dianaschnuth

Well, the 2X teleconverter arrived today, dusty but in otherwise new condition. Nothing my little lens brush with the air-puff thingy on it couldn’t handle. Wanted to go try out my new lens combo, but it was already getting toward evening when I got around to it, and there wasn’t enough light left outside. Damn that camera physics, anyway. There’s nothing to really photograph in my immediate neighborhood that would benefit from the use of a teleconverter, anyhow—I just wanted to test it out. Ah, well. Maybe some other time.

Thanks to Meijer Non-Drowsy Severe Cold medication, my severe cold is getting a little less so. I no longer have that hacking, phlegmy cough, but my nose still drips like a broken faucet. Sort of. I slept for freakin’ 10 or 11 hours last night, so that helped a little, then I got the cold medicine over my lunch break today, which has helped a lot. Hopefully I’ll be better by Saturday’s class reunion.

Now, about my new job…

I’ve decided that moving from the Sky Service Center in Bowling Green to the Sky Service Center in Arrowhead Park (Maumee) is like going from the Hampton Inn to the Quality Inn. It’s not a nasty place to work or anything, it’s just that the finer points are different. It’s all in the details. Granted, our facilities people are still working on getting the building up to spec, but… it’s things like the spackled-and-yet-unpainted spots on the walls, or the door to the women’s restroom that doesn’t quite fit and has scraped the paint off of the metal doorframe. It’s things like not having the break/lunch room completed, and not having tables for sitting outside to eat, and not having a trash can in close proximity to my desk.

Then, of course, there’s the getting used to a new place, be it fancy or not. Figuring how far away from the stall door to stand when you drop your drawers, so you don’t have to look back to see where the seat is. Getting the hang of tossing your used paper towel in a different style of restroom trash can. Timing your trip to work when you have to clock in at your own desk instead of at the door.

And speaking of clocking in and out, there’s the new job itself, and the new people. I’d gotten used to leaving my desk around 4:55 at the old building, putting my almost-empty bottle of water in the freezer to make ice for tomorrow’s ice water, maybe taking a pee, and clocking out on my way out the door at about 4:57 or 4:58. We have a leeway of seven minutes either way, after all. But these people… they don’t cheat on their time. Well, most of them don’t, anyway. The vast majority of them clock out precisely at the time they’re supposed to leave, be it 4:30 or 5:00; and since we all have to clock out at our desks, you know when your neighbor has gone off the clock by when they leave their desk for the day. So, as much as I’d like to get that five-minute jump on everyone else leaving Arrowhead Park, I find that I’m leaving just a smidge before my coworkers and just at the beginning of the 5:00 rush out of Arrowhead.

Even so, it only takes me 15 minutes to get home. Right on.

Regarding the job itself: I now know how to do a few things, instead of just two. It still makes for a slow day, since I can only take a fraction of the work there is to do, but I’m getting the impression that I’m catching on fairly quick—at least, from the trainer’s reactions to my not needing to be told things more than twice. But really… I’ve used the software before. It’s just learning all the new options that are now open to me. See, we access accounts through a sort of menu-driven terminal shell thingy, and each user is only given access to the menu options that they’ll need for their job function. Before, I had one or two screens of menu options. Now I think I have five screens’ worth. And I’ve only used about six individual options so far. Really. Holy crap.

But, yeah, the job’s going well. Now I just need to socialize with the people, and it’ll all be good.