Note of the Living Deb

Six meetings this week.
Each one better than the last.
Worst one now over.

(That's calming and soothing just like a real haiku, right?)

Pun of the Day - From our Spanish teacher's extremely pregnant daughter - "Mom, the baby wants to come out, but she's not making any headway."

Cartoon of the Day - XKCD's Future Self - I really admire good commenting.

"# DEAR FUTURE SELF,
#
# YOU'RE LOOKING AT THIS FILE BECAUSE
# THE PARSE FUNCTION FINALLY BROKE."

Do read more--it gets better. Just like my work meetings.

I've been using iGoogle as an RSS reader. I keep track of blogs there and for each blog, the latest three headlines are shown; with a mouseover you can see the first several lines of an entry. I have several tabs such as Home, News, Hobbies, and Finance, so I can read whatever I'm in the mood to read. Sadly, iGoogle is disappearing. They gave us a warning about a year ago with plenty of notice; it won't disappear until near the end of the year.

I'm not going to go into how annoyed that made me or how I looked for replacements unsuccessfully and began hoping there'd be more information later, etc. because I now have my replacement: Protopage. It lets me see see the seven latest headlines (or, if I prefer to use less space, fewer, but with a scrollbar). And it shows pictures. And it lets me have tabs. And the default easy way to add another blog is just to paste in the home page address, which works on pretty much everything I've tried. (With iGoogle, I was always looking for an RSS feed button because I'm technologically ignorant.) And it comes pre-loaded with a bunch of news feeds and Dilbert. (You can no longer get Dilbert on iGoogle.) And you can have bookmarks, which is what I use to keep up with my LiveJournal friends and Facebook.

When you first go to the site, you are on a sample page which you can start messing with without giving them any of your information. So, maybe it doesn't have the features you most want in a portal, but I love the risk-free test drive. That's pretty much what sold me to try it first. After a week, I no longer want to try anything else.

I've been taking this opportunity to re-organize everything. Most of my tabs are different--my favorite new one is called "Favorites," with all the ones I look forward to the most. My other favorite new one is "Rare," for old favorites that almost never update anymore, but when they do, I want to know. And I just thought of a new one - "Try outs," for new blogs I think might be good, but I'm not sure I want to keep them yet. I'm not bringing over everything from iGoogle, but instead using this as an opportunity to de-clutter a bit. It's nice to use both portals side-by-side to help me decide which of my less-favorite blogs are worth moving over.

The only thing I don't like is that you are also supposed to make a title for each tabbed page, and that title is what appears on your browser tab. Finally I just named them all "Portal." Overall, I actually like it better. So take that Google, my favorite too-big* company!

*Too big to fail. Too big to worry about competition. Too big, I'm afraid, to have to live by their own motto, "Don't be evil." So big that I rely on them a lot.

Article of the Day - Mother Jones's All Work and No Pay: The Great Speed-Up - "This will keep up as long as we buy into three fallacies: One, that to feel crushed by debilitating workloads is a personal failing. Two, that it's just your company or industry struggling—when in fact what's happening to hotel maids and sales clerks is also happening to project managers, engineers, and doctors. Three, that there's nothing anyone can do about it."

Yes, Mother Jones is extremely left-wing. But it feels quite true to me. Most of my friends work way more than 40 hours. Teachers have to do way more than teaching including lots of paperwork on things like attendance. And now my own employer, who used to be one of the exceptions, can't stop talking about doing "more with less." This trait of modern jobs is one of the big reasons I never want to have to work for money again.

Yesterday was my last day at work. My favorite part was sending out this e-mail to everyone in the office:

Dear Staff,

Someone has left snacks on the table in front of Denise’s office. Illicit snacks. On a non-party day. The person who committed this heinous act should not be allowed to return to the office after today. Also, the snacks should be confiscated.

Yours,
Debbie

I never got around to making the cookies I had fantasized about making, so it was just bagels and chips. But that was enough to justify the e-mail.

I also enjoyed wearing all black (except for the red flowers on my black socks).

My least favorite part of the day was at 4:00 when I was told that the canceled 4:00 meeting was back on but my desk was still a huge mess. Fortunately, the meeting lasted only 15 minutes, and I still had time to clean some more.

Too many things were left unfinished, but I knew that would happen. That's part of why I left--there was never time to finish everything. But I got all my computer files moved to the intranet where they are accessible, and they are all in logical places there, and all but two small sets are fully filed in their proper places.

I also cleaned my desk. This is saying something considering that I had one of those nice L-shaped cubicle desks (big) and that much of it was covered in a one-foot-high pile of papers. There were a lot of old reports that had become superseded by newer reports, so those were easy. And there were lots of problems or confusions that I had been hoping to solve when I first covered them with the next layer of things, but after having gone uninvestigated so long, it was easy to officially give up on anyone ever doing so. I never ever want another job where I don't have time to catch up on everything on a regular basis (and with the cycle of the regularity being at least once a month, though ideally once a day). Well, but I will be wanting an income again, so we'll see what happens.

I accidentally left my sweater in the file cabinet, but I'm prepared to just lose that, though if I happen to be on campus in the next month (which could happen because of the awesome library but which might not because I would love an extended break from waiting for buses for a million years), then I will see if it's still there.

All evening I had a smile plastered on my face. At the mall where I met my friends for walking, one of the security guards was watching me much more closely than I am usually watched. My head may have been tilting from side to side while I was smiling, though at that point I was not also skipping.

Although I have absolutely no experience in firing people, I still have opinions. Just like those childless people giving you ideas about how to raise your kids better. So here is some of that advice.

1. Actually fire the person. Tell them what they're doing wrong and how to fix it. Document and review with them the next three times they screw that up royally. Then fire them.

Do not say that you are doing away with their job when actually you still need all those duties to be done. That's being a chicken and a liar. (Probably there are also very good bureaucratic or financial or liability reasons or whatever I guess.)

2. Make sure that more than one person knows how to do each of the vital duties in your area.

Do not leave yourself in the lurch by firing the only person who knows how to do some of your vital duties.

3. When you do pretend to get rid of a job but you still need the duties done and you do leave yourself in the lurch, ask the company trainer to quickly train a couple of your people who have some relevant experience already and then to come back a month later and train the replacement. The urgency is a little imposing, but that's okay.

Do not ask the trainer to actually do all the data entry and filing for a month while you look for a replacement.

Do not ask someone for help from their team when the relevant part your team is at least five times as big as their entire team and when you brought this on yourself.

Sometimes I have to look at course schedule change forms for which I
do not have to make any updates. In that case it’s a matter of seeing
how quickly I can accurately click certain images, just like a video
game:

Right-click on the “view task list” link.
Click on “Open in New Tab.”
(Confirm that no updates are needed.)
Click on the “Close-Tab” X.
Click in the box next to “Mark entire task list as completed.”
Click on the “Update task list” button.
Click on the “Close-Tab” X.

Repeat until finished.

Goal: complete all forms in in-box before falling asleep. Uncrossing
and re-crossing the legs in the other direction may help.

What was the magical tool that let me make line drawings before? Line drawings where circles could touch edges or corners of other shapes instead of being adjustable only in gigantic steps? Drawings that could be saved as gifs?

I don't think I have any of these on my Mac at home or my PC at work. Which is making this job application a lot more difficult. What kind of writing sample am I going to submit? Some all-prose thing, I guess.

And I can't let another deadline go by. I really need to get out of this job. I suspect it's going nightmarish on me. There's evidence today that the people who have taken over a certain duty, and who have been in a big fight about who would allow the most exceptions (no, you! no, you will!) is making exceptions left and right after all. And I really don't want to be caught in the crossfire, let alone caught figuring out how to code for all this nonsense.

Plus, I might really like this job (writing and editing for an educational consultant). And their expectations are low enough (two years of writing/editing experience, but only hoping for a clue about html and a clue about math and science content) that they might actually hire me.

I've almost never been a supervisor and I've never had a position involving hiring and firing. I'm afraid of hiring, because how could you possibly know who's good? I've seen too many people who are great workers and bad interviewers and vice versa.

But firing, that might be a different story. At my employer, people think it's hard to fire someone because you have to document what they're doing wrong, tell them this, tell them how to fix it, give them a chance to fix it, and then they don't fix it. Three times. Sounds straightforward to me. And of course I'm the type to be overly sympathetic and have a Bartleby situation on my hands, except now I'm older and have heard a lot of stories.

Lately I've been noticing that about half my headaches at work can be traced back to a single guy. Today I found another set of those courses that are the same and different, only even more blatant. But happily, the instructor was someone else. Nope, turns out those courses were improved by the original guy's wife.

When a single employee (okay, actually a married pair of employees), out of a total of 10,000, who's not even in my department and is not one of my contacts and is not anywhere in my line of bosses and who in fact I never talk to, can wreak so much havoc on me, I'd really, really like to have the power to fire. How can someone get that much power?

We are actually getting together a committee of people to discuss when we can just reject things that are on forms that don't make any sense. There's only so much you can abuse the system. I hope.

(Today's title is the answer to "What's the difference between a duck?)

Today I told several people at work about my philosophy that things cannot be both the same and not the same. Yes, they can be the same in some ways and different in some ways. But they cannot be the same in every way and different in some ways. Can it be true that bureaucrats discuss the laws of physics or philosophy or whatever this is?

I hope I do not know all the facts, but it appears that a professor wants to get credit for teaching three courses at the same time. This, in itself, is not uncommon. For example, you might teach a Music class called "The History of Rock and Roll" at the same time as you are teaching a History class called "The History of Rock and Roll." This is really the same class listed under two departments so it can be found and counted by people looking for courses in either department. It has lots of both music and history content. All is good.

But when the courses have different titles and one course can fulfill a science requirement but another one can't, then they are different in some ways. So, it seems like you should teach them differently, doesn't it? It can't be both a real science class and not a real science class at the same time, can it?

I am trying to convince some of my fellow bureaucrats that we can just say no sometimes. Not because our little bureaucratic systems cannot deal with things that are both the same and different (we actually have ways of making this work because we are creative and awesome), but because it seems like someone is trying to pull a fast one. All the other people who should have been saying no first have various reasons for not doing so, and so perhaps we should say it.

Blog entry of the day - My most cost-effective renovation projects at Funny About Money. Finally, someone who discusses this concept in a way I can respect, as if what makes your life better actually matters in a renovation (as opposed to just what percentage of your money you could get back if you sold the house). Learn about her two most cost-effective updates.

Compared to keeping a carpet clean, "[k]eeping a hard floor clean is very, very easy. You never have to call in a professional with heavy equipment to pick up the dirt. When the dog barfs on it, you just wipe up the mess and spray on some disinfectant. When dirt or rainy mud tracks in, you just mop it up. Better yet, a Swiffer, a dust mop, or a vac-broom cleans the dust—and icky dust mites!—out from under the bed in seconds, with no heavy lifting."

When you're testing an update to a system, there are three things that can happen:

1) You look at the same stuff you always look at, and it looks just the same as it always does. This is sleep-inducing. And although I like sleeping, I feel pretty certain that my employer does not want to pay me to sleep, even though I don't remember seeing anything specifically prohibiting this in all the "compliance" modules we've had to do lately.

2) You can find a problem. This means that something that used to work no longer works. This is depressing.

3) You can find something you don't understand which is due to your not having understood how the system was supposed to work to begin with. This is frustrating.

Or some combination of course. Today I experienced #1 until 4:00 when I experienced #2. I really hate reporting problems at the end of the day.

Notice how while I am testing, I am not getting any real work done. By real work, I mean doing the actual work which is the whole point of having a system.

**

Today I wandered around in the store across the street from my work building labeled "Coop for Women." It turns out it's also the Coop art store. In this store I found a thing called a "darkroom thermometer." This reminded me that I would like to have a room thermometer so I can see just how cold my office is and so I can see how the temperature varies within my house. It's not so easy to find this kind of thermometer, although I have seen large decorative ones intended for gardens.

The darkroom thermometers I found are about 6 inches long and an inch wide and look like the usual mercury-type thermometers with the liquid colored red. I recorded the price ($6.45) and the location (next to the picture frames) on my new list of stuff I want.

**

I also did some research on front-loading washers. I don't plan to buy one until ours breaks or until I feel less poor or both. But I discovered that besides being more efficient and cleaning clothes more thoroughly with less wear on the clothes, there are two additional benefits of interest to me. First, you can generally fit bigger loads into them. Second, a load comes out of this kind of washer much drier than a load washed in a regular washer. Both of these advantages together mean I might not mind so much not having a drier if I had one of these washers. I wouldn't need to do so many loads, and it wouldn't take so long for each load to dry.

Work was surprisingly good and then surprisingly bad, and it will be worse tomorrow. I mean I got angry at one of the best employees. And I brought work home. Me. I.

I fantasized about just quitting. I read stories all the time about people who quit or get laid off with no job lined up, and then they find the perfect thing and their lives are so much better blah blah blah. Of course the ones who quit and then spiral downward into homelessness probably don't have internet access and don't get interviewed for self-improvement books. Maybe I'll hold off a bit longer.

But then I have Friday off. Ha! My excuse is that the Wildflower Center is having its semi-annual plant sale. This should be an excellent place to get plants because they sell only native plants. Of course there are three geographies around here, so you still have to make sure to pick the right plants (I should get the kinds that like clay soil rather than the kinds that enjoy growing in rocks), but they all can live with very little water, but also handle flooding, and can live through very hot summers and intense sun, but also an annual freeze.

And then I'm picking my sister and for her birthday I am taking her out to eat and then to experience unfortunate events at Borders Books. ("The End is near and Lemony Snicket has saved the worst for last. You probably shouldn't join us for this special event featuring some unpleasant activities to celebrate the end of the Baudelaire orphans saga. See store for details.")