A Very Warm Day In January

We got into the 60's today.  If I wasn't working, I might have got the Mustang out.  My luck, it wouldn't have started.  But I was stuck at work on a Monday, that seemed not quite so busy, perhaps because people had better things to do on a nice day like this than come to where I work.

We got our safe replaced, we have two just like the broken one, and the drilling guy took the guts from the money safe and put it into the other safe.  I also overheard him apologizing to my coworker who is one of the finest men to have ever walked this earth.  I know he had been upset by this, he had said so and I know how something like that can eat at you when you are unfairly and unjustly accused of something.  His weekend was ruined but not being able to eat or sleep and he thought of it constantly.  I hope he feels better now.  I guess the boss went to bat for him, which makes me loathe the boss a lot less.

I still have no date for starting at the new job.  It has been two weeks since I officially said I'd go, although I decided three days before that.  It sounds like they are still half-heartedly trying to keep Low Man here, they told her the people at the new place would make her cry.  We were all "What the ?" on that one.

Saturday I rolled out of bed and got on the internet.  My home page is Google on the desktop and the Google doodle was something about the 125th anniversary of the world's largest snowflake.  Clicking on the doodle brought up an article about the doodle that had more to say about Google's new privacy policy than the giant snowflake, so on to the next result, which was a Wikipedia article about weather records.  It was heavily annotated with lots of footnotes and footnote 71 was for a book called The Handy Weather Answer Book, which I promptly ordered from Amazon from a seller in Wisconsin and the book arrived today.

I spent a while being annoyed on Saturday looking for pictures of record setting snowflakes and had to admit that in 1887, there weren't a lot of cameras around so it should be no surprise that no pictures were taken of the 15 inchers that fell on Ft. Keough in Montana, near Miles City, on January 28, 1887.

If 15 inch snowflakes fell today, there would be loads of YouTube videos of it and people would say moronic things in them and at least one would get songified and end up on my iPod the way the Bed Intruder Song the the Nascar Prayer Song did.

The Love That Dies Untold

The safe was finally opened today around 11:00 and other problems were solved throughout the day which seemed to get better and better and things looked awesome and hopeful.

While I was making some copies, I fiddled with The Book Of Answers.  We had played with this a few days ago.  It's a thick little orange book with Ouija symbols on it and you are supposed to hold it and ask your question and rifle the pages a few times and then open it up to a page and there's your answer.  I asked it if I was doing the right thing by transferring and if I should tell my Dad I am gay.  I got "Take More Time To Decide" for both questions.  Well, I had already decided to transfer and have never been anxious to have that conversation any way.  Some other questions brought nonsensical answers and I put it back in the copy room.

Today, I decided to ask if she ever loved me and if she loved me still.  A negative is what I need to hear, even if yes is the answer to the first question.  I know, it was probably a bad idea to ask both questions at once but I'm busy and just taking a moment while waiting for the copies and totally hadn't planned to play with the book again.  The book said "It Is Certain."  Which put me somewhere between "As If!" and "I Knew It!"

And for most of the day I was too busy for the fantasies of finally getting a look at those breasts, among other things.

Near the end of the day, we got word that we are bad people who break safes by using tools and shit.  One person, who is one of the finest men to ever walk this earth, was targeted in particular and he is justifiably outraged.   The safe was closed at night and wouldn't open the next day, end of story.  Nobody forced anything or worked at it with tools.  So a tough week ended on a very low note.

Please, give me my transfer.

between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender

The guy came back to day and over about six hours drilled less than an inch into the safe.  He'll be back tomorrow.

I can drink a lot of beer.

Another Day

As I walked in today, one of my co-workers told me we had a "little issue".

On Saturday, they couldn't open the little safe with our money in it.

So if you wanted to do business with us, it had to be credit, debit, check or exact change.

They couldn't get anybody to come out on Saturday to work on the safe and someone came and worked on it today.  I heard occasional drilling and sometimes banging.  He did not get it open and said he would be back tomorrow and spend the better part of tomorrow drilling on it.  I hope we can close the door on the big safe to muffle the sound.

On the brighter side, they might have another person lined up to come in, so they might not be delaying my transfer all that much now.  That would be so swell.

I have had my two beers tonight, and am trying to stop there.  Should one attend AA if they are merely troubled by the extent they turn to alcohol for comfort or wait until one gets DT's when they try to stop drinking?  I always said I'd rather die than go to one of those meetings and stand up and announce I am an alcoholic.  Because I don't think I am.

locked up

I dreamed I was thrown into jail, it was a small well lit cell.  Some latches on the window were pointed out to me and I was told to not try to escape.  Once I was left alone, I was so upset, I could barely breathe.  I can't remember now what I did to get put there.

I started a Lost marathon on Netflix.  The program listing says there are 100 episodes.  So when I realized I was well past 100 episodes I wondered why they didn't list the correct number of episodes?  I was really annoyed but not so much that I couldn't breathe.

A Public Service Announcement for the US Department of State

I've been watching Lost, sort of having a marathon and I became very concerned about something.  Claire's baby needs a proper birth certificate, or he will never be able to get a passport.  I haven't watched to the end of the show yet, so I don't know if Kate tried to take care of this when she was home with him, posing as his mother but probably not.

What he would need is a certificate or maybe it's an affidavit, concerning his birth abroad.  While it was Kate who delivered him, I would think it is reasonable to say Jack was the attending physician, even though he was busy trying amputate a dying man's leg while the birth was in progress.  Since the island isn't really associated with any country, I imagine baby Aaron is in for a tough time getting his identity papers together.  If his mom was Australian, I guess that would make him Australian, unless Kate could pass him off as her own and make him American.

Assuming he is going to be American, he could go to travel.state.gov and figure out what he needs to do, because that site is very user friendly.  I recall a public service announcement that showed Uncle Sam in a hot tub with a bunch of people and one of the things he told them was that if the needed a passport, they should go to travel.state.gov to see what they needed to do.

We had another bad afternoon and I told Low Man another thing we wouldn't have to deal with at our new jobs- children.  Where we are going there won't be any children.  We also think there probably won't be any cell phones allowed there, we didn't see anyone yakking on one while we were there.

My laptop was shut off when I got home, I think from overheating since I hadn't left it on the Belkin fan.  It was getting hot and shutting off when I watched YouTube and FetLife videos, but now it's may have shut off from just sitting there.  That would be a good excuse to get a new laptop, right?

Delays

My boss indicated it might take as long as a month for me to get out of here.  Low Man on the Totem Pole will probably get out sooner, leaving me in the situation I dread.

It's my opinion he is doing this to torture me, I think nothing would make him happier than to see me drop dead from a heart attack or have to be hauled away because of a nervous breakdown.

The elation I felt yesterday knowing I would be leaving soon has been replaced by the disappointment that it will not happen soon enough and what is left will be pretty bad.  I got an email that one of my help desk tickets was resolved.  There was a link in the email where you can go to a page if you need to reopen the ticket, but the page didn't work when I got there.  Because my issue was not resolved and I was not happy about this, since my customer was not happy I couldn't close out his business because of this.

Just when the system started to respond quickly to my input, someone would come back and interrupt me- I had to talk on the phone, or I had to go up front and by the time I got back, I'd be logged out and when I'd log back in, the system would respond very slowly or just randomly log me back out.


Kind of hard to be productive under those circumstances.


And most of this talking on the phone stuff is explaining State Department business.  I spend a lot of time explaining stuff to people about State Department policies and the State Department has a totally awesome web site that is very easy to use, navigate and search.  I am tired of being the State Department's bitch.  I am not a State Department employee and I do not appreciate their ever increasing fees and complexities in their rules.  That is another thing I won't have to deal with in the new job.

And up front, well, let's just don't talk about that.  Because that is why I have to leave.

But I can't resist finishing with the Stupid Person of the Day award, to the customer who asked us how to contact two of our competitors.  Could we give him their numbers?  No?  Well, where could he find those numbers?

I really got to get out of here.