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The Remaining Catch-Up Entry
Rosh Hashanah made this a quiet week, so I can finish catching up. This is all the odds and ends I have been saving up, including several mini-rants. Well, everything except the longer entries I have been planning on the subjects of politics, dating, and social networking.
5773: If it isn't obvious, I wish a happy, healthy and prosperous year to all. I may even manage to mail out cards this weekend.
Storytelling: I was part of A Sampler of Stories at Friendship Heights Village Center on Wednesday night. I had fun telling a personal story, about what I really learned in 6 years of ballet classes. There were two other personal stories and three folk tales, making for an interesting mix. Where else can you hear about Beowulf and the minor traumas of suburban childhood in the same evening.
Now I have to pull together the story I am telling at Better Said Than Done at the end of the month.
Work rant, part 1: If you send out an email to six people asking what their availability is for a meeting on Wednesday or Thursday, you should not then schedule the meeting for Tuesday.
Work rant, part 2: The correct time to close restrooms for cleaning is not during lunch hours or during peak departure times.
Work rant, part 3: When I rule the world, all documents sent for re-review will have all changes (including deletions) clearly marked. If they are sent as Word documents, one can often find this via "track changes," but that is not the case for PDF files.
Work rant, part 4: Why is it that any acronym I don't already know is the one that is missing from the acronym list?
Work rant, part 5: We've been getting new computers with Windows 7 on them. What child thought having a default font size of 8 points was a good idea? I had to change the font size in Outlook in 3 separate places to make my mail readable. And changing the overall display resolution required rebooting. I have things more or less functional now, but this was a waste of my time. (The thing that is not fixable is specific to our set-up. It now takes two steps to log-in, instead of just one. I reserve the right to gripe.)
One of my co-workers, listening to me kvetching about my disdain for Microsoft, said, "this tells me you don't want to learn new things." Uh, no, I love to learn new things, but I want to choose which things I learn. And spending time learning where they moved 28 separate buttons on an application takes away time I could spend learning to read hieroglyphics, which would be infinitely more amusing.
Work rant, part 6: We had a potluck brunch Thursday to "celebrate" our one year anniversary in our new digs. Aside from that hardly being an event to celebrate (small, noisy space and a bad commute for pretty much everyone), this was announced on Wednesday around lunch time. I managed to run into Whole Foods and buy mini-muffins, but with adequate notice, I would have made my famous mixed berry muffins. When I rule the world, all potluck events will have a minimum of one week notice.
Work non-rant: My promotion finally came through.
One final note on work: We got an announcement about a new program for charitable contributions. It included the information that United Way contributions had ceased in February. Maybe I should look at my pay stubs more closely, since I hadn't noticed that.
Why I want to retire: Aside from all the work ranting, the real reasons I want to retire sooner rather than later are: a) the horribleness of commuting to the Land that Transit Forgot, b) the events that I miss because they conflict with work (e.g. a two day symposium on Yiddish radio at the Library of Congress earlier this month), and c) the annoyingness of administrivia, especially this time of year when I am waiting for my badge and CAC renewal paperwork to get done and I have to deal with semi-annual and annual report inputs, in addition to the usual monthly and (two separate) weekly reports.
Celebrity death watch: Hal David wrote pop songs. Raindrops keep falling on his grave. Reverend Sun Myung Moon married his followers off to one another in exchange for having them sell flowers. Actually, until his recent death, I don't think I'd heard anything about Moonies in over a decade.
Note to myself: If I weren't interested in learning things, would I have scrawled the following in the margins of a planner page?
Language
Class
+ Dance
+ Everything Else
Odd ingredients: I was eating lentil-couscous soup for lunch yesterday and noticed that the ingredients list included "pineapple (dried)". Why?
Don't interpret this dream: I had a dream in which I was about to board a flight to Russia and realized I had forgotten to get a visa.
Trivia for the week: There was an interesting article in the Washington Post the other day about race and American Sign Language. Apparently, there is actually such a thing as Black ASL. I suppose it isn't surprising that there would be ethnic "dialects" to ASL, but I admit it's something I had never thought about before.
Baseball: There's always next year for the Red Sox. But the Nationals are in the post-season. I attempted to get NLDS tickets, but ended up waiting in their electronic virtual ticketing line for several minutes only to get a "this game is sold out" message. Sigh. (I could have tried for tickets to games that might not be played, but that isn't really my sort of thing. I hope to have the opportunity to try again for the NLCS and the World Series.)
5773: If it isn't obvious, I wish a happy, healthy and prosperous year to all. I may even manage to mail out cards this weekend.
Storytelling: I was part of A Sampler of Stories at Friendship Heights Village Center on Wednesday night. I had fun telling a personal story, about what I really learned in 6 years of ballet classes. There were two other personal stories and three folk tales, making for an interesting mix. Where else can you hear about Beowulf and the minor traumas of suburban childhood in the same evening.
Now I have to pull together the story I am telling at Better Said Than Done at the end of the month.
Work rant, part 1: If you send out an email to six people asking what their availability is for a meeting on Wednesday or Thursday, you should not then schedule the meeting for Tuesday.
Work rant, part 2: The correct time to close restrooms for cleaning is not during lunch hours or during peak departure times.
Work rant, part 3: When I rule the world, all documents sent for re-review will have all changes (including deletions) clearly marked. If they are sent as Word documents, one can often find this via "track changes," but that is not the case for PDF files.
Work rant, part 4: Why is it that any acronym I don't already know is the one that is missing from the acronym list?
Work rant, part 5: We've been getting new computers with Windows 7 on them. What child thought having a default font size of 8 points was a good idea? I had to change the font size in Outlook in 3 separate places to make my mail readable. And changing the overall display resolution required rebooting. I have things more or less functional now, but this was a waste of my time. (The thing that is not fixable is specific to our set-up. It now takes two steps to log-in, instead of just one. I reserve the right to gripe.)
One of my co-workers, listening to me kvetching about my disdain for Microsoft, said, "this tells me you don't want to learn new things." Uh, no, I love to learn new things, but I want to choose which things I learn. And spending time learning where they moved 28 separate buttons on an application takes away time I could spend learning to read hieroglyphics, which would be infinitely more amusing.
Work rant, part 6: We had a potluck brunch Thursday to "celebrate" our one year anniversary in our new digs. Aside from that hardly being an event to celebrate (small, noisy space and a bad commute for pretty much everyone), this was announced on Wednesday around lunch time. I managed to run into Whole Foods and buy mini-muffins, but with adequate notice, I would have made my famous mixed berry muffins. When I rule the world, all potluck events will have a minimum of one week notice.
Work non-rant: My promotion finally came through.
One final note on work: We got an announcement about a new program for charitable contributions. It included the information that United Way contributions had ceased in February. Maybe I should look at my pay stubs more closely, since I hadn't noticed that.
Why I want to retire: Aside from all the work ranting, the real reasons I want to retire sooner rather than later are: a) the horribleness of commuting to the Land that Transit Forgot, b) the events that I miss because they conflict with work (e.g. a two day symposium on Yiddish radio at the Library of Congress earlier this month), and c) the annoyingness of administrivia, especially this time of year when I am waiting for my badge and CAC renewal paperwork to get done and I have to deal with semi-annual and annual report inputs, in addition to the usual monthly and (two separate) weekly reports.
Celebrity death watch: Hal David wrote pop songs. Raindrops keep falling on his grave. Reverend Sun Myung Moon married his followers off to one another in exchange for having them sell flowers. Actually, until his recent death, I don't think I'd heard anything about Moonies in over a decade.
Note to myself: If I weren't interested in learning things, would I have scrawled the following in the margins of a planner page?
Language
Class
+ Dance
+ Everything Else
Odd ingredients: I was eating lentil-couscous soup for lunch yesterday and noticed that the ingredients list included "pineapple (dried)". Why?
Don't interpret this dream: I had a dream in which I was about to board a flight to Russia and realized I had forgotten to get a visa.
Trivia for the week: There was an interesting article in the Washington Post the other day about race and American Sign Language. Apparently, there is actually such a thing as Black ASL. I suppose it isn't surprising that there would be ethnic "dialects" to ASL, but I admit it's something I had never thought about before.
Baseball: There's always next year for the Red Sox. But the Nationals are in the post-season. I attempted to get NLDS tickets, but ended up waiting in their electronic virtual ticketing line for several minutes only to get a "this game is sold out" message. Sigh. (I could have tried for tickets to games that might not be played, but that isn't really my sort of thing. I hope to have the opportunity to try again for the NLCS and the World Series.)
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Or first thing in the morning. Whenever I walk into A3 (usually around 640a), the men's restroom is closed for servicing.
Work rant, part 3: When I rule the world, all documents sent for re-review will have all changes (including deletions) clearly marked. If they are sent as Word documents, one can often find this via "track changes," but that is not the case for PDF files.
You can't always do this if you are doing master and sub-documents. Track changes screws up sub-document inclusion. (Obviously, that's not your case since they are distributing Word). When folks forget to track changes, I use another useful feature: Compare Documents. You can also compare documents in PDF.
Work non-rant: My promotion finally came through.
Congratulations. My manager walked in Thursday to let me know I got a PRF!
One final note on work: We got an announcement about a new program for charitable contributions. It included the information that United Way contributions had ceased in February. Maybe I should look at my pay stubs more closely, since I hadn't noticed that.
I knew about that (because I enter everything into Quicken). What annoyed me about the new program is you can't see what charities you can support without creating an account at the new service.
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I would like to see this circulated widely and made into a meme on Facebook with appropriate picture of a nineteenth century clerk or a kitten or something. It is the appropriate retort to everyone who insinuates that older workers are by nature resistant to change. I'm not resistant to progress, just to change for the sake of change and new license revenues.
Congratulations on the promotion!
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I don't see any real advantage to charitable contributions via payroll over just making my own direct contributions. The only reason I did United Way was management pressure to do so.
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Overall, I was pretty unimpressed with the choices. I also noticed that the corporate choices were limited to various United Way branches - and did not include the county I live in, though all of the surrounding counties are listed.
Again, I really don't see a reason to donate via this, rather than directly.
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* ($1/wk)
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