...or maybe a few more.

The first is simply the phrase "This has gone beyond frustrating to ludicrous." That was about a domain name in wild dispute.

The second: The song "Brain Problem Situation" has been going through my head, enough that I'm about ready to add it to the journal's subtitle.

Third: RAIN!

Fourth: I excelled at cattiness tonight. All those people who think I'm the sweetest, most tolerant thing: that's just because you've never seen someone get on the wrong side of me.

There's this chick at the secondary workplace who is known for General Flakiness. (I don't think any of y'all know her; she's not someone who comes up in my discussions often.) She was wondering why she didn't make it onto some arbitrary list of Excellent Stats People. She complained to Snarky Lady. Snarky Lady dove into my database and researched the issue. Snarky Lady found that it was due to excessive absences. Snarky Lady went out onto the call floor to let the woman know.

Snarky Lady came back in grumbling. Seems that the chick still doesn't care to accept even partial responsibility for her attendance. " 'I had all those meetings with my parole officer,' " Snarky Lady quoted in a whiny falsetto.

"Parole officer?" said I. "You mean being that stupid is a crime now?"

(This did have the intended effect of making Snarky Lady laugh and stop snarking.)

Fifth: (Blackadder didn't make it that far.) But. I want to get my typing speed up to 90 wpm in order to keep up with work. There is not enough time to close one ticket before the phone rings again if the queue is high. Not if I've not been keeping up with the notes. Alas. That means that I need to bring my typing speed back up again.

Sixth: Someone I met on LJ is at work with me. Today I saw that person on the intra-office IM. That person had let me know whereabouts in the building they were located. That happened to be on the same end of the building I happened to be. I hailed. They hailed back. I stuck my hand up in the air and waved in their general direction. The person I'd thought was them waved back. So now we've seen each other in person! Even though we haven't actually talked face to face yet.

Seventh: That guy who handles bugs? *drool* *thwapself* Bad Lunatic. No chasing after co-workers. Not while still in training.

Eighth: Stage fright = almost nearly gone.

I have probably done this to people without even realizing it.

Today was pretty much taken up by one blamed report I was putting together for Management. The requirements for something that I got Friday were kind of blurry, but I put together something pretty spiffy. It was, however, wrong. I got the actual requirements, put something far better together, then realized that OMG, stuff from non-current interviewers were not being counted. (And there's still stuff that's not being counted, because the numbers are off. But it's better.) It needed a whole chunk of data, broken down in specific ways. And it wasn't stuff that I was comfortable shoving around with queries, because it was just so fiddly and obnoxious (and I wanted to see wtf I was doing; I'll use queries next time on all the other jobs). But I got it done and got to go home early and go play.

It's planned for four-hour shifts the rest of the weekend. Oi. Not fun with the happy. There's dayshift starting up Real Soon Now. That's good, because hours are short.

Instead of being quite as short as they might be and sending everyone home totally obscenely early, they are doing "review training", aka "sit & bitch & review stuff we should have known and leave some of the phone work alone." My numbers are occasionally the star of the show.

Mr. Boring-Ass McCrankypants who attempted^* to Start Shit At Work With The Supervisors for othercat some time ago was Not Pleased with the fact that while he may in fact be above average, he is not in fact above planned production. There was snark at his expense. There was rather a lot of it from 3:30pm Eyeliner Woman right then and there (she was loudly excited about her above-production scores) and a rather lot more behind the scenes later. (*And failed. Succeeded in putting him deeper in the hole himself, though. Tip to obnoxious know-it-all old men: don't complain about "my neighbor talks to herself" to the multiple-personalitied supervisor. Especially when you don't want anyone to, like, let your neighbor know that it's a touch disturbing, or be moved, you just "think someone should be aware." I'm aware that you're an asshole and trying to start shit, and I'm aware that she's better at her job than you are at yours, and that the supervisors like her and don't like you. And if you mouth off the way you have been lately to the wrong person, you're going to be searching for some of that employment elsewhere that you're evidently so much better suited for.) (Amazingly, Cute Desk Guy and the Figment actually get along with the dude. What is it about pompous windbags?)

Don't keep objects that could possibly be misused by the very determined off the plane, keep potential terrorists off the plane. Oh, goodness. I almost wrote "phone".

In at work for 3.5 hours working on the damn spreadsheets. Snarky lady make database. No time for game, dammit.

Evidently there has been mass quitting. Cute Short Chick quit. Ponytail/Metal Dave isn't going to be around. My former Opposite quit/isn't coming back from leave. Comic Pirate Super is going in the back to Fulfillment full-time, now that Sampling is going to be shutting down. The Check-In Princess is not going to be in field (not sure if it's going to the back or quit). Chaos! Panic! Disorder! Random booths disconnecting from the telnet improperly, with things that involve a possible bad situation with routers outside of the immediate building!

That last took up most of my day. I came in and started getting stuff set up. I don't think I ever entirely got the job figured. I was starting to get Spanish set up when there was a spate of red-screens and I had to start running around telling people not to panic. It goes like so: red-screen, reboot, log in again, red-screen, move.

The custom telnet screens are set up to turn bright red when they lose connectivity to the server. When they turn red at the end of the night when you're logging out, that's one thing. But when something in a router somewhere goes astray and there are router loops going out of state somewhere (according to the rather incomprehensible response to the trouble ticket that the Clean-Cut Geek wrote up) and the thing red-screens in the middle of a survey, that is a problem. It screws up the timeclock. It loses the survey info. Doom! Lots of doom!

There was lots of running around with insanity today, lots of trying to get people to be all at the right place at the right time. Outsourced dinner with the gang. Went on break at a sane time. Comic Pirate Super started out attempting to teach me Emerald City (a spreadsheet) but got called off for meetings and didn't return until right before dinner.

I wasn't watching my job properly; Mountain went high (too many surveys complete in proportion to the rest of the timezones) and then they ran out of numbers. Comic Pirate Super wound up watching it for me.

In addition to supervisor trainees, there are monitor trainees. One of them is this tiny little lady with a daughter about my age. The woman reminds me of my own mother, except Mama does not look as if you will break her if you accidentally knock her over. There have not yet been monitor calibration meetings, so there is all sorts of crazy going on. The monitors are trying to calibrate the new monitors, there is training, there are insane computer problems due to end-user error, and then the Lunatic goes more loony, because OMG END-USERS.

My general wit is getting honed at work, though it's a rather lot more punchy than had been typical. I made some sort of riff on "talk to the hand" the other day -- "All problems should be addressed here," and I indicated the outstretched hand. Then (to a new monitor, talking about a certain OMG WTF individual not much more clueful than Mike JONES, the Used Car Salesman) I mentioned that he should talk to the hand, except the hand I displayed only had one finger paying attention.

I actually went on break something like on time today. Amazing.

Comic Pirate Super eventually did teach me how to use Emerald City. Very useful piece of spreadsheet, that. Flat file turn into spreadsheet! I did not break it! This digressed into work-related geeking. It becomes ever more apparent that those around me are not particularly tech-savvy, except for a very few. Those few, I can get into serious geeking with.

Homie G Super wanted to borrow my electronic TPS Report, except it was a little more involved than he was looking for. Now that I see what's going on with Emerald City, I think I'm going to be spiffing up the sheets something fun. The more I can automate these things, the more time we save. I get so excited when I get to work on all that stuff. It's just simple spreadsheet manipulation, pulling stuff from one sheet and generating about five more, but oh, we're doing too much by hand, and we needn't.

Spent the evening restoring my missing R.E.M. songs on iTunes; iTunes and I lost most of Out of Time for a while, and I've been deprived. Living with Sis was not good for my sanity all of the time, and the times when I should have been restoring my sanity with the music, I could not.

Turns out that the happy schedule-fu from work, the thing where I got my schedule turned upside-down and handed back to me was even more screwed-up than I thought.

There are two places where the schedule is kept. One of them, for staff and phone goons yoinked to pretend they're staff, is a simple spreadsheet stored somewhere on the system. That's the one that the supervisory-type person changed.

(Incidentally, I am not the only phone goon yoinked to pretend we're staff who is confused as to who our direct supervisor is; Trendy Chick Super was asking about that the other night. It could be one of about half a billion people, actually.)

There is also another place -- the little system that keeps track of the phone goon and phone goon yoinked to pretend we're staff schedules and the jobs we know how to do -- the system that makes up the people/booth lists and the seating charts -- that schedule is contained. The supervisory-type person did not know about this one, and did not know that it was necessary to change things there.

So I was scheduled in last Sunday morning, but not Sunday evening. (I was check-in Sunday evening, so I got to see that I was put down as an absence on the Sunday morning shift, and note that I should not have been scheduled in, and was in fact there in the evening.) I was not scheduled in Monday. (I was check-in on Monday, and again noted this on the paperwork.) I was scheduled in on Thursday, and put down as a no-call/no-show. Snarky Lady Supervisor was very curious about this, as that's just not like me. "Um, because I wasn't scheduled in?"

Things got fixed in the system. Things got fixed in the system fast. My bad attendance points were taken away. The supervisor who'd unknowingly caused all the ruckus had the error of her ways (needing to change things in both places instead of just the one) pointed out to her. Peace and happiness ruled the workplace, and lo, all was good.