Bleagh

Since monshu ate some of the chocolate mousse Wednesday night and told me it was good, I thought I'd have some myself last night. I don't know if that's what's responsible for me yakking up my breakfast first thing upon arriving at work today, but it's the obvious culprit. (No word from the Old Man on the state of his belly, but his tends to be more ironclad than mine.)

This makes me wish even more we were going to the Pick Me Up Café tonight, as I requested, instead of some tapas lounge called Twist. Ah well; they must have tortilla española there, right?

Heroic Coworker 1, Cranky Old Man 0

Five hours since I was last hugging porcelain, so I'ma declare victory over the cause of my nausea, whatever the hell it was. (monshu pointed out that we also had medium-rare salmon last night, so that's another possible culprit. I really do hope not, however, since I hate my ocean fish well done.) I had tea for elevenses and that went so well I followed it up with a toasted bagel for lunch. I'm feeling adventurous enough to eat my leftovers as merienda so I don't show up at the tapas place absolutely ravenous.

My shift was a little rough. First of all, it took ten minutes to log into my computer remotely because they'd upgraded the workstation and wiped out our defaults. Then, about halfway through, we had a moment of power loss that caused my PC to restart. I couldn't tell this from the other room, however, where I was just finishing up an involved post, so I was not in a Good Place when our difficult customer came in.

If you're not part of our user community, you need a Guest Pass to log on. Giving these out is a big part of my job on the front desk, but since I only have one shift a week, I don't have the credentials to generate them myself. This caused some stress last month when I found that three of the passes in my stack were blank and not one of the usual crowd authorised to generate more was available. (That's the fun of a Friday afternoon slot, I guess.)

But this isn't about that day; this is about today, when this guy came back to the desk, claiming that the login I gave him didn't work. He pointed out that it had yesterday's date on it. Well, yes, they all do; it's usually the night supervisor who generates them, but this isn't an issue because they're good for 24 hours and visitors have to be out by 5 p.m. I patiently explain this and get nothing but attitude. It gets worse when I tell him I can't generate a guest pass with today's date.

This is where my heroic coworker steps in, volunteering to accompany the man to his workstation and walk him through the logon. Several minutes later, he returns. "It worked first try. I don't think he even tried it. He was just looking to start something." As evidence, he relates how they returned to find someone else at the workstation. Despite a free machine right next to it, "he starts yelling," forcing my coworker to ask the innocent unfortunate to move down one.

We ratted him out to my supervisor when he stopped by a bit later. That's one more cranky old many who's on his way to finding himself banninated.