Hot Mama

[azurelunatic]

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...

Comments

[sraun]

I'm awful at remembering names. If I see them in writing, then I can start to actually remember them - after I've got the name remembered, I start associating a face with a name. That's the only way that works for me.

[wibbble]

Now I'm picturing a giant mug, floating in space, with the Millennium Falcon approaching it and the caption "That's no moon!"

[azurelunatic]

... *facepalm* And now I'm seeing, in my head, the spongmonkeys' "That is no moon / it is a space station" thing.

[wibbble]

You know, the only Google hit for 'spongmonkeys "that is no moon"' is your journal...

[azurelunatic]

Woah.

Did I link?

[wibbble]

Yes, but the domain has since expired, taking the content with it.

[azurelunatic]

Indeed it has. pyrogenic's comment on my post, though, applies quite well -- it was an eye-searing experience. And I evidently need to include spongmonkeys as well as the goatse man on my disc of 'net oddities.

[azurelunatic]

I can do it that way -- but if I don't see a face often enough, or have reason to remember details, I don't remember the face. I do remember enough demographic information to describe them for a reasonably successful missing persons hunt, but not enough to pick out their photograph from a row of similar ones.

I remember that D% L% at work is a young male, about 5'8", in the neighborhood of 90-110 lbs (I could pick him up and break him easily), either no or very little facial hair, African-American --- and there are two people at work who fit this exact description, down to the initials. When I say "D% L%", that's exactly what I mean -- I know one of the names associated with this description, and that tenuously, and I don't know which face goes with that name.

There are a few more young men who fit the general description, and I unfortunately could not match names to faces or even identities (unless they've been working there for long enough for me to know them) if they all stood in front of me without hats. (One of the young men wears a head covering, and I've learned that he's the one with the internal capitalizations in his name. Would I recognize him if he were silent and hatless? Probably not.)

Then there was the time when one of the phone goons pulled to assist changed her hair color. She was a recent-ish hire, and I hadn't worked with her overmuch. I looked up one day and wondered, "When did we get another one of the tiny cute Anglo girls? And how come she's an RPA already?" Then I caught sight of her name badge and realized that I hadn't seen the person associated with that name around much, and this girl must therefore be the same girl, and it was just darker brown hair instead of light honey brown with russet highlights. But until I actually saw her with a name badge in the administrative area and thus realized that it might be a new look for a pre-existing person, I'd appended her to the "tiny cute Anglo girls" file, not replaced the new picture for the old picture.