Category: General

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So I caught some kind of bug at the right time last week to have it really fully hit me on Saturday evening, while watching X2. I’d already been having the sinus pressure and sore throat, so I had my box of Kleenex with me, and I had fun timing my nose-blowing during explosion scenes. I slept 14 hours that night (getting up at 1:30 the next day) and lounged around doing nothing much yesterday, and decided I was well enough to come to work today. Well, in trying to rip off two packets of DayQuil, I ripped into the plastic of a third and had to take both pills. Normally, I only take one. Can we say “medicine head?” It’s supposed to have worn off by now, but I’m still a little spacey.

I was coming back from the bathroom and the receptionist asked, as I was punching in my door code, “How’re you feeling?” I don’t remember what I said, because her next line was:

“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”

That about knocked me flat. I wanted to say, “WHAAAAAT???”, but settled for “Absolutely none,” and went in. I’m still trying to figure out how a stuffy head, sore throat, cough, body aches, and tendency to sneeze can be caused by pregnancy. Of course, the people in this office have tried to pin all sorts of my physical ailments on pregnancy. I don’t know what they find so cool about the idea, but I’m getting a little tired of it. Thing is, if I say so, they’ll just say, “You’re really irritable. Is there any chance you might be pregnant?”

Grrrrr.

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On the rare occasion that I answer an email, my “about” fields indicate that I am Brown Ajah, of the Salidar faction. In recent weeks I have come to realize that I may have jumped the gun on my designation. Salidar I may be, but as yet I think Accepted is a more accurate term.

One of the women whose work I handle has made an annoying habit of checking up on what I’m doing (and not doing) on a very regular basis. Like every time I’m not at my desk. I understand that she has a professional stake in what I get done, but there’s a practical limit to the amount of work you can require of someone and expect them to complete it when you want it and how you want it. If you have a standard way in which things are done, that’s good. If you trust the person to do things in that way, that’s even better. Unfortunately, any time there’s any deviation from the standard, I have to get confirmation that what I’m doing is appropriate. Which, when she’s not here, is a bitch.

However big a bitch this job can be, it’s infinitely better than the job I had that gave me damane syndrome. Everything had to be done exactly the same way every time, not because of any legal requirements I could ascertain but because my supervisor found it easier to nitpick that way. I was supposed to proofread, but I wasn’t allowed to correct about half of the mistakes that were the most common. I was pressured to go faster, but if a report came back to me more than once, she’d say, “You know, you can take your time.” If something I’d done was returned to her for further correction by her superior, she’d make a production of it and have me change it just to make her point, and blame me if it didn’t get done on time. And perfect wasn’t good enough. If I went more than a few days with no mistakes, she’d find something I “really had to watch” and explain for five minutes why it was vitally important that I always do it, apparently not realizing that the world had failed to end in the last few weeks that I hadn’t known to do it. In the three months I worked there, I had maybe five days that I didn’t get criticized, and received maybe three positive comments on my work, two of those on the first day. I know there had to be three because about a month and a half in, she said something positive and I caught myself being unreasonably happy to have earned her favor. It was pretty chilling to realize that she was training me in more ways than one.

Here, on the other hand, they pay for me to go to class, like the food I bring, let me wear jeans on Fridays and carry my Swiss Army knife, and appreciate things like henna, magnetic poetry, Dilbert, and paper laundry. And they pay better. So nyah to the cube-kennels.

And I’m asking for a Great Serpent ring for my birthday.

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I went into the lunchroom a bit ago and saw that someone had tied a very large rubber band around two chairs for no apparent reason. So I decided to give them something to think about: I went back to my desk, cut out several articles of miniature paper clothing, and taped them over the rubber band between the two chairs. Let them try to figure out who did it.

******

About ten minutes after posting, my phone rang. The nifty little text console said “INTERCOM FROM KELLY.”

“Hello.”

“Did you leave your little paper dolly clothes in the lunchroom?”

“I dunno. Did I?”

“Well, it just seemed like something you’d do.”

Damn, I’m getting predictable.

******

At lunch I found out who hung the rubber band in the first place. She walked in while everybody else was remarking on how the clothes culprit must have too much time on their hands. And it turns out I’m definitely getting a reputation for this sort of thing, even not having done it often (or much at all really). Two other people had me pegged before I confessed. Fortunately, everybody I talked to thought it was funny.

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We’ve got some construction going on at the office, and for the duration, we’ve turned off the alarm on one of the emergency exits to make it easier for the contractors to get in and out of the area where they’re working. This exit happens to be right by my desk, making it very convenient anytime I need to leave, be it for the bathroom, for lunch, or to go home at the end of the day.

The problem is, I can just see myself forgetting after it’s all done and we turn the alarm back on. Go to lunch, set off the fire alarm. Not a good idea.

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The Santa Ana winds are back. I spent a considerable amount of time last night wondering just how strong the glass is in our windows, particularly the big sliding door onto the balcony. We had several brief power outages, the first just long enough for us to head for the flashlights and convince us to not turn the computers back on, the rest lasting only a few seconds each, but plenty long enough to set all the digital clocks blinking again. Three cheers for battery backup in alarm clocks.

The drive to work was… interesting. First we saw one of the apartment complex’s flags had been knocked over, the pole sheared off at the base. Then there was the cop directing everyone away from a nearby street (we couldn’t see anything down there, but we figured maybe a tree had fallen across the road or something). Then there were huge fallen eucalyptus branches by the side of the road, and a number of young trees that had pulled their stakes down with them as they went. At one point traffic slowed to a crawl, until we passed several police cars, a fire engine, an ambulance, and a four-car accident in which a smaller car had hit an SUV from behind, actually pushing the front end underneath the SUV. (And just yesterday we’d been talking about the dangers being in a small car in a collision with an SUV.) After I dropped Katie off, I had to avoid a large tree limb that had fallen into the right lane.

On the other hand, I think all the tumbleweeds went last November.

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So there’s finally a plan to start up smallpox vaccinations. The bad news is, it’s likely to become necessary. Worse news is, I may be at risk for some of the nasty side effects. As Katie pointed out, it worked so well the first time that no one made any effort to improve it. The good news is, they hope to have a safer vaccine by the time it’s made available to the public in 2004.

We’ll see.

In other news, while looking for a reference to the NPR story, I found this story about London’s Killer Fog of ’52 and the history of smog going back to twelfth-century London. So smog not only predated the Industrial Revolution, it predated Shakespeare.

And finally, the other story I heard on the way in, about military-funded butterfly research. Apparently the Air Force is very interested in building insect-sized robotic flying cameras, and at that scale it makes sense to use insects as a model. They could be sent down into caves to locate enemy troops, or sent into buildings to check on hostage situations. (The paranoid in me is also saying they could spy on ordinary people, but it’s a lot cheaper to just search the place when they’re not home.) So if someone’s studying insect flight, the military is quite happy to fund it.

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My desk is going to file a work comp claim of its own one of these days. I’m forcing it to hold more than anybody else’s desk, except maybe this one woman on the other side of the office. That’s a continuous trauma for excess loadbearing, and a psyche claim for unequal treatment by a superior. But it’s not going to win…..it attacked me first. Just stuck out its drawer and took a chunk out of my shin. And I’d like to meet the attorney who can get a desk to rebut my testimony that I never hit it…….

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