Crude-ité ?

So it's a brand new year and good riddance to 2015. Last year was, in many ways, a bust. But this year will be different! (It kind of has to, but I digress.)

So my colleague (Confessions of a Techno Peasant) and I decided that we would start blogging again. My inspiration for this blog has always been to write about funny/crazy/bizarre incidents at work and the start of 2016 did not disappoint!

In order to protect the identities of the guilty, we decided that we would post incidents on one another's blogs. So first day back, my friend is talking to one of our recent hires, chatting about respective Christmas vacations. My friend is commiserating with our colleague about a problem he is having when he suddenly blurts out (with a huge smile on his face) "You seem to have gained a lot of weight!". The inanity of it made it difficult for my friend to keep from laughing out loud but, really, what is the right thing to do here? The "gentleman" she was talking to has been in Canada for less than a year, hailing from India. Should my friend have tactfully tried to point out to him that these sorts of comments (especially to someone you barely know) are culturally frowned upon here? Or was her grin-and-bear-it attitude the way to go?

Cheers, everyone!

Gotta love Google error messages. This is a search error I just received for google maps:
503. That’s an error.
The service you requested is not available at this time.
Service error -27.
That’s all we know.

Snippets of conversations from yesterday's Crisis du jour: "Who took the AC down in the machine room? "Some guy." "It usually doesn't do that." "I turned this one off, but somebody turned the other one off." Cue the networking guys running into the machine room with a couple of fans and one of the managers coming over telling us to get ready to shut some of our machines down, so they don't die from heat prostration. Disaster averted. More comments: "I'm old, goddammit. Leave me alone." "I hope you learned your lesson."

Return to Journaling

It's been awhile. But today seemed like the right day to start posting again. It's April 27th; 2010 brought an unusually mild winter and a warm, early spring. We had flowers blooming in late March! That rarely happens in this neck of the woods. So it would be perfectly reasonable to expect, one month later, that the mild weather was here to stay for awhile. Am I right? Not so fast, honey. Snow's been falling all day. Temperatures a few degrees above freezing. The drive home? Blech! I swear that the flowers are wearing expressions; the tulips are shocked, the flowering shrubs, dismayed and the daffodils are downright depressed. As for the Magnolia trees that opened their showy blooms in the balmy sunshine this past week, well, all they can say is, WTF.

Yesterday was gorgeous. Today I'm diggin' my down coat and winter boots out of the closet just to take the dog for a walk. Outrageous.

All that makes for a nice segueway to this. It's a video of Gloria Steinem discussing doing outrageous or shocking things (in the cause of justice) and having a good time doing them. I considered pulling a fire alarm today while I was sitting through a rather tedious portion of a course I'm taking with some of my colleagues (social justice?), but the tedious part didn't last long. I settled for donning snow boots in April instead.

Long time no blog

When I started this thing, I promised myself I would make several entries a week. Yeah right. Anywhore, it's time to get back on the bandwagon, so to speak.

These past few months have been much more tolerable, since the dude in the Corner Office got the boot and his evil minion (aka Big A) has been somewhat destabilized by the whole thing. It seems that the new head honcho at this here institute of higher larnin' just did not see IT to IT with Corner Office Dude and put him out to pasture. Not a moment too soon, as my colleagues and I were all seriously rethinking our career paths.

The replacement Corner Office dude is a temp; bridging the gap until a new pointy-haired boss can be found. Trouble is, temp Corner Office Dude wants out by year end and the promised "international search" for a new Visionary to lead this IT quagmire has yet to be launched.

Fun times. And now, you're up to date.

Noticed by the Techno Peasant

TP: You have a blog too? It must be about erotica!

HO: More like "Neurotica". You got the perversion part right, 'though.

An early Christmas present

TP: Hey, I hear that the boss is off on a conference and won't be back until the new year.

HO: Yep.

TP: What's the conference? Soft Skills for Dummies?