Recently in Work Category

First of all, I must inform the uniformed that my "normal" work week is Tuesday through Friday, each day being 10 hours. Not that I ever have very many normal work weeks, I also pick up extra shifts in another department. Although my schedule being such, Tuesdays are my Mondays. Today started out Mondayish to the extreme of Hades.

I woke to the alarm blasting country at 5 AM. Not a bad start, all in all, except I meant to set it for 4 AM. So before I even had a foot hit the floor, I was an hour behind. I rushed to get things ready. This required me to cut my morning task list down to the bare minimum.

First, brew coffee. My attempt to do so ended in disaster. First off all, my eyes (I have vision issues) were not the best. It often takes a few hours of consciousness before my vision is at its peak. In my haste and fuzzy focus state, I failed to notice that I had not completed the pot from yesterday. I still poured the same amount of water into the machine. The filter collapsed, the coffee pot overflowed and my "coffee" consisted of luke-warm gritty black stuff that would not even melt the powdered creamer.

Adventures in bathing were next. In my haste, I forgot why I wanted the extra hour. I do not run my hot water tank all of the time. It, simply said would be a waste of money. I wanted to wake early to do one load of laundry and some dishes. This would have given the tank time to warm before my shower. I realized that I did not turn on the tank right after I got the shampoo in my eyes. One good thing... The cold shower certainly substituted well for the coffee maker disaster.

I did manage to get out of the house on time and the only other incident was trying to get a receipt for my gasoline purchase. Not too big of a deal but why do gas stations offer you the option of putting a card into the pump and then not bother to put paper in the printer and make you walk inside for your receipt? Rather defeats the purpose doesn’t it?

Does any one know why major corporations spend top dollar on new "state of the art" computers and then have the IT department dissable so many features that they funciont only slightly better than an engineering calculator? Being sure to disable right clicking, save image as and numerous other features.

There is an ironic art to it. First of all they disable so many features that you can't even let Microsoft Word use web services, next they refuse to allow users to have Firefox and, finally, they still respect the work of malware writers to allow them to worm their work in through Internet Exploder. They,of course, protect the machine with Nortan's Anti-virus. So many cycles are lost that not even Lance Armstrong could find one. The end result is a CPU that moves about as fast as a glacier.

To think, these are the educated people on this subject. I gotta wonder how these machines are supposed to make us more productive. I find it more likely they will drive someone postal.

Of course they explain it is because it is a "public" computer and they must protect the network and such. Double irony... Public computers have adminstrator only private features...

In a conversation regarding a conversation with another, a co-worker of mine made the statement that "one can not argue with common sense". He was referring to the validity of my point, the fact that he believed I was in the right, and that I had argued the point effectively. It was a compliment.

The conversation we were referring to is irrelevant to my point here. The point is he believed that anybody would have seen the point as it was presented and the idea should have been implemented.

Many of us believe this. If something makes sense, do it. The idea seems foolproof.

My response to him was "Yeah, it is true but, unfortunately, one can always choose to simply ignore it."

This is, regrettably, often the outcome of such "common sense debates". It is sad but true. Reflection, consideration and adaptation are more often thwarted by narrow-mindedness, stubbornness and denial.

I mentioned the day that I received a pretty decent puncture to my leg. After taking some time off due to the painful nature of walking, I returned to work ready to go. The wound did hurt but not any worse than a bruise. It tended to lock up, like a muscle cramp, if I remained stationary too long so l guess working is best. It also felt more than slightly uncomfortable when I squatted. Other than that, the only annoying aspect of it was that my boot constantly rubbed against it.

I remedied the problem with a piece of cardboard partially wrapped around the inside of my boot and secured with tape. It curved the boot outward and away from the punctured area.

Before lunch on the first day of sporting my improvised fashion statement, several of my co-workers had inquired about it, others were teasing me about my "pig bite" and some creatively modified my nickname to "Limpy". (Thanks "dude".)

And then there is Scott, who is always thinking of some creative gag who, while I was at lunch, scribbled "John's Bite Safety Shield" on the cardboard in my boot. Now that is how to pull a guys leg... hehe