Eventful day:

(a) Had a conversation with Christine about how to decline dates and if it’s at all possible to do without getting stalked or murdered (she says this is why she cultivates resting bitch face at the gym) and she said she’d ask her husband about it.

Let me tell you his suggestions:

1. Basically do it like a job offer: “Thank you for your interest, but we’re going with another candidate.”
2. Have a supply of cat pics in which the cats are dressed in clothes and show them to the guy instead of answering. He had very specific suggestions as to how the cats should look all alike or at least similar.

WTF, y’all. It was funny, but I can’t deliver THAT with a straight face.

I sent this information to Redhead Sarah later and she responded with ten crying/smiling cat emojis.

In other news regarding Christine, she is not going to be sharing the same office space with the sharks as yet. Whew to that.

(b) There is an extremely frequent flier at work....I seriously have stories about this dude that I will never be able to tell publicly because they are SO specific. Let’s just say he’s like a cat who wants in when he’s out and out when he’s in and is taking the Extreme Slow Path to his goals and making ridiculous life choices that impede him in such. He was the bane of my dead coworker’s existence. Anyway, New Boss had to deal with this guy emailing her over and over and over and over and over and over (“note that my replies are getting shorter, and shorter, and shorter....”) and then she was all, “Is this like what Jen has to deal with with (“favorite” population)?” Yes, yes it is.

(c) New Boss sent in a giant list of complaints for me about all the shit that is broken, yay, and also said we are instituting a new “no international mail if you refuse to pay for shipping” policy. I don’t just mean our new “we’re not going to waste our time mailing these out if they are going to be flushed down the toilet of mail,” as in, we’re gonna announce it publicly. HUZZAH.

This last conversation was brought on by the first of the people who didn’t have their documents wasted finally sending in her complaints as to where her document is. (And then another complaint came in later, same population.) My boss said she’d take care of this one and I asked how she responded and she ended up sending “Yes, we still have it, if we mail it for free you will NEVER RECEIVE IT, here are various ways to receive it that are more likely to be reliable, and here is how much it costs you when it’s lost in the mail, and here’s a copy of the email we sent to everyone announcing that this was an issue in case you forgot about it.” It delighted me and I immediately adapted it as a template, but throwing in even more information about just how expensive it is to replace these things. Seriously, it’s a lot of damn money.

(d) Another coworker (not in my unit, but a lovely person) has decided to change careers and take up programming. Good for her. I sent her a congratulatory email and she said she’d miss my outfits. That’s both fun and notable and at the same time...just my outfits?

I wish I had something else I wanted to do with my life. I am not smart enough to program, though.

(e) I had to train one of the sharks (the one now doing my old job) and the boss of the Shark Tank in how to deal with microfilm today. HOOOOOO BOY. At least High Horse wasn’t around so I didn’t have to deal with him. Poor ST boss was all enthusiastic to learn new things, and then I had to show him the following...*

*The shark seems to be in Goth depressed mood of late even more than usual, I’m not even sure how fazed she was by the whole thing. Not happy about it, sure, but not like, crushed like her poor boss.

1. Our storage area, which is borrowed from another unit, is filled with junk from the unit that owns it and they literally blocked our access to a lot of stuff. We also need a stepstool in there because all of us are too short to reach the cabinet at the top that had the record we needed. Except there is literally no room for a stepstool to fit in there. I pointed out that while I am able to blindly reach up from behind and grab blindly until I find something, I am in no way able to put anything back into the cabinet, which is why a bunch of reels are stacked on the top of it.

Added bonus is that ST boss is the safety coordinator. I’ve never bothered to report this shit before because (a) what good would it do, and (b) since it’s “not our space” and we cannot get any more storage space than there, I don’t know if there’s anything he could do about it. Well, up to him now to make that decision to pursue it or not. Have fun with that.

2. Luckily for them, the record they wanted was easy to find within the tall cabinet, i.e. right at the front. I showed them that we can’t get to the records from the 60’s/70’s because of stuff blockage, and the records from the 80’s were thrown willy nilly into boxes with bizarre labeling and GOOD LUCK FINDING ANYTHING IN THAT.

3. I warned them that reels may be missing or break while you use them or be scanned blurrilly, so you may not be able to find the record at all.

4. I showed them how the machine worked (it cooperated today, so they got lucky, and the record wasn’t unusable, and what they wanted was actually on it) and they were horrified at how illegible things are anyway. “You can read that? How are you supposed to read that?”

I do enjoy it when others realize the absolute horrors of what I deal with at work for the first time. Meanwhile I am totally blase and burned out and “yup, this is how it goes here, all the time.”

Again: have fun dealing with that! At least with my “back to my old job” change, I will only rarely have to use the microfilm.

(f) I get that Tigress is super overloaded dealing with every special snowflake situation, and she’s almost entirely the only one who can deal with them and she says she doesn’t have time to train anyone else on them. I get that she wants me to help out with the group e-mail box and do the things I do know how to do. That’s fine, but I really wish she wouldn’t like, try to keep tabs on what I am doing throughout the day and nag me to go check the e-mail box like every 15 minutes. It makes her panic contagious and I do not want that. This is not typical behavior for her and she used to be chill. Sigh. Also, geez, after I finish my workload, THEN I do hers, because I have to prioritize like that. I’ll get to it when I can. Until then, cool it with the pressuring...I wish I could say that.

This is especially awkward since I am having more ebb and flow going on with my current job--which is to say, I’m no longer in Busy Season and I have about cleared out everything else I can do around here until the next giant project comes in or more crap in the e-mail box. So she’s overloaded and panicked and meanwhile, I’m kinda like “well, I’ve literally worked AHEAD of schedule on stuff and cleared out everything until I hear back from the work gods....hope nobody notices I don’t have much to do at the moment.” I should have the Next Giant Projects come in within the next 1-3 days, but I’m on vacation for two of them so that’s awkward.

(g) I’m still finding hearts.(Which admittedly makes more sense right now than the rest of the year....) I found another one yesterday that I think is off a light set, and I found a fancy heart rock (with Hawaiian flowers painted on the heart, even) today when I walked out of work.

Funny thing: I was thinking earlier in the day that I found a heart rock early on when the “finding hearts” thing started and didn’t realize what was going on until I was going through my photo albums on the phone. My boss has a rock with a heart on it that Lioness gave her and she wanted to keep, and of course I saw that earlier today while hanging in her office and was thinking, “I’ve found rocks all over campus, but so far I haven’t actually wanted to keep one.”

So now I’ve got one :)

(h) Turns out one of my coworkers is learning Reiki healing and brought some kind of sound gadget with her today, which my boss and I had try out on us. It was fun. Nice sound to it, relaxing vibration on the head. I said she should use that one on everybody, and she said this is how she’s so calm at work all the time.

(i) And finally, I was going to do laundry tonight, but the new laundry setup where we have to use an app to pay for and reserve and turn on the machines? Crashed on me like fifteen times in a row, within five seconds of opening it each time. I tried to report the crashes and guess what, that crashed too. I uninstalled and reinstalled and that did no good. All I could do was to leave a mean one-star app review. God knows complaining to management isn’t going to do any good and it’s not like they can fix an app anyway. I guess I am going to have to go to an actual laundromat in the future, dammit. But after fighitng with that app for most of an hour (it lost my password too...and then had issues sending me another one, so that was like 20 minutes alone), fuck it.

(j) So now I am watching The Flash, and absolutely loving “Love Is A Battlefield.” Amunet and her gold boyfriend are adorable and I’m loving New Mirror Iris, who is quite together and badass.

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