This is what the back of the Consulting Company's building looked like at 7am today. (The picture was taken on Sunday, but the snow hadn't been shoveled yet). Most of the streets in Cambridge weren't much better. I found it interesting that my little suburban town had better-plowed streets than the city. Maybe it had to do with traffic flow, or budget restrictions or some other factor. I just know that all the slipping and sliding didn't occur until I got off the highway.
Luckily, I didn't have to slog through the three feet of snow to get into work. We have a garage underneath the building for which I pay a ridiculously low sum every week (one of the perks of working nights and weekends, for the most part). Though I'd worried that the commute would be long, and left early because of that fear. I guess most people elected not to go into work today, because the roads were mostly empty, and I got to work at 7am. I checked voicemail, and there was a message from one of the designers, saying that her day care had closed due to the weather and that she wouldn't be coming in. Since most daycare centers had posted the fact that they'd be closed as of the 6 o'clock news on Saturday, I wished she would have called earlier, so I could have left a message for those checking in for a true "snow day" to perhaps come in earlier. I left a message to the general group, saying that there would be only two people in the department until 11am. (Two others had already taken the day as vacation time, well in advance of the storm.)
Right after I hung up the phone, it rang. It was Walter, telling me that he couldn't get his car out of the driveway. So it was down to me. Alone. In the office. By myself.
Yay!
Nothing was scheduled. The large document from yesterday never appeared, so I spent the time cranking tunes on the stereo (nobody there to tell me how lame my Enya CDs are...oh wait, can one "crank" an Enya CD? I think it's against the laws of physics), learning how to work with Portfolio (an image database program that I downloaded for a free trial), and designing the cover for that document that I hadn't heard back from the consultant about. She ran in around 8am, frantic because she thought I'd be mad at her for not responding to my e-mails and voicemails. I told her that I wasn't mad, that I was worried she'd ruin her meeting if she didn't have those booklets. She said the booklets weren't due until the next day, approved my covers, and then ran off with an armload of binders.
Now, the printing room is just far away enough to make it impossible to hear the phone in the office, but since it was slow, I chanced printing the covers one at a time and binding the booklets after the covers printed. The foil printer for the covers takes forever to get through just one page (it's a multi-layered kind of printing), so I'd set a cover into the printer, hit "print" on the computer, run back into the office and fiddle around with Portfolio for a few minutes, then grab one packet, run back to the printing room, bind the packet (the perfect binding machine is fast), and print another cover.
Why didn't I print 10 covers all in a row? Because the foil printer jams if you put in more than one page at a time. Efficient!
Eventually Dan came in (he was doing reviews from home with the European designers, which meant an early-morning start for him), but he wasn't much help because he still had two more phone reviews to give. I now know the details of everything those two did during the year, because Dan did the reviews on speakerphone, and he tends to talk very loudly on speakerphone. Not that it was interesting. I would have preferred to hear, "You suck! You'll be fired if you screw up like that again!" Instead it was all, "Goals for last year, blah, blah, blah. Goals for this year, blah, blah, blah. Personal developmentzzzzzzzzzzzz..........."
Finally, someone arrived with a document. She's fairly new, and doesn't know PowerPoint at all (which is usually an advantage, as the folks who claim to know PowerPoint give us more crap than those who admit they don't). Her submission was very straightforward, but she ripped the pages out of her notepad with some degree of violence, because they were torn right down the middle. Rather than rewrite it, she just brought it in in that condition, so I spent a good amount of time with the Scotch Tape. Next time, she'll probably bring in a sketch she did with her lipstick on a napkin. At least her handwriting was good.
Eleven o'clock rolled around, and Jan showed up. She had no trouble getting in, so I guess it's just the day staff that's a bunch of wimps. Mark Z. arrived shortly thereafter, hearing my cry for help. ("If you left the message overnight, I would have come in at 7:30," he said. "If I knew I'd be alone last night, I would have left a message," I said.) Of course, nothing came into the department for a good hour or so, so we mostly sat around looking at one another while Dan continued his loud speakerphone conversations ("Total compensation package, blah, blah, blah...")
And then the most awesome thing at work happened to me. Jessica and John (who are husband and wife) arrived, and Dan finished up his conversation. He walked out of his office, and John accosted him about Jessica feeling like crap for not having understood about the newly-proclaimed "work from home if it snows" policy.
"What kind of shit are you trying to pull, Dan?" he said. "There's three feet of snow on the ground, and you don't call a snow day? If a fucking state of emergency doesn't mean a snow day, then what the fuck does?!?"
Dan tried to reason with him. "Trust me, John, I wasn't trying to pull any sort of 'shit'. We have laptops now, which means that we can work from home if it gets bad outside."
"But you don't let Jessica work from home when she wants to, just when it's convenient for you. That's total bullshit."
"Trust me--"
"That's the fucking point. I don't trust you. I never have."
And the conversation ended.
It wasn't awesome because I particularly agreed with John (we do have laptops, and if we prove that we can work from home during an emergency situation, we'll probably be able to work from home more consistently), or that I wanted to see Dan get some sort of comeuppance (the man just gave me a very nice bonus and said great things about me in my review). It was awesome because interesting things just don't happen in my office. We're a diverse group of people, but there's never any real drama. And this was drama. Spanish-channel soap opera-style drama. Drunken fistfights outside a bar drama. Wig-tearing transvestite catfighting drama.
And the most awesome thing of all? Nothing happened after that! Nobody got reprimanded, nobody got called into the office. Things just went along like normal, as if these kinds of heated, cuss-filled statements were made to the boss every day. Hell, if that's the way it's going to be, I'm going to come in with a smile and a hearty, "Fuck y'all!" to everyone in the room every day I work. It'd be fun. "Design department. What the fuck do you want?" It has a nice ring to it.
I knew I couldn't keep all this bottled up, so I called Laurie and asked her if she wanted to grab some dinner. Once I got to her house, I spilled the beans on everything that happened. I never have any stories to tell, so this was exciting for me. Laurie was suitably impressed, and a little sad that she wasn't there to witness it.
We went to Hilltop and I had chopped sirloin with gravy (yep, that diet is starting off really well) and she had strawberry shortcake (yep, that worrying about diabetes is going really well). We talked incessantly for over an hour. It might have been the caffeine. I'm totally falling off the wagon on that one. I no longer drink over two liters of caffeinated soda a day, but I'm indulging more than I should.
She then dropped a mini-bomb on me. It seems as though her mother wants to help her out with debt, so that maybe she can save up to buy a house. She offered to let Laurie move in with her.
Whoa.
Laurie and her mom have a very strange relationship, to say the least. Her mother can go from perfectly nice to an insane person at the drop of a hat, and she's very abusive to Laurie when she gets like that. She'll go for weeks without talking to Laurie because of some innocuous slight (one time it was because Laurie hand-delivered her Mother's Day cards rather than mail them), or invite her over only to tell her to "get out of [her] house!"
But Laurie's mom is also very lonely, I think, and might do well to have someone living with her for awhile. She's been "good" for awhile now (well, since Christmas), and seems to really want to help.
It'd be great for Laurie to get out of debt. She has student loans that aren't budging, and credit card debt, and she has her own apartment, which leaves her broke a lot of the time. So if she could pay off her debts, she'd be in great shape to purchase a house, which she desperately wants to do.
But I'm worried about the idea. What happens if her mom decides to kick Laurie out of the house? What happens if they start to wear on one another's nerves, and it's a living hell for Laurie?
Then again, there is the money factor. She said she's considering it. I told her to consider it for some time before making up her mind. I don't know what I'd do in her situation.
We then hit Target, so I could pick up a new alarm clock. My old one keeps perfect time, but it flashes as if the power has gone out. I've changed the time, but it still keeps flashing. It's pretty distracting when I'm trying to get to sleep.
They had one on-sale that has a CD player in it, with the option of waking up to a CD and going to sleep to a CD. I don't know that I could be woken up with the same music I'd listen to to go to sleep (see Enya above).
Still, I almost always wake up before my alarm goes off these days, so it's a nice feature to have.
In fact, I think I'm going to test it out right now.
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Patrick's Daily Journal