Last night's sleep was not exactly a farce, but it wasn't the feel-good blockbuster of the year either.

Work started out with a meeting, which is always my favorite. (It was a decent meeting, as meetings go, but I'm not particularly charmed with things that are tied that tightly to the clock. It's a personal viewpoint.)

Sometimes you reach into your pocket for the phone because you think of something, and you pull out a call from your braintwin. We are due a sit-down fairly shortly because stuff and also things.

There was delicious delicious braised (I think?) goat for lunch. Unfortunately, I did notice that one piece was ... kind of hairy. I set it to the side while Purple and I giggled. Amazingly, no one made "get your goat" jokes.

Today was Pi Day. K argued that since UK dates are different, UK's Pi Day was 22/7, and that 3/14 was American Pi day. This touched off a series of increasingly horrible references.

You'd also think that at a celebration of Pi Day, there would be pie. I found no pie. Others also noticed this.

There was a really awesome moment when I noticed a problem with a binary gender question in a community signup, and it was fixed about 15 minutes later. The bulk of the problem was finding the file that needed edited.

You'd think that people designing buildings would think to include lights where changing the ballast doesn't involve finding a forklift. You'd think that they'd not repeat that mistake in subsequent buildings. Alas.

You'd think that buildings made for a technical company that has a lot of developers with a lot of machines might put more power outlets than that into a two-person office. Perhaps Mr. Mosby needs to get his head out of the 90s.

I need to not stand on all of my feet for more than an hour when I'm already generally tired. #godgivenknees

Therefore, when I got back to my desk, my body was already ready to throw in the towel. I persevered. There was discussion of the lack of pie. I decided to file a ticket requesting pie at the next Pi Day, next year. I came back to a discussion of the types of pie. Someone said that there was fruit, meat, and pizza. But then one person mentioned chocolate, another person mentioned custard, and I mentioned nut (pecan). So we had to think about it. I suggested pizza, dessert, and entree. Mr. Zune was still puzzling over whether a banana cream pie would be a fruit pie or not. "And comedy," I added. Mr. Zune agreed that a banana cream pie is definitely a comedy pie. I shared around Skippy's Squid Pie link.

lb is back from Vegas, but not yet back from work. He had some delicious-looking pictures. I was particularly struck by the handsome clay of one of the plates bearing some mouthwatering sushi.

Transcription remains my "favorite", but it's not as bad as it could be.

Every hour or so, I would get up and limp off to the kitchen for more ice or whatever. Around 19:30, Purple decided it was time to knock off for the day. "And what's keeping you from going home right now?"

"Shoes," I said mournfully.

He looked down at my feet, uncharacteristically clad in little black footsocks with neon-blue toe, heel, and trim, rather than my usual bare feet in hiking sandals. I had to explain that it wasn't that shoes interfered with my brain, it was that shoes interfered with the foot-pedal. His next argument involved the tiptoeing off to the car in just socks on the spot.

I must not have looked convinced. He held out his arms to hug me. I hugged back, leaning my head on his upper arm facing away in the classic posture of woe. He then marched off in the direction of his own car, leaving me to limp back to my cube. I decided that perhaps I would just clean up and go home, but that process involved rebooting to attempt to revive my betraying Outlook.

I had decided to restart Outlook. So I then closed it. This had been mid-afternoon. At length I remembered that I'd done that, and went to restart it. It flashed many things on its little splash screen, and then just sat there animating. I let it sit for a while. Then I tried to close it. It was not amenable to closing. So I opened up the Task Mangler and mangled the task, and then tried again. Still no luck.

So I decided that the next step of course would be rebooting. So I got my machine ready to reboot, and I rebooted. And started Outlook. And waited. And dropped chocolate on the desk of Madam Standards, Madam Standards' new officemate The Norseman (the old officemate was the one with the vicious chihuahuas), and dropped chocolate on the desk of Purple's officemate, who will be their team's guru next week, and came back and it was still misbehaving. (I'd played chocolate fairy last night to one of my own teammates who'd worked on Thursday morning's meeting with great aplomb. Purple's officemate puts up with me popping in and saying random things, so I figure chocolate or something is in order.)

When I came back, the thing was still sitting there turning various tints of yellow-orange, so I decided it was time to call the helpdesk. So helpdesk I called. I explained the various things I had done so far to a guy who seemed strangely familiar (and he recognized me as well; we would eventually remember that I'd called about VPN access from my phone, and he'd said I needed Jellybean, and then we had a great conversation about Android). He decided that it was time for a remote desktop session. I allowed as how that would be a great idea, but I took sudden pause -- invitations are usually sent via email, and my Outlook was broken. I conceded that there was OWA, ugh. He agreed that no-one liked OWA, and it was best reserved for emergencies (as I sighingly opened a new browser tab) but this probably counted as one.

At my suggestion/his request, I killed my Chrome session so the processes wouldn't clog up the Task Mangler as much as they were doing. He verified that there were no weird second sessions of Outlook open. There were a few rounds of poking about. Then he popped open the settings, and I was alarmed to see that there were two profiles in there, one being Default Profile and the other being Exchange, and Default being defaulted to. This was not as it should be, as I'd managed to utterly brick the original default profile by attempting to hook it up directly to an email account it was never meant to work with *cough*kipper*cough* and had had to create a new one. Somehow my setting had become unset. I understood this in a flash, but was slower to communicate it fully; thankfully, that did not matter, as the crucial information was "Oh, my profile is named Exchange, and that's the right one", which I did say, and we got it set up, and logged in, and then restarted because the mofo was refusing to connect to the server even after the inbox loaded, but then it was at last all good.

By that time it was also 21:00, and I explained as much to helpdesk. We signed off, and I obliterated the stray profile so it wouldn't trouble me again. Muahahaha. The power.

I arrived at my car to find that the serendipitious parking space I'd found at the awkward hour of the engineering morning had also come with a gift basket of tiny ants busily crawling on the outside of the car and attempting to work their way in the doors. I was not best pleased. Then I went on a brief grocery excursion and went home.