"Abandon all work, ye who enter here"

Also, check your youthful enthusiasm at the door, sweethearts, 'cause it ain't gonna do you no good nohow.

What have I gotten accomplished today? Not a damn thing worth a damn. This frustrates me, because I had plans. I had a list. I had intentions. So much for that. I've spent the day trying (and failing) to find a free program that will allow me to map zip codes by radius, as part of the survey project I've been doing for weeks. Then I watched as two people called five times between them, to ask me which department I worked for. I knew why they were calling, and I let their under-worked butts go right to voicemail. Then, one of them crossed that tenuous line between downright annoying and outright "oh-hell-no" territory and called my husband to try and get the answer from him. Oh. Hell. No. I called one of them back and told them, that if determining what department I actually work for was of some grave concern to them that they need to call me multiple times a day (and so nice to know that they have time to make something that trivial a priority in their day), then to take it up with HR, and if further clarification was needed to address it with my bosses. Both of them. The HR receptionist then called the other fool, and told them to knock it off. What is wrong with people? Sure, my department info is all messed up, but that is my business, to be resolved between me and the two departments I support. I don't want people with hero-complexes and chips on their shoulders making a big issue out of this, simply because they're freaked because the minutes of their stupid staff meeting that nobody attends have the wrong department info from when I got the employee award. Obviously, they don't have anything better to do, but guess what - some of us do, and no one else cares about your meeting minutes. Especially me.

Going to my sister-in-law's birthday pizza-cake fiesta after work. Mmmm, pizza-cake.

The myth of the silver lining

I think this is the fourth day in a row that we've gotten rain? And it's supposed to be like this through most of the week. I had coffee this morning with no sugar (how is it possible to have a building rife with seven different kinds of candy, but not a grain of plain old table sugar to be found?). The weather is conspiring to make my hair a frazzled mess, and I broke my only decent hair clip somehow this morning, so now my hair is being secured with a very utilitarian rubber band.

I spent part of my morning trying to explain to someone how our online ledger report program is different than their Excel worksheet that they used to track their expenses, and why the information between them didn't match. Then I learned (as I had suspected all along) that this person I was trying to educate didn't even know the first thing about formatting formulas into Excel. That one little skill is pretty fundamental to even the most basic clerical position around here, and would probably explain why their math was wrong - reason number two why the ledger reports showed a different balance than their incredibly error-riddled hand-crafted worksheet. This took me a horrifying hour and a half of attempting to explain. I swear to you, a couple of times it felt like I was trying to communicate to a barnyard animal, for all the comprehension I saw in that person's eyes. This is accounting. Not rocket science!

Now I'm engaged in trying to find a decent, workable (FREE) online mapping tool. I want a radius grid, and I want it to be presentable. I'm not having a lot of luck, and I freaking refuse to pay for some crap program that some kid mishmashed together out of a Google hack.

I love how my coworker comes in late, goes to play handball in the gym for an undetermined amount of time, takes twenty minutes to change in her office, disappears for long periods where no one can find her, and often leaves a few minutes early. Because that is effectiveness in action. She'll have a promotion and pay raise within six months - you mark my words.

Oh, and by the tone of these questions I'm being faced with today, I work with some seriously stupid people. That's a given, though, right?

Wheeeze

Spent the afternoon and evening at my sister-in-law's house celebrating Mother's Day with my husband's family. She and her husband have three cats and two dogs, which all seem to be in the process of shedding. My nose is itchy, my throat is scratchy, and I am covered in cat hair and Jack Russell Terrier fur. I like pets as much as the next person (obviously - I have my own), but when all of the furniture has to be covered in sheets and and there's a layer of cat fur covering the top of the stove (because a nervous cat decided to crouch there to get out of the way of all of the activity in the kitchen), it's a bit much, even to me.

Speaking of cats, though, my husband and I recently realized that we hadn't seen the neighbor's pack of semi-strays for a while. One of the other neighbors had threatened to put down traps, and I guess she meant it. So no cats fighting on my porch and carousing and depositing kittens in my yard...

But the rabbit population on the block now seems to be booming.

The rule of three

I am a supersitious person. This comes as a surprise to some people, because of my sometimes mind-boggling insistance on a life defined by the word "practical". But I've believed in the Rule of Three since I was a kid - meaning that events in one's life often come in a series of three. For example, bad news. Over the last couple of weeks my husband and I have both received bad news relating to family (actually in my case, it's complicated because it's "former" family, really), so we've got two, and are waiting on the third. Hopefully, whatever rounds out the three is a minor thing. This is part of the reason that I'm not a big fan of odd numbers - as a child I was obsessed with symmetry and eveness, and anything not cleanly divisible into even parts or anything off center really bothered me. I could write endlessly about the bizarre workings of my mind when I was a little kid. I think things have normalized a little in adulthood, though. But I still see portents of doom practically everywhere...that much hasn't changed.

Of course, the rule also can be applied to positive things as well. I have been making plans to go to Disneyworld with M at the end of the month, and my husband and I will be taking our son to go bowling later this week with a young newlywed couple we've become friends with, plus I think my in-laws might be planning a get-together this weekend, so there's three for the month of May.

More ensuing panic evident

According to the local news, three schools in the neighboring county are closed due to "probable" - but as of yet unconfirmed - cases of H1N1. I don't want to rant over this, but I feel I must. As I told a coworker today, the influenza virus is biological force to be reckoned with. No matter what we do to combat it, all of our best efforts are for naught, since almost every regular flu season presents a slightly different strain of the virus. Of course, once most people catch the virus and recover from it, they have developed a level of immunity to that strain. Which is why our flu "vaccines" contain small amounts of the virus, in order to innocultate our immune system so that if we catch the flu at all, it will be less severe. And at this point, what are the signs that this new strain is more pathologically virulant or more deadly than your typical influenza that puportedly kills thousands every year? According to members of my family, my Great-Great Grandfather died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1818 -1819. At that time, for many, basic sanitation was a luxury and there were large numbers of people living clustered in poverty-driven unhygienic conditions - just like the majority of the cases of death from H1N1 in Mexico (the news doesn't seem to be in too much of a hurry to be very forthright with that little gem of info, does it?). All we can do is be preventative (some basic hygiene, people!), and if you're sick for God's sake stay home! Closing schools won't keep people from going to the grocery store or kids from going to the mall, where they could unknowingly pass it around.