With the reassurances from the Fixing The Goddamn Helldesk Software team that they are prioritizing things correctly, I have had more brainspace to notice and complain about other things in the workplace. Notably, while I was trying to order office supplies for some of the new arrivals, things went fractally wrong. In addition to the ill-trained tech from Tuesday, I discovered that the new system is spitting out .pdf instead of .html in email. I was mispleased. I complained. I discovered that in fact there were more things going poorly than I'd imagined, complete with a cameo from our friend the WHAT THE FUCK PLUGIN ARE YOU USING training site, yet again being used as documentation.

I am not allowed to attempt to own that circus or make them into my monkeys.

Friday involved the now-customary dinner with Purple and Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly. I had fun until my uterus decided that it was going to send spikes through every part of me, after which point I waited for the ibuprofen to kick in. Purple petted my arm reassuringly, but declined to take my uterus for the low low price of FREE TO GOOD HOME.

Saturday I ventured forth to get fruit, then curled up in earnest with the Lynburn Legacy trilogy. Specifically, I had the first volume on hand in hardback, and while I did have to pause at several points (first for fruit and then a few more because TOO MANY FEELINGS), I discovered that it was the soulbonding epic that we deserved.

I stayed up until maybe 5am reading the rest of the trilogy.

It's been too hot. I've been snuggling up to ice packs.

I emailed Darkside to let him know that I'm still alive. He emailed back Monday night. I reckoned he might still be up and we haven't talked in months, so I called. Yay.

I had lunch with Purple and crew on Monday and Tuesday, but Purple had dinner with a friend on Monday, and HOA stuff Tuesday, so we didn't have the customary walking-out chat. I was expecting to have my lunch replaced by a conversation between Haystack and a vendor that I needed to be a fly on the wall for, but Haystack got the app upgraded without the vendor intervention. Tomorrow will be the next conversation between same, and since I'm the in-house Linux expert (expertise: broke* a zone file in uni, cried about it; knows to be super careful with anything involving rm) I really do need to be there. One or two of the team data center guys will be there too. (When I said something about wanting to start up the app's version of Tomcat when the VM boots, one of the data center guys went all

at me and tossed me a link to Stack Exchange. So.)

* Turns out you really do need to increment your serial numbers.


Today I had lunch with Purple's crew, tried to figure out questions for tomorrow's thing with the app vendors, did some administrative stuff and other tasks. I also had one of those terrifyingly emotionally naked philosophical-disagreement-except-for-me-it's-less-abstract conversations with Purple. More on that in a short bit.