It's been a bit light on content around here this week hasn't it... what basically amounts to a meme a day... well, not really just this week...To be honest, I'm feeling a little "light on" myself just at the moment... or maybe it's more "lights off"... I dunno...
This may very well develop into a big fat whinge, which, given my mood, is likely... so you can either get out now while the getting is good, or come along for the ride. I know, I know... I'm working, it pays the rent and, in theory, the bills, and it means that I can take Ma to see Pirates 3 in Gold Class for her birthday, and buy her a present or two, and probably take her out to lunch or dinner somewhere nice... and it gets me out of the house, and takes me away from my increasingly annoying neighbours... and for all these things I am grateful, but holy crap.
I'm having one of those days where nothing is going quite right... and that never helps my mood. I got up five minutes earlier this morning (making it 5:40am... urgh), but it was around about the same time as usual by the time I managed to get out of the house for my walk (which is a trial in itself, with the mornings being cold and pitch black and so very, very, very early and all).... then I managed to miss the "early" bus by mere seconds (although I've actually been pushing my luck with that the last three days, since each time I've only managed to catch it my pure fluke, and due to dashing across the road to jump on just before the bus takes off again), which meant I had to wait for a later one (granted it was only a few minutes later, but it's the principal of the thing)... then, when I stopped off at the ATM to get some money out (HELLO PAYDAY! The one bright spot in my day thus far, other than when it was time to leave work finally), whereas normally there wouldn't have been anybody there, today, when I was running a little behind my self imposed schedule, there has to be three other people who all want to use the ATM (okay, so it was obviously payday for them too, but still)...
Lunch was an experience today too... not as bad as yesterday's effort, when I had to dash up to the Mall (which essentially took up my whole 30 minute lunchbreak) to drop something off for Ma (long story, mostly dull), and grabbed a piece of vegetarian pizza on the way back... vegetarian being basically tomato, and, well, I don't know what else, mostly tomato I guess, but very much meaning lacking in any kind of cheese... meaning that by the time I was finished trying to eat the damn thing and walk back to work at the same time the bottom of the bag ended up with more of the pizza topping in it than I think I'd eaten. But today I decided not to do the Subway thing (which is what I've been doing pretty much ever day for the last three weeks), but instead, being payday and all, to try the snazzy new "MYO" (aka "Make Your Own") place just down the road from where I'm working.
And, as with any new system that I'm exposed to, I pretty much froze up and had no idea what the hell I was doing in there, so my sandwich, while perfectly edible (pastrami, Swiss cheese, baby spinach and tomato with fruit chutney on rye), it was essentially me sticking with the most familiar looking things just because I had no idea what was going on and didn't want to risk exploring properly or asking dumb questions and possibly ending up looking like a complete and total wanker. Plus, while I'm sure the store will be beautiful in the warmer months, with the big windows and doorway and all the shade and whatever, but at the moment, winter, chilly, a huge wide open doorway, on the shady side of the street... less conducive to better (or, more accurately, warmer) dining.
Work isn't even being interesting or distracting or time consuming... and, for the record, I never, ever, ever, ever want to hear the name of any regional towns around the state or the names of their schools again... I swear they're coming out of my eyeballs and I'm over it now.
I'm not sure what frustrates me more about the whole work situation... the fact that I'm essentially sitting there twiddling my thumbs just at present (I ended up leaving an hour early yesterday, since I'd just flat out run out of things I could legitimately do, plus I was bored with attempting to look busy and finding things to do on my own, so I just called it a day... and then this morning, knowing that I was at the thumb twiddling stage yesterday, I wasn't given any kind of direction or an actual task to keep me occupied... oh, no, wait, I lie, I was... something that took me literally five minutes to do, and which could have been done by, like, an untrained chimp with a copy of Word... and, for a large chunk of the afternoon I actually worked on this post before emailing it home to myself just before quitting time... oh god, now I think I'm lost in this bracket... where the hell was I?) or the fact that if I was still working upstairs then the whole design and look of this site would have gone a different way and wouldn't look quite so craptastic...
Okay, I don't know that second one with any degree of certainty (since I never try and underestimate the rampant stupidity of people when it comes to their web/graphic design choices... and don't even get me started on the whole information architecture side of things, and the whopping great clue that I think they're in need of in that arena), but I would have given it the old college try... and there's already an ever growing list of things design-wise that I'm going to mention because, to me, they just look crappy and, to be honest, amateur.
Actually, I think one situation is exacerbating the other... if I was busy doing content and coding things left, right and center, then I wouldn't have so much time to pay attention to the design (it would still annoy me, but I wouldn't dwell)... and if I was still working upstairs then I could quite happily put the phone down, or walk away from a meeting, or close my browser window and then be able to throw up my hands and go PFFFFFFFTWHOGIVESACRAP....
Plus, the guy from upstairs who is handling the "tech" end of this project, while very technically proficient, isn't half the designer that he seems to think he is (and I would know, I used to work with him).
Add to that the fact that I KNOW that if the mob I'm working for actually had gotten all their proverbial little chickens in a row and had actually sorted out all the content and had everything ready to go then I could have come in here and polished the whole damn website off in around a week, two weeks tops (less good for me financially, but possibly much less stressful).
If I'm putting all my cards on the table (which, by this point in the post, is pretty much all I have left), I just miss working with the reprobates upstairs in the World of Web Admin... sure there were elements of thumb twiddling up there too, and I know you can't always go back to a place and expect to fit in with the current crew and have it all be rainbows and sunshine flavoured lollipops (did anyone else's brain just take that to a scary visual place? No? Just me? Okay... moving on then...) but when I was there and everything was working well, I was part of the team and I had a purpose (not to mention an actual
title) and felt valuable (sometimes), and however much I might have complained about various and sundry people (both in and out of the team) when I was up there, well, I still miss it.
I had a brief run in with somebody who was part of our wider "team" ( but who I didn't actually work directly with) yesterday... it's funny actually, of all of my former co-workers he's actually the one I think I miss the most, he's in the top two certainly... and when we saw each other we stopped really close together, and I think had one of us been a chick, or he'd also been a 'mo, then there could have been some huggage... cute, but a weird moment... I'm half tempted to email him and see if he wants to go to lunch sometime next week, catch up on some goss or whatever, but I dunno... see my earlier comment about not wanting to look like a wanker...
Speaking of "co-workers"... I also get the distinct impression that the people I'm working with currently just think I'm a freak... I mean, I am a freak, but I just get that feeling that they don't quite know how to take me, or that they're humouring me, or something. Actually it's not all of them (although currently there are only the three of them), but the pair I work most closely with... most specifically the woman I report to. Maybe it's just my usual sense of paranoia, I dunno, but I actually don't think it is for a change...
I'm just really sick of that whole building... I'd go and work for Google in Sydney (I was killing time reading about jobs with Google earlier), but you need a Bachelor of Science or a Bachelor of Arts just to work for them as an Admin Assistant... *rolls eyes and pokes out tongue at Google*
Okay... enough with the pity party... put the party hats and the noisemakers away and let's see if I can't list some good stuff... YAAAYs to counteract all these BOOOOOs...
YAAAYs :
- Payday... always a yay
- Seeing Pirates 3 in Gold Class on Saturday (all two and three quarter hours of it)
- The high likelihood of "Boom-Chika-Boom" action on Sunday (I'm planning a trip to the sauna, it being the last Sunday of the month and all)
- Finding a half full 75ml bottle of Joop! What About Adam (retail value $75, "discounted" value $44, so I've got somewhere between $37.50 and $22 worth) Eau de Toilette Spray on the footpath outside my building yesterday morning (Finders Keepers and all that!), and discovering that I quite like the fragrance (coriander, mint, freesia, amber, citrus and lavender) on me
- Having Seasons 1-4 of The West Wing still to watch (I ended up starting to watch Season 5 before I bought the other ones, which was silly, but part of the reason I did end up buying all the other Seasons)
- BIC Velocity mechanical pencils with a 0.9mm lead... I love me some mechanical pencil action!
- "Urban Suitage" aka cute dudes in business outfits
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1 comment:
A different industry and different environment, but a lot of that could describe my job too.
I am so not commenting on the lollipop. ;)
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