Shawn called twice while I was at work. I called back when I was walking home, and we had a grand old chat about the comic and stuff until he was about out of minutes. We ran down my battery. Good times. Damn good times.

... I like being a muse. He had two ways for something to go, and was torn between them, and when he was laying out the scene for the setup for the decision point, I saw a third way it could go, and I shared it with him. He was torn three ways. I was evidently supposed to make the choice easier, not harder.

He and I belong creatively teamed, and it's good that we're talking again.

I wound up in #lj_s sometime after that, and life was good. Life is very good. It's like coming home, to go there. If I'm awake but not otherwise occupied, odds are I'll probably be there.

Monday was an extra shift at work, on the phones. Tuesday was the regular shift, 12-7, except at the stroke of 7 I was still trying to get one last bozo phone goon monitored. This was the fellow who is not at all cool but thinks he is. He's also not at all competent, but thinks he is, and hurtly contests each time we tell him it ain't so. I had to rewind the tape to reconstruct the phone conversation.

Homie G. wished we'd made a dub of the Mike JONES! incident. Evidently this character is now Rev. Not-So-Nice Super's new hero. I was really tempted to take the tape and create an .mp3 using super-advanced cellphone technology. I didn't. I resisted the urge.

After I was done with the bloody monitor report, I helped the Check-In Princess close up the job and clean up and get paperwork and distribution done. I was eventually out of there around 9:45. Lots of paperwork. There are new trainees now, as the one fellow quit to pursue a more musical career. I hope to be seeing him succeed; he deserves that.

Metal Dave thinks that supervisory stuff is rather high-stress, what with all the things that have to be done at once. I think I have to agree with him.

I used the phrase "uphill both ways in the snow" to describe why we mere trainees mayn't have the use of the shiny spreadsheets that the more senior supervisors use to figure the job and all that nasty-bad stuff.

I did the booths out report tonight. Yay booths out. Corrupt files, 18 instances of a trojan deleted so what should we do now, just continue?, a missing F1 key, a dodgy number pad, a headset that Grandma Cinderella can't hear me over when I say "Hola, me nombre es Joan Lunatic..." when calling the bullpen from a random booth, a phone that was set to pulse and not tone, ten booths who can't talk to the domain controller right, and some dodgy telnets. And more.

I'm going to be sleeping in. Seriously sleeping in. Then I have some laundry to attend to, some dishes to put away, and some plasma to share with those more in need of it than my perkily healthy self. By that time I'll be late for writing group.

My desire for performing in any type of leadership capacity during my leisure time has gone absolutely rock-bottom. Will discuss at more length with people once more coherent.

Monitored today. The shift didn't start until 10:30, which had supervisors there at 9:30. I had gotten spoiled being check-in so much. Now that the not-enough-work side of the hours crunch is hitting, I will be lucky to get 30 hours this week. That's not such a good thing.

It was the end of the logical week, so there were only ten monitor reports for me to do, and four of them were second-time-'round on people. There was a computer error, largely caused by a klutzy whack at a keyboard that left me re-doing a monitor report after the browser backed out of the report that had just been finished and was about to be submitted. And it was one of those tapes where you can't just scrap it, call it Computer Error, and re-tape and re-monitor live. No, the report had to be re-constructed.

I validated after that. To validate, one winds up calling back a certain percentage of the people surveyed on any given survey to make sure that yeah, we did talk with them, and it wasn't just a phone booth or something. (And we've gotten that.)

The day ended early with downtime.

There was an in-depth discussion (as break trailed to a close) about the recent changes we're still undergoing. There are three child companies of the parent company involved in the aggregation of phone centers. One company outsources everything. Two of them insource things and have phone centers. Of those with phone centers, the other company has six and we have just the one. As Comic Pirate Super pointed out, it makes business sense to have the one phone center do the bulk of (okay, all of) the changing.

So our positions are being made to line up with their positions, and so on and so forth. This seems to be leading to net disgruntlement. Some of the changes are indeed more efficient, but some of them seem very arbitrary and unnecessary.

I monitored today. I should ask the lead monitor to make it a standing order that if I am ever seen on the phones, that I am to be monitored twice just to make sure that I get monitored enough times per week to not make the paperwork scream. I've been off the phones more often than on, these days. We're watching supervisor to phone goon ratios tightly at the moment, so evidently either I'm good enough, they're desperate enough, or we're really short-staffed.

And it turns out that Big Goth Super is leaving within the next two months or so, because he's found a better position elsewhere. One of the newly promoted little RPAs left sometime this month, maybe two weeks ago. One of the monitors is retiring in November.

After I ran out of people to monitor, I wound up validating. Alas that while the first job went well enough, the second one took a long time, and I wound up talking with this ... man.

You know those people who insist on telling you their life's stories? And how sometimes you are forced by the situation to be polite, pleasant, and professional? That was this guy. The world is filled with corruption, he is obsessed with Waffle House, he has over 50 corporate inventions, he has no actual income, and it was clear from what he said that he'd filled the ear of the phone goon who'd done a survey with him yesterday. It was also clear that he was, without a doubt, utterly not in contact with reality as most people know it, and certainly not reality as I know it, though I could probably reach his angle on reality if I really stretched, but that scares me too much to even go there. I'm not sure how long I was on the phone with him, but it was far too long. After I extracted myself after getting all my validation questions answered, I put a gold star on a sticky-note, wrote the phone goon's name on it, and "For putting up with chatty respondent on 6/25. Validator's Award." I stuck it on his timecard after ascertaining that he was not in the building today.

All in all, a lovely day at work.