Face hurt.
Face hurt bad.
Loonie see dentist when dentist open at 9am tomorrow.
Loonie have work number in cell; loonie call apologize to snarky lady for blowing off at least part of the potluck setup.

Loonie had wrenched shoulder a while ago. Urgent care place thought wrenched arm warrant narcotics. Loonie no think so.
Loonie think ZOMG ONE AND A HALF OF MY TEETH ARE KILLING ME AND THE REST ARE PLOTTING TREASON BEHIND MY BACK AND ANOTHER HAS OPENLY DEFECTED TO THE ENEMY is sufficient reason for narcotics.

The ones that make the Little Fayoumis say I should not use Strongbad for a role model.

So. Yeah. I call Mama in the morning too. Thank goodness it is payday? Thank goodness my parents love me and are willing to step in when Bad Things Happen? I thought that I could poke around and look at recommendations over the weekend and call somewhere Monday, and maybe get an appointment before the end of the month, but this has just stepped into emergency territory. There's still a dull ache that I can feel through the topical anaesthetic and the painkiller, and I'm not going to do anything stupid with either of those measures.


On the bright side, at work I finished copying Management's floppy disks for her. I was working on that project since January of this year. That's a happiness.

Things are going much better now that I've gotten into the groove of things. It's nice and peaceful back here except for the vacuuming. And even that's not so bad.

Sundays are good days. I think I'll see if I can't give a certain best friend a call later.

---

Later...

Let's see. I got in back around 11:30 or so, and didn't emerge until 1:30, really. So two hours back here in the morning. I departed for back here again at 4:30, roughly, and I'm going to be staying back here as long as I can to get these things done.

I've finished three little boxes of disks, the ones that are supposed to hold about 10 disks apiece. One of them was full of blank disks. I have about 7 boxes or equivalent bundles remaining.

Part of that time was time spent clearing things out and then writing an e-mail of shame and penance to the Powers that Be. Management likes my sense of humor, so this may reduce the amount of scolding that comes my way.

It seems that Management took notice of the new person who was writing these hilarious and consummately professional e-mails very early on. I just learned about it on Friday, when my e-mail about the mice ("Since the technologically advanced mice have been removed from the monitor rooms, could they be used to replace the simpler mice that remain in the bullpen? I believe the technical skills of the bullpen staff are equal to these mice. The [list of computers] all have older mice.") got a response of "You are so funny" from Management. I mentioned this e-mail to Stressy College Chick, and she told me the backstory about my earlier general amusement.

I'm hoping that she'll get a giggle out of this:

( Backup tape needed )

Went to bed in a reasonably timely fashion Saturday night; got up Sunday morning and went to work.

Pink Shirt Guy wasn't in. I did the check-in things I could do out front (there was one notable spreadsheet that I have to do things with that was missing; that spreadsheet is having some errors with macroes, and will be reconstructed manually, and then Management will have a look at it when she gets in. I saw part of what was going wrong in the VB, but it went by too fast, and I don't know that spreadsheet and it's not commented for an outsider to work with.

Went back into Sampling and finished up the work on the suite of backup disks involving that selfsame spreadsheet. I thought all was done, but then -- I found one stray file lurking in a place I hadn't looked. And because I'd measured once, I had to cut twice -- er, that is to say, I had to copy the damn files off the CD and back onto the HD because, surprise surprise, by Managerial Instruction I'd deleted them off the network as soon as I got them burned. So. Burn, copy, re-add, re-burn.

This is the amount of floppy-disks I've been working with.

I was about to stack the completed disks onto Management's desk in my triumph, when a little thing at the back of my head warned me that this was too easy, and not enough evidence of hard work done, visually. And I was reminded of grifyn's triumphant presentation of a color-coded, tabbed, and indexed report binder to someone who was maybe expecting papers shoved in a folder any which way.

Management may have been expecting naked CDs in a pile on her desk. What Management got was a rubber-banded pair of sets of disks-in-paper-sleeves (one primary and one backup) with each set wrapped in a clever little paper label proclaiming the broad topic on the front and the contents of each disk on the back. I was wise enough to realize that there was no way for me to make this look slick without making it look exceptionally cheesy, especially as I had not really got the tools to hand to present these properly. I did not want to make this look like it was supposed to look good but I fell short of the mark. Instead, I went for higher-end presentation dressed down. A slick semi-gloss color CD booklet only looks good in a jewelcase. A label with the company logo slapped on a notebook and with the contents written on it looks good in semi-gloss color, and is cutely ironic wrapped around a stack of CDs.



I anticipate being patted on the head and being given more interesting little things to do in the future.

Doing the Dread Project, with xcopy a:\ c:\TEMP\Discs\###\ /c /f /i /e /r

This seems to be doing the trick quite nicely. I just ran into a whole box of blank disks. I have the Cute Desk Guy tapped to help me write labels, which is the worst part of it all, I think.

I could be doing this in a slightly more geeky fashion, but I'd be hard-pressed to be having a much easier time of it. Typed it out in full the first time, and now I'm doing up-arrow, using the back arrow, manually incrementing the directory name by one when the previous disk was not blank, and trying to re-label the directory with a slightly more descriptive name when one's available, but preserving the numbering.

This could be a hell of a lot worse. As it is, I seem to have it down to a science. And thank goodness for pre-written number labels. I was doing that in some of my downtime in the bullpen, and I got the Cute Desk Guy to doing it. Whee!

I have xcopy echoing the filenames as it copies them, so I get to get an idea of what's on the thing to summarize it if there's no label.

I could be doing many, many worse things. I rather like this assignment, now that the headache's gone out of it and I'm not mousing all over the place. Yowza, that's a lot of files on this one!

Oo la la, aren't we all geeky now.

I got told at work that Management needed to see me in the back. (Ph34r.)

First, my proposal about a program to make my job easier on the system went over really well. In my two-week vacation, there was stuff going on with IT, and I got to meet one of the back-room fellows, and I got to see the beta release of something that was created based upon my suggestion.

I suggested it. Someone else built it. I'm so very geekily high right now. And I'm sure I'm much easier to code for than other people might be, because I can understand the limitations of the system and understand trade-off. And oh, this will save us so, so very much time. I made some naive suggestions based on the fact that I don't know the underpinnings of the system too well, and I don't know the business plan too well either, but the main functionality (compare scheduled-in vs. logged-in, sort by last name or sort by booth number) is present and accounted for. (Or, at least, will be after the dude goes back and adds in logged-in-but-not-scheduled and adds in sort-by-booth-number.)

So I am gleeful on that account.

The second reason Management needed to see me in the back? Management had "a little project" for me. (Ph34r. Seriously.) This one utilized my massive amount of IT training ... in feeding floppies into the machine to extract a backup off of nearly-obsolete media.

5 hours later, the brain was dead from dull, but I had processed about 80 floppies.