dianaschnuth

Nope, the PC is still not fully functional. I’m about this close *thumb and forefinger one centimeter apart* from taking the stupid thing down to Virtual PCs and making them fix it. OK, guys, don’t hose the second hard drive—this is not an option…

I guess the good news is that I haven’t gotten any of the new viruses going around. Very few hackers bother to make Mac viruses. 🙂

Now, let’s see if I can properly segue here without telling you anything my employer doesn’t want you to know…

Hey, guess what? Our e-mail was down at work yesterday. And our fax server. And, well, hell, the whole goddamn network was down. Never you mind why. It’s a bunch of fun to manually fax clients who either are usually faxed straight from our computers or receive their deposit reports via e-mail. It’s also a barrel of monkeys to work harder than usual to get less done than usual, all while the rest of the building is cleaning their workstations and going home early because they have nothing to do without their computers. Ahh… there’s nothing quite like having your primary workstation on a network separate from the corporate domain.

My 90-grams-of protein-and-30-minutes-of-exercise-a-day diet died a quick death. Like, two weeks. I’m trying to convince myself that just because I’ve been off the diet for as long as I was initially on it doesn’t mean I’m necessarily a failure. *smirk*

Aaron told me today he’s been contemplating the Atkins Diet himself. Yes, I slammed it earlier, I know, but if he’s willing to give it a shot, I’ll do it with him. He hasn’t totally committed to it yet—he wants to double-check what’s legal for the first couple of weeks to a month and figure out some potential meals first. Chicken, burgers, and tuna would get kind of tedious after about a week, we’d imagine. Anyway, both of us need to lose the same amount of weight (and, oddly enough, have the same starting point), so if we managed to coordinate our weight-loss efforts, I think we could succeed. All I know is I’m tired of being frumpy.

When Mom visited last weekend, she told me she thinks I don’t eat enough. Gee, thanks, Mom. That’s just what I need. —Anyway, she’s probably more correct than I want to give her credit for. I think eating, for me, is a social thing. When I’m by myself at home, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass if I eat dinner or not. I say to myself, “Hey, I’m hungry.” I look in the kitchen, and if nothing strikes my fancy, I don’t eat. I pay my stomach about as much attention as I would a headache (and Aaron always bugs me about not taking anything for my headaches when I have them). I just don’t give a shit. If it’s the weekend, though, and I’m out with Aaron or other people, I tend to order up something huge and full of pasta. Lately, I’ve ended up taking half of it home, but still. Maybe I have more of a laziness problem (like, not wanting to actually make anything for dinner). I’d believe that, too. Actually, that’s probably right on the mark.

Part of me is sad that all my pretty code will probably get reorganized once I put this back into DreamBeaver. The rest of me smacks the first part and says, “Dreamweaver lives on your GIGAHERTZ machine, and you’re currently coding this on your 275 MHz PowerPC. Get a life…”

Not much to report. I am proud to report, though, that I ate breakfast *and* lunch today, and I jumped for a half hour on my trampoline. I opted against a walk/jog due to the severe thunderstorms and the tornado warning that was issued as I was driving home from work. Yipes. Anyway, the trampoline was fun but challenging, as I actually jumped for 30 minutes straight, instead of giving up after I got tired. (Probably should have stopped after 20 minutes, though, since that’s when my knees and ankles started actually hurting on every impact.) I did it while watching the 10:00 Fox News—while the news was on, I’d do the jog-bounce in place thing, where the balls of your feet don’t really leave the mat. During the commercials, though, I’d do full-on six-inch-high jumps (much to the dismay of my bouncing boobies). Forty-five minutes later, I can tell that my heart rate is still a little elevated. My breathing has long since returned to normal, though — I’m not that bad off.

Ended up staying at work a little longer than I needed today in order to get my 40 hours, so I got 45 minutes OT. Sweet. Andrew and I stayed after all the work was done in order to compress some little-used files on the server to reclaim some hard drive space. He was in rare form today, though, so we ended up having some particularly pleasant time together. Who’da thunk it? I found out that he turned 30 on Wednesday (we all thought he was in his early- to mid-30’s already), and had kept it ultra-low profile, to avoid any embarrassing "you’re old" parties. I’m considering writing him a "Gotcha Card" (remember, those are like RCC Pizza Points at Sky) just to say Happy Belated Birthday. Ah, what the hell.

I also narrowly missed having to work two weekends in a row—Loni’s husband has been in the hospital this week with major heart blockage. She was on vacation out-of-state on Monday and Tuesday, then Wednesday morning she came in to work, but left at 10:30 to take her husband to the doctor. Seems he was having difficulty breathing while mowing the lawn or climbing the stairs in their house. Turns out he had one 90% blockage and one 60% blockage, but they didn’t find this out until they admitted him to the hospital and ran some tests. Anyway, Loni has only been to work for about three hours this week, so we were assuming she would want to be at the hospital or with her husband this weekend. Well, we were wrong. Her husband is being released on Saturday, so she’s coming in to work. At first I wasn’t sure whether she was stir-crazy from being at the hospital, or if she was antsy just to get back to work. Turns out that she wouldn’t have been able to take my next weekend to work, so she opted to just work the schedule as is. Hmm.

Hey, I just managed three decent paragraphs out of "not much to report." I think I’m getting better at this blogging thing. ^_^

I finally did it. I got my hair bobbed. It is now just a shade longer than chin-length. I feel like a new woman. And I look like one, too. I can’t stop shaking my head and running my fingers through my hair.

Damn, now I’m going to have to break out the round brush and blow dryer on a regular basis.

So, today at work I got yelled at by the IT guy. See, we’ve been having these problems with the new fax program scrunching numbers or just plain eliminating columns of numbers from reports. So, someone’s report will say $1,115.79 when it should really say $15,115.79. This is ungood. Our clients very irately reported this issue to us, and we reported it to Andrew, and Andrew reported it to the IT department. And the IT guy mainly in charge of the fax software had a little bit to say to us about it.

He storms in while Loni’s on the phone, and starts ranting at me, since I’m closest to him. "I cannot be held responsible for every fax," he announces, and shows me what we already knew: that there was a column of digits missing. Yes, yes, we know. But then he claims that it’s the client’s fax machine at fault. It must glitch while feeding paper at that point. I politely explain that when we fax these same clients manually, it goes through fine. This steams him even more.

At this point Loni is off the phone, and tries to jump in. Her normal, interruptive conversational style isn’t working for her in this instance. (It rarely does.) She chimes in and says what I just said, that manually faxing works fine. Larry says that we can manually fax every client, then, and he’ll just get rid of the software entirely. Loni shoots back that we’ll have clients pulling out for lack of service, then, and that will be bad for Sky. She also mentions that BitWare (our old, Windows 95 compatible fax software) worked just fine. Larry yells back — over his shoulder, since he’s already started to storm out — that we can find fax software on our own and tell him all about it, or he can just put us back on BitWare, then, and be done with it.

Of course, the red-faced yelling and pissed-off attitude doesn’t really come through in my little transcription here, but I think you get the point. As much as I hate to admit it, I share my mother’s dislike of confrontation, and I try to defuse every volatile situation I find myself in. From my perspective, we were just pointing out a bug in the software, and asking them to look into it. From his perspective, though, I’m sure we were personally attacking this project he’d spent months working through and perfecting. I can understand where he’s coming from, though I don’t think I’d react nearly the same way.

After he stalked out, we told Andrew how Larry had treated us and spoken to us, and I communicated to him that I found it unprofessional, ill-mannered, and uncalled-for. Andrew talked to his boss, Ruth, and I’m sure she talked to HR. So, we’ll see what happens.

Oh, Loni told me later on that this Larry guy has a reputation for having a bad temper. He got a talking-to from HR once for throwing a printer across a room. Yikes.