Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2015-08-19 10:51 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2015-08-19 10:51 pm
Telepathy is bacon-wrapped tofu.
There's a love meme on, one of the self-nomination kinds that evades the third-person pronounery that I usually find so fraught in the nominate-others sorts. My thread: http://radioaches.dreamwidth.org/81108.html?thread=1190356#cmt1190356
Over last week the ant profusion at work was on the decline. I was cheered. I was still squishing them at a rate of about 4 per hour, but that was much better than previous.
Sadly, Polka-Dot Researcher has left the company; I'll miss her. She's been very sick for a while; she came back briefly with visible pain patches on her injured shoulder and then went back out again. I'm sure there's a story but I don't know much of it.
I try to time my arrival at the lunch table to coincide fairly closely with Purple's, since that increases the chance we'll be within conversational distance. I think it was Thursday that we weren't, so I only joined the conversation about the quintessential "American!" airline meal towards the end. Pizza? Ketchup. Hot dogs? Mac and cheese? Deep-fried something? "Deep-fried tofu?" I suggested.
"It's not really Amurrican unless it's got meat in it somewhere," Purple pointed out.
"Bacon-wrapped deep-fried tofu!" we said together.
"With a shot of ketchup," he continued.
"Stop being telepathic," I told him.
Purple had another engagement for lunch on I think Friday, but I found myself gravitating to his crew's lunch gathering anyway, because there was no fucking way I was eating at my desk due to the ant situation, and it was a little late to locate my team.
Last Friday evening included the usual dinner out. Purple mentioned that there was close parking, and then there was a parking garage "under the plaza" and there was a road that went back around. I didn't see parking in the close lot, so I went back around on the road. I saw some things that looked like entrances to a parking garage, but they seemed to all be for residents. Then I saw a little bit of parking under an underpass, and it was (as Purple had said) about 90% empty. So I turned left and went into that. It was a fair walk, but it was a lovely evening and I wasn't having much pain.
Dinner was delicious. The special involved a lot of beef. The company was good. The foot entrance to the parking garage was actually very close. Purple walked me back to my car, and teased me gently. When I pulled out, I noticed what looked like some debris that I hadn't seen when pulling in to the parking spot, in between my car and the car next to me. I looked a little harder, and realized to my horror that it was a pile of poop. Eww.
I've been making incremental progress on housework, but I really do need to clean my fridge. This message brought to you by the mostly-empty Costco jar of artichoke hearts that flew out of the refrigerator and poured brine all over the kitchen floor mat, and the subsequent load of laundry.
Guide Dog Aunt and I had intended to take a walk on Saturday, but it was hot and miserable. We took a walk down on the waterfront on Sunday, and it was hot and somewhat less miserable. I stuffed ice packs into my shorts pockets. We had a good time catching up! She asked after Fishie; I said that she was off at college away from the #yamappendix her regrettable and reprehensible birth mother.
Fishie stayed at college this summer; she had a summer job there. Her parents are in the Bay Area.
"She was the one who had to take a break from her parents?"
"From her mother. Her father's mostly all right."
"Her mother's crazy?" Guide Dog Aunt hazarded.
"I'm crazy," I said reflexively, with the stigma of mental illness right up front in my head. "Her mother is mean." I paused. "And crazy," I added after a bit of thought.
"And they're divorced?"
So I gave a highlight of the greatest hits there: they're effectively separated but living in the same house because he doesn't believe in divorce due to Christianity or something, and she prays that he'll die. "And she used to make Fishie pray with her!" I concluded cheerfully.
"So when you're saying she's crazy and mean, that's an understatement," my aunt said, staring at me. She'd given me a couple self-help books that perhaps Fishie might appreciate. One of them was about making "troubled relationships" work. I hope I have dispelled any illusions that Fishie's mom is any of the sort of troubled relationship that can be made to work...
Over the weekend, about 100 emails from the helldesk software landed in my inbox. The helldesk dev group has been hard at work. Some of them were resolve notes. Some were resolve notifications. Some were re-opening notifications, followed by different resolve notes and more resolve notifications. One was from the helldesk dev triage person, apologizing for the deluge. I still have over 70 of them that I haven't dealt with or even read yet.
I came in to a river of ants. This time they were not primarily on my stuff, but they had discovered the team table. Someone had left a bag of corn chips there. It's not a super popular offering, so it tends to stay there until someone figures they've gone stale and tosses them. This time they were swarming with ants, there were ants on the table, and there were enough ants forming a trail out the door that it looked like someone had spilled laundry detergent all over the floor and it had got dirt ground into it and everything was stained. It wasn't a stain. It was ants. I was horrified.
I mentioned the poop in the parking lot to Purple. Immediately the engineering brains come out to play, and the previous discussion of San Francisco and the Bay Area's public bathroom shortage comes up. Methods of automatic bathroom cleaning come up. And this is how the sentence "The worst job: cleaning the poop roomba" came into my life.
Mr. Tux knew it was One Of Those Mornings on his way in; in the crawl on 280 after it rounds the Daly City corner before 380 splits off to connect to 101, he saw some vehicles pulled to the side of the road. Then he saw this pit bull lolloping through the crawling traffic, clearly having the time of its life. Some guy was running through traffic in the same direction, yelling, clearly having the Monday to beat all Mondays. It's those little things that get you through the day.
After lunch, having regained some moral strength, I came back to toss the chips in a garbage bag and tie the bag to isolate that portion of the ant population from the world, and to isolate the chips from the rest of the ants. I wiped down the table, but the ants kept coming. I issued a cranky update on the ticket.
Purple warned me that he might be late for lunch on Tuesday, or at least not appear on IM until late, because of more dental work. "Coronation?" I guessed. He joked about his "princess tooth", then interpreted my wide-eyed gaze somewhat defensively. "Well, if I've already had a king tooth and a queen tooth crowned, why can't I have a princess tooth next?" I kept looking at him steadily: "You can have as many princess teeth as you like." He delights me. (I tell him this regularly.)
My Fitbit stopped talking to my phone. This annoyed me deeply, since I have come to depend on its little reminders to move my ass regularly, and its graphs. I went through the troubleshooting document twice with no luck. I did manage to dig up the computer dongle, and got it plugged in and set up and got it to sync that way, but the phone thing is sort of how I live my life and I don't like being tied to my computer. So I went back through again after emailing support, and I decided to try changing the state of the "hide my phone from blueteeth that aren't already paired" checkbox, and LO AND BEHOLD. Happily, it had cached the week's worth of data, and uploaded it, so while some of my day-by-day things won't have caught those days, the Fitbit servers will have them. It also looks like my fitbit doesn't talk to other people's phones, unlike the last model.
Tuesday was another customer conversation day. By this time the actual full-size keyboard had arrived, and while I'm still getting used to how it types, it doesn't lock the iPad when I miss the backspace key, because the backspace key is full-size and I don't miss it. This time it was at 8:30. So I pried myself out of bed early and came in early.
Aunt-Manager had tried to go through Polka-Dot Researcher's cube over in the other building, but there had been an unfortunate soup incident. She'd accidentally left a cafeteria takeout container in the file drawer, and while it hadn't attracted bugs, it didn't smell great. Aunt-Manager is a somewhat delicate soul, and told me to file a ticket. I'm somewhat untrusting of facilities' discernment in what is trash and what is not trash, so when I found myself with an extra hour-ish at work and no scheduled tasks, I walked up and over, wearing gloves and a grim look.
It was actually not all that bad. I opened the drawer, found the container, threw it in a trash bag and tied a knot, and went about putting other things in a box while the file drawer aired out. Some of the stuff was the Commandant's, and we'll have to sort that out later (as Polka-Dot and the Commandant had shared a double cube).
The customer thing went OK, despite the engineer who was confused as to which one was Thomas and which one was Travis. Afterwards I went over to the quiet room with my waterbottle full of ice and faceplanted in the beanbag chair. I know I must have slept, but lightly, as I kept tasting awareness of my surroundings. I came out an hour later, refreshed but somewhat wobbly, and crossed paths with a somewhat surprised Purple. I'm not supposed to be in that building anymore!
Lunch was outside. I was glad that I'd brought my hat.
There are two flavors of primary helpdesk at work. The first flavor is the techs on the phone who do first-tier tech support which only needs a sketchily trained warm body. The second flavor is the techs with offices in each building. phone has observed the staffing of these offices go from 4 per building (2-floor California earthquake buildings, one office on each floor, two techs per office) to 1 per building. When I joined in 2012 it was one office per building, two techs per office. One tech at a time was out on house calls or breaks, but there was generally one tech in the office at all times, so you could walk up for services like dead mice or cable locks or what have you. With the sag in staffing to one tech per office, the office has to be locked up when the tech is out on a house call, and you really feel the bottleneck when the single tech has to review all the issues in that building's queue.
In order to partially relieve the user pain, they put a "genius bar" in my milkshake dungeon.
Tuesday after lunch was the ribbon-cutting ceremony. I felt I had to go, after seeing pictures that included some really terrible-looking chairs. lb, Angry Tattooed Man, and Mr. Netflix were on their way up, so I walked with them. The way the building is laid out, the stair-free access to downstairs is via a two-door elevator. lb and I peered out the rear door into a scene from introvert hell, with some guy giving an interminable speech about something. Surprised faces peered into the elevator until the door slid closed again, and we escaped via the outside door. One of the other entrances served better. We squeezed in the back. The speech concluded and everybody started pouring into the "genius-like" bar area proper to get free t-shirts. lb and I looked at the cafe area briefly, then lb peaced out. I joined Angry Tattooed Man and Mr. Netflix and explained the problem with the chairs.
When the crowd thinned some, I encountered a succession of people: first the short cheerful man with the round bald head who had been the R&D "Tower Lead" for the helldesk software last September, and who seemed much happier with this, his new project. (He asked if I recognized him; I said that he looked familiar but I couldn't place him.) Then I ran into the excessively tall fellow who'd told me that the only way to get an appointment at the sub-genius bar was via smartphone app. He explained that it didn't necessarily have to be your own smartphone or login. I conveyed that I was generally the one making the appointments for other people. (Current phone situation: most of the apps which can be moved to SD card are moved there, there's room on the SD card, and there is enough not-room on the main disk that every now and then I have to uninstall things so that other apps can update.) I asked Mayor Dobbs who was in charge of the fucking chairs. He came back to me with information on the group responsible for the retrofit of the milkshake dungeon area.
The group responsible for the retrofit of the milkshake dungeon area was the Dean's group. I ran into the Dean. He was in a party mood. I was not in a party mood. I chatted with a few of the vendors. Then I stomped back off in the direction of my end of campus. The Dean caught up with me and hollered words of encouragement and that he was going to Fix Things. That did cheer me up, but I was still unbelievably mad. I called HR, then composed a very unfriendly email.
Including a sentence like "If [the Dean] were not already taking care of [the chair situation], this would be a much less friendly email" in an email that is already unfriendly? It doesn't make it any more friendly.
I followed the ant trail back out to a hole by the sidewalk, and sent the pictures on to pest control. I attacked the trail with the pet-safe spray. (It may be pet-safe. It is not Purple-safe, due to lots of clove oil.)
Going through the stack of helldesk resolution messages was pretty pleasant and soothing after that. Purple pinged me around 7; we were both tired, and we didn't stand out in the parking lot talking very long.
So when I drove home on Tuesday it was actually early enough that I felt OK about callingzarhooie, who was headed to bed via checking for updates on some Hydra Trash Party fic, but who also had important news about her Fitbit and how she managed to erode its screen super weirdly. Plastic, man. It was super awesome to talk to her because braintwins need to sync regularly.
Fitbit tech support got back to me. Their response was super inept and while it was not wrong per se, it was also not good. I suggested that they add the missing troubleshooting step in Android to the documentation, since it was missing from there. They told me to go take it to the product forum. I was not in the mood to be fucked with, and asked for a supervisor. That is not how good tech support should operate. You as a company may offer all these disparate points of contact, but once you are working with one, there need to be internal means to convey a message like "update the fucking docs" from one department or system to the other.
When I slowed for the exit to work, I saw a great big hound of some sort lolloping along the shoulder of the exit, and a great big Ford F150 pulled off in the median between the exit and the highway, with some lady running down the median and shouting at the dog. There wasn't much I could do at that point, so I drove on carefully.
I came in today to zero visible ants. Yay! I am cautiously pleased.
The last time I changed the password on the SurveyMonkey account, apparently I typoed something somewhere. This meant that I had a hell of a time getting in. I finally managed to typo it right in order to change it. This time it will be much less easy for me to get wrong.
Then I went to lunch. The missing bench in the cafeteria is still missing. I made a note to goose the ticket.
Aunt-Manager has been encouraging people to take advantage of the dinner to go thing. This time it was bbq pork ribs from the smoker. I thought this was a good plan. I let Purple know, and he thought that sounded good. So after a while, and at about the point where I was saying things like "Jolly well don't close a ticket like this without a) telling me the ticket that helldesk dev is tracking this on, and b) subscribing me to it!" I realized that yes, it was definitely time for dinner.
Purple and I converged and had dinner in the atrium instead of my cube, as my cube is small, bbq ribs are often messy, and my corner of the world still smells like cloves. Besides the ribs, there was jalapeno cornbread and minted diced melon. I told the story about Calico and the cornbread. Calico was a really great hen, and a very personable example of the breed.
Eventually there were two pieces of melon left in the container, one cantaloupe and one watermelon. Purple's fork advanced, then he paused. "Which would -- which do you prefer?" he asked.
"Watermelon, actually," I admitted.
He took the cantaloupe. "This is how you can tell you're a friend," he said seriously. "Some people, I wouldn't ask, and you'd get the cantaloupe."
I have been intermittently poking at the new participant database SaaS now that the thing is up and running again. Tonight I tried describing it to Purple. "It feels sort of like some engineers got some lego block ui elements and put them together ... somehow."
"That ... actually doesn't sound very good."
"No. Trying to understand it is like those dreams where you walk into a room, and it's full of wisps of smoke, and when you try to touch it, it falls to the ground as sand."
"..."
"And I'm wondering if I need to, like, smoke some acid or something."
"You ... don't smoke acid."
"Okay, fine, drop some acid, whatever. I'm just not sure whether I need to find some from the same batch they were using."
It's cooled down some, which is good. It's been nasty hot. I hope I can sleep.
Over last week the ant profusion at work was on the decline. I was cheered. I was still squishing them at a rate of about 4 per hour, but that was much better than previous.
Sadly, Polka-Dot Researcher has left the company; I'll miss her. She's been very sick for a while; she came back briefly with visible pain patches on her injured shoulder and then went back out again. I'm sure there's a story but I don't know much of it.
I try to time my arrival at the lunch table to coincide fairly closely with Purple's, since that increases the chance we'll be within conversational distance. I think it was Thursday that we weren't, so I only joined the conversation about the quintessential "American!" airline meal towards the end. Pizza? Ketchup. Hot dogs? Mac and cheese? Deep-fried something? "Deep-fried tofu?" I suggested.
"It's not really Amurrican unless it's got meat in it somewhere," Purple pointed out.
"Bacon-wrapped deep-fried tofu!" we said together.
"With a shot of ketchup," he continued.
"Stop being telepathic," I told him.
Purple had another engagement for lunch on I think Friday, but I found myself gravitating to his crew's lunch gathering anyway, because there was no fucking way I was eating at my desk due to the ant situation, and it was a little late to locate my team.
Last Friday evening included the usual dinner out. Purple mentioned that there was close parking, and then there was a parking garage "under the plaza" and there was a road that went back around. I didn't see parking in the close lot, so I went back around on the road. I saw some things that looked like entrances to a parking garage, but they seemed to all be for residents. Then I saw a little bit of parking under an underpass, and it was (as Purple had said) about 90% empty. So I turned left and went into that. It was a fair walk, but it was a lovely evening and I wasn't having much pain.
Dinner was delicious. The special involved a lot of beef. The company was good. The foot entrance to the parking garage was actually very close. Purple walked me back to my car, and teased me gently. When I pulled out, I noticed what looked like some debris that I hadn't seen when pulling in to the parking spot, in between my car and the car next to me. I looked a little harder, and realized to my horror that it was a pile of poop. Eww.
I've been making incremental progress on housework, but I really do need to clean my fridge. This message brought to you by the mostly-empty Costco jar of artichoke hearts that flew out of the refrigerator and poured brine all over the kitchen floor mat, and the subsequent load of laundry.
Guide Dog Aunt and I had intended to take a walk on Saturday, but it was hot and miserable. We took a walk down on the waterfront on Sunday, and it was hot and somewhat less miserable. I stuffed ice packs into my shorts pockets. We had a good time catching up! She asked after Fishie; I said that she was off at college away from the #yamappendix her regrettable and reprehensible birth mother.
Fishie stayed at college this summer; she had a summer job there. Her parents are in the Bay Area.
"She was the one who had to take a break from her parents?"
"From her mother. Her father's mostly all right."
"Her mother's crazy?" Guide Dog Aunt hazarded.
"I'm crazy," I said reflexively, with the stigma of mental illness right up front in my head. "Her mother is mean." I paused. "And crazy," I added after a bit of thought.
"And they're divorced?"
So I gave a highlight of the greatest hits there: they're effectively separated but living in the same house because he doesn't believe in divorce due to Christianity or something, and she prays that he'll die. "And she used to make Fishie pray with her!" I concluded cheerfully.
"So when you're saying she's crazy and mean, that's an understatement," my aunt said, staring at me. She'd given me a couple self-help books that perhaps Fishie might appreciate. One of them was about making "troubled relationships" work. I hope I have dispelled any illusions that Fishie's mom is any of the sort of troubled relationship that can be made to work...
Over the weekend, about 100 emails from the helldesk software landed in my inbox. The helldesk dev group has been hard at work. Some of them were resolve notes. Some were resolve notifications. Some were re-opening notifications, followed by different resolve notes and more resolve notifications. One was from the helldesk dev triage person, apologizing for the deluge. I still have over 70 of them that I haven't dealt with or even read yet.
I came in to a river of ants. This time they were not primarily on my stuff, but they had discovered the team table. Someone had left a bag of corn chips there. It's not a super popular offering, so it tends to stay there until someone figures they've gone stale and tosses them. This time they were swarming with ants, there were ants on the table, and there were enough ants forming a trail out the door that it looked like someone had spilled laundry detergent all over the floor and it had got dirt ground into it and everything was stained. It wasn't a stain. It was ants. I was horrified.
I mentioned the poop in the parking lot to Purple. Immediately the engineering brains come out to play, and the previous discussion of San Francisco and the Bay Area's public bathroom shortage comes up. Methods of automatic bathroom cleaning come up. And this is how the sentence "The worst job: cleaning the poop roomba" came into my life.
Mr. Tux knew it was One Of Those Mornings on his way in; in the crawl on 280 after it rounds the Daly City corner before 380 splits off to connect to 101, he saw some vehicles pulled to the side of the road. Then he saw this pit bull lolloping through the crawling traffic, clearly having the time of its life. Some guy was running through traffic in the same direction, yelling, clearly having the Monday to beat all Mondays. It's those little things that get you through the day.
After lunch, having regained some moral strength, I came back to toss the chips in a garbage bag and tie the bag to isolate that portion of the ant population from the world, and to isolate the chips from the rest of the ants. I wiped down the table, but the ants kept coming. I issued a cranky update on the ticket.
Purple warned me that he might be late for lunch on Tuesday, or at least not appear on IM until late, because of more dental work. "Coronation?" I guessed. He joked about his "princess tooth", then interpreted my wide-eyed gaze somewhat defensively. "Well, if I've already had a king tooth and a queen tooth crowned, why can't I have a princess tooth next?" I kept looking at him steadily: "You can have as many princess teeth as you like." He delights me. (I tell him this regularly.)
My Fitbit stopped talking to my phone. This annoyed me deeply, since I have come to depend on its little reminders to move my ass regularly, and its graphs. I went through the troubleshooting document twice with no luck. I did manage to dig up the computer dongle, and got it plugged in and set up and got it to sync that way, but the phone thing is sort of how I live my life and I don't like being tied to my computer. So I went back through again after emailing support, and I decided to try changing the state of the "hide my phone from blueteeth that aren't already paired" checkbox, and LO AND BEHOLD. Happily, it had cached the week's worth of data, and uploaded it, so while some of my day-by-day things won't have caught those days, the Fitbit servers will have them. It also looks like my fitbit doesn't talk to other people's phones, unlike the last model.
Tuesday was another customer conversation day. By this time the actual full-size keyboard had arrived, and while I'm still getting used to how it types, it doesn't lock the iPad when I miss the backspace key, because the backspace key is full-size and I don't miss it. This time it was at 8:30. So I pried myself out of bed early and came in early.
Aunt-Manager had tried to go through Polka-Dot Researcher's cube over in the other building, but there had been an unfortunate soup incident. She'd accidentally left a cafeteria takeout container in the file drawer, and while it hadn't attracted bugs, it didn't smell great. Aunt-Manager is a somewhat delicate soul, and told me to file a ticket. I'm somewhat untrusting of facilities' discernment in what is trash and what is not trash, so when I found myself with an extra hour-ish at work and no scheduled tasks, I walked up and over, wearing gloves and a grim look.
It was actually not all that bad. I opened the drawer, found the container, threw it in a trash bag and tied a knot, and went about putting other things in a box while the file drawer aired out. Some of the stuff was the Commandant's, and we'll have to sort that out later (as Polka-Dot and the Commandant had shared a double cube).
The customer thing went OK, despite the engineer who was confused as to which one was Thomas and which one was Travis. Afterwards I went over to the quiet room with my waterbottle full of ice and faceplanted in the beanbag chair. I know I must have slept, but lightly, as I kept tasting awareness of my surroundings. I came out an hour later, refreshed but somewhat wobbly, and crossed paths with a somewhat surprised Purple. I'm not supposed to be in that building anymore!
Lunch was outside. I was glad that I'd brought my hat.
There are two flavors of primary helpdesk at work. The first flavor is the techs on the phone who do first-tier tech support which only needs a sketchily trained warm body. The second flavor is the techs with offices in each building. phone has observed the staffing of these offices go from 4 per building (2-floor California earthquake buildings, one office on each floor, two techs per office) to 1 per building. When I joined in 2012 it was one office per building, two techs per office. One tech at a time was out on house calls or breaks, but there was generally one tech in the office at all times, so you could walk up for services like dead mice or cable locks or what have you. With the sag in staffing to one tech per office, the office has to be locked up when the tech is out on a house call, and you really feel the bottleneck when the single tech has to review all the issues in that building's queue.
In order to partially relieve the user pain, they put a "genius bar" in my milkshake dungeon.
Tuesday after lunch was the ribbon-cutting ceremony. I felt I had to go, after seeing pictures that included some really terrible-looking chairs. lb, Angry Tattooed Man, and Mr. Netflix were on their way up, so I walked with them. The way the building is laid out, the stair-free access to downstairs is via a two-door elevator. lb and I peered out the rear door into a scene from introvert hell, with some guy giving an interminable speech about something. Surprised faces peered into the elevator until the door slid closed again, and we escaped via the outside door. One of the other entrances served better. We squeezed in the back. The speech concluded and everybody started pouring into the "genius-like" bar area proper to get free t-shirts. lb and I looked at the cafe area briefly, then lb peaced out. I joined Angry Tattooed Man and Mr. Netflix and explained the problem with the chairs.
When the crowd thinned some, I encountered a succession of people: first the short cheerful man with the round bald head who had been the R&D "Tower Lead" for the helldesk software last September, and who seemed much happier with this, his new project. (He asked if I recognized him; I said that he looked familiar but I couldn't place him.) Then I ran into the excessively tall fellow who'd told me that the only way to get an appointment at the sub-genius bar was via smartphone app. He explained that it didn't necessarily have to be your own smartphone or login. I conveyed that I was generally the one making the appointments for other people. (Current phone situation: most of the apps which can be moved to SD card are moved there, there's room on the SD card, and there is enough not-room on the main disk that every now and then I have to uninstall things so that other apps can update.) I asked Mayor Dobbs who was in charge of the fucking chairs. He came back to me with information on the group responsible for the retrofit of the milkshake dungeon area.
The group responsible for the retrofit of the milkshake dungeon area was the Dean's group. I ran into the Dean. He was in a party mood. I was not in a party mood. I chatted with a few of the vendors. Then I stomped back off in the direction of my end of campus. The Dean caught up with me and hollered words of encouragement and that he was going to Fix Things. That did cheer me up, but I was still unbelievably mad. I called HR, then composed a very unfriendly email.
Including a sentence like "If [the Dean] were not already taking care of [the chair situation], this would be a much less friendly email" in an email that is already unfriendly? It doesn't make it any more friendly.
I followed the ant trail back out to a hole by the sidewalk, and sent the pictures on to pest control. I attacked the trail with the pet-safe spray. (It may be pet-safe. It is not Purple-safe, due to lots of clove oil.)
Going through the stack of helldesk resolution messages was pretty pleasant and soothing after that. Purple pinged me around 7; we were both tired, and we didn't stand out in the parking lot talking very long.
So when I drove home on Tuesday it was actually early enough that I felt OK about calling
zarhooie, who was headed to bed via checking for updates on some Hydra Trash Party fic, but who also had important news about her Fitbit and how she managed to erode its screen super weirdly. Plastic, man. It was super awesome to talk to her because braintwins need to sync regularly. Fitbit tech support got back to me. Their response was super inept and while it was not wrong per se, it was also not good. I suggested that they add the missing troubleshooting step in Android to the documentation, since it was missing from there. They told me to go take it to the product forum. I was not in the mood to be fucked with, and asked for a supervisor. That is not how good tech support should operate. You as a company may offer all these disparate points of contact, but once you are working with one, there need to be internal means to convey a message like "update the fucking docs" from one department or system to the other.
When I slowed for the exit to work, I saw a great big hound of some sort lolloping along the shoulder of the exit, and a great big Ford F150 pulled off in the median between the exit and the highway, with some lady running down the median and shouting at the dog. There wasn't much I could do at that point, so I drove on carefully.
I came in today to zero visible ants. Yay! I am cautiously pleased.
The last time I changed the password on the SurveyMonkey account, apparently I typoed something somewhere. This meant that I had a hell of a time getting in. I finally managed to typo it right in order to change it. This time it will be much less easy for me to get wrong.
Then I went to lunch. The missing bench in the cafeteria is still missing. I made a note to goose the ticket.
Aunt-Manager has been encouraging people to take advantage of the dinner to go thing. This time it was bbq pork ribs from the smoker. I thought this was a good plan. I let Purple know, and he thought that sounded good. So after a while, and at about the point where I was saying things like "Jolly well don't close a ticket like this without a) telling me the ticket that helldesk dev is tracking this on, and b) subscribing me to it!" I realized that yes, it was definitely time for dinner.
Purple and I converged and had dinner in the atrium instead of my cube, as my cube is small, bbq ribs are often messy, and my corner of the world still smells like cloves. Besides the ribs, there was jalapeno cornbread and minted diced melon. I told the story about Calico and the cornbread. Calico was a really great hen, and a very personable example of the breed.
Eventually there were two pieces of melon left in the container, one cantaloupe and one watermelon. Purple's fork advanced, then he paused. "Which would -- which do you prefer?" he asked.
"Watermelon, actually," I admitted.
He took the cantaloupe. "This is how you can tell you're a friend," he said seriously. "Some people, I wouldn't ask, and you'd get the cantaloupe."
I have been intermittently poking at the new participant database SaaS now that the thing is up and running again. Tonight I tried describing it to Purple. "It feels sort of like some engineers got some lego block ui elements and put them together ... somehow."
"That ... actually doesn't sound very good."
"No. Trying to understand it is like those dreams where you walk into a room, and it's full of wisps of smoke, and when you try to touch it, it falls to the ground as sand."
"..."
"And I'm wondering if I need to, like, smoke some acid or something."
"You ... don't smoke acid."
"Okay, fine, drop some acid, whatever. I'm just not sure whether I need to find some from the same batch they were using."
It's cooled down some, which is good. It's been nasty hot. I hope I can sleep.