“Be sure when you step,
Step with care and great tact,
And remember that life’s a
Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be
Dexterous and deft
and NEVER mix up your right foot
With your left”
-Dr Seuss.
When I read that a while back, I thought it was such perfect life advice that I rolled it around in my head all the time.
Then I forgot it. I’m sorry.
At what point did the people I know online stop being “internet friends” and just become friends? I remember back in my BBS days (ahhh, technology nostalgia) everyone was clearly defined. These are my friends. These are my BBS friends. It was a different kind of friendship even, based more on talking about software than anything else.
Then I moved on to chat rooms on the big ol’ internet. This was still within some kind of limits and when I talked about the people I knew there it was still “oh, my internet friend Rantzay said…”. Then, TSO happened.
I don’t know if it’s the taking on of human form or simply more time spent with these people, but somewhere along the line I stopped saying things like “Oh, Lauren, my internet friend, said… ” and started saying “Oh, my friend Lauren was talking about…”. When I first realised I was doing this I thought “my word, that’s odd” but now it’s just - now it’s just people I know, and care about that happen to live a long way away.
I’m thinking about this because last night a friend of mine went into freefall and a group of us all got together to help catch her. This is not so unusual. Friend in crisis, we all went over to her house and offered our love and support. Except in this case, the house doesn’t actually exist in any 3D form, and the those of us that were there were in reality scattered over America and, in my case obviously Australia. And we all got together and sat around in her house and did anything and everything we could to help her.
There are limitations. There are times, when I speak to my friends all over the world, that people are in pain and I can’t do what I naturally want to do and sit with them and hug them and offer them that kind of face to face support, but I don’t feel any of the relationships are weaker because of this.
So, to my friends who I happened to meet online and who have become my Real Life friends - thanks. :)
What a freaky day today was. Not helped by wearing stockings which I’ve not done in ages, I’d forgotten that “spring loaded leg” thing. Also, if you stride in a skirt, you feel like a drag queen. Who knew?
OK, first hint of the bizarre was a note from a weekend staffer blathering on about the Family History PC. Error message. The only info I need in these cases is “This PC has an error message and won’t load windows”. I got a FULL report “So and so tried to use the machine, and the message came up and blah di blah this andyammer yammer that…”. Meh. Anyway, set that one up for a full reinstall fromt he server and was thankful not much else was wrong apart from woefully slow internet.
But oooooh no. Nope. Not for this little black duck could things be so smooth. Mr W, a man who does not know the meaning of “Personal Space” or.. for that matter “Breath Mint” had a problem with one of the word processors. It won’t accept a floppy disc. With my striking IT support intuition, I take a couple of paddlepop sticks with me (those are the wooden sticks in ice-creams and icelollies). There was a metal flippy bit stuck int he drive (what are those metal flippy bits called? JP? You’ll know this). I pulled it out while being stared at by Mr W. Shudder. Anyway, after that the drive didn’t seem to be working so we put him on the info desk to finish his typing.
Then… THEN! He comes up to be and says “Your computer has put extra files on my disc and renamed other files” so I wander down to have a look and he sits down at the PC so I have to lean over him and carries on an entire conversation with my breasts. I would have left them to it, but my breasts aren’t that great at computer problems so I had to keep interrupting. I’m looking at a batch of duplicated files which could have ended up on the disc in any number of ways, and all of which have edit dates of last month. I say “Well, look, I’m sorry, but I don’t really know how this has happened, but I’ll let IT know”. Then he got sulky “Well I’ve had three discs chewed here, and two at another branch. I’m not game to use this PC anymore and to be honest, it’s ruined my day”.
Anyone who guessed I would want to say something along the lines of “Well, don’t come here then” gets a gold star for knowing me too well. I didn’t. I just said “Sorry about that” and walked very fast into the workroom to kick a trolley very hard. Having my breasts talked to is not something that happens to me… ever. I’ve no previous base on how to deal with that. Not within “Not Getting Fired” guidelines, anyway.
Alicia was in a little early today so I got to catch up with her. We are both delighted that we have found our collar bones, can feel our ribs and have hipbones to speak of. We both play with our collar bones all the time, isn’t that odd? Guess it’s like a new toy and the novelty didn’t wear off yet.
Today we did training in use of space and display design. There were many people there from many branches and I have to say the branch manager from one of those branches is a total, complete and unsavable bitch. Argh. I know my major flaw is being defensive, and today I very nearly blew my top in her face. All the staff from that branch are unbearable, one of them works weekends with us and she’s a nightmare. Anyway, deep breathes. I’ve had some Bowie since then, and a little bit of George Harrison warning me of darkness and am not remembering the details of the day because I’ll just get all NGURH again. My apologies to Jonah for taking the brunt.
Anyway, one of the best things about all day training sessions (apart from not have to do any real work all day) is that I get to sit around with a pencil and paper. Here are the better efforts from the 12 pages i covered today. Due to my new knowledge (I have a certficate. They mis-spelled my name, but still) I know that the most effective way to present anything is in a pyramid shape, so here is my Pyramid of Distractions. Also, Happy Birthday to Jackie - lotsa hugs :)
Congrats to Jackie and Dean who’s first baby is due in November.
That’s all I have to say today :)
No, I’m going somewhere with this. Trust me. OK, I have several Bowie photos stuck to the wall over my desk at work, one of which is a shot of him underweight and drugged as Ziggy Stardust. In this particular shot he is shirtless and the photo is a chest and shoulders. My desk faces the workroom door and as I came in from a cigarette at lunchtime today I noticed someone had cut a shirt out of blue paper and stuck it to the photo. There was also a speech bubble reading “Blue is so my colour!”. I started to laugh so hard Kirsty was alarmed (she often is when I do that) and I pointed it out. She also thought it hiliarious. I wrote a little note along the lines of “Tampering with Bowie is blasphemy!” and peeled the shirt off to use the blutac again. Fresh laughter as the removal of the shirt revealed two bright pink squares covering his nipples (see, I was going somewhere with this). The handwriting on the bubble gave it away as Jackie. I took it out to her and she fell apart, having forgotten she’d even done it. It was one of those “Eye contact will be lethal” things, and we were useless for a few minutes. “That’s for the stapler” she finally said (I may have put her stapler on top of the cupboard for 6 weeks or so, can’t recall exactly… ahem).
Later I went back to see the shirt in place again, I peeled it off again and Jacks said “Oh come on, we don’t want to look at skinny Bowie and his nipples”. I stuck it back on, but first I cut holes to show the nipples. Jackie fell about and covered him up again with the pink squares. So, in revenge for that, I enlarged the chest on the copier and put it in her drawer. Tomorrow the battle continues…
Today was basically weird, despite concentrated attention on semi naked Bowie. One girl came in and said all in one breath “I’m a member of this lie-berry and I’m at the TAFE over the road and I have a MAJOR assignment due today and all the printers at the TAFE had KERashed and we can’t print anything and I know you need, like, a card or something to use the printer here and I have my lie-berry card but I don’t know if I can use that can I? So I guess there’s another kind of card, for the printer, and can I, like, get an application form or something for that?”. At which point I sold her a $2.20 card and told ehr I didn’t need her life story (OK, so I just sold her a card).
Today was also the day we introduced a new, strict overdues policy where books later than 40 days past due are being invoiced and fines older than 40 days are blocking cards. Thankfully, none of the reports they had to run to do this worked…
Also, the IT manager resigned last week. Apparently he offered to give 2 weeks notice (his resignation was requested by the CEO as far as I can gather) and then come back for a week in 6 weeks to hand over the position to a new person. CEO told him he could be out by the end of this week, thanks. Ouch. I’m a bit more shocked than I thought I would be, Tony’s not a bad bloke. Anyway, in the midst of all this shock came laughter at the string of e-mails flying around the BITS people. It ran a bit like this:
Karen: Tony is leaving, should we get him a gift and since the next meeting is at this branch, do lunch?
Karen: I’ll collect money for a gift and do we want to do lunch or morning tea?
Natasha: I’ll put in some money, how much?
Jennet: I thought the meeting was at that branch, not this one.
Karen: It was moved. Shall I book for morning tea?
Nadia: I’m happy to buy a gift, send the money to me
Tony: Next and last meeting at HQ for morning tea and farewells.
Karen: So since the meeting is at my branch, how many shall I book for? Send money please.
Crystal: I’m confused, who are we sending the money to?
Ah yes, the BITS staff… dynamos one and all.
A while back I bought a new printer because my old printer was refusing to print in any colour other than blue. Or maybe it was yellow. Either way. It was a very wizz bang sort of a printer with great photoquality prints blah blah. First issue I had was the newness of the model meant there wasn’t a shonky ink refill available - HP shells out full price for brand name ink with gritted teeth. Still, says HP, at least I can be sure the prints will be of excellent quality. (It’s not a HP printer, by the way. I learned my lesson with my HP scanner… a whole other Hardware Nightmare story).
Print quality, no matter how I played with the settings, was never brilliant but since I don’t often print photos I wasn’t too fussed - even through the printer did a better job on plain paper than photo paper GRR. Today I found a pack of 4 x 6 photo paper I bought a while ago and hadn’t used. “OK,” I thought to myself, “Self, I’m going to print some photos! Yay! Gosh, how exciting” (Yes, my internal monologue is very 1930s British Movie, you have a problem with that?). A quick trawl of my hard drive came up with a photo of one of my bestest TSO Friends Buttercup. I set the image resolution for quality, cropped the image for pleasingness to the eye and changed all the other relevent settings for top quality photo printing. First print was a little grainy like all the prints have been. Hmm. Faffed some more settings, jiggled the image a little, printed it again and it was better. Not perfect, not as good as it should be, but better. Aha! I thought, AHA!
In order to gain maximum quality goodness and after close inspection of the prints, I ran a nozzle check to see if my nozzles were clogged with… gloop. They were! Aha! Had those cleaned. Also ran a print head alignment and GOSH but those print heads were all wonky, so I sorted that out and loaded a new, glossy bit of paper into the printer. I wandered off while it printed and came back to find….
the WORST quality print it has ever been my misfortune to see. It kind of looks like Buttercup… from a distance of around 400 feet. This is very annoying to me because I know it is possible to get great prints, just not from this piece of crap I own. I won’t name the brand, it was one I swore I’d never buy a couple of years back LMAO