Category: Work

amusement

how is it, the elderly woman remarked, that all she did was volunteer to print the agenda and take minutes and somehow she ended up with most of the action items. So the family meeting happened, there were no children present, and I got most of the action items. This seemed to be an arrangement that everyone was happy with.

This morning I need to contact Keith and find out if we’re coordinating a trip to church or he’s going by himself.

I know I got things done yesterday (I came home from the meeting with a whole cooked chicken and chocolate ice cream and I’m pretty sure I emptied the dishwasher) but it all fades in my memory thanks to the emotional challenge of the meeting. I so feel for Paul! but Katie and Keith get a round of applause for what they’ve been doing, which is facing up to the housing disaster in their immediate future.

Keith and Paul DO NOT WANT to break the household up. A replacement apartment or dwelling to take them is at least fifteen hundred dollars more than what they have and what they have is steps from untenable anyway. Katie’s been carrying more than her portion of the rent and pretty much all the groceries since she moved in – and she MADE ALL THE ARRANGEMENTS AND DID MOST OF THE PACKING FOR THE LAST MOVE –  and she needs a break from being the pack mule. Katie can’t help but want to since she’s exhausted and wants to concentrate on her boys. She and Dax have decided not to live together until they have a few more things sorted out and that’s very mature of them. (But it will happen eventually is the hoped for outcome….)

And of course my mood was altered even further when I heard Marianne Faithfull’s “Deep Water” for the first time yesterday and cried and cried and cried because I couldn’t stop. It’s about the experience of having dementia from the inside and it is at once one of the bleakest and most sympathetic songs I ever heard, breathing past her cthonic voice and the simple piano accompaniment.

Oh well. Off to do some of the things I promised I would do. And it’s not like I didn’t see it coming. Ask for the minutes, get the hours, I say.

Jeff and I are very much wishing to thank Dave D for his recommendation of “Endeavour” because we just consumed the first series with happiness. It’s quite a period piece (early 60s) and the scripts are thoughtful and not peppered with 21st c neologisms.

not another project, must be AU Monday

It’s called The Trust Issue, and it’s a nested set of received opinions about how to trust the ourselves, the world and how we move through it and eventually out of it. I am thinking of it in terms of being on three scales; personal, familial (via family history, which is basically me saying HEY MA I THINK I FOUND ANOTHER USE FOR THE GAZILLIONS OF PIXELS YOU’VE SLAUGHTERED), and linguistic, but not in any academic sense, just in the sense that I have to use English to actually, like, do anything. English as often noted has many limitations in terms of felicity of precision *and* metaphor, at least for me, so I must perforce be appalled at operating within its tiresomely inevident confines. I know I am stuck here, in English, for I have neither the life expectancy nor the will to become able to write with ease and style in another language. The very idea makes a mockery of trust in any degree, but so be it. I shall scale Mt. Impossible because I dare not leave my room! The idea of actually making it fit into any politics, including the increasingly deadbeat anarchism I claim to claim (know what I mean) is loathsome to me so I am avoiding the political or public sphere, and I don’t think I could do it in less than 20000 words and suspect it’ll be closer to 70K.

the worm’s eye view

For about thirty years now I’ve thought about a polemic called ‘the worm’s eye view’ which is about the state of employment in Canada. I always thought I would get to it while I was still working and the blood boiling in my veins from the insanity of the workplace animated me to rant like a little steam engine.

Mike called to say he was once again unable to get together this weekend. Today he’s going in to the office in Burnaby for the last time to clean out his desk. TPTB (The Powers That Be) have decreed a teleconference for 7:30 am Monday and ANOTHER one at 5:30 am Tuesday. A more vile Fuck You to the people who are expecting to be laid off on the 15th of this month can hardly be imagined. Mike’s mood is thus explained. It’s very hard to pin a smiling face on under the circumstances and I certainly won’t jib at that when I’m still coughing a lung up about four times a day. I’m working my way through his lovely chowder as a consolation prize. ALSO GODDESS PEGGY HAS DISCHARGED A VOLLEY OF APPLE TARTS ONTO OUR FRONT PORCH.

I was feeling sorry for meself and we went and got a very abbreviated Timmy Ho’s order. I was the one who stood in line and it was godawful, slower than bullet time and scattered with people not wearing masks. I always thought people of colour would be more sensible about masking but no, this morning was a standard cross section of humanity but with the usual bullshit men not masking (all the women were masked) and I just wanted to vent so hard and I pasted silence into my brain and a smile onto my face until Jeff turned up in the parking lot after a side trip for cat food. SO MANY CARS  ATTEMPTED TO IMPEDE OUR EGRESS that it was hard not to take it personal. I want to stick a camera there; some of the parking interactions must come close to mayhem, public mischief and homicide — occasionally.

Anyway, with respect to the worm’s eye view, I’m just going to jot down what it would look like

chapter one ONBOARDING – all the horse puckey that happens when you join.
chapter two TRAINING – the even worse busssshit that happens when you are training
chapter three – BOREDOM, OVERWORK, performance issues, CAREER PATH, JOB-HOPPING – the five states of employment
chapter four – MANAGING THE MANAGERS WHO CAN’T MANAGE
chapter five – THE PETER PRINCIPLE, IF YOU HAVE A PETER YOU GET TO BE THE PRINCIPAL
chapter six – HOW TO BE A MEMBER OF A MODEL MINORITY
chapter seven – CUSTOMER SUPPORT
chapter eight – And now, the end is near And so I face the final curtain
CONCLUSION – IT’S ALL TAINTED, CORRUPT AND EARTH-DESTROYING BUT HEY A GIRL’S GOTTA EAT.

the wilds of Coquitlam

I wanted to just post the video of our trek yesterday. No comment, just the train wreck of ongoing wtfery.

Jeff said he wanted to drive somewhere for a client and I made a face. I know how terrible that part of town is (for driving, Coquitlam is quat nahss as far as greenery etc goes) and I wanted to help navigate, so I went in the car with Jeff and almost, but not quite, navigated us into a large scale portal of a Horror Dimension.

Jeff kiboshed the idea of sharing the footage with a right royal Kibosh, because essentially we didn’t do anything but swear at fate, the other drivers, and the signage.

Among other sweary things: the signage on Highway 1 as you drive just short of the Port Mann bridge. The signage as you come off 7B onto Lougheed, which just sucks in conventional terms; the signage that was COMPLETELY OBSCURED BY OVERGROWTH and it’s a fucking good thing I knew which way to direct Jeff to turn; THE FACT THAT NOT A SINGLE FUCKING PLACE OF BUSINESS ON LOUGHEED HIGHWAY BETWEEN THE 7B EXIT AND OXFORD ACTUALLY HAS ITS STREET NUMBER FACING THE ROADWAY.

The footage of us both cursing at all of this will be lost to history, and Jeff’s perfectly happy about that. The joint wail we let out when we saw the grown-over sign, though, that being lost to history mekketh me sad.

The client visit took about twenty minutes.

We solaced ourselves with Mickey D’s and Toim Tayeem.

Finding out that Phil’s ancestors were among the first to move to England – I would have bet money on that.

scratch track

the distortion is part of the charm – it’s a natural feature of whacking the guitar this hard at a harmonic point with a rubber mallet – yes this is a hammered guitar

It’s the hottest part of the summer and I’m treating myself to beer. God I love this song. Anyway, it sounds MUCH BETTER on headphones, I’m hearing stuff I didn’t hear the first time. It’s just got depth, you know, and then this sort of pounding howl of a chorus, so much pent up jealousy and rage and then back to… I do this, I do this, I do this, life has a rhythm, and then I JUST GET SO MAD. I LOVE IT so there

 

walk with Paul

We both wanted something fairly level and WE COULDN’T EVEN GET INTO THE FUCKING PARKING LOT FOR DEER LAKE PARK YESTERDAY

Drove by and there’s a bigass sign saying ‘PARKING LOT CLOSED’ and three non-masked non-social-distancing CoB employees flinging the sign around. I cursed quite a bit but what can you do, and I wasn’t trusting any of the pulloffs on Deer Lake Parkway – figuring for sure we’d get a ticket (meaning Paul would get a ticket) if I parked around the corner from the Willingdon and Deer Lake Parkway lot.

I drove (Paul lets me drive so I can stay current) to Robert Burnaby park instead and we walked around the ball park twice and then dropped me off back home.

I was, honestly, completely wiped afterward and literally slept for most of the day. Went to bed late, woke up at 5, feel super tacky and dehydrated so I should go take care of that.

Paul’s foot from when he hyperextended it is slowly healing.

I wore my mask (which I had washed, which I do every time I wear it) and Paul wore nothing.

Peggy says she may be ill with the thing, mildly, I really hope not.

AOC posted this on twitter this am

Image

 

Researcher finds that bad Phys Ed classes can ruin you for wanting to exercise for the rest of your life. My response on twitter:

I loved PE in public school, even though I was terrible at it, because I was kept engaged. Once I hit high school, I wanted to kill every PE teacher on earth and salt their graves.

Street sex worker talks about her job.

@_L1vY_ talks about (she’s a therapist) common symptoms under quarantine
Image
common sx
-Tiredness/Exhaustion
-Guilt (Esp: parents, productivity)
-Trouble saying ‘no’ to mtgs/interactions)
-Dissociation
-Hypervigilance
-Oversleep/Insomnia
-Forgetfulness/Loss of concentration
-DREAMS
She’s one of my fave people on twitter – humane, funny, despairing, a continuing thread of good sense and solid experience, also wackiness and perverse hope

Work thoughts plus a cool video

This is what triggered the following. I watched the metal dust come flying out, and then the wrote following back to the poster (I’ve met him I think once IRL, he’s associated with the Seattle filk fen) pOp check out his youtube channel he’s made some awesome videos of stuff he’s built.

 

…Made me think of a work story. Must be almost fifteen years ago now this happened. Take an RMA for a 1500W inverter. Mo Z the repair & analysis dude cracks it open, mutters to himself, and approaches my desk with a small plastic container of brass dust … Which he then proceeds to pour out onto a piece of paper on my desk. “Mo what the hell?” sez I and he sez, brown eyes snapping, “Under no circumstances is this a warranty failure. These metal shavings came from inside.” I get to talk to the customer, lucky me. Found out during my intense and unpleasant callback to the customer that he’s using the inverter to run a mobile key cutting machine out of his van, no protection, brass dust every-fuckin-where but screechin all heartbroken that it should be covered under warranty. And so it went for the next I dunno how many years, he’d run it until it breached the ass of the laws of physics for how it still worked with that much stray metal in it, and then I’d sell him a refurb for a discount. THE END

Feeling much lighter

I edited AND wrote yesterday (SOTW and HotM respectively) and practiced mandolin, and worked a shift, and did a shop, and felt gross and slept too much.

Now I’m feeling really kinda okay.  I was still getting migraine signs until a couple of hours ago, but I think it’s lifted and I’m much more cheerful.

There are apparently 113 fire trucks at the Cherry Street Fire in Toronto right now. Toxic smoke would be even worse if it hadn’t been raining off and on through the night.

 

Egil’s a jackass

Since I can’t actually talk about anything that I really want to comment on regarding my week away (and I’m okay with that, for the most part) I’ll talk about the stuff I can talk about.

1. Egil’s a jackass. Read the Sagas of the Icelanders if you want to know why.
2. I do miss the physical place, Toronto, rather more than I expected to, and returning to Vancouver gave me a lot of strange feelings. I have to go past all my stomping grounds on the way out of town.
Or perhaps work is not all that exciting. I fucking hate it when workers don’t check their pagers and don’t call in to ask why they haven’t been paged in four hours.
3. I seem to have broken my fanfic addiction. Of course, I don’t feel like writing anything at the moment, but that will change once I have characters working in my head again. I think I learned what I needed to. I’ll finish the two projects at some point but I’m no longer worried about it.
4. U2 ON FRIDAY. I have something to look forward to!!!!
5. It was absolutely lovely to see all of the Jewish men walking up and down Bathurst as I took the bus out of town. I only saw Bubbies, no Zadies.
6. LOST MY CHEESE at a friend who keeps using the word gypsy. I’ve told her not to before, but this time I just slammed it down and then backed off. Yes there are American Roma who accept the word, but that’s on them; every person of Roma descent I know personally has specifically asked me never to use it and to call it out in people who use it, however the fuck they employ it.
7. The transit in Toronto is so superior to what we get in Vancouver that I’m really annoyed about it. Cheaper, better, faster. It took me less than two hours to get from Bathurst and Sheppard to the airport, on a Saturday. The airport express was just sitting there waiting for me. ALMOST got off at the wrong terminal but managed to leap back onto the same bus and save myself a lot of trouble.
8. The new front loading washer is quite nice, and very efficient. IT WAS ALSO DISGUSTINGLY FILTHY which as brOJeff says, you can fix, versus it being mechanically subpar.
9. NEVER FLYING AIR CANADA AGAIN. I know that flying passes gave me a bad feeling, but after the last experience trying to get out of Vancouver I know that is something I will never be obliged to go through again.
10. This is going to be a bit of a lean month, since I will not be paid for the time I took off. I’m okay with this but I may not be able to help people who need it.
11. Still having happy feelings about the beginning of the week when Little E talked to me again and walked up and down on me with his little hot feet.
12. Slept all but four hours of my time off today. I am almost recovered from my visit and travelling and the dryness; one of the reasons I was sleeping while I was gone so much is that my eyes were so dry I could hear them as I opened and shut them. I did use drops but that’s not always useful for long.
13. I think I’ll go in early and treat myself to a meal at Browns.
14. This means goodbye for now!