr7HEB6

con pic

Me with ethicalslut

( Read more... )