Tag: anger management

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Fax It to Me Baby

The team meeting was pretty worthless this morning, but I expected it to be with Jason’s attitude about “nobody sending him any projects” yesterday. Heather had some lines to pull at the junior high, so Ben helped her with one set while Allen and I ran another longer one. Ours was a fax line for the counselors, because it’s 1982. We worked until a late lunch, then went to Wind Taste to eat before going back to drop the cable down the wall.

Once that was finished, we went back to the shop for a while, where I spent some time chatting with Gary before heading to the high school to do some work. I wrapped up late there too, then headed home for a little while. I messed with the aquariums some until I saw Summer’s text about needing help at the shop. Evidently they had some trouble with their modem, and poor luck timed it during an outage with Suddenlink’s own provisioning service. We called and spent a while on hold, but couldn’t ever get the service switched to the new modem, so Summer left her personal modem there for tomorrow.

Having done all we could do, Summer went home to get some clothes while I picked up some Zaxby’s for dinner, then met her at my house for the evening.

I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a freelancer, but I’ll give it a shot.

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Learning ALL THE THINGS

I tried pretty hard to get things done today, and though I closed a few little things, I felt better about learning and knowing processes and things. I wish I had time to just sit and document some of this stuff, or better yet, organize the documentation that we already have so it’s more accessible. I worked into lunch a bit, but got hungry and bothered enough to leave. I tried to go to CiCi’s with Summer, but she got stuck on the phone while I was waiting for her, and I had to run to Wendy’s really quickly instead.

After lunch, I chatted with Ben for a bit so he could help me better understand some of the things I had been working on. I was on the right track, which made me feel at least a little competent. It’s starting to feel like I’m the everything-guy though, and it’s aggravating being around people that make more for less. I also about had a fight with my phone over how stupid it was being, but then out of the blue it fixed itself as though it could sense that I was preparing to pull the trigger on a full factory reset.

I finished up the day a little late, then headed home to do some more laundry while I waited for Summer to get off work. Then we went to my parents’ house for spring rolls, and the girls brought some homework along as well. They did really well today, but they couldn’t stick around for too long. I had to head home to finish laundry and clean up after the cat too, and then it was a relatively early night to bed.

Shrimp everywhere!

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Don’t Get Testy

I started out at the shop this morning so I could finish my LockDown browser deployment. I got the last piece I needed in order to put the whole thing together, and it worked. Once that was done, I had to leave the shop before I got too annoyed with anyone that was either not doing anything at all or too stupid to remember how to do what they were doing yesterday.

Most of the rest of my morning was spent shuffling around Verizon Jetpacks that reeked of cigarette smoke and unemployment. Evidently we lost two outright last year, and four more were damaged or not working for one reason or another. Lunch came and went, and nothing sounded good so I seized the opportunity to ride on through on another Soylent.

The afternoon rolled on pretty quickly, and then Eaddie rode the bus over to me after school. We went to my parents’ house for some fish soup before I had to take her to karate. She’s been aggravating me with her lackadaisical responses any time we ask her to do anything, and today was no exception. She had 20 minutes to finish eating before karate. Then she had 15. Then she had 10. Then she had 5 to get dressed. Then she was 10 minutes late to karate and still wouldn’t even walk quickly to the front door of the establishment. I cannot imagine why someone with so much uncontrollable, spontaneous energy would have to drag her feet after being asked to do anything and everything, and things are about to get really serious.

I came on home after that and started taking care of the fish again. I put Fatty back into the community tank since I’ve lost enough of the other inhabitants over the years that she shouldn’t be stressed. I still need to put together some bigger tanks for the other two bettas, and I can’t decide if I want to put one in the Imagitarium to take to work. I’ve still got the Fluval Edges to work with as well, and the Miracle-Gro® Performance Organics™ All Purpose Container Mix seems to be doing quite well for my plants. I like the Black Diamond sandblasting media as a substrate cap as well, though I wish I had the coarser stuff.

For some reason, out of all the still water in my house, a mosquito laid eggs that hatched in my Imagitarium. I sucked a bunch of larvae out in a massive, first water change in that tank, but I wish I could have just dropped a fish in to take care of it. The nitrogen cycle is stupid. Hopefully after tomorrow it will be ready for some fauna, but at least so far the plants have really taken off.

I’m gonna count to one.

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Third Wind

I went to bed early last night but tossed and turned for a couple hours before I finally fell asleep. It wasn’t too much later that I woke up to the sound of the cat retching in the floor, so I had to get out of bed to clean that up. Then I tossed and turned, wide-eyed from about 3am until about 5:45, when I finally jumped out of bed and drove to Waffle House. I sat at the bar by myself with only one other customer in the restaurant, surprised that there weren’t more people there for breakfast. Running on so little sleep, I knew what I had to get. Bacon cheese burger with hash browns scattered all the way with chili and gravy. It was full-on punishment for the betrayal I felt as my body refused to go to sleep. The cook was a rockstar, but accidentally threw some hash browns on the grill for a regular customer that ended up not wanting them. He offered them to me for free, so I mounded them on top of my already sloppy plate and destroyed it all. No mercy.

It was a super fast breakfast with nobody else there, and I made it home just in time to hear my alarm clock start buzzing. It was go-time. Full morning routine and out the door a full 10 minutes early. I made it to school and got up into the building way early and jumped right in. Then I was assaulted by the library when some testing didn’t go as planned. Failures exaggerated, our pseudo hero jumped in to “save the day” and “take the credit.” Gary showed up in the middle of it all and had to go hide in my office for all the screaming.

With that crisis out of the way, Gary and I wandered around vo-tech taking care of phones. The Mac internet issue ended up not being my problem, which was nice. Then it was back up to the office for our second crisis. Just as class let out, one of our internet circuits went out for just a few minutes and I had a line of people out my door wanting to know what we were doing to fix it. Without even having enough time to identify the failure, we had people wanting to know an ETA for a fix so they could plan their next period. Gary rage-quit and went back to his office for good reason, but I was no stranger to dealing with people in a self-induced panic. Boom, more work orders closed.

I continued on with work orders until lunch when Allen invited me to Smackin’ Wings. I met him there, along with Gary, Zach, and Ben. We had entertainingly, lovingly hateful conversations, making sure we made it fully around the department. Then I had to load up a computer lab worth of computers to take to the high school. Allen helped me move them to the dock to load them into my car, and then I cut him loose to do his own things. I got lucky and ran into my intern while looking for a dolly to bring the computers inside, then got a bit of sass from my mohawked maintenance guy for knocking on his dungeon door. I get personal space, but I still felt slighted. I may have to take his internet.

Ben met us to help set up the computer lab, which ended up taking the rest of the day. We fought the switch configuration a bit, and even had trouble toning out a line, and ended up switching ports in the room for one that was labeled at the switch. All done except for the deployments. Then I closed out a few more things before walking out.

Finally home, I just continued my work streak and cleaned up all of the aquariums. It looks like Murderface has a bit of hole-in-the-head, but I’m not certain. Gotta keep his water changed more often, especially since I never test it. Those snails are messy. Once everything was cleaned up, I headed to my parents’ house to pick up some props for picture day. Then it was off to Summer’s for promised head scratchies to ensure absolute sleep tonight.

All the angles.

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Ah, the Old Bait-and-Switch

Ben and I were supposed to go take care of a few older pending things at the high school today, but instead I ended up getting a scolding for not listing things on GovDeals during our busiest time of the year as we drove to the junior high to do just that. I definitely never meant for Heather to feel any anxiety about what was left, but it just didn’t seem like a priority to me when she was coming into the job not knowing how to do most of it anyway. I did feel tremendously guilty for not having my things out first, but I also felt an obligation to wait for Dale to leave before I started shuffling things around. The entire ordeal just kind of felt like a big mess to me, and I’ve felt nothing but bad about it all for the several months it’s been since I had been advised of the changes.

In any case, he and I spent all morning cleaning up her office before we went to Bocadillos for lunch. He had never been, and like the rest of my week, nothing at all sounded good to me. I almost feel like a tiny part of me has died and is just over food altogether. I’m sure that won’t last, but it’s a weird feeling at the moment.

After lunch, we finished up with what we were doing and then grabbed a bunch of phones to deliver to vo-tech. We didn’t realize – and nobody could tell us – that they had already delivered all of the phones to the campus, and even set them in place for the most part, which was another aggravation of mine. You’d think the project manager would have known, or at least would have sent the same crew to complete the job so they could report accurately what had been done. That’s not how we do things though.

I left work a bit late after all of that, never having the chance to complete any of my work. I went by Summer’s shop to see her, but she was super busy. The girls were there, but they didn’t seem bothered by my presence either. I ended up just slowly uninstalling a bunch of old crap from the shop’s laptop to try and help its poor performance. When it was all over, I felt so sweaty from just existing there that I had to go home to dry off.

I started immediately on just about anything I thought I could accomplish. I cleaned up some email, did some research, cleaned up some things, paid some bills, and finally made it to Summer’s house just in time for absolutely nothing. Everyone was asleep and I kind of wished I had just stayed home where I could have at least continued cleaning while I was still in the mood. Instead, I sat in the dark for my evening routine and eventually went to bed.

How dissatisfying.

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An Actual Day of Progress

I got to spend the whole day at the high school, and felt quite a bit of progress for it. The work orders are still flowing in, but at least it doesn’t feel like I’m still sinking. I got stuck on a couple more difficult tasks, but even then I felt like I made a little bit of progress and got to affirm things I’ve learned over the last year or so. I worked through lunch time feeling pretty good, and eventually went to Wendy’s for a relatively light meal. I did have to give up on some SCCM stuff in the afternoon, and went back to the shop so Gary could learn me a few things. I probably should have known what he showed me, but it was just one of those things that never even occurred to me.

After work, I came home for a little while before heading up to Summer’s for dinner. They wanted chicken sandwiches, but all I wanted to do was get rid of all the old stuff she had in the fridge. I almost burned the house down trying to toast some French bread in the broiler, but they got their sandwiches. I warmed up some soft taco stuff and cleaned up a bunch of the leftovers, but there’s still enough food for a week in there.

Eaddie and I finished our episode of Daredevil from the other day, and then I headed home for an early night. It’s time for welcome-back nonsense tomorrow, and nobody seems as concerned about how much work they’re putting on us at the last minute as us. Typical.

It’s less stressful if you don’t actually care.

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The Rhoids Are Back in Town

We were supposed to get today in our buildings, but Jason called us to the shop instead. He had me take a person to Oakland to do Brice’s work orders all morning, which really wasn’t that bad but I resented anyway. Amanda volunteered and we just cleaned up what we could in the time we had. I wish I had gotten to spend more time with the people I’ll miss, but a lot of it ended up being new teachers that I’ve never met before and won’t be supporting for the foreseeable future.

I dropped Amanda off at the shop for lunch, and Allen invited me to meet him at KFC. Surprisingly I wasn’t really that hungry, but I went anyway. I wish I had the self control at the time to just order something small instead of getting the buffet as usual. I guess I need to do the survey on my receipt for the freebie for next time. That’ll be a whole lot less guilt.

After lunch I finally got to spend some time at the high school, but the first little bit of that was setting up new keypads for the cafeteria. I got them hooked up but couldn’t set them up because nobody was around that could identify line numbers for me. A problem for another day, I suppose. After that I started digging into my work orders, but they kept coming in faster than I could close them. It’s such a big campus too, so I feel like I’m always running so far out only to have to come back for something else. I foresee a hoverboard in my future. I ended up staying super late trying to fix a couple persistently annoying things, but it didn’t help. I’ll still be at it all day tomorrow.

When I finally got home, I had to clean all of the aquariums. When I took the water out to the garden, I saw that Bác Vân had trimmed over the mint I planted in the garden, which made me sad. Hopefully the rhizome is still in good shape so it can come back next year. I got the water changes done but still didn’t get everything else done around the house that I needed to. Focus probably isn’t so much the problem right now as prioritization. Memory seems bad too. Could probably use a reboot.

Weave my allegorical elegy.

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Shrimp Berries!

Things got off to a rough start this morning. Jason started rambling incoherently about moving carts and laptops around in about a dozen different ways, giving us more odd counts and half measures than any of us could keep track of. Four of us kind of looked at each other, so I spoke up and said he should write it down or something, to which he responded that I should take notes. Then he started talking down at us like we were all idiots for not understanding what he was trying to communicate. That pretty much got everyone in a foul mood all day, but we eventually got things written on the whiteboard and divided up into groups.

Just as Allen and I were hooking up the trailer, Jason called to tell us to stand down because the middle school was actually hosting active shooter training today, and that we would instead spend all day on work orders. Heather, Gary, and I decided we would work together to clean up the junior high while Allen left to work on his “50 work orders” by himself.

From that point on, I was just kind of more annoyed to be there than anything. Heather kept pestering me about selling things on GovDeals while I was already still annoyed by all of my things she had been throwing away while I wasn’t there. It kind of felt like she spent most of the morning on the phone anyway, but I tried not to hold that against her since I know she spent at least some of that time trying to help Melinda in her new role. I just tried to stay busy by myself.

Allen and I met up at Ruby Tuesday for $5 salads, and then he left me about 15 minutes early because he’s paranoid about getting back to work on time. I finished cleaning up at the junior high and finally left to get some of my own things done at the high school. I was already feeling a little overwhelmed with all the new people, learning the layout of the campus, and just the logistics of working on computers that may or not even actually exist in the building when I finally get a chance to come work on them. I did have a fair moment in the office which made me feel a bit better, and they gave me a name tag for the first time in the district.

I finished up work and headed home where I found Eaddie sitting around on her phone surrounded by half-eaten crackers in the cushions. Their couch is always so disgusting, and I envisioned the same kind of foodstuffs crammed into mine if I let her hang around my house for too much longer. I don’t think my general fatigue really let me express how displeased I was, and I’m not sure how much it would have mattered anyway. She had karate but didn’t bring her bag, so we had to run to their house before I could drop her off. Then I went and spent about an hour wandering around Walmart just hitting all the aisles I never get to visit with everyone else in tow.

Summer finished up at the gym and got Eaddie home, so I went to Lowe’s to recycle some compact fluorescents and finally caught up with them to help dig out some leftovers for dinner. We watched an episode of Parks and Rec just to keep it short, and I headed home to relax.

As I replaced one of the bulbs on my shrimp tank, I noticed I had two berried females and started researching breeding. Hopefully in about a month I’ll see some little babies. Wouldn’t that be neat.

I should just let them go, but!

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Progress Monitor

I squeaked in to work this morning by the skin of my teeth. Really I was actually late, but nobody noticed. I don’t know what happened. I lost a couple minutes somewhere too late in the game and just couldn’t make it back up. I guess I paid for it by having to load two trucks worth of monitors when Jason took Amanda and Allen with my first truck to the high school with a 30 count, and then sent me with Heather to the junior high with 90 to replace. Heather was hungry, so we stopped for jalapeño kolaches and an apple fritter. Gary joined us as well, and we got one lab done and another started before lunch.

Allen was the only one that wanted to go eat, and without any better ideas, we settled on McDonald’s. I tried the Grand McExtreme Bacon Burger from Spain, which tasted okay but was way too messy for what it was. In the end I would have preferred a Big Mac. In spite of the decent taste, the whole thing was oversauced and greasy in a way that left me just barely gurgling the rest of the entire day.

Back at work, I got some help to load up one more truck bed with the last pallet of monitors. The three of us got about halfway into the second lab when I had to leave for a doctor appointment. I hesitate to call them doctor appointments now though, since I haven’t actually spoken to a doctor in about two years. Almost unsurprisingly, they had me fill out a bunch of paperwork again because they “got a new system.” At least there seems to be an online portal now that may help with tracking some of this that I’m dealing with.

After about an hour of that and scheduling a regular appointment for six months later, I went back to the junior high and we finished the last lab with just enough time to get back to the shop for quitting time. Amanda and Allen even joined us for the last couple monitor swaps at the end. I chatted with Ben for a little bit after work, and then went home to find a hungry Eaddie with no phone or enough sense to eat the frozen sausage biscuits. She opted for the bike, and I took her to Arby’s for a sandwich and a orange cream shake.

We started an episode of Jessica Jones and waited for Summer to get there so we could go to the park again. Eaddie and I both hurt from riding bikes yesterday, and Summer let herself get aggravated with the Grom, which never helps. After about an hour we had all had enough and came back home. They went home to clean up while I did some cleaning at home myself, and then they came back so we could finish our episode before bed.

Pancho is now the machoest tecknikken!

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The Inefficiencies of Mortals

I decided to go to the shop this morning to help out a bit since I had mostly finished with the 1:1 stuff at the high school. It was the mistake of the summer, because Jason and I were at each others’ throats all day. Everything he did or had anyone do was so stupid. From breaking down and having us do what I told him to do two months ago, to fussing about not wanting people to have his phone number in spite of the fact that the district gives him a stipend for his phone service, we just couldn’t see eye to eye.

We started out by loading up Chromebooks to deliver to Oakland, then the 5th grade campus. He couldn’t really tell us where everything belonged though, so each of us ended up wasting most of the day. It really would have only taken a couple people all day to do the job, but instead he tied us all up and prevented anyone else from completing any other work.

Amanda and I went to Taco Bell for a quick lunch, and then we finished up with a less-tense afternoon. It was still stupid and time-wasting, but at least we weren’t also hungry on top of it all.

After work, I went to the DMV and registered the Grom and Murano. The line was longer, but the lady helping me had better soft skills. I got done just in time to get to Eaddie and drop her off at karate. Then I went to wash the car on the way home and encountered one of the strangest, dumbest things I’ve ever seen. Some shirtless guy was trying to pressure wash this girl’s hair that looked like she had just died it bright red. I don’t know if they just didn’t want to get the dye everywhere or what, but it looked ridiculous.

I settled in at home just a little bit before heading up to Summer’s for dinner. We picked at leftovers, then watched an episode of Daredevil before changing our minds and starting Jessica Jones. I didn’t immediately love it, but the story and characters just kept getting more complex the more we watched, and by the end I was hooked.

Lancelot Drive, 12th Street, Glenwood Avenue…