my favorite kind of workday

I have just learned that a thing I've been trying to do -- all morning and a fair amount of yesterday afternoon -- cannot be done with the resources available to me, which is why I've been failing to do it. The person I begged for help right after she'd left yesterday, who is miraculously in today, told me to stop trying and let her do it.

I do enjoy vindication.

dream theater

I dreamed I was officiating at a curling tournament of some consequence, and my office-mate, of all people, was running one of my clocks. The coach of one of the teams on that sheet was very interferey, and I kept calling up to see why the clock had stopped, why it was still running, or why -- in one memorable instance -- both clocks were running (memorable because on the official clocks we use for Important Events, it is not possible for both clocks to run at once). The coach had kept on asking my office-mate/timer to stop the clock for timeouts and a variety of other things, which she is not allowed to do, and I finally said to the timer, Look, only the players can call a timeout, and the clock stops for one minute, and it resumes when the minute is up or when they throw the next rock, and the coach has nothing to do with you; and then when I went to try to fix the time, give a team back a minute or so that they'd been charged incorrectly, both clocks were running and then one of them wouldn't stop and the whole thing was a disaster.

I was assisted in all of this by ES from Utica, whom flt is going up to work with in a couple of weeks. The news from Utica was that they had been supposed to get a brand-new facility, a big domed arena thing with special space for curling, but the plans had fallen through -- though not before, being Utica, they'd had t-shirts and sweatshirts made, so now they had all this paraphernalia for a building that didn't exist.



So this morning I e-mailed the Green Bay people about scheduling practices. It's definitely time to get on the ball with that. :-)

imbalance

Something may be really wrong with me, y'all. You've seen the rotten mood I've been in the past couple of days -- not like there's much that's new about that, I guess, except that I normally just don't like people very much; I don't normally have this kind of hatred in my heart. (I have recently described myself as a "friendly misanthrope", and I think that's actually shockingly accurate.)

And then today I really thought I was doing better. The thing at work wasn't my fault when it wasn't going well, and it got done anyway, and there weren't too many people around, and that was fine. I made a miscalculation w/r/t when the paycheck was coming in vs. when the visa bill was going out, but I can take one day of red ink as a reminder not to get above myself. That didn't ruin my mood at all. I even left a little early and smiled at everyone on the way out.

So I was kind of surprised when, having arrived at Whole Foods for the half of my errands I didn't do yesterday, and having gone in through the in door, to be met by a woman with a cart coming out through the in door, she physically stopped me as I was scooting by her and scolded me not to break her flowers, which I pointed out I was nowhere near, and she said yes I was, and all I could do was push past her (not so much as touching her flowers) and point out that this was the in door -- actually, none of this is the surprising thing. The surprising thing was that it was half an hour ago, and it cost me about fifteen seconds, which I had to spare so wtf, and I am still FUMING. I wouldn't actually ever follow her through the parking lot and deliberately throw her flowers on the ground and stomp on them, or even rip their little flower heads off, but I would, and I'm a little sorry I didn't, say WELL IF YOU ARE GOING TO INSIST ON EXITING THROUGH THE ONLY DOOR THAT OPENS FROM THE OUTSIDE, YOU NEED TO LEARN TO GET OUT OF THE WAY OF PEOPLE USING IT AS AN ENTRANCE, AND THEN YOU WOULDN'T EVEN BE WORRIED ABOUT YOUR UGLY FUCKING FLOWERS, AND GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME.

I broke out a square of the chocolate I'd just bought when I got to the car, because I felt sure a little instant blood sugar couldn't hurt, and I felt a little better, but I was still angry all the way home and hit the horn unreasonably hard at the IDIOT in front of me who started to go when our light turned green and then stopped again, so it's not the thing where we get impatient with people who take longer than we'd like to get their foot off the brake and onto the gas -- not that he didn't deserve the horn, mind, but I should have done the "ahem" horn and not, you know, hurt my hand smacking the thing.

A little better now, but honest to god, where did the extreme spike of fury come from? I'm not actually joking about something possibly being wrong. Not ready to call someone yet, but I do want to have all this written down in case the mood doesn't even out when the holidays are over (or it doesn't turn out to be because ellen_fremedon isn't here to act as a foil, because normally she is here, and next to her I'm a ray of bloody sunshine).