Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2014-12-20 05:14 am
azurelunatic) wrote2014-12-20 05:14 am
Sleep is still generally in short supply.
I stayed up a bit late Wednesday night because duty called. (Duty in the form of Yuletide. Love to Hippos.)
Thursday involved further wrestling with the procurement system, even though the vendor was supposed to have been added. The helldesk software is getting some new and questionably infernal updates. I had my early alarm set, because the Conference Commandant and her co-chair and I were going to do a walkthrough of the far south building to see if its large conference room was right for our event. (I think it will be.) However, when my alarm went off, I saw that the Conference Commandant had cancelled because her co-chair caught the crud. Cool! I tried to sleep a bit longer.
Lunch was the A-Team white elephant, organized by one of my dudefriends amongst the admins and QUILTBAG club. Lunch was clearly ordered as an afternoon nibbles session, not actually lunch unless you are currently reducing. Sigh. But the game was fun. The themes were wine and iTunes. I bucked the trend by bringing a nice little selection of trinkets -- a slap bracelet watch, one of the two little suction cup bluetooth speakers with the not-so-great battery life, a phone stylus, and a decorative scarf held in place by ponytail holders as the wrapping. It looked like a little purple wrapped candy. It was the last lonely package on the table. (It wound up going to Madam Not Appearing In This Film, who had sent a package with someone else but not shown up herself as Things had Happened.)
The walk back was refreshing. I wore the Festive Hat, fully lit up. That always gets noticed. I put it away, though, as next was the Dreaded Team Meeting. I told Purple that depending on how it went, I might or might not spend some of the subsequent time sobbing under someone's desk with vodka.
The bad news from Wednesday was that my occasionally frustrating but always well-meaning grandmanager the Randomizer, who has been in and out of the hospital over the past year-ish, will be stepping down entirely, due to illness. The next round of treatment begins in January, and he will be out at that point on medical leave. After which is completed, his plan is to retire. He's totally due his chance at surfing with his devoted black lab, who is still amazingly waggy and friendly and clearly adores him.
This naturally comes as a shock, because while he is definitely old enough to retire, and has been in and out this past year, he's always been so very vigorous. Yadda yadda yadda. So he sent out the message Wednesday night. Team meetings are on alternate Thursdays. Due to various people's schedules, this week turned out to be better for a meeting, off-cycle. And mostly the meeting was about his leaving.
He went over the highlights from his time at Virtual Hammer, including the work of Madam Standards and the internal conference. He gave a heartfelt pitch for being included as an external speaker at 2015's iteration of the internal conference. He and my manager went over a bunch of the logistics; she'll be standing in for him, and she is the best possible person I can think of to do that. So while I'm concerned for him on a personal level because he's ill and stepping down because of illness is never a happy thing, I have every confidence business-wise.
So I came out of the team meeting more hopeful than I had been going in, which was not the outcome I was expecting. No vodka-desking for me!
I had the package tracking notification that the latest package in Syne's BPAL decant circle had arrived, so I set off to the mail room with a small bag of the good candy. It is always recommended to bring bribes of an edible nature to the fine folks of shipping & receiving, because theycrave that mineral appreciate it. It was at this point that I learned that the notification is slightly inaccurate for our setup, as the arrive notice is when it hits our post office, and then our team goes over there in the morning and picks up the mail, and it didn't hit the post office endpoint until noonish. So it would arrive Friday. I delivered the candy anyway, admired their bubble wrap snowman, and walked back.
On my way back, I observed Purple's car in the parking lot. The parking lot had cleared out some, and so I saw that his right front tire was more squodgy than most tires ought to be. I pinged that at him.
The supplier was still not in the database. I beat my head against it a little more. Helldesk was still helly. Et cetera.
Since Purple had been Out of the Office on Wednesday, having lunch and seeing hobbitses, he had not seen my disco ball in action. Once all of my teammates had left the wing and I was alone, I turned off the ceiling lights and turned on my disco ball. Festive! So Purple walked in to see it in its full glory as his first view of it. Since he squinted and winced a bit, I'm thinking I'll avoid deploying it unnecessarily around him.
We went out, and indeed, that was a very low tire. Fortunately, Purple has one of those handy little tire pumps that plug into the little plug place, and set it to re-inflating the tire. He wondered if he'd picked up a nail or something. I promptly found the nail.
I got home surprisingly early after all that, and was in bed by midnight.
I often clutch at my star necklace in times of worry. I heard a clink as I got out of bed around 4am to head to the bathroom. The cord had become separated from the clasp, and the pendant hit the floor. I will have to repair it or figure out something new.
Friday was another day. I woke up midway through my sleep cycle and discovered confirmation that the vendor was in the database. However, the mobile app didn't let me edit jack shit. I went back to sleep. When I woke up, I looked for a necklace, since the star necklace wasn't going to be a viable choice. The raven one looked good.
At work, the vendor was listed, so I spent a few minutes making sure the submission was set up and sent off for approval. Then I went to lunch, a few minutes after Purple's lunch call. Purple had not found time before work to get the tire seen to, but it's a very slow leak. No telling how long the nail has been in there.
I saw the table with Purple's usual crew. I saw the cluster of tables with a whole bunch of my team, including the rare sight of the Randomizer. I went with my team. Later, having finished my burrito and refilled my lemonade, I joined Purple's table. They understood.
I did a bit more candy-distribution. Having finished my bit of the terrifying procurement thing, I tracked down some software for Brutus Cochin (as that is a vaguely known thing and also vastly less expensive). The shipping & receiving guy came by with the mail cart, which included the latest decant circle. I had some more festive cheer for him. He hugged me.
Bash ensued. It took me longer to get there this time, and it was harder finding a table. I did score one, though! Purple joined me. "It's not like your hat is visible over the wall or anything," he teased. He claimed the sort-of-occupied-looking chair after I reassured him that the reason it looked sort of occupied was because I was scaring off chair-vultures. Radius and R joined us. R was late on account of a meeting, and then had to run off to wrap up before dashing off somewhere else. Radius had a bug to be stomped. Mr. Zune was off with family. lb was off with family. phone was home minding a sleeping possibly-teenager (we're a little uncertain as to the actual age of his kid). Later, Lennon Glasses Guy came by, and that was nice. Eventually we told tales of social engineering and various exploits and bugs we have known. Lennon Glasses Guy hadn't realized that I'd worked at the domain shop in the past, which was where two of my tales came from.
Midway through it all, I got an email that made me start swearing.
"Hi Azure, The user needs to be added to CC in order to make the ticket visible to them. Please refer the attached screenshot and confirm if we are good to close this ticket. Thanks, Helpdesk Guy."
Very fortunately, I am in a position where my input is respected as a bellwether of parts of my greater organization as regards this piece of fucking software. My response was brusque and to the point.
"Not acceptable. Tickets need to be visible to users not on the CC list."
Upon getting back to my desk, I added lb's Overlady, as she is the current torchbearer for our division's good fight. We've got her back, and the pitchforks. I feel like this one is important enough to hammer spikes in to any reasonably slowly moving surface and cling to them while yelling.
There has been a squeaking sound all up in our corner for days now. One of the facilities dudes has been investigating. Unfortunately his hearing doesn't go that high anymore. Most of my department can hear it. He located some vent louvers which were oscillating when they shouldn't ought to be, and a substantial leak from a pipe on the other end of the roof. The ventilation guys have been summoned.
Chatted with Rocky some. The time to be a dick about your nerf weaponry is not when you've just scratched someone's cornea. (This was a lead engineer in a place he used to work.) It was a rough work neighborhood. Rocky carried in a large nerf gun in a duffel bag, then introduced the engineer most likely to cause trouble to the business end of it...
Purple came by to head out. He chatted with Rocky and encouraged me to tell how Tay and I used to troll the roosters by crowing out of turn at them.
I'm not sure if Purple would describe himself as "a gamer", but via a link I sent him, he wandered into Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and reported back that he was impressed and generally in agreement with a lot of things, even though not 100% in agreement (and 100% agreement is rare for him). He was pleased at the evenhanded treatment of the topic and that Anita obviously likes video games as a genre, and that she pointed out that if it were just isolated instances it wouldn't be worth yelling about, and yeah, it would be nice to see more stories which aren't propped up by some of the things she finds objectionable.
I owe Purple two corrections:
* It wasn't specifically the Penny Arcade guys who sent flowers to Jack Thompson, it was a pop-up group
* I was right about the entities in the Sony/Penny Arcade doughnut delivery, but I got the direction wrong: it was Sony to Penny Arcade, and not the other way around.
Purple learned the story of how Mr. Out came to switch teams.
Purple got treated to an abbreviated version of my unpublishable rant on the topic of video as a medium that I can't deal with. (The reason it's unpublishable is because it's about how I simultaneously resent that being a member of a group which is getting various abuse means that any indication of something that could be construed as infighting gets used as an excuse to launch more abuse, and thus I feel as though I cannot express myself freely on a certain topic; even articulating the general topic in enough detail to explain it could also be used as an excuse for certain parties to be dickhats.)
Next week will be very quiet.
BPAL Pandora has serious throw, and is therefore not the best one to try at work.
That lunch Purple had with Murraya was pretty awesome. Michelin stars are srs bzns.
The #cupcake card games may need to start up again at some point. If my family chooses to play cards, I'll let Purple know.
Bash was dinner enough for Purple, so he generally declined the concept and headed home. I picked up some groceries.
Thursday involved further wrestling with the procurement system, even though the vendor was supposed to have been added. The helldesk software is getting some new and questionably infernal updates. I had my early alarm set, because the Conference Commandant and her co-chair and I were going to do a walkthrough of the far south building to see if its large conference room was right for our event. (I think it will be.) However, when my alarm went off, I saw that the Conference Commandant had cancelled because her co-chair caught the crud. Cool! I tried to sleep a bit longer.
Lunch was the A-Team white elephant, organized by one of my dudefriends amongst the admins and QUILTBAG club. Lunch was clearly ordered as an afternoon nibbles session, not actually lunch unless you are currently reducing. Sigh. But the game was fun. The themes were wine and iTunes. I bucked the trend by bringing a nice little selection of trinkets -- a slap bracelet watch, one of the two little suction cup bluetooth speakers with the not-so-great battery life, a phone stylus, and a decorative scarf held in place by ponytail holders as the wrapping. It looked like a little purple wrapped candy. It was the last lonely package on the table. (It wound up going to Madam Not Appearing In This Film, who had sent a package with someone else but not shown up herself as Things had Happened.)
The walk back was refreshing. I wore the Festive Hat, fully lit up. That always gets noticed. I put it away, though, as next was the Dreaded Team Meeting. I told Purple that depending on how it went, I might or might not spend some of the subsequent time sobbing under someone's desk with vodka.
The bad news from Wednesday was that my occasionally frustrating but always well-meaning grandmanager the Randomizer, who has been in and out of the hospital over the past year-ish, will be stepping down entirely, due to illness. The next round of treatment begins in January, and he will be out at that point on medical leave. After which is completed, his plan is to retire. He's totally due his chance at surfing with his devoted black lab, who is still amazingly waggy and friendly and clearly adores him.
This naturally comes as a shock, because while he is definitely old enough to retire, and has been in and out this past year, he's always been so very vigorous. Yadda yadda yadda. So he sent out the message Wednesday night. Team meetings are on alternate Thursdays. Due to various people's schedules, this week turned out to be better for a meeting, off-cycle. And mostly the meeting was about his leaving.
He went over the highlights from his time at Virtual Hammer, including the work of Madam Standards and the internal conference. He gave a heartfelt pitch for being included as an external speaker at 2015's iteration of the internal conference. He and my manager went over a bunch of the logistics; she'll be standing in for him, and she is the best possible person I can think of to do that. So while I'm concerned for him on a personal level because he's ill and stepping down because of illness is never a happy thing, I have every confidence business-wise.
So I came out of the team meeting more hopeful than I had been going in, which was not the outcome I was expecting. No vodka-desking for me!
I had the package tracking notification that the latest package in Syne's BPAL decant circle had arrived, so I set off to the mail room with a small bag of the good candy. It is always recommended to bring bribes of an edible nature to the fine folks of shipping & receiving, because they
On my way back, I observed Purple's car in the parking lot. The parking lot had cleared out some, and so I saw that his right front tire was more squodgy than most tires ought to be. I pinged that at him.
The supplier was still not in the database. I beat my head against it a little more. Helldesk was still helly. Et cetera.
Since Purple had been Out of the Office on Wednesday, having lunch and seeing hobbitses, he had not seen my disco ball in action. Once all of my teammates had left the wing and I was alone, I turned off the ceiling lights and turned on my disco ball. Festive! So Purple walked in to see it in its full glory as his first view of it. Since he squinted and winced a bit, I'm thinking I'll avoid deploying it unnecessarily around him.
We went out, and indeed, that was a very low tire. Fortunately, Purple has one of those handy little tire pumps that plug into the little plug place, and set it to re-inflating the tire. He wondered if he'd picked up a nail or something. I promptly found the nail.
I got home surprisingly early after all that, and was in bed by midnight.
I often clutch at my star necklace in times of worry. I heard a clink as I got out of bed around 4am to head to the bathroom. The cord had become separated from the clasp, and the pendant hit the floor. I will have to repair it or figure out something new.
Friday was another day. I woke up midway through my sleep cycle and discovered confirmation that the vendor was in the database. However, the mobile app didn't let me edit jack shit. I went back to sleep. When I woke up, I looked for a necklace, since the star necklace wasn't going to be a viable choice. The raven one looked good.
At work, the vendor was listed, so I spent a few minutes making sure the submission was set up and sent off for approval. Then I went to lunch, a few minutes after Purple's lunch call. Purple had not found time before work to get the tire seen to, but it's a very slow leak. No telling how long the nail has been in there.
I saw the table with Purple's usual crew. I saw the cluster of tables with a whole bunch of my team, including the rare sight of the Randomizer. I went with my team. Later, having finished my burrito and refilled my lemonade, I joined Purple's table. They understood.
I did a bit more candy-distribution. Having finished my bit of the terrifying procurement thing, I tracked down some software for Brutus Cochin (as that is a vaguely known thing and also vastly less expensive). The shipping & receiving guy came by with the mail cart, which included the latest decant circle. I had some more festive cheer for him. He hugged me.
Bash ensued. It took me longer to get there this time, and it was harder finding a table. I did score one, though! Purple joined me. "It's not like your hat is visible over the wall or anything," he teased. He claimed the sort-of-occupied-looking chair after I reassured him that the reason it looked sort of occupied was because I was scaring off chair-vultures. Radius and R joined us. R was late on account of a meeting, and then had to run off to wrap up before dashing off somewhere else. Radius had a bug to be stomped. Mr. Zune was off with family. lb was off with family. phone was home minding a sleeping possibly-teenager (we're a little uncertain as to the actual age of his kid). Later, Lennon Glasses Guy came by, and that was nice. Eventually we told tales of social engineering and various exploits and bugs we have known. Lennon Glasses Guy hadn't realized that I'd worked at the domain shop in the past, which was where two of my tales came from.
Midway through it all, I got an email that made me start swearing.
"Hi Azure, The user needs to be added to CC in order to make the ticket visible to them. Please refer the attached screenshot and confirm if we are good to close this ticket. Thanks, Helpdesk Guy."
Very fortunately, I am in a position where my input is respected as a bellwether of parts of my greater organization as regards this piece of fucking software. My response was brusque and to the point.
"Not acceptable. Tickets need to be visible to users not on the CC list."
Upon getting back to my desk, I added lb's Overlady, as she is the current torchbearer for our division's good fight. We've got her back, and the pitchforks. I feel like this one is important enough to hammer spikes in to any reasonably slowly moving surface and cling to them while yelling.
There has been a squeaking sound all up in our corner for days now. One of the facilities dudes has been investigating. Unfortunately his hearing doesn't go that high anymore. Most of my department can hear it. He located some vent louvers which were oscillating when they shouldn't ought to be, and a substantial leak from a pipe on the other end of the roof. The ventilation guys have been summoned.
Chatted with Rocky some. The time to be a dick about your nerf weaponry is not when you've just scratched someone's cornea. (This was a lead engineer in a place he used to work.) It was a rough work neighborhood. Rocky carried in a large nerf gun in a duffel bag, then introduced the engineer most likely to cause trouble to the business end of it...
Purple came by to head out. He chatted with Rocky and encouraged me to tell how Tay and I used to troll the roosters by crowing out of turn at them.
I'm not sure if Purple would describe himself as "a gamer", but via a link I sent him, he wandered into Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and reported back that he was impressed and generally in agreement with a lot of things, even though not 100% in agreement (and 100% agreement is rare for him). He was pleased at the evenhanded treatment of the topic and that Anita obviously likes video games as a genre, and that she pointed out that if it were just isolated instances it wouldn't be worth yelling about, and yeah, it would be nice to see more stories which aren't propped up by some of the things she finds objectionable.
I owe Purple two corrections:
* It wasn't specifically the Penny Arcade guys who sent flowers to Jack Thompson, it was a pop-up group
* I was right about the entities in the Sony/Penny Arcade doughnut delivery, but I got the direction wrong: it was Sony to Penny Arcade, and not the other way around.
Purple learned the story of how Mr. Out came to switch teams.
Purple got treated to an abbreviated version of my unpublishable rant on the topic of video as a medium that I can't deal with. (The reason it's unpublishable is because it's about how I simultaneously resent that being a member of a group which is getting various abuse means that any indication of something that could be construed as infighting gets used as an excuse to launch more abuse, and thus I feel as though I cannot express myself freely on a certain topic; even articulating the general topic in enough detail to explain it could also be used as an excuse for certain parties to be dickhats.)
Next week will be very quiet.
BPAL Pandora has serious throw, and is therefore not the best one to try at work.
That lunch Purple had with Murraya was pretty awesome. Michelin stars are srs bzns.
The #cupcake card games may need to start up again at some point. If my family chooses to play cards, I'll let Purple know.
Bash was dinner enough for Purple, so he generally declined the concept and headed home. I picked up some groceries.