It’s almost like I hate you all, such was the suck I almost posted, and because we all know that I do NOT hate all of you, posting that post would have been a lie, and I try very hard to NOT lie anymore because that’s a sin, which is to be avoided because Lord knows I do enough of that on a daily basis. Not posting that post is a step in the right direction, for all of us, I think you’ll agree.
But, in the absence of that Post of Suck, what to put here in its place? Our weekend wasn’t interesting enough to write about, my 401K statement is enough to make Hulk Hogan weep, the fact that school started again today is a newsy point but not much more. This is the point at which most other people would simply not post anything at all, but I’m not that strong. I did manage to miss my high school reunion this weekend, which looks like it was a lot of fun but from the pictures posted on FB seems to have been populated with people NOT in my ‘core group’ of the time, so I probably would have just hung out in a corner making myself feel foolish if I’d gone anyhow, so there’s 125 bucks saved. Plus which, I didn’t have to buy new duds, so even more saved. Good thing about the saving thing, because we DID have to buy new shoes for the Things, as theirs have seen 10 too many lawn mowings to be anything BUT work shoes at this point and because they both wear size 14 clodhoppers we had to go to a big and tall shop, where shoes cost approximately a billion dollars a pair, which is bad news for the thrifty-minded. Good God! At this rate I should start a savings account just to keep them shod, because they are NOT done with them growing and thus we WILL be purchasing new shoes in ever-larger sizes until such time as either there are no bigger shoes to buy at which point they will simply have to go barefoot or their feet agree that it’s time to stop growing while there are still shoes to fit them (my preference, though barefoot would be cheaper). The Big Dood store only stocks wide width shoes, which doesn’t really work for Thing 1 anyhow, and then only up to a size 16, so me and the ‘special online order’ will, no doubt, because best friends where footwear is concerned.Size 14. Ye gods.
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Just in case you were wondering why I don’t write about the slurping sniffling stats girl anymore, it’s because she’s gone. GONE! Sweet mother of Doctor Bones, she’s GONE! The silence is deafening. There’s no grunting, no long personal phone calls from her cube, no croaky-voiced exhortations, no annoying noises of unknown origin or purpose AT ALL. It’s lovely. I almost forget to be happy about that sometimes, but I did just take a moment to soak in all the quiet.
Little things, people.
Now, if I could just convince the colleague with the constant throat-clearing to work at home more often, or seek other employment, life would just be that much sweeter.
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Speaking of work, the assimilation of our little company in the Cube of our purchaser is nearly complete. Our old systems and software are being replaced with theirs, even when it would really have made much more sense to go with what we had prior to the purchase as it was, in some case, 1) simpler, 2) more intuitive, or 3) just outright better.
But not the email software. Lotus notes can bite me. Outlook rules. So thanks, New Big Company, that part rocks.
Most of the other stuff though, not so much. As an example, there is one process that now involves the need to provide paper copies of documents, which are then shipped to another country to be scanned, the scans then are emailed to another country to be entered into a database, which is then mined by folks in yet another country to start a process which will, after 60 days have elapsed, initiate a process that will result in a final product. Read that again and marvel at it’s complexity and backwardness. Soak it all in…
This is the replacement for what we used to do, which involved sending an email straight to the person who had the capacity to create the final product. Snappy, huh? All electronic, efficient, and had a rapid response time! So, obviously, why on earth NOT replace it with a process so Byzantine that it takes a flow chart and a 50-page SOP to get through?
Sometimes, I’d like to speak with the people in charge, and give them a piece of my mind, but nowadays that would likely involve having to etch my request on a clay tablet using only stone-age era cuneiform runes, letting it dry, coating it in three layers of masking tape, setting it on fire, dousing it with the blood of a virgin tapeworm, shipping it to a third-world country on the back of a crippled emu, spitting into a northwesterly wind for 3 days at noon to ensure its safe passage, then reading its fate in green tea leaves until such time as notification arrives in the form of cloud-writing that I’ve been summarily denied permission to ever again think I could approach the upper levels of management with something as upstarty as an ‘idea.’
Just like the new SOP says.
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I’m out. Got to go get lunch, then think about what to do this afternoon. The thinking requires a full stomach, wouldn’t you agree?
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