I am not speaking Esperanto.

I had a minor freakout at the end of this week. Without delving into specifics, our HR department is severely pissed at one of the departments in my area for their shoddy hiring processes, and it's now blossomed into some kind of minor disaster. I spent all day Friday providing information to HR and explaining at least three times how this all happened. The big boss personally attended to getting people paid...sort of - but it's still all screwed up and they will owe the money back (it's like a loan), and I heard at least twice today that this was an "accounting issue" and the supervisor of these employee who took a whole pay period, several e-mails and two skipped meetings (scheduled by him and skipped by him) to get the paperwork back I needed "should not be held responsible". So...let me see if I have this right - even though I'm the one who sent the countless notifications and did my best to follow up and get this paperwork back to fix this before it even became a problem, and even though I don't oversee these employees or their supervisor, somehow I am accountable for this? I can't tell you how many times in the past two days I have been compelled to hold my temper and not just quit on the spot. I do have bills to pay, after all.


My job. Sometimes it sucks in completely new and undiscovered ways. I really think it's about time for a new one. I think I'll start looking...now.


The only thing I had to eat all day at work was half a cup of coffee. I'm not sure how it happened that I didn't stop to eat lunch - most of the later part of the day is remembered as a blur of semi-panic and seething frustration on my part. And there was demolition happening outside my office door today. Some work stations were removed. We are now the proud owners of a $900 table that isn't even real wood and a chair and couch from upstairs in a very ugly shade of blue. We lost two functional spaces and replaced them with a place to read a magazine and have a little chat. I can't say I see an improvement here.

Maybe if I spent all day sitting on my butt and talking - oh, pardon, I mean networking! - this would be a useful thing. But I have to attend to the mechanizations of our little machine and someone has to put out these fires that never seem to stop popping up, so that couch won't get so much as a second glance from me after today.

I still haven't been sleeping very well. I'm exhausted to the point of almost not being able to function, but I find myself unable to fall sleep until 12:30 - 1:00 at night. I've been getting headaches and heartburn again. I'm really edgy, too, and this is compounded by the fact that my son has lost the ability to discern what an "inside voice" is and has picked up the supremely annoying habit of clapping along to the syllables of his words as he talks - "Mommy can I have a juicebox, please?" = *clap clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap clap* *clap*?

I just found out that the local radio station bowling for charity event I may be going to in October will have Trans Siberian Orchestra performing bowling. A few years ago at my previous job working for a national TV shopping channel I coordinated (i.e. acted as gopher and stage hand during) a show they were doing to sell their latest CD.

David Duchovny...mumble mumble...Celebrity Jeopardy...mumble...
No Sir Sean Connery, but Trebek calls Lynne Redgrave "stupid":



Can you believe my sister-inlaw and her husband have never seen SNL's celebrity Jeopardy skits?? Who ARE these people?

*The audio in the clip below is bad, but they were all like that*