Tag: anger management

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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…

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Guv’mint Work

I had an awful time trying to get to sleep last night for some reason. I don’t remember thinking or feeling anything at all. I just remember not being asleep for longer than I wanted to be. To make matters worse, for some reason my shower would never get hot. I ran straight-hot water and it just felt cool. I turned the water heater up a bit and the water felt quite hot later, so I don’t know what was going on.

My office light was on and the door was ajar when I got there, but to my surprise no one was there. I spent some time investigating to find out who had been there, but the hallway lights turning on and off all night made that a nearly impossible task. I assume Jason had gone in there last week and left it that way, but I may never know.

Gary went to help Amanda, Brice, and Heather finish the cable runs at vo-tech, so once I got my laptops started I went to help as well. The first couple runs ended up being a bit easier than we originally expected, but it still took us all morning. Brice and I went to Zaxby’s for lunch and then went to run one more line in the afternoon. It was quite a bit worse, and the end point actually came out at the top of the raised ceiling, back into a hole in the wall, and then out of a surface mount box at an accessible height. It was super stupid, but we managed to use the old line as a pull without losing it in the wall.

I finished up the afternoon and completed the 1:1 laptop imaging task. I’ve got a few more things I’d like to do, but I don’t know how much time I’ll get to do that after seeing how many Chromebooks are left for the others to enroll. At the end of the day I gathered up a bunch of stuff to take to the DMV and headed across town.

It was a surprisingly small crowd with only one person in line ahead of me, but I was informed that after all that trouble to find my boat’s hull identification plate, I would have to visit someone to get a longer replacement tag before I could re-register the boat. I had also forgotten to add the Murano and Grom to my..account?.. I’ve already assessed for the year, so I have to call before 4pm to add the two new vehicles, and I guess I can’t do it online. For some reason I had hoped the government would suck a little less by 2019, but here I am, unable to complete any of my three required tasks.

Defeated and annoyed, I went home and started cleaning up a bit. I’m trying to do some more frequent water changes to drop nitrate levels a bit more. Summer came by with some Quiznos for dinner before heading to the gym. Then I spent the rest of the evening wandering around the house picking at little things. I need to spend a whole day cleaning up the living space, but that just feels impossible.

It must be so nice to leave at 4 every day forever.

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Boot Nuked

I got to pull away from the low priority nonsense that’s been going around so I could deal with the more important stuff. Gary and I spent all day at the high school coming up with a process to create boot disks, breaking only for lunch at Wendy’s with Zach. It wasn’t stressful work, but we weren’t quite at the stage where we churn through hundreds of laptops yet either. At the end of the day, I finished up and then rebooted the computer as usual. Unfortunately I didn’t notice that I had forgotten to take the boot disks out of the USB ports, and the computer immediately booted back up and wiped itself.

After spending so much time making sure we copied all the files Dale saved for me, I wiped it all away in just an instant. I’ll have to pull the hard drive and try to recover some of those files, but I have a feeling that most of them aren’t that important. It’s still a good lesson in keeping important things off of the local machine though. I had been thinking about getting rid of the desktop and going to a docking station setup anyway, so this just kind of forced me along into trying that out sooner than I expected. I was so initially upset by my negligence that I decided to go ahead with rearranging the office. I stayed super late moving things around to how I wanted them, and I’m not even sure how long any of it will stay. At least it’s left in usable shape for tomorrow morning.

Summer left Eaddie with her parents and came to stay the night at my house. I hadn’t planned to eat because it had gotten so late, but then felt so hungry by the time I actually left, so she picked up some Taco Bell for us. I ate some, and then did some quick water changes in all of the tanks just to try and help out my recent negligence. That seems to be a running theme lately.

Are you leaving those here? Are those your own personal speakers??? Can you even hear me??????

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Runaround Blues

Jason had us take a crew of four to Oakland this morning to do what really only two probably should have done. We’ve got pallets worth of higher priority work to do, and we’re doing cleanup crap, and it’s just infuriating as usual. I peeled off with Amanda, which somehow made it less bad. Then she and I ate leftover turkey at the shop while the others went out to eat.

After lunch, I managed to escape and run around with Gary for a bit, mostly to start looking at high school stuff. While we were there, it started to pour down rain, so we stayed longer than originally planned. We explored the PAC some more while trying to find some people there. All we ever heard were ghost whistling and wood cutting, but no people.

Once it cleared up, we went to the junior high and helped Heather with some stuff for the rest of the day. I stopped by the high school on the way home to deliver my refrigerator from the junior high. I think I may have scratched up the front a bit, but it was a gimme anyway. I shouldn’t be too attached.

I went home and got ready to go to Sheri’s father’s visitation at Humphrey. I’d only met the guy a couple times and only in passing, but I at least wanted to stop by to see her for a second. I told her it really felt like I was in line for a buffet that was just taking forever, so I didn’t want to keep her long. There was a good sided group of people there, and it was nice to see them outside of work for a change. Everyone was all smiles, as I think they should be in the best of scenarios.

Becky, Marcia, Miranda, Mollie, and I all went to Ruby Tuesday afterward for dinner and drinks, and we had a grand ol’ time. Our waitress was awesome and took all three coupons I had, and worked her magic to split the discounts across all five tickets. When we left, I dropped Becky off at her car, then had to stop in to see Summer for a minute. She and Eaddie were watching Spider-Verse in bed, and I had a bed of my own at home that still hadn’t been cleared, so I left to do that and get some sleep there for the first time in over a month.

So long, flower man.

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The Long Exhaustion

It’s been getting hotter every day, which I think has people more lethargic and irritable. Amanda needed my help running some cable at the middle school in the morning, and when we got back, we heard some of the others had gotten into a yelling match while we were away. Jason ended up taking the afternoon off, but Ben finally returned after nearly two weeks away.

Gary and I went to Foodies for lunch, which was pretty decent but super expensive. The gyro I had was good, but for the price, I would have just gone to Arby’s. The rice was pretty good, but I think our favorite was the cheesy potatoes.

After lunch, I took Amanda to the junior high with me to hang out while I tried to pack up a few things to move out. After a while she got bored and we went to the middle school and did a couple things off of her cleanup list.

We ended the day at the shop a little early because power went out. Evidently it went out momentarily for over half of the city, but it seemed to come back pretty quickly. At first I thought it was something the construction crew did while filling in our parking hole they had dug.

I ran home to unload some things that had been in my trunk, then got a much needed car wash on the way to my parents’ house for dinner. Summer brought all the kids over after karate, and we had a mix of eggplant soup and spaghetti. I ate too much because of picky eaters, and then we all headed back to her house for the evening. The kids continued with their misguided dummy nonsense on into the night since I couldn’t inspire them to anything else, which was of great personal frustration.

Stymie to the moon…

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Newtonian Roast

Dale and I delivered a couple of oversized televisions to James and Robin this morning, which felt ridiculous. I’m mostly concerned about setting the precedent. When we got back, we all spent the rest of the morning building more Chromebook carts while Brice rearranged the graveyard. I think we all basically took turns telling him how pointless that is, and then I spent a bunch of time sifting through stuff that was going out in the garbage. I don’t think we even broke $200 in scrap metal, which I expected. We would have made more by selling the miscellaneous power adapters by themselves, let alone all the other good electronics.

Allen wanted to try Newton’s Pharmacy for lunch, so he, Jason, Dale, and I went there and had the roast beef special. It was pretty good, but I thought my Oreo milkshake wasn’t quite cold or thick enough. At least it was relatively cheap and fast. Then Dale and I went to the high school after lunch to try and go over a last few things before he leaves for good in a couple of days.

After work, I stopped by Sonic to get a drink and free corn dog to surprise Summer at work. At first I thought the drive-through speaker volume was messed up, but then it became apparent that it was probably the girl on the headset that was speaking so quietly. It was also disturbing to see how many of the guys inside were looking to revive the grunge look. I think only two of the five or so people I saw looked like they had washed their hair this week.

I hung out in Summer’s office for just a few minutes before heading home for a while. It’s looking like I won’t have working air conditioning for another couple weeks, but this week has been cooler and more bearable anyway. Hopefully the sun chills out for a bit until my house is back online again.

Once Summer and Eaddie got home with some leftover pizza from her work meeting, I headed up for dinner. Then we watched an episode of Parks and Rec before bed.

Only the dirtiest of copper.

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Angry Turds

It was a peculiarly small crowd at work this morning. Gary was on a tear about having to come in over the weekend to replace door batteries every four hours because power was still out since yesterday, and the doors couldn’t lock without them. Jason came back in from somewhere and was in a pretty foul mood himself, presumably because he felt he was doing the lion’s share of the work and that this wasn’t fair.

We started out in the morning moving crap around in the warehouse for seemingly no purpose. “The shell game” is a phrase I keep hearing lately, and it’s ever so relevant. We moved things from boxes to other boxes. We unnecessarily cut cords off of power bricks to scrap the dirty copper and throw out the actual useful parts. We moved Chromebooks off of pallets and into another room, and were scolded for it without genuine cause. It was overall just a very aggravating morning.

Allen and Dale wanted to go to BFD for lunch again, so I drove us down there to eat. I ate way too much there, and the service was slow again. I still haven’t completely figured out their menu pricing, which is weird because of how electronic it is. The food was good though.

After lunch, Jason sent me with Dale and Amanda to re-mount a bunch of TVs in the halls of her middle school campus. The painters patched our holes, which made it difficult to re-mount them in the same place. We made it work though, in spite of the arm cramps I started getting. When we got back to the shop, we finished the day by wiring carts in the cafeteria, which at least had air conditioning.

When I got home, I cleaned up the bettas and fed them some mosquito larvae. I found a larger container to replace the smallest, so hopefully they’ll be a little happier. Then I spent most of the evening testing inCharge cables. I had a pretty bad ratio of 2:1 cables that wouldn’t charge my phone, which was stupid and aggravating, but it seems like they’ll warranty them without too much trouble.

Finally at Summer’s for the evening, I fancied-up her work email signature and pointed out the obvious flaws of publicizing her personal cell phone number. I can’t even believe nobody considered that.

Intelligence can be such a burden.

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How Am I Supposed to Breathe with No Air?

It hardly felt like friday after such a tough week. I came in half expecting to be able to run the show again, but Jason was there to mess with that. Somehow we convinced him to let us go home at lunch if we found all but at least 10 of the Chromebooks we were still missing. I spent the morning crunching numbers and directing people to campuses. Then Gary and I spent most of the morning at Dwight.

We got down to about 11 missing, and I think Amanda was the most upset about it. Evidently Allen saw Gary’s leftovers from BFD yesterday and decided that he had to have some of that for lunch today, so we took him and Jason down to try it. Our server was the only one there, and the place filled up really fast. He did his best to keep up, and did well at it, but it definitely felt like amateur hour for the owner to be working. I got the lunch special this time, but I think I ended up inadvertently convincing him to charge me extra for my drink. In any case, everyone loved it, but unfortunately nobody had time for dessert this time.

After lunch, Gary, Amanda, and I went to the junior high to try and track down a single Chromebook that likely shouldn’t have ever been on the campus. By the end of the day, we got down to nine serial numbers that weren’t accounted for, but a whopping 23% missing chargers. Jason was content to put that off until a later date rather than get a count of them now for some reason, so I gave up for the week.

We left work at 3, and I went home to start crunching numbers on my great air conditioner/heat pump debate. I lost count of how many hours I spent on it, but when I finally got up and went to my parents’ house, Dad convinced me that it just wasn’t worth it for a super high SEER unit. I still think I’ll go for a heat pump, but probably get one with a split gas furnace as well.

I left after eating some spaghetti and headed to Summer’s, where I flailed past a porch light of swarming bugs and into a sauna of no air conditioning. At first I thought it might be the filter, because I’ve always noticed it looking super dirty. I struggled to pull it away from the wall because it was so clogged, but that wasn’t the issue. Outside, the compressor wasn’t running either. Autumn and I ran to Walmart to try and find a replacement filter so we wouldn’t look like such jackasses for having such a filthy one, but they were completely out. I had Autumn call her grandparents to see if she could go back there for the evening, and then dropped her off before meeting Summer at my parents’ house.

We didn’t stay up long, but she did have to lay and marvel at the glowing things in my old bedroom for a bit. I’m running out of alternative air conditioned sleeping arrangements, so I guess it’s time to bite the bullet.

Why is the heat following me around?