Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2016-01-09 12:13 am
azurelunatic) wrote2016-01-09 12:13 am
"Nearly anything else would be better." (Things which are much better: hummus with Purple.)
My first act of the morning was to respond to the guy newly in charge of Helldesk 2.0 thus:
The lady who's been doing bug triage on the thing for the past year replied in a state of hilarity.
I called lunch as it was after 12:30 and I was hungry. Then I headed off to the cafeteria without waiting for a response from Purple. I'd had my eye on the macaroni and cheese served from the pizza station. I regarded the salad the guy was transferring between containers with suspicion, and was "rewarded" with the sight of some bell peppers. Yay. So after dithering a bit, I decided to snag the mac & cheese but get salad from the salad bar, which would be safe. As I was grabbing a salad bowl, the guy rushed up after me and told me that he'd had a word with the chef and there were in fact un-advertised bell peppers in the mac & cheese. He asked was there something else from the pizza station that I might want. I dropped it like it was hot whilst the ... well, I set the plate down, pushed it away from me, backed up, managed to say that I needed something to eat (implied: something that was not that monstrosity) and fled the cafeteria with the plan to go cry in a conference room.
Naturally any such plan would have to meet with some sort of snag, so I recognized the guy from the department which tries to keep tabs on R&D's tool use to try and monitor how much Shadow IT there really is. He recognized me. I paused in my headlong flight to briefly chat pleasantly as we made a formal introduction.
Then I found the conference room which I'd been hoping was empty. It was. I sobbed in it for a few minutes before wiping my eyes, blowing my nose, and heading back to get some food which wasn't contaminated with nightshades. (I wound up in the grill line behind Purple. There was a chicken quesadilla sandwich, which amounted to grilled cheese with chicken in, plus bell peppers and onions. I had them make it without adding contaminants.)
I do not want to make life substantially harder for the kitchen crew. My general approach when I see something that I otherwise want that comes with bell peppers is to get something else. (I have also been known to pick them out, or if it seems like they should be optional, to ask for it without.) I do not want to deal with the sore stomach and disgusting bell pepper belches that result when I eat bell peppers. This is especially important to me because while I am 99.999% in favor of my new-as-of-September meds lineup, it does include stuff with serious THIS WILL FUCK WITH YOUR DIGESTION BIGTIME side effects. This means that on any given day I have the chance of having a sore stomach anyway, with the attendant I hate everything about my life that comes with some fun phobias. I haven't fucked around with adding two things that screw with my digestion in similar ways together, and given that one of them I kind of hate and is (or should be) optional ... in conclusion, fuck the cafeteria.
I have sent an email to the main cafeteria address, and also included the manager. Also also included: caps lock, swearing. I have additionally forwarded him about nine months of previous communication on the topic.
As I told Purple, the thought of how long I have been fighting this battle is an unguarded path into the depths of my anticipation of missing this beloved workplace.
I was thinking about Manager Can You Even YouTube Bro's mention of Greek cuisine, and contemplating that I was in the mood for Mediterranean as an option for dinner tonight. Then the email about the theme for beer bash crossed my watch, and I had to open the email to see what food was going to go with the somewhat ridic theme. Greek. Naturally! I was amused by the coincidence.
A previous designer stopped through. My manager still has her cat (the cat is now timeshare, apparently).
I made an appearance at beer bash. I looked at the food options but saw that everything except the pita bread and hummus was laced with bell pepper. I got a bit of two of the lovely fruit crumbles, and wound up chatting with Chicken Guy.
I let him know that it had been a pleasure working with him all these years. That's one of those phrases that heralds "and I'm leaving".
To be clear, I think the trend towards limiting the institutional memory of the groups responsible for your infrastructure to a year and a half at most is a stupid-ass move that's in the process of very slowly and methodically shooting off any organization's toes one by one before moving on to larger and more important foot bones. This is what relying on people who you can only keep for one year (or a year and a half, in rare circumstances) will do to you. I wonder if there's a suitable all-hands coming up, because people are still talking about the helpdesk question that I asked in the last round. (oh god. I am imagining my manager's look of horror.) On the gripping hand, the drawbacks are minimal and the possible benefit to other people in my boat (and there are so many) are huge.
Designer Sparkles said hi to Chicken Guy, who tried to introduce us. Designer Sparkles said that we worked together. "Assistant, hero." She'd not heard the previous topic, so her comment was illustrative.
We wandered in different directions. Purple not being visible, I settled down with teammates (Huckleberry and R, the guy who's getting married shortly). Rocky joined us. Rocky wound up telling us this amazing story about an early 80s concert a friend had let him sit in the booth for, where the main attraction guy was on serious drugs and got into a beef with a punk in the audience heckling him. The punk was climbing on stage, whereupon the guy wallops the punk with his guitar, to the detriment of both punk and instrument. (Punk here is both general and fandom-specific.)
The Chicken Guy joined the group at the table. Purple showed up, and the group cycled, so it was Chicken Guy, me, Purple, and Mr. Tux. I pulled out my crocheting. Chicken Guy mentioned that there was crocheting in his family, but he'd never quite picked it up. He thought it might be good to be able to do the thing, as he has that AD(H)D thing where he needs to be occupied with something physical in order to focus on information.
Somehow the topic of crop circles got us on to Viagra jokes, and they just kept popping up.
At length, I pulled out the other yarn and one of the other crochet hooks, and walked Chicken Guy through the process of crocheting plain old chain stitch. He made a decent start before heading off.
I laughingly suggested Greek cuisine for dinner; Purple contemplated some Mediterranean places he knew of. I looked up the place he was thinking of while he was on the phone with Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly. It turned out they were booked solid for a while, but there were other places.
I ran into the Singing PM while washing out my coffee cup, and we chatted about our breaks.
I complained to Purple about the current state of my mouth, as two taste buds had gone rogue. Apparently his mouth does not do that. We compared notes on our least favorite colds while waiting to be seated.
Dinner was lovely. I got a sip of Purple's lemonade (definitely tasty, and this was the place that had had the inch worm on the fresh mint that time) and we shared our side dishes. He took some of my carrots, and I had one of his balls. The phrase "Where have you been all of my life!" when uttered to vegetables is amusing. (Purple had said this to the cucumber and parsley dish some years ago.)
A note: if you have an object that's roughly cylindrical, except for a wider part at the base ... plastic wrap is not going to help the phallic effect. Just so you know.
As a general philosophy of Helldesk 2.0, I would caution you against using Helldesk 1.x as a user-accepted baseline. Helldesk 1.x has been violently rejected by the users.
This is why I had concerns about the intended survey for Helldesk 2. Using Helldesk 1.x as a point of comparison is similar to "do you like this better than being punched in the face". Nearly anything else would be better.
The lady who's been doing bug triage on the thing for the past year replied in a state of hilarity.
I called lunch as it was after 12:30 and I was hungry. Then I headed off to the cafeteria without waiting for a response from Purple. I'd had my eye on the macaroni and cheese served from the pizza station. I regarded the salad the guy was transferring between containers with suspicion, and was "rewarded" with the sight of some bell peppers. Yay. So after dithering a bit, I decided to snag the mac & cheese but get salad from the salad bar, which would be safe. As I was grabbing a salad bowl, the guy rushed up after me and told me that he'd had a word with the chef and there were in fact un-advertised bell peppers in the mac & cheese. He asked was there something else from the pizza station that I might want. I dropped it like it was hot whilst the ... well, I set the plate down, pushed it away from me, backed up, managed to say that I needed something to eat (implied: something that was not that monstrosity) and fled the cafeteria with the plan to go cry in a conference room.
Naturally any such plan would have to meet with some sort of snag, so I recognized the guy from the department which tries to keep tabs on R&D's tool use to try and monitor how much Shadow IT there really is. He recognized me. I paused in my headlong flight to briefly chat pleasantly as we made a formal introduction.
Then I found the conference room which I'd been hoping was empty. It was. I sobbed in it for a few minutes before wiping my eyes, blowing my nose, and heading back to get some food which wasn't contaminated with nightshades. (I wound up in the grill line behind Purple. There was a chicken quesadilla sandwich, which amounted to grilled cheese with chicken in, plus bell peppers and onions. I had them make it without adding contaminants.)
I do not want to make life substantially harder for the kitchen crew. My general approach when I see something that I otherwise want that comes with bell peppers is to get something else. (I have also been known to pick them out, or if it seems like they should be optional, to ask for it without.) I do not want to deal with the sore stomach and disgusting bell pepper belches that result when I eat bell peppers. This is especially important to me because while I am 99.999% in favor of my new-as-of-September meds lineup, it does include stuff with serious THIS WILL FUCK WITH YOUR DIGESTION BIGTIME side effects. This means that on any given day I have the chance of having a sore stomach anyway, with the attendant I hate everything about my life that comes with some fun phobias. I haven't fucked around with adding two things that screw with my digestion in similar ways together, and given that one of them I kind of hate and is (or should be) optional ... in conclusion, fuck the cafeteria.
I have sent an email to the main cafeteria address, and also included the manager. Also also included: caps lock, swearing. I have additionally forwarded him about nine months of previous communication on the topic.
As I told Purple, the thought of how long I have been fighting this battle is an unguarded path into the depths of my anticipation of missing this beloved workplace.
I was thinking about Manager Can You Even YouTube Bro's mention of Greek cuisine, and contemplating that I was in the mood for Mediterranean as an option for dinner tonight. Then the email about the theme for beer bash crossed my watch, and I had to open the email to see what food was going to go with the somewhat ridic theme. Greek. Naturally! I was amused by the coincidence.
A previous designer stopped through. My manager still has her cat (the cat is now timeshare, apparently).
I made an appearance at beer bash. I looked at the food options but saw that everything except the pita bread and hummus was laced with bell pepper. I got a bit of two of the lovely fruit crumbles, and wound up chatting with Chicken Guy.
I let him know that it had been a pleasure working with him all these years. That's one of those phrases that heralds "and I'm leaving".
To be clear, I think the trend towards limiting the institutional memory of the groups responsible for your infrastructure to a year and a half at most is a stupid-ass move that's in the process of very slowly and methodically shooting off any organization's toes one by one before moving on to larger and more important foot bones. This is what relying on people who you can only keep for one year (or a year and a half, in rare circumstances) will do to you. I wonder if there's a suitable all-hands coming up, because people are still talking about the helpdesk question that I asked in the last round. (oh god. I am imagining my manager's look of horror.) On the gripping hand, the drawbacks are minimal and the possible benefit to other people in my boat (and there are so many) are huge.
Designer Sparkles said hi to Chicken Guy, who tried to introduce us. Designer Sparkles said that we worked together. "Assistant, hero." She'd not heard the previous topic, so her comment was illustrative.
We wandered in different directions. Purple not being visible, I settled down with teammates (Huckleberry and R, the guy who's getting married shortly). Rocky joined us. Rocky wound up telling us this amazing story about an early 80s concert a friend had let him sit in the booth for, where the main attraction guy was on serious drugs and got into a beef with a punk in the audience heckling him. The punk was climbing on stage, whereupon the guy wallops the punk with his guitar, to the detriment of both punk and instrument. (Punk here is both general and fandom-specific.)
The Chicken Guy joined the group at the table. Purple showed up, and the group cycled, so it was Chicken Guy, me, Purple, and Mr. Tux. I pulled out my crocheting. Chicken Guy mentioned that there was crocheting in his family, but he'd never quite picked it up. He thought it might be good to be able to do the thing, as he has that AD(H)D thing where he needs to be occupied with something physical in order to focus on information.
Somehow the topic of crop circles got us on to Viagra jokes, and they just kept popping up.
At length, I pulled out the other yarn and one of the other crochet hooks, and walked Chicken Guy through the process of crocheting plain old chain stitch. He made a decent start before heading off.
I laughingly suggested Greek cuisine for dinner; Purple contemplated some Mediterranean places he knew of. I looked up the place he was thinking of while he was on the phone with Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly. It turned out they were booked solid for a while, but there were other places.
I ran into the Singing PM while washing out my coffee cup, and we chatted about our breaks.
I complained to Purple about the current state of my mouth, as two taste buds had gone rogue. Apparently his mouth does not do that. We compared notes on our least favorite colds while waiting to be seated.
Dinner was lovely. I got a sip of Purple's lemonade (definitely tasty, and this was the place that had had the inch worm on the fresh mint that time) and we shared our side dishes. He took some of my carrots, and I had one of his balls. The phrase "Where have you been all of my life!" when uttered to vegetables is amusing. (Purple had said this to the cucumber and parsley dish some years ago.)
A note: if you have an object that's roughly cylindrical, except for a wider part at the base ... plastic wrap is not going to help the phallic effect. Just so you know.
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I also wonder how long it takes for Virtual Hammer to onboard new contracts. They're probably chewing up a significant amount of time just getting everyone up to the level of basic competence.
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I have several long-term beefs, as you see.
There's a new local Facilities lead who doesn't know the campus yet, and seems like he doesn't want to maybe. (The old guy got moved up the hill to maintain the building the executives sit in.) My battles are epic. They have denied the sqeakening. They have declared war with Beldorion.
It's a significantly large campus, and there are a lot of weird infrastructure tricks that aren't documented basically anywhere. (People who stumble upon my wiki page about office stuff have been known to email me with thanks.) But, only FTEs on products need to know how things work, amirite?
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It's a real http://kite2012.com/wp-content/uploads/angry-rooster.jpg of a situation.
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...That would explain SO BLOODY MUCH about me. Brb learning to crochet.
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Except the manager is trying to keep us from scurvy.
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Still, bell peppers in mac & cheese is just wrong.