the ongoing saga of my job 2 Comments

Busted!

“Can I have a word with you?”

These are not the words anyone wants to hear from their supervisor at 9:00am. I’d come in late this morning (again), so I thought that maybe I was about to get a talking-to about my tendency to tardiness. My supervisor looked around for a private place to talk, then gestured me into the copy room.

Incidentally, most people seem to think that the copy room affords them some measure of privacy. As my cube is right next to the copy room, I can assert that it does not. Just because you can’t see anyone else doesn’t mean that your conversation isn’t carrying out into the hallway.

In the copy room, my supervisor told me that there’s a person or department who checks the internet for references to our company, and that I had blogged about it by name. At this point, my brain started whirling — I didn’t talk smack about work, did I? — and I know that my eyes had to have been giant saucers of Oh-Shit-ness, because she kept a very amiable tone and tried to be reassuring and factual. She explained that the person who monitors the spider or search or proprietary whatever-it-is that finds mention of our company online noticed that a Toledo employee had written about the company.

(In my mind, the SWAT team from The Blues Brothers movie comes swarming down the sides of the pointy pink building I work in, as IS Security blares an alarm: WE HAVE A BLOGGER ON THE PREMISES.)

The problem was not that I had written about the company — I did not, in fact, talk any smack about my employer, as I value my job and know that the internet is a very visible and accessible place. The problem was that I posted my del.icio.us link about the company at 2:46 PM on a weekday. During work hours.

I was incredibly flustered. I explained to my supervisor that it was just one of those online bookmark sites, and I saw the article and posted it, and it automatically posted to my blog later, and I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I’m sure I ran off at the mouth and sounded excessively nervous, because she calmly and kindly assured me that she didn’t see it as a problem, but that I should keep in mind that blogging during office hours is against company policy.

That pretty much wrecked my flow for the rest of the day.

After I retired to my cube and got my heart out of my throat and back where it belonged, I started to wonder how they knew I had blogged during work hours. After all, my del.icio.us links don’t display a timestamp, and the timestamp on my blog is 11:00pm, when the del.icio.us feed posts my daily links. All day, I was convinced that Security must have actually sought out my blog (hi, guys! *waves*) to see if I made any other references to the company, then found my Twitter posts throughout the day, and busted me on that. As it turns out, though, the timestamp for my del.icio.us link is right there in the RSS feed. So, nothing vindictive or borderline unfair was going on in Security. Just that one post.

Still, though, I’m going to lay low for a while, as far as internet at work is concerned.

writing

My Queue

My plan had been to get a move-on with migrating my blog to my other server tonight. I’m planning an entire redesign, and am finally ready to sit down and do it.

My hosting provider had other plans.

Turns out that, somehow, I didn’t get the Past Due Notice that I’m *sure* they must have sent before charging me a late fee. So, when I tried every possible password combination to log into my Cpanel and nothing worked, I decided to log into the Members section of their site, where I discovered that my account had been suspended. I promptly PayPal-ed them my annual $85 for 5GB of webspace (plus a $9 late fee), then contacted Billing (via a support ticket, since they had no e-mail or other contact form on their site) to confirm that my payment had been received and that my account would be un-suspended.

To their credit, they responded within an hour and reactivated my account — while I was writing this blog entry, in fact. I was seriously considering whether I wanted to continue my business relationship with a company that doesn’t seem to notify its customers before suspending their accounts… but this is the first real issue I’ve had with them (besides their initial data entry error in calling me “Dina”), so I’m willing to stick with them for another year. After all, dianaschnuth.com has been hosted there for the past three years with no major snafus.

I hadn’t been planning to go off on my web hosting provider, though. I’d been planning to detail my project plan for the next couple of months.

November, as usual, is National Novel Writing Month. I’ve never “won,” meaning I’ve never successfully completed a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I’ve never finished a 50,000-word novel at all. I have three unfinished novels, though: the first, started in 1999 (I think) and clocking in at 19,400 words, I haven’t touched since 2004, according to Windows. The second was my first real attempt at NaNoWriMo, back in 2005 — between my NaNo wordcount and subsequent additions, it’s up to 16,000 words, and hasn’t been touched (besides the story bible) since late 2006. The third was last year’s half-hearted attempt at NaNo, which only made it to 10,000 words, despite being a plot idea I’m particularly fond of.

I’m going to pick one of these to write on this November. Since I haven’t successfully completed NaNoWriMo with 50,000 words in 30 days, I’m not going to be invoking the Zokutou Clause by finishing a previous work and still claiming to be officially participating. See, the rules clearly state that all actual writing must be done within the month of November (of the current year) in order to qualify. So, technically, I’m not planning to do NaNo this year. I am, however, planning to devote much of my November to writing.

Which means I need to get my blog redesigned (or well on its way) in the next 2½ weeks. And then decide which story I want to finish this November.

Oh, yeah, and after that? I should really update my portfolio and resume.