The Death of Imagination

Fuck me, this cold is dragging out. I was really hoping it would be gone before I have to leave for St Louis Friday morning but I'm giving up on that. I know it's a decade since I swore off Amtrak, but Southwest wanted three times as much to fly me down. So I'm looking at a minimum 8-hour travel day. I thought I'd spend it comfortably reading, but looks like I'm more likely to be fitfully sleeping instead. Feh.

It's got to be easier than getting through an 8-hour workday, right? So far I haven't had to do that this week--I gave up after two hours on Monday and yesterday I left at 3 p.m. Today not only will I have to be here past five to make up for being a bit late but I've got another tutoring session. As with Monday's dinner, I know I'll perk up once we get swinging, but I'll probably end up feeling even worse afterwards.

Shortly after the previous post, I decided to let my hair down. I took my scrunchy out walking through an empty corridor, then I stopped to bend over and finger comb it until it was big and loose. This is something I do seldom these days, and basically never at work; it gets too hot and it gets in the way. But I was facing the prospect of receiving an award for time served (a.k.a. a service award) and wanted to do something to make myself feel pretty.

I did not expect the reaction I got. I'd hardly seated myself and the woman behind me, our director of PR, was asking if she could braid my hair. She expressed surprise both at how long it was and how soft. I requested a reverse French braid, and she threw herself into the task. I didn't realise these existed until a picnic in Germany when one of the women along gave me one. Somewhere there is a picture of me posing side-by-side with my blond braid twin. The only other time I think anyone has done this to my hair is for my brother's wedding (I was best man so I had to look my best) and it looked great but needed like a dozen bobby pins to keep it in place. Not this time--with nothing more than a ponytailer, it held up well into the night. It was still tight when I undid this morning in order to shampoo.

Apparently, it was quite the show. I noticed several colleagues stealing glances with amusement. Then when I got home, I found that one of my buddies had taken a series of snaps with his phone and posted them to Facebook. The Grand Poobah (whose delightful gaffe was the other thing that made the ceremony worth attending) didn't say anything about it, but the head of Administrative Services, who gala this was, made a slightly strained comment as we were chatting afterwards. For the next event, I'm going to see if the PR director will braid me a crown. Maybe I should bring some fresh flowers for it, or a length of silk ribbon.

monshu warned me yesterday that he'll be home late two days this week because of mandatory "team building" at work. "I just hope it isn't gimmicky," he confided.

"What kind of team building is there that isn't gimmicky? I honestly can't think of anything."

Anyone?

To tell the truth, the term "team building" always makes me snigger. In our RPGs, this was a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for "singling out one of the members and beating the snot out of him". Sadly, the consultant his boss has hired is highly unlikely to share that definition.

I didn't think today could be crazier than yesterday, but that shows what little faith I have in ComEd. Yesterday I awoke to grey skies. I didn't think much of this until about a half-hour later, when it was clear it had grown noticeably darker. I went out to the back porch and the wind whipped dust in my face; somewhere I heard a tinkling, as of something glass shattering, and responded by repositioning pots and taking the Old Man's ashtray inside. I stayed out there watching the tops of trees tossing until I felt the first drops.

It began pouring at about 8:10; the thunder didn't strike until a few moments later. At first the cat seemed blasé, but he eventually ended up in the closet again. I resolved to go in late if it was still pouring when I came out of my shower, but by then it had settled down to a sprinkle. The cloudburst had only lasted fifteen to twenty minutes. There were some downed branches on my street, but nothing big; from the shuttle I saw that one tree in Loyola Park had been felled, but other than a car stopped in the northbound lane it was an uneventful commute.

So I was in no way prepared to walk into work and find the lights out. At the urging of some coworkers, I went to the windows to look at the storm damage on the south side of the building; behind the police tape, I could see three large trees were uprooted, one was snapped, and another lost a branch bearing half its foliage. My mind then went to the basement; I grabbed a coworker and went down to look for water in the storage area our departments shared. Amazingly, it was bone dry despite large puddles in the access corridor. We ran into an engineer who explained that the water had come in through the ductwork and poured out of a mechanical closet.

So we were left with nothing to do but kill time until we were sent home. Another coworker took me to where we had some games squirreled away and I brought down Uno, Connect4, and Apples-to-Apples. We tried to break the last of these: at one point, I think we had a dozen people playing at once (including both my bosses). After a couple hours, we had very nearly run through every red card in the deck. (I had a respectable three green cards, but two others ended up with six each.)

Hopes swelled when one of the administrators came by around 11:30, but it was only to tell us that they'd refilled the emergency generators so they'd keep running past noon. It was another forty minutes or so before we were cleared to go home. I might've preferred a nap, but a friend offered me a ride and we ended up having tasty grilled meat at La Choza on Clark.

That was yesterday.

Today I checked the website first thing. After all, something like 800,000 people were without power throughout the are and ComEd had given us an estimate of 72 hours the day before. But everything was normal, so I was even more shocked to arrive at work and find dozens of people milling outside watching a policeman and a couple of fire marshals go inside. I quickly learned that power had been restored yesterday, but not until 3 p.m. And it had stayed up until five minutes before my shift; the fire alarm went off shortly after. After a bit, emergency services gave the all clear for staff to entre. Over the course of the morning I learned that the hilarity we'd overheard the previous morning was public services people playing charades; the current excitement was an office chair race down the administrative corridor.

Finally at 11 a.m., we were dismissed again. But going home didn't make sense for me, since I'm meeting Daddy Bishop for lunch in town at one. So after texting my new hire not to come in, I hung around chatting with work pals--until the lights came back on. Tentatively, we're rescheduled to open at 1:30, but the great part about being in the back office is that once you've been sent home, you're home.

I just know monshu will tease me about getting two days off. But, lemme tell you, coming into work only to be sent home is nothing at all like a vacation.

Lately my work PC has been acting up. Not in major ways, thank Gates, but in annoying small ways. For instance, when I'm working at the front desk, I use RDP to log into my main machine so that I have access to all my bookmarks and such. Recently, this has begun to fail intermittently for reasons that the IT staff simply can't diagnose. It seems to be related to the tendency of my screen to go black after the machine has been idle and not come back up even when the mouse is moved or the keys tapped.

Since I always lock my machine when I'm away from my desk for any length of time, these blackouts used to be what annoyed me the most. But since I've discovered that I can easily log in again, I've begun to see them as an additional security measure. All you have to do is press CTR-ALT-DEL to bring up the login screen (although visually there's no change) and mouse the cursor down to the point where it changes from an arrow to an I-beam. Now you've found the login field and can entre your password normally--if you're me. If you're not me, good luck figuring out how to switch users.

Now the only bug that really bothers me (besides the remote failures) is this weird tendency toward enlargement: once in a while, I log in and everything is magnified to several times the size, meaning there's barely room for any text in a given programme window. If I log out and log back in again, it goes away, but I have to manually resize all the window back to the proportions I had before.

April Fools is one of those observances I always end up dreading a bit. Not because I worry about being fooled--I would love it, in fact, if anyone thought enough of me to actually pull something on me. No, because it always feels like an opportunity wasted. I never seem to have a good idea for a prank and, if I do, I don't have the gumption to carry it out.

This year is an example of the latter. A couple weeks back, a bright orange ladder appeared in the back hall where the staff restrooms are. At first, I thought it had been temporarily laid there by some careless workman in the midst of a job, but when it didn't disappear after a week I began to get annoyed. I know there's a space crunch in this building, but that doesn't mean I accept that staff areas should be viewed as auxiliary storage.

I thought about pointing this out to Facilities, but then it occurred to me: Maybe it would be more fun (and effective) to just take the ladder and hide it someplace. And if I did that, I wouldn't want to say anything that could attract suspicion to me. So I kept my silence, even though the thought of sticking the ladder someplace wildly inappropriate remained an idle one.

When I realised April Fools was only around the corner, I thought Now or never. To build some pressure on myself, I confided my idea to a co-worker, Mr Smith. He had some choice suggestions himself, such as getting some rope and suspending the ladder from the ceiling like an art installation. But my best opportunity for getting away with this was arriving early this morning, and though I was up in time (thanks, kitty!), I simply couldn't get myself moving. So I strolled in at the usual hour, disappointed in myself for another year.

Then I noticed that the ladder is missing.

So far, I've come up with excuses to make a sweep of two floors and I still haven't come across it. Sure, I could ask Mr Smith, but where's the fun in that? The anticipation is making me have to choke back giggles every time I leave my desk for a bit.

I have to agree with paladincub when he says "at this point, this weather thing better be bad - i'm talking some real riderless pale horse shit." Seriously, I can't recall the last time we had so much damn hype about a snowstorm. A single inch has fallen since last night and already I'm hearing of entire universities shutting down preemptively. Our place reportedly didn't even close for the Blizzard of '79, so I'm not expecting to have a day off tomorrow. But so far they've cancelled the weekly staff social, the biweekly administrative meeting, and a safety presentation scheduled for the afternoon.

BREAKING NEWS! Just got word that we close at 5 p.m. today. (Normally we'd stay open until 3 a.m.) Of course, I normally leave at 5, so this affects me not a bit. (Unless, of course, they suspend shuttle service. Oh, crap.)

I was looking forward to getting a solid night's sleep for the first time this week followed by a productive couple of hours tidying up before the arrival of my father around lunchtime tomorrow. So naturally he called me last night to say he's coming up today instead. And since he apparently can't leave STL until late afternoon, it'll be quite late before he gets here. And since it is my father, he'll doubtless manage to get lost in the dark coming to our place, which means I'll be very lucky to be in bed before midnight.

But so be it; at this point, I'm just looking forward to being out of the office, since it's hard to believe he could be more of a pain than my boss in her end-of-the-fiscal-year fugue. Staying late yesterday to get her the damn statistics still didn't prevent her from scolding me about them in the middle of the department. It's a simple three-step procedure to load them into the workbook and she categorically refuses to learn how to do it herself--which is fine, I suppose, because I'd hate to see how she'd manage to bollox that up.

Well, I survived our in-service training for today, a three-hour workshop on serving internal customers. This despite the fact that (a) it was presented almost entirely through the medium PowerPoint slides of LOLcats and (b) I sat myself at the same table as the Big Boss so I wasn't able to surreptitiously mark up photocopies of Abendpost articles for later translation. I survived with my dignity mostly intact, though in case anyone in the Division didn't already know I was a bastard, I made sure to point out that empathy was all good and well the first couple times someone screws up, but by the tenth they can go sit on a stapler.

The presenters spent a considerable chunk of time trying to reshape our speech patterns, despite the fact that one of them readily acknowledged "tone trumps words". I was particularly amused by the suggestion that we de-escalate adversarial conversations through strategic use of the phrase "Help me to understand you", since it immediately struck me as exactly the sort of thing a Miranda Priestly might say. In fact, no matter how many times I hear it, it's inseparable in my mind from Meryl Streep's fantastically withering delivery. The presenters even confessed that it's basically become code between the two of them; I can think of worse euphemisms for "You are getting on my wick today."

They also tried to wean us off the word "try" because it usually means "no" (e.g. "I'll try to get that to you today" = "In your dreams you'll get it today"). Thank God the Big Boss stepped up and pointed out that they were essentially inviting staff to lie to each other so I didn't have to be the one to. They said point blank that nice people get "slammed" because they're the ones everyone would rather deal with, although they tried to undercut this mixed message by claiming unpleasant employees were on track to get fired. Well, when it comes to our organisation, they're half right.