the ongoing saga of my job

Troubleshooting

OMFG. New networking crap at work sucks. …Well, no, I actually find it pretty cool myself. Teaching my co-workers to use it (after I figured it out by myself yesterday) sucks.

Before this week, we were using Groupwise for our e-mail client (never heard of it), BitWare to fax from our computers (that one looked homemade), and were happy in our own little domain on Sky’s Novell Network. However, at the end of last week, our fax program magically stopped sending faxes. Upon calling the helpdesk, we discovered that the rest of the company was migrating to a new system, and BitWare would no longer work because they had rerouted the faxserver to work out the bugs in the new fax program. Nice to know. So, for several days, we had to print out our reports and manually fax all of our fax clients — about 70 or so, I think — rather than sending them like attachments from our computer. That slowed us down a bit.

But this week, the real fun began.

Since I send the most faxes right now, I became the guinea pig in our department to migrate to the new system. Lucky me. Scott from the tech support side of things spent over an hour migrating my computer to the new domain and figuring out how we could still access our old server (since it has all of our reports and important stuff on it). That was over an hour during which I could do nothing. Good thing it was a light day, anyway. Actually, once everything was installed and set up, life was OK. I enjoy learning new programs and playing with computers, so using Outlook (yay! seriously, yay!) and the new fax program made me happy. Even troubleshooting how to transfer our old address book into the new was a fun challenge, though a little frustrating. But life was still… OK.

Until today. When they migrated Rama and Loni.

OMG. It must be the age difference. All the stuff I’d had to figure out on my own or with minimal instruction, they had to ask me about every five minutes. I barely got any work done today, because I was walking over to talk Rama through attaching an e-mail and finding a contact from the address book and blah blah blah. Not that I mind, I guess, but after explaining something twice, I expect not to have to babysit a person as they say, "Now I click OK, right?" or just plain forget steps altogether. I am so not cut out for tech support. Then, it made things so much better when Rama and Loni found out they weren’t added as users to the faxserver, so I had to fax (from my computer) all the accounts they had tried to fax before and just not noticed the error messages they were getting. Aargh! For God’s sake, people, read your e-mail when it comes in! It might save me having to fax, say, two dozen files!

Ahem. I’m better now.

At any rate, this was not one of my better weeks. And I’m not done yet — I have to work tomorrow, too. From 11:15am to 5:00pm. End of the half, you know, and we have to keep up so we get everything done on Monday in time. *sigh*

I need to start looking for another job again. Sounds like we might be having an exodus of the temps soon, because they’re tired of barely getting 35 hours a week. I don’t want to be there when shit hits the fan, or whatnot. I think I could find a job with comparable benefits (besides the free checking). I still scope out the job postings on Sky Central (our intranet), but nothing comes up that is really in my field. There’s only a few jobs that I’d really jockey for, and Loan Support or Customer Service (aka bank teller) are not those.

Plus, I must admit that I’m feeling a bit belittled by the fact that A got out of the same job I’m currently in, except she was a temp and I’m a Sky employee. Same thing, pretty much. I don’t know how much she’s currently making, though, and I don’t know anything about her benefits, so I’m sure I could still have the better job on that front… but still. Did I drop the ball? Did I ever actually take possession of the proverbial ball? I don’t know. All I know is that I keep playing "sour grapes" by maintaining that I get good benefits, and I never had to move back in with my parents, and that outweighs the fact that I don’t have the job I want.

Eventually, pull factors and push factors will propel me to find a new job. Until then, the pull of a steady gig with vacation time outweighs the pull of another, more relevant and enjoyable job. And I’m willing to deal with that. For now.

randomness

Thunderstorms

I love summer rain. Some people are freaked out by thunder and lightning. I am calmed by it, and find it beautiful.

But there’s a reason for that.

See, when my Mom was little, she had a scary incident involving a thunderstorm and a man who played a sick joke on her, telling her she’d never see her mother again. Mom obviously did not see the humor in this, being only a little kid, and was consequently freaked out by thunderstorms for a long time after.

I was born when Mom was 21, at that age when childhood is still relatively fresh in your mind. (Listen to me, at the ripe fucking old age of 27, sounding like some wizened scholar or something.) Anyway, she decided to help me not be as frightened of storms as she was. One of my first vague memories is of being cradled in my mother’s arms, standing in the open front doorway. I could smell and feel the rain, and hear it, and hear the thunder, and all the while my mother was telling me how beautiful it was. I’d like to think that’s part of the reason I love thunderstorms so much.

Anyway, on to other things…

Turns out A’s gig is for a Harley dealership — and, seeing their website now, pretty much anything would be an improvement. She’s got her work cut out for her. When she’s not designing for their website, she’ll be doing light office work, too. Seriously… I wish her luck.

I’ll work on getting some wedding pics scanned and posted soon. Right now, it’s drumcorps season, so I’m trying to work on my long-time pet project. The Northern Aurora alumni page has seen many, many revisions and several redesigns, but this time, I’m hoping to have a design concept that sticks around for a while. If I can get some asp help — OK, not help, but someone to do it for me — it’ll be right about where I want it, in terms of functionality and design and content. Alumni are being so helpful, scanning photos and old programs and schedules and all sorts of stuff. Seventies alumni are so cool. 🙂

the ongoing saga of my job

Good For Her…

My former co-worker, A, got a job doing web work for Harley-Davidson. No offense to her (well, maybe), but I’m working at a bank, and she has a job with a nationally-known corporation, designing their website?

I think I’m going to shoot myself.

travel

One Month Without A Blog (Oh The Horror)

I’m glad to know that my blog has been sorely missed by some (and moderately by others). I was being optimistic when I made an offline entry two and a half weeks ago, thinking that ecom meant it when they said my credit card would be reprocessed in 24 hours…

Where to start… Jeez. I never thought I’d actually use my website to communicate with people, no matter how small an audience. You seven people are important to me, dammit! 🙂

OK… here’s the narrative of what you missed.

Week After The Wedding: Honeymoon, duh! Monday was a travel day — got to Cummington, Massachusetts in roundabout 12 hours, give or take eating and fueling. Aaron drove the whole dang thing. Tuesday we drove up to Mt. Greylock, the tallest peak in the state. Wednesday we drove out to Boston and spent the evening and night there; Thursday evening we drove back. Friday we left Cummington and headed west to Niagara Falls, where we spent Friday night. Saturday afternoon we completed the drive home, only to get the message that Memaw had just died that day (shortly after we had driven through Cleveland, in fact. How weird). What a downer. Called work on Sunday, left a message that I’d be out for three more days.

Week Before Last: Didn’t really need to take all three available days of bereavement pay, but I did. The funeral was on Tuesday in Parma, and I drove there because Aaron had to drag his ass out of bed much earlier than he would have liked. He slept a good deal of the way there. Got there, ate lunch at Mom and Gary’s, and steeled ourselves for the funeral. The "viewing" was the first hour, although Mom had opted to have the service be closed-casket. I provided a nicely matted and framed Olan Mills portrait of Memaw back in the early 80’s, before she even went gray — the way I remember her best. The viewing was a little strange, because I saw people I hadn’t seen in years and was glad to see, despite the circumstances. Also, Aaron and I received many congratulations on our recent marriage, in the shadow of Memaw’s death, which confused my brain. I wasn’t all that mournful to begin with, but I was downright happy after a while, seeing my Aunt Connie and Brother Squire from church and all. The service was small, relatively brief, but appropriate — come to think of it, the drive to the cemetery was longer than the service, I think. 🙂 We ate dinner afterward at a local restaurant where my step-brother Philip works as a cook (he’s 16 and just got a car, fyi). I guess the best part about the whole affair was that Mom got back together with her best friend Connie.

Last Week: Full week of work? Wow. Same old shit, finally. Oh, yeah, and we picked up our wedding proofs.

This Week So Far: Flew to Fort Worth, Texas on Saturday (and boy are my… oh, nevermind). First airplane ride since I was less than a year old. Fun. I want to do it again, despite having to remove my shoes for the nice metal detector. Texas was actually OK; we visited the Water Gardens (featured in the 1970’s sci-fi flick Logan’s Run), Cowtown (the original Fort Worth downtown, complete with fake gunfights on the hour and more cowboy hat stores than you can shake a shotgun at), and a water park (with a wave pool and enough innertube rides to keep me happy and my face out of the water). The Smoke clan is actually much cooler than you would think, given only Gary as an example. Mom and Gary stayed until today, but I bailed on Tuesday. Got home around 10pm, went to work the next morning. Since then, things have been pretty normal again.

Don’t worry, I’ll supply a better, longer, and illustrated version of the honeymoon soon. I’ve just been disinterested in updating lately, since, well, no one was going to see it.

family, travel, wedding

Since I Last Updated…

…the wedding and reception happened with only minor issues, we got lots of wedding presents (and money), my domain name expired, my credit card went overlimit, we drove to Massachusetts for our honeymoon (and back via Niagara Falls) totaling over 1700 miles on the Kia, my grandmother died, we put away all our gifts, I paid on my credit card and renewed my domain, and we’re preparing for the funeral in Cleveland on Tuesday.

Oh, yeah, and I go on “vacation” with my family to Texas in less than two weeks.

I think I’m going to put the honeymoon and wedding entry separate from the “normal” blog entries, so as not to overload the June blog page. ‘Cause this is going to be loooong. Like Sheryl‘s Japan narrative, but not quite.

I called Amy last night to see how she was doing. I guess she’s doing a little better — she’d been planning to try to go back to work today. She’s been home all this past week, tired and weak and kind of in pain. Good thing she didn’t try to make the wedding, cause she would have been miserable.

Well, I guess I’ll go start on the wedding and honeymoon entries, and maybe scan some pics. I don’t have the professional proofs from the wedding yet, but a friend of Aaron’s brought a digital camera to the wedding, so I have some wedding and reception pics, too.

Oh, and don’t feel too bad about Memaw. I’ve already done my mourning, and I will continue to do so tomorrow, but it was expected. Honestly, I’m glad it’s finally over.