Allegra is on my desk again while Thalia is in the shop. I'm writing this from hcolleen's machine, because it has a larger keyboard, a happier processor, and a larger screen. Allegra is a good and steady little machine, but not quite what one would want for one's web-surfing needs. I ought to mail the BOfD to let her know that yes, the system is on her bloody way in. ( I write a stiff little note. )

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At work on Tuesday, I was all set to leave at 8:30 when Field ambushed me with a "few questions" about the spreadsheets they use. Some of the stuff used to boggle me about those spreadsheets, but after all the database work I'd been doing, and all the digging around in the Queen Bee's spreadsheets, these seemed almost simplistic. I poked at things and realized (to my horror) that there were things going on in there that ought not to be done the way that they were being done. (To wit: there were three-positive-line entries that were being treated as if they were two-positive-line entries in the formula at the very end. O, the horror of it all. I got in there and fixed it with some swiftness.

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Group tonight was fun. I've been working on "Hell's Angel" in slow but fairly steady little dribbles. I still don't know where it's going, but it's going somewhere. It looks like it may be the corporate novel that Welcome to the Workplace didn't turn out to be. Nick is much more fun than a thinly-disguised co-worker, and Mary is much more fun than the Mary Sue I was trying to float. Mary is quite possibly a teacher, and goes out drinking 'cause of job stress ordinarily, but now what with Current Events, she's out not just getting tipsy, but getting plastered.

... In hell? Twelve step meetings are hellish.

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I was at least somewhat out of it tonight. I did get M on film sniffing her shoulder to clear out her nose between sniffing at highly scented tinned candles. That was amusing. Dinner was Of the Fun, though I can't remember much of it. There was silliness and whipped cream, and I employed my Book of Quotes happily. (I still want a scan of the workplace Book of Quotes, because there's so much good stuff in that one.) I had this pink water bottle of grape juice and blackberries, and I took to forgetting it places.

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"I'm parking in the car wash." There's this broken sprinkler at the one end of the iHop parking lot, and I picked the spot that gets rained on the most. hcolleen thought that it might have been fixed, but no -- kilarneyblarney came in, letting me know that my car was under the water spout and getting righteously drenched. (Right on!)

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A couple weeks ago there was a Crazy Lady dropping in on group, someone rather frantically worried about her ex-husband and his computer follies. She was exceptionally non-technical, and had a distinct case of non-computer-person paranoia. I wound up giving her what tech support type help I could. She was absolutely paranoid about identity theft, and seemed to think that her daughter's social security number written in a file in the computer was an open invitation for identity theft to happen. ... rather along the lines of "OK, so this text file is in a non-shared folder on the computer that I use on dial-up with a firewall. Someone is going to telepathically sense that this is a machine with juicy data ripe for the taking and break in to it and STEAL MY BABY'S IDENTITY OMGZ!" I gave her the hairy eyebrow and pointed out that if she's running with a firewall and not doing anything, say, STUPID online, there's probably about as much chance at identity theft as someone doing a physical break-in and identity theft. The risk exists, but she's ... being over-cautious. She chilled out, finally. That woman made me very very nervous, because she seemed the type to become psycho!clingy. Today I saw her poking her nose near the door of the writers group room. Scary!

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I didn't do plasma today, because I am due my annual physical, and I got off to a late enough start that I did not have time. Alas! If only I had gone to bed earlier Tuesday night!

23 minutes on the phone is enough to get the worst of my shuddering inability to cope out. Must remember that Darkside does not empathize particularly smoothly with pure social angst, and creates awkward silences. He's much better, much more comfortable, at battling technical angst with tart commentary and humor.

I checked social arrangements; Saturday might be a good day. No plans. So. I plot to go over there. Afternoonish.

Chatted with BOfD. At least 2 more days for parts to arrive. Then shipping. I could spit. Tigereye zombie has power probl

There's a certain amount of mental freedom that comes with the "Oh, I'm going to do X thing to this machine." I have a certain amount of hardware geekitude, but not so much that I'm quite comfortable with it. But instructions from those whose geekitude I trust makes me secure in doing things that I haven't done before, like replace a laptop hard drive. Seriously, this machine, all you have to do is pull it out and push the new one in. So much easier than with desktop.

The hard drive is "not a user-replaceable part".

I've been on IRC with the usual suspects. IE may be behaving badly on my account, but it is not crashing too often on the guest account. I have a Cunning Guess about why it's not crashing, actually -- when CGI:IRC is open, the page is always half-loaded. Never fully loaded.

They're not shipping me a new HD. They're shipping me a box. Not like "boxen", like shipping box. I pull the wireless NIC and battery and AC adapter out of the system, and I ship the damn thing back to them. (Note: in cases of problem, love for the compeh evaporates like water on an Arizona sidewalk in the summer. But it comes back when things are solved. Ordinarily, my sweet Thalia would not be "the damn thing".) They shove a new HD in the machine and ship it back to me. (Or they give me an identical system with a new HD.) The HD will be blank, and the tech support chick who 0wns the case will be walking me through the reinstall. For lo, I am an End-User.

The 60gig HD that I got at Fry's Electronics is still in the package. The enclosure is not. Pretty thing. I now wonder if I shouldn't go ahead and shove the HD in the machine right now, install as I please on it, then put it in the enclosure. Those look like they're so much fun. Naomi wants to start a collection of hard drives, because she's just realized that OMG memory is cheap now. I'm telling her that she needs to get the tower in working condition first, and she's pouting, because that's too much like doing work.

Work was insane. Lots of people. I managed to make Avaya Centre Vu Supervisor cough up a Work State report on the split skill, and set the thresholds so I could see who was slacking at a glance and did not have to keep glaring at the reports. This leads to an almost supernatural ability for me to show up when someone is all slacking for a minute and bust them for it. Like the Philosopher was sitting on a refusal screen for two minutes playing Suduko. BUSTED! I am all for the dialer giving people breathing space. I am not for making oneself unavailable for calls by staying on the previous screen.

The Philosopher attempts to curry favor by bringing in treats for the supervisors. I am not the only one who finds him a little creepy. He is a very lonely old man whose concept of personal space does not line up to mine. He weirds me out seriously.

As of the time I left, I had clocked in about 42 hours. I am coming in late on Sunday so that I do not go over the limit of 14 hours of overtime by accident. I'm filling in for Ponytail Dave, and Grandma Cinderella and the new trainee will be doing the morning. The notes for Sunday II say that "...[Homie G] and [I] will be the go-to people..." That kind of intimidates me. I consider myself to still be a trainee, and here I am running the job? And essentially senior supervisor on the job??

Got Gemini's license plate today. I wonder if they make Vash the Stampede license plate frames, because the letters on it remind me of him. I practice divination by license plate every now and then -- it's an interesting form of divination. This license plate makes me smile. Anime: Drugs would be cheaper!