Tag: work

Nutz

Today has been insane. I took the morning off so that I could take Miss Robin Sparkles the cat to her vet appointment. I dropped her off, ran some errands, went home, re-watched most of last night’s three episodes of Andor, went back to the vet’s office to pick her up, came home, ran another errand, ate lunch, and punched into work at 1:00pm.

That’s when it hit. I had meetings scheduled from 1:00-5:00. Bam. All of them. One after the other. At the same time I was getting hit with all sorts of customer issues and questions and hectic stress and wow… It’s 5:31pm now. I can punch out. I need a nap!

Here’s a picture of the clock downtown. It’s not a good picture, and don’t let anyone try to tell you that I thought it was a good picture… because it’s not a good picture. Whatevs, I’m going to go cook dinner for the love of my life and then go to sleep.

Another Crazy Day

Hope you are all having a happy, fascism-free Tuesday.

I was having a calm, yet somewhat productive day today. The minute I finished lunch all hell broke loose. It became a crazy, hectic, tense, productive day. You know how it is.

Now I am about 20 minutes away from the end of my work day and hopefully things are calming down. Everything seems covered at the moment. Breath in, breath out. You’ve got this, Robert.

I have half a personal day booked for tomorrow. Robin the Cat has a vet appointment. Just her annual check up. I have meetings booked all afternoon though, so it’s going to be busy tomorrow too. At least I’ll have three episodes of Star Wars Andor to plow through before the work day starts. They come out at 9:00 Eastern time tonight. I am ready. There was a new episodes of The Handmaids Tale over night last night. I watched it while doing my morning exercise today. It was excellent. Here’s hoping Andor holds serve on the which-show-about-people-fighting-fascism-is-more-awesome sweepstakes. At this point it’s anyone’s game.

Oh good. 10 minutes away from quitting time and it just started to rain. It’s freakin’ pouring out. Good, good.

That Was a Day

I’m down to the last few minutes of the work day on this screwy Thursday. I was out the last two days and figured I’d spend the first hour or so today sifting through the hundreds of emails in my inbox. It didn’t take long for that plan to go down the crapper. One customer with a critical issue lead to three of us from my group spending the day on the phone along with a bunch of other co-workers. We hashed it out and fixed it but woah was that a grind.

I actually feel pretty good about the state of the universe from a work perspective. From every other perspective? Yeah, right.

I am too tired and fried to think of anything else to write. I’m hoping for an easy commute tonight but yeah, right. What else? I don’t know. It’s May 1st. Happy May. This month will see my birthday, mother’s day, my step son’s college graduation, my step daughter’s birthday, Memorial Day, and our wedding anniversary. That’s what I call busy. May is a good month. Here’s hoping we get spectacular weather and not dreary, rainy gloom like we’ve been getting the last few months. The sun only comes out during the work week now. Weekends are gross, weather wise. I need that trend to stop and do a full 180.

Okay. It is now 5:30pm and I am clear to punch out and go home. Wish me luck on my commute.

Busiest Day Ever

I can’t even tell you how busy this work day has been. I haven’t had a minute over the last four hours where I haven’t been on a conference call. It’s nuts. I have to go pee, and I need to eat lunch, and neither is an option right now and won’t be for a while.

Here’s a cat. I hope it helps.

Meetings

File this one under first world problems.

I just want to have some lunch. I usually break at 1:00pm but I was added to a meeting at that time. I punted lunch to 2:00pm but when the 1:00 ended I was added to a 2:00. I tried to reschedule my 3:00pm but I needed to keep it in place.

Dude… I just want to go to lunch. Why can’t I go to lunch? It is 5:00pm now and still no lunch. At least I will be able to have dinner soon.

What a day! Here’s a cat.

234/365

Friday at Last

Work has been good this week. No disasters, no scary moments. I did get a call from a customer (service programmers, like me, are not supposed to get calls directly from customers) but I was able to help the guy and it actually felt pretty good. Nope, this past week was a good week at work.

It was the rest of civilization that blew chunks. My wife and I agreed when we discussed it last night that this week has been the longest six months of our lives.

I need to do something creative this weekend. I NEED TO. Photography. Let’s go out and snap some pictures! Let’s play with the new long lens I bought a few months ago. Let’s play with the 120 film camera I bought a few months ago. Let’s go to the ocean and watch the sunrise and shoot all sorts of good stuff. Of course we should check the weather first… snow and rain today and tomorrow and rain on Sunday. Well you can just bite me, mother nature.

Music it is then! Guitar! I will play guitar this weekend if it kills me! I don’t know if we’re going to have a band practice or not. I’ll post something to our messenger thread later today (when it’s not pre-8:00am so that the other three guys don’t think I am weird and obsessed or anything) and see what’s up. If not then I need to find something else to do.

I do not want this weekend to be spent doom scrolling news sites and reading stories about the collapse of american democracy that will build up inside of me until I have a stroke. No. That would be bad, even if it is more or less inevitable. I must play guitar! I! Must! Play! Guitar!

Big Red Haired Ball of Stress

Woah, boy… today… am I right, or am I right?

The stress level today has been through the roof. The contractor experience went off without a hitch, but the first half of the work day was… woah.

We caught a customer issue before the customer did and went into a mad scramble to get it straightened out for them. It took a little while to get a band aid in place but now we’re dealing with figuring out how to stop it from ever happening again while also talking the customer down from their panicked state. The code/app that my team is responsible for is downstream from the actual cause of the problem. It didn’t happen in our piece of the system, but it did present itself to people using our piece of the system. Yikes is the word of the day. Everyone involved, both on my company’s side and on the customer’s side, did a bang up job getting everything straightened out, and I bet that when the dust settles we’ll all agree it wasn’t that big of a deal… but for the moment. Yikes.

Back to the home owner situation, two more contractors are coming tomorrow. One is a plumber who will put everything that was taken apart today back together again. The other is just a routine maintenance thing. I will be in the office for both of them though. I am thinking about trying to find a way to be able to stay home for all of it. I don’t want my wife to have to deal with either thing. If I work from home tomorrow it means I will have to be in the office three days next week…….. yeah, I think I am going to work from home tomorrow. Command decision made. Three days next week.

On an unrelated note, today is the anniversary of my Uncle Johnny’s death. It’s been 17 years. He was godfather to both me and my sister. He was my father’s only sibling. He had a tough life but he overcame a lot of awful shit. He was good people and I love him and I miss him. I wish he could have known all of our kids. He would have been proud, I know it.

Okay. Back to the stress. Look out below!

Crazy Day Coming

Last night Jen and I stayed at the hotel that is hosting her company’s function. I got up at 5:30, took a shower, and drove home. It’s a little wacky, but I am working from home on a day when we aren’t actually home. Does that make sense? No? So what, it’s how it is. Heh.

192/365

Tomorrow I will work in the office, so I’ll be driving there from the hotel instead of from home. That’s going to be weird too. I was thinking that I would bring my camera with me and wander around the city after work tonight, but if I am going straight to work in the morning I will have my work laptop with me… so I think I will be going to the hotel after work, and it will be late enough that the sun will be down by the time I get there and put my stuff away. So maybe I won’t be wandering around the city after all. Maybe I’ll just stay in the room and watch Daredevil while I wait for Jen to come back from her post-work, work-events.

We’ll see. I did tell Jen that if I happen on a music store in my wandering and said music store had a Gibson guitar for sale for under $1,000, then I am totally buying it. I should see if I can make that promise come true. Heh heh.

Anyway, time to get ready for work. There is a contractor coming this afternoon as well as a delivery that I have to open the door for. All of that on top of having a crazy busy schedule. It’s going to be a weird one today. Big time.

Almost Time to Go

I haven’t been to every city on Earth. Not even close. I love San Diego, CA. I love New York, NY (except for the fucking Yankees). I love a whole bunch of other cities as well, but if I had to pick just one as my favorite… just one city to spend the rest of my days… it would be Boston, MA. My home. Sort of. I grew up about 20 minutes north of Boston and today I live about 30 minutes north of Boston. Close enough. Boston is home. Boston is my favorite city.

For the next few nights we are going to be staying in Boston for my wife’s company event thing. She’s going to be there for the whole time while I am still going to go to work as usual. I’ll just be hanging out waiting for her work events to end each day. I could stay at home while she stays at the hotel, sure, but that would mean we would be separated for a few days and frankly I’d rather stick a railroad spike through my eye than chose to spend a few days apart from my love. Call me sentimental.

Anyway, she’s wrapping up her work day. We both have a bag packed. Yeah, I’ll be home for the work day tomorrow, but I am still bringing cameras. I expect to do some wandering around while she’s at after-hours events. I don’t know if I will have time to shoot any film, but night shooting digital is definitely a possibility. Hopefully I’ll have enough sunlight to FINALLY run a test roll through my new, ebay, Lubitel. Once that is done I can send off a whole pile of film for developing. Disney World and New York photos will be included. It’s a must, really.

Here’s hoping it’s a nice hotel room. If we’re going to be stuck there for a few days it would be helpful if it were comfy with a nice view. It’s close to Boston Common, but not close enough to see it. At least I don’t think so. I’ll probably post a few thousand pictures over the next few days. You know, like I do.

Weird Week Coming Up

Happy Monday, everyone. Mondays suck, but what can you do?

This week is gonna be a weird one for us here at the Inside the Red Head’s Head family. Yup.

First off, contractors. Yet another contractor is coming to the house today. Just routine maintenance. It’s not even 8:00am and by all rights I should be in the shower right now but I am not because the contractor just told us he’s on his way. He may even be done before I start the work day. How crazy is that?

There are two contractors on the books for tomorrow. One is coming to fix a leak in our dishwasher. I am so mad about that leak that I cannot even think straight, but fingers crossed it will be back to normal tomorrow. The question of whether I will ever trust it again is still outstanding. The other contractor scheduled for tomorrow was for the same issue. I have to cancel it, but it’s the same service that is coming today and I had this nasty feeling that if I cancelled Tuesday’s appointment they would accidentally cancel Monday’s and hijinx would ensue.

Contractor visits are just one of the weird things going on this week. The other has to do with a hotel. Jen’s company is running a conference this week in Boston. They booked rooms for their staff and that includes my beloved bride. I took a half day off of work today so that I could bring her to the hotel in time for whatever they have planned this afternoon. I am hoping that I will be able to squat at the hotel with her at night, though I have to work from home tomorrow (see above) and I have to work in the office for the rest of the week. The end result is, I am going to be doing a lot of Boston driving this week. I am okay with that… I just need to know where to go, you know? Jen has the details so it will be fine.

Other than that… my step son was here yesterday but he’s already left to go back to Vermont. He is on spring break this week but he is scheduled to work a ton. No extended visit this time but I am very happy to have seen him yesterday. I do love it when my step kids are here.

It’s now 8:00am. The contractor called about 25 minutes ago saying he was on his way. Here’s hoping he gets here soon and can wrap up the job quickly. Fingers eternally crossed.