Woke up after 7 hours sleep. (Went to bed an hour late.)

Dream had featured rope-climbing, weird buildings on one of the blocks around home. Wood pile sort of construction in a shed, and we'd climbed up and had to get down. There were ropes that we were climbing down, and the wood or plants had all turned into nasty composty rubbishy muck. Obso1337 Super was there. He also happened to be about 8 months pregnant. This was a perfectly normal thing according to the dream. There was no backstory; it just was. Upon waking up, my first thoughts were along the lines of "WTF?!" and my second thoughts were probably very amused.

Obso1337 Super seems to think that the pair of search terms "womens" "testicles" turning up a crazy number of hits means that women have testicles. I attempted to explain to him that he was using two separate search strings, not one single one, and therefore his results meant jack. He is Always Right, though, in addition to being male and 40-ish, so nothing's going to change his clothes the mind he's already made up. This was probably a contributing factor to said dream. Nothing says mpreg like women's testicles.

Have been noticing a disturbing technical trend. Wrote it up for the workplace. Hope to hear back on it. Darkside will viciously mock one of the pieces of code involved.

Came in for my shift as scheduled. Since my social life revolves around

1. time with Darkside
2. writing group
3. LJ
4. #lj_support

and none of those were conflicting with work, I elected to remain for the second shift.

There is general bogglement over the UnF spreadsheet. The thing is cracktacular, and will be more so after I wind up customizing it for each team. It looks complex at first glance, but really it is not entirely. I realize that $ISSUE_SIDE_JOB has a lot more paperwork than some jobs. I wound up customizing the Team 1 version of the UnF spreadsheet. I left it in their folder for them to play with.

Snarky Lady has started calling me Joanie, and it is spreading. (She started this because the Old Gum Lady Phone Goon calls me that. The Old Gum Lady Phone Goon likes me. It's good to be liked.) It almost feels like home. Added to that is the fact that some of the new people and temps are starting to wonder if I live there... Pink Shirt Guy said that I might as well.

It is entirely bizarre that my entire department is looking up to me as the Tech Person. I can troubleshoot most of the common problems of the department! If not, it is not usual that someone else can fix it. I am already reasonably proficient with entry-level dialer puzzles.

Next Sunday will be another potluck. This time, we must explicitly #include Comic Pirate Super. He was not called properly last time.

Was training on running $ISSUE_SIDE_JOB today at work. Good times. Explained some of the more obscure commands to Comic Pirate Super, and generally had a good time. Comic Pirate Super has an unfortunate first name. He goes by his middle name, and the consequences to anyone who uses it.

Today was supposed to be a client call, but the clients were actually busy, so we just pretended. Hehe.

Comic Pirate Super runs a brisk little business in shall we say media, and is therefore very interested in new movie releases from rental motion picture shops. He noted that he has certain titles in his library that are very popular, but that he won't probably ever watch himself, from lack of interest. Brokeback Mountain is one of said titles (I believe it's slated for near-future acquisition, rather than has-it-right-now).

I started with the intense snickering, and sighed, "Oh, you heterosexual men."

Pink Shirt Guy pointed out that it's really a good movie, and that if it were girls, the assembled gentlemen would be watching said flick in a heartbeat.

Snapping Gum Super allowed as how that was so, and clarified that it would be front row all the way, baby.

Ahh, how cultured is the workplace.

We're doing a new form to fill out at the end of the night. Given that I am quickly becoming a routine goddess of spreadsheets around the workplace, I noticed that the nastiest part of the new thing is the fact that we've got to do certain tedious calculations. They're perfectly easy, just they take information from about three different places and it has to have random stuff done with it, and it would be so much easier to have the computer do it for you, except it's got to be filled out in such and such a fashion...

Making a second page and having the calculations done on there was almost trivial. Getting the OMGZ YOU DIVIDE BY ZERO!! error to not show up when it wasn't meant to took a bit of doing, but Google was my friend and I found a tutorial for conditional formatting quite handily, and proceeded to apply it, with a few false starts.

Comic Pirate Super saw what I was doing, and should have made me do it all by hand to demonstrate that I knew what I was doing, but he is of the opinion that if you can tell your spreadsheet how to do it, you're in no danger of not knowing how to do it. (He did make me do it all by hand for the out-of-country Spanish-language version of the job, but that was only fair.)

"My babysitter's running low. ...Late."

Strawberry blonde! Now made with real strawberries!


The guy who called up, called us fucking sons of bitches, et cetera, and then called us from a cellphone and whistled at us. Rev. Not-So-Nice Super eventually answered the phone on him. (He's infamous for answering the phone. We don't let him do it often.)

Someone insane called up wanting to know if we had an internet connection. Rev. Not-So-Nice Super said yes. The someone wanted to know how fast it was. Rev. Not-So-Nice-Super wasn't able to answer the question, and "put them on hold" ... complete with humming and bopping some "hold music" through his fist into the microphone. By the time he was about to "transfer" to Comic Pirate Super, who was going to take the call, the dude had hung up.


"My computer locked up!"
"What did you do to the computer this time?"
"IT'S THE COMPUTER'S FAULT! IT CAN'T EVEN SPELL!"

"What part of 'find a booth in Area 2' did you not understand?"
"I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO READ ALL THAT SPAM!!"
"Job-related paperwork being put on your desk is not spam."
"I DIDN'T ASK TO GET IT! IT'S SPAM!!!!"


(in short? Must. Control. Fist. Of. Death.)
Calling Darkside after work never looked like such a good option. A minute and a half with him at the end of lunch break. So good.

Work has eaten my life, with no foreseeable letup until gods-know-when. In fact, it's likely to get worse.

The Check-In Princess has been removed from the check-in e-mail group last I heard; she's been in the office off and on, mostly on, since the new system went live, and she may be there semi-permanently. This means that there are only two of us regular check-ins, myself and my opposite. (I haven't a nickname for her yet, because I don't work with her much; we're generally on opposite shifts.)

The shortest check-in shift is generally Sunday, and that's usually at least eight hours. With just the two of us, we're each to be working 4 shifts check-in, and someone's got to cover if the other has to be out. There is one other regular check-in trained person in the building, and that is Comic Pirate Super, who is in Fulfillment these days on a regular basis (and therefore not available to fill in). Poser-Geek was the other check-in trained person, and he's not working with us any longer.

That would be dire enough, but we're also short on supervisors who run jobs. This means that phone goons are getting pulled to be trained for supervisory duties. Groucho Marx Guy is getting pulled now; Flattop Dave is getting pulled; Ponytail Dave is getting supervisor training as well as monitor training. (He was Fulfillment about half-time earlier.)

My opposite and I were intended to be trained to run jobs as well, but due to random people quitting when we were getting trained, we never wound up finishing. We've both petitioned to finish our supervisor training so we can fill in as needed. But the training is going to take time (ours) and going to take up supervisory time (theirs, to teach us as well as running jobs).

I'm feeling a lot more confident in my ability to be a good supervisor. I remember enough of the mechanics of running jobs to have a good handle on doing it; the theoretical hooks for the actual skills are in my brain already. I could probably limp through running a job with the notes I took last year and heavy reliance on other supervisors to remind me what I need to do. The retraining will bring me up to speed. I'm hoping I get someone other than Grandma Supervisor, because she prefers to tell what to do on the system without explaining how it's done. I learn best when I know why I'm doing it, rather than following by rote.

Unfortunately, as geek, stuff that's Heavy Geekage for the average supervisor is shallow to me, and I'm going to want something more in-depth than I think most of the supervisors are capable of giving me. What I really want is to be apprenticed to the back-room geek who's currently out with his tonsils out, but I don't think that'll happen for a while. That man is highly respected around the workplace, and I have the core technical competence to hang the system details on. He knows the refinements of the system, whereas his opposite number knows the basic functionality but doesn't do the little things that make the field staff exceptionally happy. Ah, well. I can start out learning the basics from whoever happens to be around to train me, and work my way up to learning the cool stuff at some later point.

All this means hectic schedule insanity. It's probably going to be something like me pulling five shifts a week for a few weeks all check-in and her pulling five as well, three check-in and two doubled up with me getting trained, and then me doing three check-in and two training while she does five check-in. And it's going to be insane.

Did I mention I was having sleep issues? Perfect timing for those. I've got the cold that's going around, the tail end. A little congestion in the sinuses is sufficient to screw up my life for weeks. My voice gets all nasty and rusty. Oh, and I'm working this Wednesday. If it weren't already apparent, National Novel Writing Month is over for me.

To top things off in an even more interesting development...
Short Chick Super was admiring my ribbons on Saturday (I wore the Ravenclaw colors to work this weekend because I was still feeling festive), and that reminded her that she'd been searching for a cheat code on something Harry Potter, or some game or other, and she came across a website. And the person looked a lot like me.

So. It looks like my co-workers have found my LJ.
It had to happen sooner or later.
Hi, co-workers.

Other than my brain falling apart far too late the other night, I've been having a good couple of days. Work yesterday was insane but otherwise decent -- I was running check-in, and while my hours were adding just fine, the day was made to be nutso by a batch of very irate callers around 7pm or so. One lady was mad because we were calling her at 9:20 pm (and I can see being annoyed, but this was serious off-the-handle stuff involving screaming, profanity, threats to sue and/or fire people, and the CEO's contact information), and one guy absolutely positively needed to talk to a supervisor because he needed us to send him a free box of cigarettes. (WTF? We're trying to gather opinions, not send out boxes of death sticks.) After that, someone got upset about being called "man" (the fellow in question has an accent, and was actually saying "ma'am") and someone else threatened to fly down to Phoenix to take care of things in person.

It's the end of the month and stuff is closing down, so all the phone goons but a last little cluster got off early, leaving just one supervisor cleaning up the last stuff, me, the Stressy College Chick Shift Ops Super, and the Lead Trainer Monitor with a clutch of n00bs in training. I needed to stay to do the paperwork, the Stressy College Chick can't leave until after I do, and then Pirate Comic Super was taking care of the computers and kickin' it and gossiping about his youthful sexual misadventures. Many lessons can be learned from his counter example...

• When you are a high school kid with a girlfriend, the walk-in freezer sounds like a pretty good place to get it on.
• Once.
• After that, you prefer the refrigerator.
• Or the roof.
• Or the ladies' room at the park.
• Or, in fact, anywhere else you can get it on.
• In some cases, it's advisable to check the religion of your partner before the act.
• Once your partner has informed you that she's a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, it's very much not advisable to say, "Well, at least you're not a fuckin' Mormon."
• After she hits you (hard), you should at least apologize.

Today, I was on the phones (in theory); I was testing one of the re-written surveys for next month until well after break, and that was a pain in the arse. We were comparing the survey on the computer to the paper survey, noting the discrepancies, and noting the other things wrong with it.

There were a handful of questions from the old version that popped up out of bloody nowhere in the middle of the thing, causing me to cuss, yowl, scowl, write up a handful of furious notes, and utterly doubt my sanity. The survey branched without warning, and one combination of choices caused it to go on one track, and another handful of choices caused it to go on another, and I wound up making a flowchart (color-coded) to illustrate what was going on. Sadly, my favorite line from the snarky commentary (Inevitably, VAR_043U is followed by VAR_043V, but not by inner peace, for neither of them exist, according to the paper survey!) could not be used, because it turned out that it was only Q through T that were not supposed to be there; U happened some pages later in the paper version, albeit out of sequence with what was actually going on with the computer version.

Another question had been re-worded from the paper version and wound up asking an utterly different question (the paper version wanted to know how important it was that $COMPANY do such-and-such an item; the computer version wanted to know how $COMPANY was doing on the issue), and I'll leave it to the fine people in the back room to figure out which the fuck is supposed to be there.

A third set of questions had other issues. Comic Pirate Super came over to ask me how it was doing. "Found anything?" he asked.
"Yep, it's dreadful."
"That was not what I wanted to hear."
"But it's not a really big deal."
"Oh, good."
"But it is."
"WTF?"
So I explained: the formatting of the question was screwed, so the question's three responses with letter-perfect identical beginnings had the all-crucial different endings shoved so far the crap over on the screen that they went off the screen and were therefore invisible, and therefore unreadable and indistinguishable. It made the question useless, but fixing it was not a programming issue, just a reformatting issue, and therefore easy.

My obsessive attention to detail resulted in the Short Chick Super not having to do half as much work, because I'd already found the major problems with the survey and yelled about them at length, and she didn't need to duplicate my work.

Once we'd finally gone through and found all the problems, and gotten enough test surveys input to make the people in the back room happy, we wound up back on the phones. By that time, though, there were only a few hours left. I wound up getting one survey, and two and a half pages of random scribbling. The respondent was a nice and well-informed one, and there were things that didn't fit into the survey, sure enough, so we'll see what happens when that survey gets reformatted again. (It was already re-done just the other month, so it's got bugs out the wazoozie.)

So, yeah. Work. Fun. Stuff closed, so by 3:15, I was off the phones and cleaning up. I got in a half-hour of cleanup, including the much-needed refilling of the 409 bottles, then off home!

This is not a politically correct workplace. Since we have a reasonably diverse supervisory staff, and we work in a workplace where the clients care about ethnicity in the context of surveys, there's a lot of give and take on subjects that many workplaces might be afraid to even start to bring up.

On Friday, Cute Geek Super, Rev. Nice Super, Skinny Spiky-Haired Super (who hasn't a proper nickname yet), Superman Shirt Super, and probably a few others, were discussing the topic of race on the next census. It was Cute Geek Super's position that since people were really not paying attention to race when falling in love these days, that the next census should probably just have "White" and "Not White" as the categories, because by that time, there would be so many people needing to have "ethnic background" as a multiple-choice question that putting it as a single-choice answer would not make any sense.

And the guys were holding their arms next to each other so Rev. Nice Super could shoot down Cute Geek Super's claim that he was naturally more tan than most white guys. (Rev. Nice Super is black, Cute Geek Super is hispanic, Skinny Spiky-Haired Super is asian, and Superman Shirt Super is white. This is ordinarily of no real importance except in purposes of debate.) Cute Geek Super and Superman Shirt Super turned out to have arms just about the same color, though Cute Geek Super was just a hair paler. In the way that such workplace debates usually do shift focus so no one branch of a topic is beaten down into the ground, the focus next shifted to how people's skin reacts to the sun. Cute Geek Super said that while he just got tanner, the more sun he was exposed to, white guys turned pink and burned first, then tanned.

Superman Shirt Super was going to debate that, based evidently off of the fact that he knew white guys who didn't burn (perhaps himself included), and he thought that enough sun exposure would turn Cute Geek Super's light olive complexion pink instead of darker. He started this off by trying to say, "You don't get much more Caucasian than I am." But Superman Shirt Super is known for the sorts of slips of tongue that even the Rev. Spooner might not have been able to live down. What came out of Superman Shirt Super's mouth, instead, was: "You don't get as much cock, as asian as I am."

That was the conversation-stopper, as the entirety of the supervisory staff wound up helpless with laughter. In addition to being very caucasian, Superman Shirt Super is also very straight, and when guys who are straight and slightly uptight about this say things like that, all pretense of a work ethic is temporarily lost until the laughter gets back under control. The conversation switched to "Great moments in Superman Shirt Super's vocabulary" after everyone picked themselves back up off the floor." He's evidently made no few conversational slips like this, but this was the latest and greatest of them all.

I love my workplace.