6:46 p.m. - 2003-02-27
Mood Music
Couldn't budge number four son from the computer last night - hence no entry. Now that I'm holding down a day job again, I really have to watch I'm not staying up past 1 or 2 am. Don't function too well with only 3 or 4 hours sleep anymore. When my guys were small, it seemed that they drew straws to decide who would "sit up with Mom" each night. With six it didn't take much to lose a whole week of sleep. Sometimes I was so tired, that it felt like even the inside of my bones hurt. I used to promise myself sometimes, that "someday, I'll sleep and catch it all up". Apparently the body was paying attention and has decided that "someday" is now. No stamina anymore.
The past few days have been different. When I first went back to work, I didn't see any of the regulars on the bus or the train. Ditto downtown at noon, just no one I knew. Seemed bizarre that everyone would be off work. In the past week though the old familiar faces are starting to turn up everywhere. Maybe I was just too pre-occupied to notice them.
Signed up for the belly dance course yesterday so maybe I'll bump into some more of my buddies at the Y.
Work has changed. Tuesday at about three, after the printer hadn't worked all day, my three co-workers came chugging into the library with the part they thought would finally make it function. The PC barked an order to me to send a Word document with colour in it as a test. My default printer is down the hall and she knows 99% of my time is spent in two other software applications. There isn't much call for me to use Word. I had, however, saved screen shots of the one application because it showed some anomalies in the database with respect to the box inventories. The "hidden" properties file as it were. I switched over printers and sent the test in under a minute. It left her stuttering about the screen shot. Something about it really threw her. All of sudden there were boxes of labels too. Guess the supplier did have some somewhere.
On Wednesday, everyone was at least trying to be polite. Guess it finally dawned that there was a problem with the printer not me. B just noted that it wasn't a workhorse model. It couldn't handle the volume in the jobs I was sending. That wasn't my first choice either. I worked on assignment two most of the day, I like to complete a sequence of work once I start, that way I don't have to go back and try to figure out where I was. Waste of time. Mood music yesterday? Remastered CDs of some of the classic rhythm and blues singers - Ray Charles, BB King, Leadbelly, Billie Holiday, Big Joe Turner, Lena Horne and Joe Williams. Add in Jarvis Church, Gordon Lightfoot, and James Keelaghan's new CD "Road" - it's good.
Music today fit my moods too - belly dance instrumentals from Morocco and Lebanon, Gregorian Chants from a Benedictine Monastery in Spain, Carmina Burana (German and Latin), and Tantric Chants from Tibet. Culturally diverse - that's me. Got the last of the boxes ready for the warehouse this morning, then continued on with assignment number two. Six boxes of new data/records are on the shelves from that work so I think I'm doing ok. More viruses on everyone else's computer, just one alert on mine. A power surge this morning knocked out the PC's computer but no one else's - don't understand that on a LAN system but I'm definitely not an IT person. B was away again today because of her daughter, so I finally contacted the IT department for the software I'm supposed to be using that seemed to be the reason for the last upheaval. I sent the original workorder from her supervisor to the IT team. I probably should have cleared it with B's boss - T2 - but I think B is just forgetting things because of the home issues. I don't want her to feel like I'm trying to make her look bad with her boss or that I'm going behind her back. The original e-mail was the only "proof" I could supply to IT without having to involve T2. Maybe it was the wrong way to go about it, but I need to have the software before I can proceed with the data I'm working on. I can't wait for the next time B is able to come to work and able to find the time to e-mail IT herself. D seems very eager to help since the printer incident on Tuesday - odd what changes people's minds about one's competence isn't it - and the PC has been lying low since. Only saw her once today - I like that. I know bitchy again.
A - my supervisor - called at about 3 pm today - could we talk about my e-mail stats report later? Sure. Short call. Odd thing is that every time my phone rings - which is rare - it seems someone shows up and listens. D came by just as I was saying good-bye and didn't leave until I packed up for home. Of all the group so far, he has been the most decent to me, so I don't think it was meant as a criticism. I sometimes wonder though, why there is so much tension about that phone being used. Every other person on the floor uses their phone for personal calls on a regular basis. Mine so far have been for work purposes - well except that call to the RCMP a couple of days ago, but that wasn't my fault.
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