Moment of Enlightenment:

After a few too many go arounds up against the developers this build, it's faintly possible I am losing a sense of perspective in that I just had to go and quickly erase a comment in reply to a condescending explanation of why this program is not working no matter how I test it.

The comment? In public? To several paragraphs of explanation of why wrong is right and of course this program is working, people (you) are the problem?

-->w/e

...I really need to get out more.

Happiness means one of the stores on my way to work sells Mexican Pepsi and Coke. In actual bottles. Which means I had the dubious pleasure of trying to remember a.) what a bottle opener looked like and b.) how they worked while fumbling around with the can opener (on the side, btw), but humiliation at my own fumbling is totes worth it.

The thing is, pretty much every country in the world makes better Coke and Pepsi than the US. I mean, yes, drinking something with delicious sugar does help, and yes, I actually do think glass bottles give better flavor than plastic (but I have no objection to metal cans; maybe I like a faint metallic aftertaste? IDK), but it also just tastes more cola-ish. Like the spirit of cola is strong in this one or something; having this discussion in real life always ends up with a lot of wary looks, but it's true.

You wouldn't think a good day would hinge on so little. Believe me when I say, this will be the best part of my day. The code push didn't go through, so the code for the tests we were supposed to start last Monday isn't there. And yet when we say that we haven't tested this, everyone, including the people who do code pushes, will be totally surprised by this. Because I work in goddamn Dilbert, but I have no sociopathic dog, which you would think would be an improvement but it totally is not.

I have Mexican Pepsi. Right now, I will interpretive dance our answer to testing delays. And maybe sing. Bring it.

...kind of fun, and kind of repetitive.

Mostly, logging into my work desktop is surreal and still novel enough that I enjoy doing it. It's also a little dangerous, since I'm anal enough that sometimes bringing work home is really tempting.

Of course, I'm on my third day of VPNing and I think I've doubled my week hours, not including the overtime I did yesterday at the office, then came home and logged back in until midnight.

Currently finishing up leftover testing. As I have been since noon. Its possible if you see me tonight, I will still be doing this. God, my life.

Dear Person Who Stole My Lunch From the Freezer,

I won't go into a lecture on how temporarily, I'm restricted from certain foods, and most days I don't even eat lunch, but the days I do, it's usually for a purpose, like avoiding life-ending nausea when I take hydrocodone to control gall bladder pain so I can sit up and talk and not scream a lot. I won't even explain how I have to time my food intake between my thyroid medication, work, and what I'm drinking so there's no interaction problems with the hydrocodone and potentially the benthyl that cause life-ending dry mouth and I avoid anyway. Because this is not a secret. And people who steal other people's lunches at work tend to be dicks anyway.

So you know, fuck you.

--Seperis, really goddamn nauseated now

Between this and something I read this morning and the clinic being closed tomorrow so unless I can get to the clinic before six tonight I have to wait until next week to get a refill on my script I am not amused.

I'll do a rec post later, maybe. Re-reading Sherlock and AIRPS is totally a prescription for a better mood.

ETA: Eating half a peanut butter twix. Does not help with nausea, but tastiness does distract from it. Also being that time of the month that involves blood and rage and whatnot, sugar is always welcome.

So after losing my glasses, my work ID badge, and feeling the great weight of horror when I realized hey, this isn't really Friday since I have mandatory work on Saturday, potentially indefinitely, I'm going to speculate this will be a Bad Day.

So today is a day of Lowered Expectations.

My lowered expectation of the day: I will not throw my tiny bowl of refried beans at anyone's face with the intent of bodily harm should they ask me any of these three questions:

1.) Say, did you get that job?
2.) Hey, you have some time to do a few more tests....?
3.) How are you?

I will give myself extra points if I also manage the following but am aware this may be a little too ambitious today.

1.) Not stare hatefully at anyone who looks at me.
2.) Not hide in the bathroom stall to play sudoku on my phone, Fiendish level.
3.) Not hide under my desk to play sudoku on my phone, Fiendish level.

I will not accomplish the following things and accept that totally:

1.) smile.
2.) enjoy the company of other human beings.
3.) not play sudoku, Fiendish level, on my phone while at my desk.

This is a day of lowered expectations. Excuse me while I try to finish my refried beans before anyone realizes I'm here. I really like them, but the container is very aerodynamic and I'm already getting a headache without my glasses.

Anyone want to add their own?

So at work budget cuts are leading to our contractors not having their contracts renewed. It's complicated and by that, I mean, bad. The positions will be opened up as positions in the agency, which is cheaper--yes, it's cheaper for the state to hire people directly to work with the agency than it is to contract--but the state cannot pay them what they got as contractors, and they're software engineers and specialists--we cannot afford them. We are going to lose them. We are very fucked.

All of us are getting jumpy because the the first group of contracts expires this month and we don't have the people to replace them. I mean, literally--it's not just education or experience, it's familiarity with the system itself and how it was built and how it works. One's wife works at the White House, to make this clear; they can find much better jobs than this one, which means the state will have to pull people who are missing either experience or familiarity; education, at least, isn't a problem. I could probably do several of the jobs--let me say, I read the raw code and it's not what I'd call complex to read or write, just repetitive--but we need someone with all three.

This is a long way of saying if I'm really out of sorts for the next two weeks, it's literally because I'm trying not to cry over my keyboard as they rush more and more priority jobs at us to finish before the end of August, then the end of December, while we scramble frantically. I had four priority jobs added today and we couldn't do any of them because they're rushing to get the system up and working and it's not working, which you see where this is going, and it's not like it's getting better after the end of August. Also, two of my favorite coworkers are leaving and that's fucking with my mood so much you have no idea.

Which is why I'm going to reschedule the gall bladder surgery thing, and not just due to utter terror of it. I did the math on the workload and basic fact; it literally won't get done if I'm not here. I mean, we don't have the staff, the resources, or the literal time in existence. I work on this system; if someone doesn't do my tests, and they won't, then that's a huge swathe that will not get tested and I have to use this system when I get back and experience suggests that failure is high. I bought a ton of cherry tea to get ready for this. Cherry tea makes everything better.

There is the faint possibility this is not actually what I'm supposed to be doing with my life, which is--irritating, I think. I mean, any of this. All of this. The thing is, I have my work and my life and my hobbies and generally, as I've moved around state employment, I get settled and comfortable and I don't always adore the work, I love the fact that most of the time, I'm fucking good at it, and I won't lie, being good at something, being very good at something, and occasionally being much better at it than anyone else, usually beats out whether I like it or not by a good margin. Also, and this is where this gets deadly, learning anything new is fun for me. The learning process itself has kept me doing things I'd otherwise hate, because I really love to learn and in the process get really good at things and again, you see where this is going.

I mean, I get this is the kind of attitude that can end in disaster or terrible jobs, but keep in mind stupid cheese tricks wasn't a fluke or anything; that's the shit I do when I need entertainment and my boss isn't paying attention.

There's also this; work is not my life. It can't be; I get some people can do that, but I can't, I have so many different things I like to do. I care about where I work for pay and how much it entertains me (see learning experience above) and the fact it's fairy valuable to social work, but that's as far as I go. Work is fun sometimes and boring sometimes, but its actual function is to pay for my computers, child's lizards, shoes, cons, trips out of state, visiting svmadelyn, playing with the stock market, concerts, my hobbies, and everything that encompasses my actual life. Giving it more importance than that never seemed like a good idea; that's a good way to go crazy.

This is the first time I'm considering school as more than a means to entertain myself, which is all I was basically doing it for (and because programming is really entertaining). I'm ridiculously close to graduating, but again, school is part of my entertainment budget, not a means to an end (though yeah, that too), so that changes how I've been thinking about it, as "something if I have time, go do that" to "perhaps a change in priority would be a good idea".

Maybe I just need something new to look forward to. July and August were concert, beach, svmadelyn, and VVC and now I don't have anything to plan for or look forward to like that until potentially June of next year. I need something new to be excited about after two months of high-level excitement and debt payoff and everything.

You know, I've never done New Year's in New York. I'm actually seriously considering this now. I mean, I have no idea what, but it's something to stare at thoughtfully and examine and then possibly do like I do everything: take three steps back, pretend I know what I'm about to do, and take a running jump to see what happens when I land. I don't think the universe owes me excitement; that's why I figure I should provide that for myself.

Speaking from experience gained via a lifetime of television and movies, when one's office lights all go out but all the computers still run, this is how horror movies start. And yet, no matter how many people I tell that sitting in the dark surrounded by the unearthly glow of LCD monitors is very bad and we need to run away now, everyone tells me to stop being imaginative and also warily asks how my gall bladder is.

Hello, my gall bladder didn't cause the lights to go out--or we're entering a very specialized type of horror movie that I really don't want to have to deal with, so stop that shit because a haunted gall bladder that causes lights to go out is not something I want to know exists. Is there a genre for haunted internal organs? Okay, you know what, don't answer that question. Just, just don't.

Yes, that's pretty much all I came online to say. I am a veritable Cassandra at work and there are no lights. And also a burning rubber smell near the door that is not unlike electrical burning or possibly, burning evil. It is currently being investigated. Not by ghostbusters, so who knows what will come of this? No one, that's who.

I feel a breakdown of sanity at nine thirty in the morning is not a good sign of how the rest of the day will go.

Loosely related to my post on benefit programs in Texas.

If you are in Texas and interested in pursuing a career with the Health and Human Services Commission, the umbrella organization beneath which four other agencies also rest, this is the link to the hiring center: HR Access. This works in IE only. I can get it to work in Firefox sometimes, but resign yourself to IE if you want to be sure it works correctly.

Click on the link for external applicants on the right, and you'll see drop down boxes split by state agency, category, city, location, blah blah blah.

Now, to the part I am pimping; Texas is hiring clerks at the Clerk III and above level and caseworkers at Texas Works Advisor II level for Texas Works, which handles Food Stamps (now known as SNAP, don't ask), TANF, and Medicaid for children and families, and is also hiring Medicaid Eligibility Specialists, who handle Medicaid for the elderly, the disabled, nursing homes, and etc. These jobs are under HHSC in Agency.

Oh, direct link: we're hiring caseworkers! And some other stuff, as you can see. Start value is $2200 per month, you'll do three months accumulated training, though they switch around whether you do all three months at once or over the course of a year or two--it's very strange and based on weird educational theories (again, don't ask) and office need.

The start value for a clerk is $1881 per month. I think there is a clerical test you have to do. Let us say, if you can read this, that means you can type, and we're done here.

The state provides insurance, retirement, access to 401(k) and 457, you accumulate one day of sick leave and one day of annual leave monthly and that amount increases the longer you are with the state (we call it tenure), overtime is not a problem and some cities, though not all, have a paid overtime option instead of just overtime that means you get literal leave, which is useful if you like taking two week vacations. There are holidays! Promotion is not difficult if you are at least mediocre or fake it extremely well and there is access to educational leave. And promotions can be fairly fast. I speak as someone who jumped a lot of paygrades in less than five years very fast, especially if you live in or are close to a major city.

Having a degree is not a requirement. Work experience is good. Clerical experience or work in any social service public, private, volunteer is golden, but again, not a requirement. For Clerk III, I think you just need to be breathing, to be honest.

Job Requirements

If you apply for a clerical position, pretty much anything goes. You might work front desk (see my LJ, April 2003 to February 2004 for details under the tag work), you might work file room, you might do pretty much anything. It is freakishly busy, your day will go very, very fast, and if you have an anal bone in your body, you will fall in love with the file room and organizing cases. If you don't know basic Spanish, you will learn. It just happens.

If you apply for a caseworker position, you will determine eligibility for SNAP (that's food stamps, btw), TANF (Temporary Aid for Needy Families), and Medicaid for families, for children, and for pregnant women. You will learn basic timeliness and policy, but more importantly, you will learn how to locate things in the handbook, both a paper version you will learn to adore highlighting and an online version that you can search with google. You will learn to determine eligibility on paper with a pencil (I still can) as well as on a computer. You will interview the entire range of humanity. Your caseload when you've been working six months will be between eight and sixteen cases a day, sometimes more depending on office, some of which will take ten minutes, some will take the full hour. You will learn to interview people, access data on a variety of interfaces, and stare at small children running in your office (have a couple of coloring books ready). You will do overtime. You will do a lot overtime. There is already a system of organization in place passed down from the first caseworkers back in the days we did things on stone tablets. Trust me when I say, you will love it. Also, you will probably get an office to decorate!

Both these jobs, you will have coworkers who will be your comrades in the trenches of welfare policy, dress code shenanigans, and Christmas Cookie exchanges (email me how to do that; it's fun!).

What You Should Know:

1.) It isn't easy. It's not hard either. It's confusing ocassionally, weird a lot, sometimes you will wonder what crack the legislature is smoking (cheap shit, apparently), and it's deeply hilarious. It looks terrifying and too much for one person to learn. It's really not.

2.) Interviewing only sounds stressful; I was scared to death of that part. That became one of my favorite parts.

3.) You will meet crazy people. They won't always be your coworkers, but usually, they will be.

4.) We like keeping people and hopefully hiring their offspring and their offspring's offspring (three generations working at HHSC is surprisingly common). HHSC is very much family friendly. Your mentor and your coworkers really want you to succeed, because if you leave they take your caseload and that sucks. Trust me when I say, there are few jobs where everyone really wants to keep you around for as long as humanly possible. They may offer snacks.

5.) We like promoting from within the agency. With caseworker experience, you can do pretty much anything, because most of the positions either require you to have casework experience or really prefer it a lot. A degree is not required for most jobs, but there's educational leave! Go get one if you have time.

6.) It's stressful, exhausting, miserable, and occasionally, you will want to say die in a fire without meme or irony. It's also amazing, fun, and interesting. You will not get bored, and I say this as someone who has the attention span of a gnat. Your day will pass like you would not believe. You will interview fascinating people, work with crazy people (and sometimes reverse those), and if you don't know how to be painfully sarcastic in ways that will fly over people's heads all the time, you will learn really fast.

7.) You will have a lot of data for stupid internet arguments on welfare.

8.) It's one of the few jobs where you will change someone's life every day. Pretty good stats, I think.

The application is available online and I'm pretty sure you can submit it online unless HRAccess went down again. Create an account at the link, then you may start your journey. And if you aren't interested in casework, there are a lot of possibilities in all the agencies you can check out.

Anyone who decides to apply--good luck!

So you know how you're like, whining at a coworker (and making him check your scripts) about how you are starving and send him a detailed explanation of exactly the right kind of breakfast taco and where to get it, and then like, it shows up on your desk because you are fucking magic today?

...or possibly, you know, you tortured him when he was really hungry and he got you one because he knew you'd steal his if he didn't? Pretty sure he took orders from everyone. (Thank you R!)

Yeah. I go with magic, myself. Bacon, egg, potato, cheese, oh my God refried bean*, I think I'm totes in love. I'm also still eating, so hunger could be affecting my judgment.

*wriggles fingers* I want...a blue pony. With wings. And a horn.

Magic, yo.

* Refried beans is new. Let me say, why the fuck haven't I been adding this to all my breakfast tacos, because sublime is an understatement for the sheer complexity of WHEE DELICIOUS. Wow.

When someone capslocks a response to a question at work with obvious capslock intent you cannot:

a.) write back DIAF, because sure, they probably don't know what it means, but it is not professional.

b.) check urbandictionary for more acronyms.

c.) smallcap your response. Or use the word typevore even ironically when referring to their typing.

You can be so sarcastic you wonder if it would have been politer to simply say DIAF and be done with it, though. Passive-aggressive is awesome.

If you want me, I will be framing emails to maximize my intent to be bitchy, and in pursuit of this goal, my grammar must be flawless.

*seething*

All this week, I've been in a good mood. Like, wear lipstick and color coordinate my clothes good mood. There's even been hair fixing and whatnot. I could say it was all due to Trek (and most of it was, seriously; Trek was first fandom and my earliest sci-fi memories. Oh my God, Abrams, I love you), but by yesterday, it was also because I honestly like screwing with my coworkers and they were getting really disturbed at the entire seems to care about personal appearance thing. A few would drop by, I'd smile, and they would scurry away. P kept checking me surreptitiously for Vulcan ears. I'd totally wear them if I had them, too.

In other words, my life was perfect.

However, I am being punished for rediscovering lip liner and floral prints; I cannot sleep tonight for some reason, even though I am exhausted. What I did do was spend an hour replotting the end of the damned Spock fic and then imaging out a complex story where Kirk goes to jail and Spock bails him out, because that's the kind of thing I find hilarious.

So then I said, well, okay, screw it, let's find something to read.

It's not that I didn't know the kink meme was around. I did! But so far, I've been reading using the careful and scientific study of how many people have tagged something in delicious. Well, I ran out of that and said, what the hell, be crazy.

Wow, was that a mistake.

Mostly because if I'd done that earlier, I could have discovered five million new horrifying things, or at least like, three, and all of them involve bodily functions, how they are named, and what they are used for. And what they should never be used for. I will say this: blood. And also, to the author, what were you thinking? Blood is sticky.

Also, I fell on top of a fic with Rodney McKay in an adult diaper and frankly, I may never sleep again. Yes, I am sharing that with you. Go enjoy your day with that image and try not to walk off the side of a building; I work on the ground floor, but I can totally get to the roof if I need to.

I'm still in a good mood. But it's more edging toward what one might call 'manic'. I don't see how this can end well.

A possible explanation, gakked from trobadora:

AmazonFail: An Inside Look at What Happened

Amazon managers found that an employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as "adult," the source said. (Technically, the flag for adult content was flipped from 'false' to 'true.')

Note: If they are telling the truth about what happened, this applies. And actually, it would apply if they lied, but worse. One error is one thing, but if this was a deliberate system-wide build that made the change, pretty much the same thing applies, but with less sympathy.

My expertise is not expertise, it is anecdata, but it's also ten builds and fifty emergency releases of professional anecdata, so take that as you will.

I am a professional tester because at some point, it occurred to people that things worked better when there was a level of testing that was specifically designed to mimic the experiences of the average user with a change to a program. Of course, they didn't use average users, they used former caseworkers and programmers, but the point stands.

( a longwinded way of saying, if this isn't a complete and utter lie, it does make sense )

Short version: this matches my testing experience and also tells you more than you ever wanted to know about my daily life and times. YMMV for those who have a different model for code releases and updates.

And to add, again, if this is true, I am seriously feeling for the tech dept right now. Having to do unplanned system-wide fixes sucks. Someone is leaving really unkind post-it notes for the French coder. Not that I ever considered doing that or anything.

ETA: For us, there are two types of builds and fixes: mod (modification) and main (maintenance). The former is actual new things added to the code, like, I don't know, adding an interface or new policy or changing the color scheme. Maintenance is stuff that is already there that broke and needs to be fixed, like suddenly you can't make a page work. Emergency fixes in general are maintenance, something broken that needs fixing, with occasional mods, the legislature did something dramatic.

None of this means they aren't lying and it wasn't deliberate. My department failed an entire build once due to the errors in it.

Actually, the easiest way to find out if it was deliberate is to hunt down whoever did their testing and check the scripts they wrote, or conversely, if amazon does it all automated, the automated testing scripts will also tell you exactly what was being tested. If it was deliberate, there were several scripts specifically created to test this change.

Example:

If I wrote the user script and was running it in a near-field environment.

Step Four: Query for Beauty's Punishment from main page.
Expected Result: Does not display.
Actual Result: Does not display.
(add screenshot here)

Step Five: Query for Beauty's Punishment from Books.
Expected Result: Displays.
Actual Result: Displays.
(add screenshot here)

We're like the evidence trail. Generally, a tester has to know what they are supposed to be testing to test it. If this was live beta'ed earlier this year with just a few authors, it still had to, at some point, go through some kind of formal testing procedure and record the results. And there would be a test written specifically to see if X Story Marked Adult would appear if searched from the main page, and one specifically written to check that X Story Marked Adult was showing sales figures, either human-run or automated.

My boss came around offering peanuts.

We all looked at them warily.

"From Nigeria," he says reassuringly, offering the container.

We all eagerly took some.*

[Me: From a Nigerian scammer who bought them in America?
Him: ....
Me: Never mind. Give me some?]

(* in case you did not know, a major peanut and peanut-paste supplying corporation let loose salmonella in their peanuts/peanut butter. Otherwise, this joke makes very little sense, unless you read it as a play on the Nigerian scammer email thing, and wow, this becomes less funny by the minute. I would say this is a good argument for keeping up on current events so this is funnier. If it ever can be.)

Yeah, it never gets old to yell Wiiiiii! I am totally getting why Nintendo went with this name. The programmers totally went around yelling "Where is the wiiiiii code? Do you have more wiiiiiiii functionality?" Totally.

Wii Stats

Sunday: 1.5 hours
Monday: 35 minutes
Tuesday: 43 minutes

Currently, I've lost two pounds and lowered my BMI by some amount, cramped up my left foot, and overworked my left leg, so no heels for a few days while I walk off the strain. It's also why I had to stop; I couldn't hold any toe positions because of (very mild) leg spasms. So far, getting up every thirty minutes and doing stretches against the wall is getting rid of the worst of it, but it does mean when I get up in the morning, it'll be about twenty minutes before I can work my heels back to the ground (or ten if I'm in a hurry and that's often). For those who travel with me regularly, or who are synedochic and niqaeli, yes, like that. And yes, I'm looking into a local masseuse, since I do want my flexibility back but am not fond of low level pain when walking all day.

( the wii fit report )

( non-wii adventues )

In closing, does anyone have any Chuck icons? Or know where I can find them? Or will just give me randomly out of pity?

I'm having a day where I really want to get in an online argument with someone. Preferably over something both stupid and something I am totally totally right about. Currently I am imagining out elaborate scenarios where I emerge the victor of a long and bitter battle where everyone bows before me and offers me e-congrats and possibly worship.

I occasionally write entire ranty entries that I don't post--instead, I consign them to MSWord to be forgotten, because sometimes it is just as satisfactory to write it out and save it without posting. It's soothing. All the textual satisfaction without the inevitable byproduct of online explosions.

However, the proliferation of lj comms that I follow that aren't fannish are bringing out a lot more of my latent sarcasm than I'd thought was still active.

At work, I got in mild trouble, which you would think wouldn't relate to the above, but I hate being lectured for something I didn't do and it doesn't help that I was in a bad mood anyway with my cubicle continuing to lack electricity and network access (both of which I am getting with the help of extension cords from other cubicles now). She asked why I hadn't had the bright idea of an extension cord before (because they said the electrician was going to fix it. I will happily rewire my cube if that's what you really want, though; I looked up cubicle design and can print out the blueprints. Give me tools, please), then she ended up saying she rather thought I liked doing nothing.

Yeah, that went well.

In five years, every time my supervisors have had the authority to give me a bonus, they have, which is three out of five years. Every. Damn. Time. I've had to recut my own resumee because I couldn't cover all the projects I used to do, supervise, or create. I carry a folder to interviews with the rest of it. In testing, I finish all my first draft scenarios within the first week. I have never, ever been less than excellent at my job.

I had to stop and blink slowly, because here if not elsewhere, I'll point out; I am never less than excellent at what I do. I am lazy and I get bored easily, and sure, I blow off all kinds of stuff when I feel like it, but I can, because I'm good at my job and I've been called up for a lot of things, but the quality of my work and my ethic are freaking above reproach.

She asked if I was bored, and I said yes. This may or may not end up with actual, say, work. You know, useful work that does work things.

I'm still angry about this. I should look for a new job, but honestly, if they'd give me enough to do here, it wouldn't be a problem, because the work I do get I enjoy. I like testing. I like creating new procedures. I like doing useful things. How this has escaped anyone when I ask regularly for something to do is a mystery.

You know, I do not feel better writing that, but am tempted to get my evaluations, my stats, and my project list and drop it on her desk on Monday. Not sure I want this mood to pass.

Often during meetings, I take notes. I want to say it's not because it gives the illusion I in any way care about what goes on during meetings, but that's a lie. It's there to give the illusion I care. Usually, I have no idea what I wrote and find myself vaguely surprised days later when occasionally a verbatim speech by someone gets marked down (which explains why my hand ached). Then again, sometimes, I have no idea.

Most recently in the middle of something else entirely.

*****

Volunteer to work on team project.
STUDY
READ ABOUT TESTING

Tomorrow someone will provide hula hoop. <--[context:boss has hula hoop. no idea why]

Things
Fall
Apart

MRD RMD not there.

Make sure there is enough information.

Be Tough --> Hanging Tough --> NKOTB

Danger <---|
Will
! Robinson

(I give up. ASCII is not loved here.)

*****

Somewhere in here I also break into an adjective noun game:

*****

Defects Yay!
Dancing Bears
Singing Dogs
Flying Pigs
Clapping Monkeys
Whistling Cats

*****

...and a brief set of pictures illustrating a.) a happy sun over a smiling flower with fluffy clouds and b.) a bicycle captioned "SAD BICYCLE". Randomly in the middle of an explanation of testing procedure, I wrote a line about wikipedia.

According to the above, I have volunteered to work on the team project. That does explain the email I keep getting. It does not explain what the hell it is.

This

Okay, what weirds me out about this site is that it sounds so over the top. It does, yet if you have ever worked customer service, every so often you read one and think, oh, God. I remember that.

Take this one:

Once a long time ago, or like, a year and a half, I was on the phone when our fire alarm went off. There's no way to tell between testing and real, and frankly, I do not care. I do not like fire when applied to my skin.

The chick I was on the phone with--and the alarm in the building is not subtle, and I held up the phone just in case--would not get off the phone. I don't remember the conversation, mostly because of near-potential-death and irritation, but it was pretty much that surreal.

That

A perky scientist came on the science channel to talk about how time travel is totally possible, leading to an escalating argument with one's eleven year old on the nature of dark matter (this did not come standard in the parenting manual and I did not have time to wiki; guess who won that argument). It is not fun to be pwned. He's grounded from working at CERN, which I added to grounded from not working on the Mars landing.

My parental thrills are cheap and easy.

My other option is the next perky scientist that does this, I will write down his/her name and when Child is in need of interning somewhere, that is where he will go. I can think of no worse punishment for anyone, unless it is waking up to Child saying "Mom, it was just an experiment, okay?" I still don't know what that's about. And you know what? Until such a time as it is forced upon me? I am totally not going to go find out. Denial is my friend.

Other

I need to make a list. Of what, I don't know, but lists always soothe me. I feel extremely unsoothed.

Life, Work, Fire

I came into work today with no expectation that anything in my remaining tests would be fixed. I was pleasantly surprised to realize I hadn't overestimated the situation--in other words, while no, it's not better, wow, it hasn't gotten worse!

I was a fool.

Two hours into this morning, I stood over Thomas in his office telling him "KILL IT WITH FIRE", which only sounds like an overreaction if you haven't been testing the same program fix about ten times and no one appreciates when you explain that this job has become the definition of insanity--to wit, doing the exact same thing over and over with the idea that the results will change. I think kill it with fire gets the idea across nicely.

Later, my boss eyed me warily. I have attempted to tell him that should I need to light my hard drive on fire, a.) I need more than a lighter; I need to call my son and have him mix me up a good accelerant out of common household chemicals and b.) I will take it outside, as one does.

This will end well, one way or another.

Anthrax watch has ended; I am sure we can all breathe easier knowing whatever that mysterious powder was in the bathroom it was either a.) not anthrax or b.) was anthrax but badly manufactured.

When written out, my job sounds far more interesting than it actually is.

Thoughts from VVC

During the panel on the expansion of vids and whatnot, the idea was broached that up to now, at the intersection of vidding and writing, it tends to be writing --> inspires vid. I was curious--and still am curious--if anyone would be interested in doing the opposite, or rather, pick out a vid, any vid, and write a story based on it. Not merely the constructed reality ones (though wow, could that go some interesting places) but also thematic or mood specific or whatever floats your boat. I'm curious if the writing would end up as much commentary--ie "this is how I see this"--as fic. Would anyone want to participate in that? I mean, basically, you will watch a vid and then write a fic about it. I mean, it's a hard job, but I'm pretty sure most of us would bite the bullet and carefully examine Dean's ass frame by frame, you know?

?

Yeah, this part is just because I wanted a third section.

A Versus S: The Rise of the Clones (or something)

Because we are about three days away from Operation Reconnect on Saturday and this time I put a post-it note up to remind me that come hail, bad weather, or epic pneumonia, I will be watching this. Um, unless John Sheppard appears on my doorstep. Then all bets are off.

Linked first by gweniriol:

the following post is [about] anonymous hosted by Henry Jenkin's blog, apparently from an (anonymous but not Anonymous) student. It, er, has nothing particularly new to say that anyone on lj hasn't been saying, but it's a nice and concise summary of events so far.

Linked by JF's user Nigredo on Operation: Mock at JF:

Serious Business, hosted by Citypaperonline, a pretty darn good article about Anonymous, Scientology, the internet, et al. Really, really interesting.

The Definition of Insanity Is...

Theoretically (as in, from the internetz I got my learnings), insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different response. That personally makes no sense to me, because as we all know, doing something exactly the same way over and over is a flat out guarantee that it will have a different response just as you have fallen into the rut. Which is why people are up at four in the morning when their hard drive inexplicably crashes and they lose all their media after saving it the same way as always. Not that this has happened to me. But I have heard of it.

However. At work, this is the actual definition of sane. Doing the same test over and over and over until it starts working. I literally think that at some point, someone is going to come in here and find me sitting in my bra and a pair of sunglasses talking to my imaginary best friend Bob the Toaster. It's just that likely. Assuming I remember to wear a bra.

It's over soon. Well, not really. But the part that's making me have some kind of strange interaction with the not-real world (ask chopchica about my sudden desire to turn all of SGA into actual vampires; this can't end well).

Music

I rarely rec music, but if you are say, in a bad mood? The rageful kind? Falls Apart by Hurt is doing good things for me. It tricked me. The beginning is faintly slow emo by way of Staind and I was all, whee mope, oh woe my hard life, then suddenly there's like, that virtual feeling of being in a room full of guitars and your job is to smash them all. Yes. That please. It's on youtube (a lot), but I can't listen from here to see which version sounds right.

I think the most disturbing part of being in the new building is the fact there is a door in the handicapped bathroom stall! Okay, well, that's disturbing, yes, mostly because I cannot figure out where it goes.

It's like this great mystery. Or a mediocre mystery with a coating of huh, why? So I, being rather bored, what with the computers being down and my mentor still kind of bitter about that entire encyclopedia dramatica link, so yeah, not going in that cubicle until I'm armed with placation in the form of food and goods, decided it was time to find out The Truth.

So I asked. Blank looks all around. Door, they say, chewing on a sandwich and never meeting my eyes. A door in the bathroom?

A door in the handicapped bathroom stall, I explain. With a handle. And light coming from underneath.

So I found a floor plan (they're hanging everywhere) and lo, there's a mysterious space that hooks to that mysterious door. A space, they say as I point emphatically to the space. Right, that door! Why didn't you say so? That is a closet.

Do they always leave the lights on, I ask suspiciously, watching for tentacles (I know I've seen this movie, and I've been reliably told, fire. Kill it with fire).

Lights? They ask blankly. What lights?

So far, I have yet to hear any noise from it--and isn't that suspicious? Of course, me leaning against the door looking frantic is probably equally suspicious, but luckily my reputation precedes me--most of them are aware I'm subject to random fits of curiosity that sometimes end with me hunting up a screwdriver and taking things apart.

If I vanish, I will be in the mysterious light-filled closet.

At this point in my life, I make my own fun. Carry on.

So I interviewed yesterday for a job with testing; they called today and made an offer.

I'm pretty sure that nearly passing out on the phone is probably not going to win me points, but oh. My. God.

Job! With more money! Dear God the raise. I need to lie down or stand up or God, stop smiling and giggling hysterically.

Start January 2. I just--need to breathe. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Now breathe.

Right. Breathe. Got it.

One of the early problems I ran into during my early ipod phase was that I wanted it with me all the time. Little John and I (Yes. That is his name.) would sit out together during break, and when break was up, we'd be in teh middle of a song. And we'd go back inside.

Usually, I'd remember not to sing.

However. Rhythm always sets my walking pace, and today I was testing out A Perfect Circle's Bodies Like Sheep which is a lot more relevant when one is working for state government than I think anyone wants to acknowledge. It's also, I realized, slower than I thought it was considering--walking on the upbeat is impossibly slow, but on the four looks like I'm trying to quickly move from the scene of a crime, so I'd spent part of my break trying to find a happy medium (extended stride, etc). I was on a good part, but my break was over, so I wandered inside, at which time someone (and from what I could tell, someone far higher up the food chain though in this building, we are all kind of not the leading lights of the agency) stopped short when I came in the door to watch me mumbling about the rhythm of the war drums.

There was a second of conflict--wanting to look disapproving except it's a state office and if this is how we get through the day without emulating the postal service, go for it--wanting to ask and trying to remember work rules--we have some odd ones--and kind of wanting to laugh because I'd still been working on setting my step to rhythm and then tripped over my feet when I saw him watching me. He grinned, asked what I was listening to, and I mumbled out something while I got my headphones off and skulked to my office to wonder if he'd ever be my boss.

( blah blah blah )

I got a Wendy's Buttermilk Frescuit. If you hear word of my death, plz feel free to sue on the grounds of personal trauma you have suffered at my loss. Though so far, tasty. Very, very tasty.

I think maybe I'm not all that emotionally stable today, as I was verifiying the webpage I'm working on for work on Firefox, since it's not as forgiving as IE, and my first css table coding is so off and wrong it hurts me and I started to cry.

*sighs* This cannot be a good sign of things to come. I don't know what's bothering me more--that I somehow got it wrong, or that i have to go back through thirty pages and change each one.

Seriously. People are looking at me.

It's the rain. It's gotta be.

And I still don't know why the first table and the header aren't working!

The thing is, I am a simple girl with simple needs. No, really. At work, I just want something interesting and challenging.

Yeah, I'm an idiot.

On the list of "interesting and challenging" projects currently:

1.) create a webpage version of the user manual I wrote for our tracking program.

I have to learn DIV commands, since the table thing is driving me nuts in layout. And because frankly, I kind of want to show off. To whom, I have no idea--no one else in this office is familiar with how to code a webpage. I think writing HTML on a page is enough to impress them.

Like I said, I'm an idiot.

2.) this part is unreal. I got called into a meeting to--no, really--create a music vid about my supervisor's supervisor, to commemorate her receiving her doctorate.

Tell me Adobe Elements will work for this. Please. Also: why does knowing how to build a basic webpage predispose people to think I can create a vid?

God. Why can't VVC be *before* this? Then I could stand outside and offer money to vidders or cry on sisabet or fan_eunice or something and hope they will pity me.

OTOH, I have an excuse to websurf during work to refresh my memory of CSS. So you know, not too bad. Except for the vid part. I may go catatonic over that.

I'm going through a depressing country music phase, where I want to listen to breakup and death songs. My music tastes are almost constantly at odds with what I want to read. Lemme tell you, anytime the rotation includes one song about murder, two Johnny Cash, and this? There's something odd going on with the playlist.

Currently on the rotation--What Hurts the Most, Rascal Flatts. The video is wrenching as hell.

Work

I had an interview on Friday. It was kind of bad, in that way that bad romantic comedies are bad. They told me one, but teh calendar said two. I assumed that meant they'd changed it--it was Friday, people go to a late lunch. It's the state. It happens. But no, it was one, leading me to run desperately to my computer and print out the calender function off Outlook and shoving it into the interviewer's cubicle with a desperate expression. So the interview went off at two, and the question and answer portion was fine. I'm good with those.

Then came the practical.

I want to give you an image. Let's go with a Stargate image, because hey, it's my lj, I can do that whether it's relatable or not.

You are given a series of copies of something in indistinct patterns written in Ancient and told to creat a spreadsheet from all twenty something pages. Some of the time they black out the name and claim number, sometimes not. Those two things are the only parts of the entire damn thing you understand. MBI number? Account? (Okay, I know what account is). A dizzying variety of acronyms. Some things that refer to money. Some--you have no idea. There are dates. You look at them like they're nuts.

It's STAR and STAR+ and Medicaid related, in case you're curious. You're probably not. Unless you work the programs, I cannot imagine a more boring topic of conversation. God, you should hear our jokes. Even I sometimes shudder in horror when I realize I'm laughing hysterically when someone makes a Medicaid/Medicare misnamed acronym joke. On the other hand, if you work with the implementation, you find yourself feverishly interested in the monthly policy updates, changes to providers, and being deeply and personally invested in whether or not you need prior authorization for non-generic medication.

Okay, what I said above would be very funny to one of us. You see why I don't really talk about my job much anymore.

Anyway, the pay is nice. The fact I'll be doing something new is nice. I had a horrific moment of comprehension today when I broke into my boss' office to reorganize all the personnel files that are about six months to ten months behind, or basically stopped being updated since I was his admin. I am that bored. The height of entertainment....

Wait. I was talking about the interview.

Well, the best part was, we had forty-five to do the spreadsheet (were they *fucking with me*?), the questionaire, and a letter that--God, okay, a letter to a clinic's owning company explaining why we wont' cover something. No, really. I have this--weird and strange need to--do the hardest thing first. I did the questionnaire really fast, but the spreadsheet fascinated me. I had never seen so many sheets of paper in legitimate English composed of such nonsense. Contextually, they were rejections of billing due to third party insurers--I can see people's eyes glazing already, but seriously, this is the height of chic social chat at the office--but mostly, they were long rows of acronyms with monetary value assigned. I read through it all in horror, worked out I was looking in the face of hell, and went back and looked for commonalities.

I'm good at pattern recognition--this is why I interview well for the state. I can usually figure out what they're looking for by paying attention to the wording of questions. This is why I was a good caseworker. That's all pattern recognition in policy. The problem was, it's pattern recognition of a foreign language. And some of the commonalities--like name and claim number--were blacked out on some and not others. I pulled everything that appeared on every sheet, named it something that sounded like I knew what I was talking about, and set up the spreadsheet. I was half way done when my interviewer came over at the thirty minute mark and asked if I would be willing to do the rest on Monday.

I almost laughed. Sure, I said, because seriously, it's not like I'd figure this out without a character map even if I had the whole weekend. I did hte rest today. Didn't finish the provider letter. Didnt' really care. I wasn't qualified for this job when they asked me to interview. No, really. So that I got the interview at all was a surprise. Mostly, I tend to rest a lot of my value on the fact that I'm always good at my job. This isn't bragging. This is boredom. If I'm not good at it, the days pass a lot longer than they should. Being good is being given a lot to do, and look at that, five comes fast.

Work II

Short version--in 2005, the state sold off a lot of their social services to a private contractor, Accenture, better known under another name as the people who worked with Enron. No. I'm not kidding. I kind of want to cry, but this is typical of the current administration, so whatever. This included caseworker jobs. I was one of those, and changed jobs before they could start pink-slipping us. Well, as predicted, they made a mess of it. A huge mess of the CHIP program, the Medicaids, the--well, name it, they fucked it up royally. Tuesday last week, my mom called me while I was resting my feet in Millennium Park to tell me that the contract had been severed.

I won't try to explain my glee. It's hard to describe without going into strange, surreal comparisons to the Rapture, but suffice to say, there's a level of joy going on here that defies description. It's like--I don't know. I'm ombudsman--I know the level of fuck-upedness going on in the state due to both Accenture and the fact that the state, in prep for the rollout, started pink-slipping like crazy and we lost the best and brightest of our caseworking staff. The tenured. The ones that knew policy backward, forward, and sideways. The ones that coudl do the work. Leavingn the entire state with underqualified trainees in temp positions--so we weren't getting, in some cases, the best people. We were hiring people who knew how to read. Maybe.

Just suffice to say--I am very pleased with the universe.

Fandom

I had this thoughtful topic on gen, slash, and het, but I'm still overthinking my instinctive response to the treatment of non-canon slash and non-canon het unequally, which was hostile. I'm less comfortable with diametrically opposing points of view than I really thought I was. Over-emotional reactions to stories, sure, I know I go places there, but that at least makes sense to me--it's *fic* and the point of fic is emotional engagement. A sudden hostility to a meta surprises me. I got over it quickly, because above and beyond that, it was interesting and thoughtful and brought up some questions I've been asking myself on the blurry lines between slash, het, gen, and the canon that rules them all.

Here abyssinia4077 talks about het, slash, gen, and labeling stories.

A part of this the way I set up my flist; I keep myself fairly isolated from things that really annoy me, so I'm unused to being highly annoyed unless I'm linked or someone points it out to me. A part of me does wonder if we lost something in switching to lj and being able to, in essence, pick our mailinglist mates, instead of having to deal with the annoying people daily and building up a certain level of tolerance for it. Or it could be just me; I'm getting more fixed in what I'm willing to deal with and what I'll blow off because I just am not willing to listen today. Etc. Etc. Etc. Which is a sign of either creeping intolerance or sheer laziness. I'm not sure which. I think I prefer the laziness.

( interpretations of canon, etc )

Singing along to Buffy the Musical soundtrack. God. It's so good that no one is close enough to have their ears start to bleed.