Category Archives: Work

Device Mania Week: Day 1

Geek, ,

In which I get the first of many packages.

When I got to work this morning my new phone, an LG Lotus LX600, was on my desk.

LG Lotus

I unpacked it, which required opening about six plastic bags and removing five plastic clingies from various of the phone’s shiny surfaces, and plugged it in. Then I checked the quick start manual, and unplugged it from AC power and plugged it straight into one of my PC’s USB 2.0 ports.

I went to sprint.com to activate the phone, but I couldn’t log in…

…so I had to give it to my brother (who is the primary name on our shared cell phone account) to activate it. It was gone FOREVER. I nearly DIED. But then he brought it back and it was finally a properly activated phone!

I love the form factor. It’s square and somehow manages to be chunky and sleek at the same time. It weighs less than my old pink Katana.

It tells me – verbally, not in the form of a dialog notification – when I get text messages. “Message received,” it says. How cute is that?

I love the qwerty keyboard. (It’s a text freak’s dream device.) It’s also an MP3 player (not that I need yet another one of those) and its on board speakers are the best I’ve ever heard from any phone or iPod.

It can be mounted as an external hard drive by clicking the Home icon > Tools > USB Mode (4) > Select Transfer Music or Mass Storage or Phone as Modem or PictBridge. You can move images to and from the device, and put MP3s on it as well.

It has a built-in Google app, Sprint Navigation (a GPS map app), a browser (Opera Mini can be installed instead), and a nicely configurable interface. There’s a built-in doc viewer but I haven’t tested it yet. It takes video.

I will spend my evening transferring my contacts manually, because I’m both too cheap to buy the backup feature and too lazy to take both phones over to Sprint to have them moved.

Long story short: I love the new phone! Can’t wait ’til Notebook Wednesday. This week is totally gonna rock.

Blizzard 2008!

Weather, Work, ,

In which twitter got me yesterday afternoon off!

I follow the U-B on twitter, and noticed while at work yesterday afternoon that they’d posted an article about the city wanting people off the streets due to the extreme weather.

So I texted the article link to everyone at work – including management – and within fifteen minutes they’d closed the office and sent everyone home! Those of us with broadband connections were invited to take our VoIP phones with us and finish the work day from our home offices. (Most of our tools are accessible with a web browser, so to work from home all we really need to do is plug in a VoIP phone and open some browser tabs. I’m also running LogMeIn for access to the few things I really need on my work box, like the SSH tunnel to the POP server.)

We all piled out of the office into the snow. Bindu and I jumped into Teh BF’s car and he surfed us to Loney’s, where I bought some veggies and a loaf of bread and picked up stamps for G’ma. The snow at that point was well over a foot deep and still coming down. Kaje dropped us off in front of our house and then left to see if he could get into his own driveway.

I set up my VoIP phone in the front room and logged in. I made a few callbacks and then sat around for awhile before realizing there were no incoming calls. Snooping revealed that there was no one else logged into the queue. I IMed a couple of the supervisors and got no response. Finally, I called the office with my cell… and discovered that we were closed until Friday morning!

So I clocked off and spent the evening playing with my iThing, eating too many cookies, and watching Stardust with the family. (It was a lovely little heartwarming fairy tale, and DeNiro as a pouf was hilarious.) Then I laid in bed with my dog, watching episodes of Firefly (thanks, bro!) on my iThing until about two in the morning.

Then I slept. Apparently I slept weird, because I woke up with my back and neck all fucked up. (Stupid ancient bed with a ditch in the middle! I really need to get myself a futon or something; sleeping in sprung beds is hurting me because I’m so old now.) I did a couple rounds of sun salutations this morning and they helped, but sitting in this old chair in front of the computer isn’t helping. I downed an Advil before lunch – I made veggie fried rice – and it’s helped some, but I think I might take another.

Working from home is hella charming. I’ve really never done it before; when I was in engineering at an ISP in Iowa I couldn’t get bandwidth out at my house so I never really did much from home other than reboot web servers.

The Porch

There is snow everywhere and the city apparently isn’t very well equipped to deal with the roads under these conditions. I’m enjoying working from home today – in my pajamas! – and might do so again on Monday if we really do get the additional six inches they’re threatening.

It’s snowing right now, for the record.

I chatted with Teh BF earlier and he’s all kinds of behind in his Xmas shopping. So is my G’ma, and so am I. I think most of us thought we’d just run a few quick errands here and there… and then we got this crazy weather and none of us have been anywhere since. If we get hit with another storm tomorrow, I think a lot of people will be getting rain checks on some of their Christmas gifts!

For more Walla Walla Blizzard ’08 pics, check out the Your Walla Walla Flickr pool.

Words (and technical acronyms!) I've looked up in the past week.

Blurbs, Vocab, Work,

In which I share what I’ve used Google’s define1 function in the past seven days to better understand.

  • lemniscate
  • antipathy
  • sidereal
  • basque
  • DS3
  • SSP

I often look up words I’m familiar with just to make sure I really do know what they mean. Because sometimes? It turns out that I actually don’t.

Well, that’s not exactly true; I have extremely subtle inference skills, yo, and can grok most unfamiliar words easily by context. (I read at a high school level in grade school, and had a post-collegiate reading level in junior high, you dig). But sometimes it turns out that I don’t entirely know a word’s full meaning or etymology, and like anyone can always benefit from deeper research. Continue reading Words (and technical acronyms!) I've looked up in the past week. →

Details are unimportant

LOTD, Work

In which there’s lolcats.

I’ve been giggling at icanhascheezburger in between calls for the past hour or so; it’s the only thing keeping me sane at work this evening.

I have a really hard time supporting people who can’t read (srsly, it’s really hard) or who make up their own words for things (there’s no such thing as an “Internet cable”) or who keep talking over me telling me to slow down or that they’re “computer geeks” (meaning computer illiterate) instead of just hushing up and listening.

cat

If a customer tells me to go slow, I’ll go slow. If they tell me they’ve never been on a computer before, I’ll do everything in itsy bitsy baby steps. But when they just won’t shut the fuck up, or keep interrupting me to tell me about totally unrelated crap from last week that they saw on their sister’s computer, it drives me batshit! PARTICULARLY when I’m the only tech on the clock and I’ve got seven calls in the queue!

Thank God for the Intarwebz and all its funny websites, that’s all I’m sayin’.

Ranting about work!

Work

In which I go off.

First, this crazy woman called and left a message for support. I called her three times and her line was busy, so I moved on to the next ticket.

Meanwhile, one of our three techs was out today, so we were short staffed.

Then the woman called the sales queue… three more times. The first time she called, Kaje put notes in her open ticket, the next two times he told her to have patience.

Eventually her ticket was next and I called her.

The woman is batshit nuts. She freaked out that deleting emails from Outlook Express didn’t put them into her Recycle Bin, then she went on about how bad a time she’d had talking to Ro on the weekend (Ro put notes to the effect that the customer was abusive), then she wouldn’t shut the fuck up for me to tech her problem. I said, “Ma’am, please. Can we deal with your issues one at a time?” and she flat out said no.

After a bit I told her to stop, she refused, so I hung up on her. I don’t need to listen to a pissed off old lady yell at me; I don’t get paid enough for that!

Then the woman called back five more times and left teary, screaming, demanding voicemails. AND she sent four emails, in caps, demanding a call back.

Gah.

Then, the icing on the cake: the final customer I spoke with typed “at” instead of @ in his email address… and then made me explain to him, over the phone, step-by-painful-step, just exactly HOW to click in a field and edit its contents. (!!!) I nearly said, “Listen, dude, I’m Internet tech support. You need basic typing lessons.”

Sometimes clocking out and going home is such a relief, I’m tellin’ ya. Sheesh.

I'm Too Damn Loud, People!

Work

In which having a strong voice is more of a bug than a feature.

Depending on how closely you read the ‘box, you may or may not be aware of the fact that I am now sitting in what is my fifth location at work. In only ten months! I started in the back room, got moved to the front room, moved again in the front room (because of the glare of the skylight on my monitor), then was moved back into the room I started in, and am now tucked comfortably in the back hall next to the inventory/modem room.

I like where I sit now, for two reasons. One, even though where I now sit is technically a hallway it seems kinda like a little office. Two, my boyfriend sits at the opposite end of the hall, so I can throw things at him. (I never do, but I could!)

My Desk at the end of the Hallway

Well, today I was sitting here minding my own business when my supervisor came over and screwed a divider to the wall right next to my desk, effectively putting me in a boomy little cul-de-sac. I hit mute on my phone and hissed, “Jeeze! What are you doing that for?!”

He shrugged. “Mom told me to do it. You talk too loud, apparently.”

I opened IM and texted Mom immediately. “I really dislike these dividers. They’re boomy. They’re made out of the wrong materials to dampen sound. Help!”

She explained that when management barges in on the new hire’s calls, I’m HELLA LOUD over her headset, and so they want to make me quieter. There was some mention of moving me back into the front room! Ack! I complained more over IM. My supervisor moved the divider about eight feet away.

I still can’t see Kaje, but at least I’m not locked up in a little box.

Watch me learn to whisper!

I hate my employer. Srsly.

Work

In which I’m in a Very. Bad. Mood.

We were all told to be at work at 8 AM this morning for some kind of special training meeting with MMPI-like aspects. (Like I need to take another fucking MMPI.) Since I normally don’t start work until 11 AM, 8 AM feels like 5 AM to me. It hurts.

I clocked in this morning at 7:56. I’m scheduled to work until 8 PM. That’s twelve hours, people.

Now management tells us the training doesn’t actually start until 9, and they got us in early just to make sure we were all here before the meeting.

I want to KILL SOMETHING! Or go back to bed. Or something.

~+~+~
Update: It was a profiling seminar, but it wasn’t Myers-Briggs, nor MMPI. It was DiSC.

Four hours later, we learn I’m i/D (inspirational/Dominant) and that the following words describe me:

D: egocentric, direct, daring, domineering, demanding, forceful, risk-taker…
i: enthusiastic, gregarious, persuasive, impulsive, emotional…
S: restless, change-oriented, fault-finding, spontaneous, frustrated by status quo, active…
C: persistent, independent, rigid, firm, stubborn, arbitrary, and rebellious.

S and C stand for Steady and Competent. (The different qualities more or less correspond, according to the descriptive sheets, to pitta, vata, kapha, and a passive/aggressive vata-kapha mixture.)

While it was kind of fun to scratch things off with the side of a nickel (the assessment pamphlet was metal-reactive in certain fields), I didn’t particularly learn much about myself or about my co-workers. (Kaje was also i/D. Go figure.)

Of course, I’ve been doing this soul-searching trendy New Age shit for a looooong time, so that’s probably part of why I wasn’t all that impressed with my personality assessment. I mean, if you want to know what my learning and work styles are or how to effectively manage me? All you gotta do is ask and I’ll tell you. I know exactly what motivates and alienates me – because I know what I ‘am’ in the jargon of dozens of various cults, disciplines, and approaches – and it would take a helluva seminar to show me some part of myself I ain’t never seen before.

I’m pitta-kapha, extroverted, Violet, and only mildly deviate. That knowledge thanks to The Movement, Al-anon, and lots of self-directed reading!

Ahem. I may be being vaguely silly.

My over-all assessment of the experience was that it was okay, but would have been MUCH MORE FUN at four in the afternoon.

~+~+~
Update update: Scratch what I said earlier. I did learn something I hadn’t known before, which is that apparently medical science now believes brain cells do regenerate!

Company Party = Bluetooth Pour Moi

Work

In which there’s a party! And swimming! And prizes!

My employer throws two company parties a year. One’s at Xmas, and the other is a pool party in the summer. At Xmas, we sat at table fully dressed, and waitresses brought us food and drinks – which is how it should be. But last night was different: it was a pool party, which means mostly-naked people I work with. Does anybody really need to see – or be seen by – one’s coworkers in swimming attire?

Pool PartyI got off work an hour early (paid!) and Kaje and I went to his house for cocktails (one doesn’t just go to a company party without some social lubricant) and to collect beach towels. Then we drove to Milton-Freewater (talking non-stop, of course) for the party.

The party was catered – badly – which means I ate a lot of raw broccoli and Ranch, some cheese and crackers, and a cookie. (Apparently the meatballs and ribs were good, though.) Then we went swimming for awhile. Having the whole pool to ourselves was pretty cool, but only about half the office actually swam. Most of the people in the pool were guests, people’s kids mostly, but K and C and a few others hit the water slide a half dozen times each.

Plantronics 220Eventually there was a little water relay game – we were split into three teams and had to relay water from cup to cup to fill up a 5-gallon bottle. Afterwards, numbered tickets were disbursed and everyone got to choose a gift from a table full of them.

Kaje really wanted the rolly suitcase or the camera, but I hadn’t even really looked at the loot. When my number was called, I grabbed a Bluetooth headset for my phone because I didn’t really want an HD DVD player or a football and didn’t see anything else I could use.

K got his suitcase and was much pleased.

After the party, we stopped at Kelly’s in our swimsuits for another round and dripped all over their furniture. Then we drove back to W2 and crawled into The Taco, where we crashed out smelling of chlorine and vodka.

In other news, I remodeled my dad’s blog this week, and my baby brother is coming to W2 this weekend. Yay!