Tag: work

Rain is a Thing

So rain is still a thing. I mean this from a work point of view.

When Covid hit and we all started working from home full time, I learned to stop really worrying about rain. I didn’t have a commute anymore so I didn’t need to drive to and from work in the rain. I didn’t need to walk out to a parking lot in the rain. I didn’t even need to walk to the driveway. From the perspective of getting to and from work rain (and snow) stopped being a concern at all.

Now that we’re back in the office at least some of the time it’s a thing again and it sucks.

It is pouring rain today. I’m looking out the window and the parking lot looks like a small lake. I have to drive to a different building soon and that means I have to go out in this suck-fest of a rain storm and get drenched so that I can make the next meeting.

Working at home is so much better than working in the office. So much better.

Thus concludes this morning’s rant about rain. Thank you for your time and patience.

Nothing

It’s been a quiet day. Not a lot going on. One issue at work that should have been wrapped up on Friday came back to us today (Tuesday) and was immediately taken care of. It should not have come back to us though. There was another issue that one of my staff members worked on over the last month or so. He wrapped it up nicely last week. We were talking about it yesterday and we were both a little sad that his hard work did not seem to rate a pat on the back or a thank you from the customer. It’s okay if they just move on with their lives, but this was a kind of issue where we thought a simple thank you would have been nice. Well, he got a thank you today. Thanks for the thanks, customer.

Most years at work I am part of two holiday celebrations. One is a big lunch with a yankee swap and the other is a smaller, quieter group lunch. The yankee swap happened today. The quieter group lunch happens tomorrow. Both of them take place in Foxborough, which is the office that is as far away as I am willing to go to. It could be worse. It could be Fall River. That building has been open for a decade or so and I have never been there. It’s just too far away. If I ever have the need to go there I will, but I am not going by choice and I will avoid it whenever I can. I’ve been lucky so far. Foxborough though… today and tomorrow. It’s okay. I’ll handle it. It’s only about 70 miles away. Yikes.

At the Yankee swap thing today there was a sign that said there are only 15 days left until xmas. You know… I wasn’t feeling a holiday crunch before I saw that… now? Oh yeah, I’m feeling the holiday crunch. Panic is setting in.

There is a new episode of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew coming out at 9pm tonight. Hopefully that will make me feel a little better. I’m still not 100% sold on the concept of Goonies in Space, but I am liking it so far. I’ve only seen two episodes. I am optimistic that tonight’s episode three will be good. The bad guys are Pirates. Arrrr, righty then.

What else can I write about? Nothing. I think I need to wrap this literary masterpiece and click that publish button. Okay, loyal readers… here it comes!

Handcuffed

We just had a really frustrating issue come up at work. The customer had access to their system locked down hard, for perfectly valid and acceptable reasons. They had issues with applications crashing and we couldn’t get in to see what happened. There were a slew of people from my company, the hardware vendor, and the customer on a conference call and we were all totally stumped. Then one of our tech guys and one of the tech guys from the hardware vendor started hammering away at it and they figured it out.

Sometimes this software support stuff can be incredibly frustrating, but when those frustrating moments get resolved… oh man is that satisfying. Even in a case like this where the folks who support my application ended up being innocent bystanders (the issue and the fix ended up having zero to do with us) it is still immensely satisfying.

Huge tip of the hat to the two guys who eventually worked it all out. As the commercials used to say, it’s Miller time*.

*It’s not Miller time for me. I don’t drink. The sentiment still works though.

Almost There

It’s 2:15pm. Lunch is about to end (I started my break a little later than normal today). I have a vacation day booked for tomorrow, then the following two days are off for Thanksgiving, then the weekend. That’s right, folks. I have a five day weekend coming and it is just a bit more than three hours away. I have one more meeting on my schedule this afternoon and I have a few email threads that need updating. Other than that, we’re just riding out this fine Tuesday in the office.

87/365

So before Covid shut everything down I was a regular user of Audible, the audiobook subscription service. I forget how but at some point I came into a whole bunch of credits and blew them all on a number of books that I never got around to listening to. Back in March when my company upped our in-the-office requirement from once a week to twice a week I reopened my account and all of those unread books were still there. One was a biography of Syd Barrett. I’m listening to it now and while many of the events and facts the author describes are clearly incorrect, and many others are trying to show Barrett as some poetic legend on a level that is infinitely greater than his catalog demonstrates, it is a good read. I have been listening to a lot of his music over the last week.

The National Solo Album Month (nasoalmo) rules allow for one cover song. While adding another song does not fit my personal theme for this month’s project, I am wondering if I should record a cover of Dominoes. I’m thinking about it.

Mood

I woke up in a grade A shitty mood this morning and I don’t know why. Over tired? Probably. Stress? Maybe, but I can’t understand why or about what? Pissed off that the Bruins got smoked last night? Definitely.

I was starting to feel a little more relaxed over the last hour or so. Just generally calming down. Unfortunately I now have to go into a two hour meeting so… yeah.

Happy Tuesday, boys and girls. Let’s try to keep the grrrrrrrrr to a minimum, if we can.

2.5 Hours to Go

It’s a little after 3:00pm. I have done some of that nose-to-the-grindstone stuff and finished off the project I had that is due today. Well… I still need to turn it in, but otherwise the work is done for today.

I still feel like the universe is fixin’ to pull the rug out from under me, but as the clock keeps ticking along the chance of some other shoe dropping is getting slim. I wonder if I could go back and write that sentence again and mix in even more mixed metaphors. Hmmm… probably not.

I got tied up in something while I was finishing the previous paragraph. Now we’re more like two hours away from the weekend. Kids, travel, hockey, fun. That’s on the agenda for this weekend. I just asked the band if there was a chance of getting together next weekend. I hope so, but I am sort of losing what little hope is left. I guess I am clinging to what I still have to cling to. Does that make sense?

Okay, I have sort of lost the thread of where I was going with this post so I am going to wrap it up. Do yourself a favor and listen to as much Throwing Muses as you can today. I’ve had a playlist running since around 11:00am (about 4.5 hours). I’ve made it through about five albums worth of music and it’s helping me out. Just think, a band that is renown for mental illness and creepy, depressing music is actually making me feel better today. Weird how that works. Music is pretty freakin’ magical sometimes.

Two hours and two minutes until quittin’ time and the start of the weekend. Hang in there, folks.

I Foresee a Bad Day Ahead

I don’t know what’s going on with me today, but I have a bad feeling about this. About everything.

I am working from home for the first time this week and it feels glorious. I have a deadline today that I should be able to meet easily. Why then do I feel this sense of impending doom? I went through all of the email from my half day out of the office yesterday and I just sense that I am going to be pecked to death by the universe today.

We are going to Vermont tomorrow to see the kids. Maybe that’s the reason I feel off today. Maybe my heart is already driving North and as a result the rest of me is just pissed off that we still have a full day to go. I don’t know. We’re going to meet up with the kids for an NCAA hockey game. UMass Lowell (both my and my wife’s alma mater) at University of Vermont (my step daughter’s alma mater and employer, and my step son’s current school). It’s going to be fun, assuming Lowell cleans Vermont’s clock. Both teams are doing well in the early going. I am hoping for a fun game. Unlike the Bruins game last night where they lost in Dallas 7-2. I am just going to make pretend that game didn’t happen, m’kay?

I don’t know about this sense of impending doom. Hopefully I work myself out of it. Wish me luck.

Half Day

I just read that The Onion bought Infowars in a bankruptcy auction. I wonder how we’re supposed to tell one service’s stories from the other. They are nearly identical. I guess The Onion is slightly more realistic? Something like that.

I have a half day scheduled today. My work day ends at 1:00pm, which is 14 minutes from now. I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon that is an hour away from my current location, but the check in time is two hours away. Should I go there and just wait? Should I go there and then drive around aimlessly while listening to an audiobook? I finished Black Crouch’s Dark Matter on the drive to work and started something called The Running Man by some guy named Richard Bachman, or something like that.

Following the nightmare that was the election last week, there has been a debate on the social medias. Everyone is leaving twitter because elon musk is slime. Some are going to threads, but mark zuckerberg is also slime. Others are going to bluesky but the guy who owns bluesky is the guy who sold twitter to musk so at best he’s slime adjacent? I am on both. From the user perspective they are not terribly different from each other. Threads has more people I know, and I seem to be able to get into discussions more easily there. Bluesky just seems smarter over all and less scummy. I am not sure which horse I want to back.

Okay. Time to wrap up a couple of work things and head out for my half day. Here’s hoping there isn’t any lunch time traffic to worry about on my hour drive to the doctor’s appointment.

One More Day

Three days in a row this week I have worked in the office. Tomorrow will be the fourth day. I don’t think I’ve done four days in the office in one week since before Covid came along and fudged up everything. It’s only a half day tomorrow thanks to a doctors appointment. It’s still a day in the office though, and the office isn’t my usual office, it’s the one that’s way further away from home. Crud.

The traffic coming home tonight was insane. At one point I looked down at Google Maps running on my phone and it told me to get off route 128. I did. The traffic was only slightly better than stopped so I exited. Maps then told me to get back on the highway in the opposite direction. I think we all can wrap our heads around the GPS telling you to drive the wrong way is a bad sign.

Eventually I got onto route 3. I had a moment… I drove past the assisted living place my parents lived at before they passed away. I haven’t been there since we finished cleaning out Dad’s apartment. It made me sad. Then the route took me past the exist in Tewksbury that I would take to go to the house I grew up in. For the first time since it was sold I felt sad driving past. Yeah… today’s evening commute sucked in multiple ways.

It’s 9:47pm now. I am going to post this masterpiece and go try to get a little songwriting work in before I go to bed. I have to get up early tomorrow to make the most difficult of my four consecutive morning commutes. It’s like the pandemic never happened. Crud.

My Head is Spinning

I am about to do the most pretentious, nerdy, narcissistic thing imaginable…

I am about to quote my own blog. You’ve been warned. Put on your tin foil hat and say your prayers, here it comes…

In my previous blog post, I wrote this:

I am going to have a super busy, super stressful work day today.

Woah, boy was I ever right on that prediction! This morning has been CRAZY! My head is spinning right now. One thing after another on top of the next thing along with five other things at the same time. What a morning.

I haven’t had a bite to eat in five hours and I don’t feel any hunger pain. That’s a good thing, right? I’m about to break for lunch. Here’s hoping the universe leaves me alone for a while so I can eat it.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!