Tag Archives: everyone is stupid

I’m having a lot of despair about my transportation situation. On Tue/Wed, 3 out of four travel legs were bogged down by highway accidents. I get to stand in the dark and rain and wait for a bus. Then I get to be damp and sit on a bus forever. It’s not even December, yet.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the first thing I do when I get out of bed in the morning is run to the computer to check my Powerball ticket to see whether I have to go to work.

Driving myself wouldn’t help much although at this point it’s starting to make sense again. I quit driving because parking is too expensive. If Bob picks me up and I’m a half hour late because of traffic so he goes into a restaurant and eats and drinks something while he waits, how are we saving money? Plus now both of us are inconvenienced.

The most obvious solution is either work closer to where I live or live closer to where I work. Neither are easy fixes for us at this point in our lives/careers.

Meanwhile, my webhosting upgrade whatever is still messed up and I can’t get my email the usual way but I did finally figure out, when I was searching for an online help forum (which they do not have), that if I login on the hosting site as a customer there’s a place to access webmail. I can’t do jack-crap with the instructions they sent me. I can’t ftp. I also noticed yesterday’s post never showed up in my reader. Is that related?

I called support yesterday and after 10 minutes I was still the 10th person in line so I gave up because I don’t really have time to be on hold for two hours. The help screens are completely and totally worthless and say things like, “Webmail is easy to setup and using your username and password you can check your email from anywhere in the world.”

That is fantastic news. Too bad I still have no idea how to set it up and there’s no HELPful instructions.

Can you imagine if you asked someone to write instructions to make a pie. And this is what you got:

Crust: pie crust is a flaky pastry made from a butter, shortening or other fats combined with flour and salt and sometimes sugar. It is placed in a pie plate in preparation for fruit, custard or other prepared filling and then baked.

Do you feel like you could make a pie from those instructions? When I’m in charge of the world: everything’s going to be different.

Sometimes when I’m writing a memo for work, it’s hard not to inject my editorial comments. If it’s in-house, I might occasionally sneak something in, or at least in the first draft, but given the general situation, it’s easier to stick with the facts.

Last week I wrote a memo summarizing the State Department’s new passport requirement which they are calling: the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.

I know. Come on.

And you know they probably had to form a committee and fly people across the country half a dozen times and schedule some retreats, all on taxpayer dollars, to come up with that name.

I bet somewhere, there’s a disgruntled employee, like a Second Assistant Transitions and Speculations Analyst Specialist, Level 4 (DON’T forget the level 4, or you’ll get a phone call … ), who’s sulking because his title: the Pan-Global Special Documentation Directive, didn’t make the cut.

On Friday we decided to go ahead with the move on Sunday and give the bird to the oppressive rules of the condo association. There are reasons why this wasn’t a great idea but we had to get this done.

Then, about midday, I was informed that the new building would let us move in on Monday I went back to all my phone calls to reschedule for Monday. The mover informed me that all his trucks were scheduled. Now what? He said we could pay a truck rental fee and he could put together a crew for us. Whew. Dodged that one. Everything was back on track for the Monday move.

Closer to the end of the day I was informed that we couldn’t move into the new building until after 3pm. So AGAIN I have to call everyone and reschedule the move time. Keep in mind that I still had an actual job to do, other moving type arrangements to make and packing 13 years of a law practice. Also keep in mind that Friday is normally a day off for me.

Monday rolls around. I drove to the office at 7am to work on packing. The movers show up at 1pm. Moving always takes longer and is much worse than you expect and this time was no different.

We arrived at the new building at around 5pm and the loading dock was occupied by the people who are remodeling the office space that we’re moving into. My office isn’t ready yet. Also, when I entered the building the security officer informed me that the freight elevator was broken.

If I hadn’t already vented considerably via my tear ducts at various points during the week, I probably would have lost it completely at this point.

A guy fiddled with the elevator and got it working again but we still had to wait for the remodel crew to finish up.

We were finally able to get in there and we worked like mad and I got out of there at 8pm. I can’t remember the last time I was that tired.

Bob had a nice dinner waiting for me which I ate as quickly as I could, whining like a little kid, “I’m so tired.” I staggered off to bed because Tuesday would be my first day of work at my new office.

More to come.

I know, I STILL haven’t had a chance to update all this stuff. It’s becoming like my writing notebook on a trip. I’m so behind I don’t even want to start. I’m going to try to give you a brief version.

I have had the same job for 13 years. In fact, tomorrow is the 13 year anniversary. We’ve always worked out of a small residential condo on the river and the entire staff has ranged between 2 and 3 people, including me. There were lots of days when I was all by myself.

In the very beginning, I wasn’t always pleased with this as I had just moved here and had no friends and lived alone and then went to work alone and I felt like loner hermit girl. But eventually I grew to like it — turns out I thrive on alone time.

About 3 years ago there was discussion about merging with a larger law firm. I didn’t hate the idea but to be honest, I didn’t really want to do it. Since then we’ve been on and off whether this was going to happen culiminating last month with a “this is absolutely happening in February” and when I’d finally gotten used to the idea there was a day or two period of “this is absolutely off” followed by a “it’s on and we’re moving this Saturday.”

So to sum: a lot of change being swung back and forth.

We didn’t move that Saturday but we looked at the calendar and February wasn’t a good month for me to move since I had weekend activities so we finally decided on Mon Feb 21 since our clients take the federal holiday and it would be minimally disruptive to them and we could get the move done before March.

So I made a bunch of phones calls: movers, phones (there were additional complications with moving the phones which I won’t go into but required at least 10 phone calls), their office, our building management. Everything was set.

On Weds of last week, I was informed that the building didn’t permit move-ins on the weekdays. (For the record I did ask MORE THAN ONCE if there were any special rules about moving in I should know about.) Since the movers were still available Sunday I decided to cancel my plans and try to do the move on Sunday. I made all my phone calls to reschedule everything and then learned that the building we were in would not schedule a move out on a Sunday. (It’s a residential place, apparently the residents don’t want people moving on Sunday — I don’t know.) As of Thursday night we had phone calls into both managers hoping to plea for some sort of exception.

There’s more to this story which I will get to later but I’ve got to get moving now if I have a hope of getting to work on time.