Tag: anger management

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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?

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Tell Me About It

Brice had three more lines for us to run at Dwight this morning. Amanda and I were put on his crew, so our first demand was to re-check the rooms in question for existing lines. It only took us about three hours, but wouldn’t you know we found two lines already in place? We did have to run one more in a room that had several oldschool telephone drops, but we spent so much time trying to track down other lines that we didn’t even get to run it before lunch.

Jesica was in town for another meeting, so I met her at Sumo for lunch. Her client was evidently pretty crazy, which only served to upset her. The waitress dumped my water all over the table, but fortunately only a little bit over me. Then for some reason she only came back with a single rag to clean up a whole glass of water, and had to run off and get more. Just as Jesica’s food came out, her boss called to check up on her and she spent the entire meal talking to him about her appointment.

I was a bit annoyed that Brice had suggested Brown’s for lunch and actually had others agree to go, because nobody ever wants to go when I do. I suppose only to annoy me further, Brice didn’t even go, and Allen and Jason were the only two that did. Sumo isn’t exactly a favorite for me, but Jesica said she started keto and felt like she could only eat raw fish.

After lunch, I got out of running that single line with Brice and Amanda because Jason wanted me to meet Al and Kenny at the high school while they scouted out locations for new hallway wall clocks. I tried to convince them that digital watches for the entire student body would be cheaper, but they didn’t seem to like that idea. Somehow I managed to graduate with honors using only the existing dummy clocks though.

When I got home, a bit of rain cooled the air down quite a bit and made the house quite habitable. I started to get into a few things, but ultimately only really cleaned up some email and played some Overwatch. Later in the evening, I made my way to Summer’s where she talked at me about her week at work before bed.

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Like a Damn Circus

Jason had me drive him to the field house this morning so he could show me where we were putting equipment back into the building. He hadn’t mentioned the part where he was going to have to go back to the shop immediately after while I went back to the field house to run the lines for this equipment. We ended up with three personal vehicles on site, and then I think we had at least two more show up not very long into our exploratory mission.

We ended up having to pull a fiber line back to its entry point into the building, and then re-run it to the new switch location. Having a bunch of hands on deck helped the line runs go faster, but did leave the end product a bit less organized, which required some extra finishing work to make things really nice. We all went to Brangus for lunch, but luckily we finished running all the cable before we left. When we got back, all we had to do was terminate and mount wall plates.

By the time we got back to the shop, everyone was so exhausted that we mostly just sat around the shop for the last hour and a half. I would have liked to resolve a printer issue at Oakland with Ben, but it just didn’t work out. Hopefully I can try tomorrow.

I went by my parents’ house to chat with Dad about air conditioners after work until I had to leave to get Eaddie from karate. I could tell immediately that it was going to be a challenging evening with very little compliance from her. We ran by my house so I could change, and then stopped by Sonic for 99 cent cheese sticks on the way to their house. I fried up some chicken strips, but Summer never got around to making salads. Everyone just kind of picked at what food was already made while she struggled to get the kids to complete chores before their trip to Texas.

I know I was a whiny kid, but I just can’t remember being this completely insubordinate. The stern talkings, screaming, and eventual spankings seem to only last for so long.

It’s feeling real Lord of the Flies over here.

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Heave!

I was incredibly achy this morning when I woke up, so it was tough to get moving. I had to run to the junior high to get my blower, and then I met up with a group at the high school to clean out projectors and what few desktops were around. The campus has changed so much since I graduated that it’s easy to get lost, especially in the science area. So many of the rooms are connected through back hallways or closets. I’m hoping it makes a bit more sense once the rooms are filled with people, but I’m not sure that will be the case. Some of us had never seen the new multipurpose facility before, so we made the trek by foot. I got a pretty good sweat going by the time we got back to the cars, and that got us through to lunch.

I still had a bit of Soylent and felt contrary to the group’s choice of Chick-fil-A, so I worked through lunch, going to Oakland again to help with some summer school issues. When I got back to the shop, Amanda was outside getting things ready for Brice’s network runs at Sequoyah. Things looked bleak at first, then started to go really smoothly before making a turn for the worst.

After Amanda and I had run two lines to two different classrooms, we discovered that there were already network drops in both rooms. We went to check another room, and found multiple drops in multiple places in the room. Every single room we checked already had network lines in them. The aggravation was only compounded when I was reminded that he took the campus from Amanda earlier this year, so really she didn’t have much right to be upset with him when she could have patched the computers up instead of leaving them on the wireless.

With a face full of sawdust and rat droppings, we headed back to the shop in a lull of the thunderstorm. I chatted with Ben outside for a little while when Autumn called to ask if I would take her to Dollar Tree for some things. It was odd to receive a phone call for this, especially in the middle of a storm, so I was maybe unnecessarily short with her. Not long after, I got a call from Summer that she also received a call from a distraught daughter. I figured it was a good time for a sit-down chat.

Aching from a lack of food, I ran to my parents’ house and warmed up a little bit of fried rice before the power went out in the storm. Dad tried boiling some okra, and then inadvertently left it in the hot water too long after it didn’t boil due to the power outage. It came out like stringy apple sauce, but tasted fine. I finished up and went home to do some necessary cleaning in the heat and humidity of my home.

Luckily the cat box behaved. While that was going, I did a slow water change in the aquarium after feeling unsatisfied by the visual water quality. Unfortunately, I discovered another dead snail, possibly due to a lack of fresh veggies they had become accustomed to. With only two of the six left, I felt obligated to throw in some old, wilted lettuce with the hopes that they would eat it instead of ignoring it as usual.

Finally I made my way to the girls for the evening. Summer looked exhausted from the day, which upset me a bit more, so we had the chat. I’m hoping the humor didn’t distract from the point I was trying to make or the disappointment I felt for the situation, but it was also important to me that she understood I didn’t intentionally hurt her feelings in response to her poor decision. I am just a mean, old man with higher expectations.

It’s too early to be mad at each other already.

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The Long Way Home

We got up this morning and packed to leave. Summer took most of the stuff down to load onto the bus while I got ready, and by the time I got out, I didn’t really have time for breakfast. We took the junior high and the losers from the high school back to the Riverwalk to shop and eat, but this time we got to actually ride the bus there, which made it much more pleasant.

The high schoolers were pretty much jerks all day, and their chaperones didn’t seem very worried about it. Summer, Hannah, Dylan, and I all walked all the way to the end of the Riverwalk, stopping at the bi-level area so Dylan could get an electric massage, and then again so Summer and Autumn could go on a VR “ride.” Then we made it back to the food court just in time to gather everyone to eat. Johnny had kept the district credit card, so it was up to me to pay up front again. Disappointingly, all three of my cards got declined for fraud prevention, even though I specifically called Discover to make sure that it wouldn’t. We made it through eventually though, and I came back with two foot long sandwiches from South Philly Steaks & Fries. Summer really liked her chicken, and I really enjoyed my Philly, so I considered that a pretty big win.

The varsity team showed up right around that time as well, so they ate, and then we all loaded up onto the bus to say, “goodbye” to New Orleans. Aimee was worried about flooding along the way, so she played it super cautious by going through West Memphis, which probably ultimately added an hour to our trip. We never really stopped for food, and even told the students not to buy anything when we had to stop for fuel, but of course they didn’t listen. Everyone was really beat and anxious to get home, but I wasn’t quite ready to pass out. While the others slept, I unpacked and tried to put most of the stuff away before bed.

Fix it.

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The Junior High Issue

Just as I started to drift off, someone knocked loudly on our door. Summer and I both scrambled to our feet, and I peeked out to see who it was. I only saw one of the girls, but soon found out it was several of them outside our door, shaky with adrenaline. Johnny was there with them, and the first words out of his mouth were that this seemed like a junior high issue, so he would be letting us handle it.

Summer and Hannah jumped right into action, kicking ass and calling parents. I wasn’t sure what my place was, so I just laid back in the room waiting to see if I would be called. I started to doze off a little, but without my CPAP I ended up exhausting myself more. I don’t remember what time Summer finally came back to bed, but it was really late, and I knew that even sleeping a bit later we would still be deprived.

They kicked four kids out for vaping, including some star players, so they knew the rest of the team would suffer for it. It was a bad deal all around, and a part of me felt like maybe it was a bit much drama for some vape pens, but rules are rules, and these kids are used to a system without repercussions. I was glad they stuck to their guns, and had one of the kids out the next morning after having her sister drive all the way down overnight. It’s anybody’s guess whether the parents will actually do anything, but at least they could rest assured they did the right thing here.

I got down to breakfast just before they closed, and then ended up babysitting the three remaining kids with Dylan while the rest went to their game. I was excited to be in control of some punishment, though Dylan got them started with copying newspaper articles. After a while, I added a modifier by having them write with their non-dominant hands. I got the feeling that only one of them was really taking it very hard, but I’m not much for empathy anyway.

When the team finished, we walked to the Riverwalk for lunch. We didn’t really have time to do anything but eat, and I was still full from lunch. My ciabatta was pretty terrible, and I was just overall disappointed to be eating food court food in New Orleans anyway. Without time to shop the mall, we headed back so they could continue their day of games. It was so hot and humid that I was excited just to be back inside.

Once those games were over, we went back to the Riverwalk to let the kids shop for a few minutes before eating. Unfortunately we found out they would only be open for about another hour, so Summer, Hannah, Dylan, and I went to the opposite end of the mall for some frozen slushed wine first. Summer and Hannah had to go back to the hotel immediately after we got them though, because a second player’s parents were coming to pick him up. Johnny had also screwed up their plan to pay for dinner, but I was able to get everyone fed with my own card.

Dylan and I carried food back for the girls, and lead what was left of the group back to the hotel safely. We ended the evening with some more Mario Kart in our room, but we kept getting interrupted by kids knocking on the door. The delinquents continued being shunned for the most part, while the rest had a little get-together party in one of their rooms. We had to shut it down early too, partly because they were being loud, but also because the adults were too tired to exist any longer.

I’ve never seen a group of coworkers so divided before.

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Basskitball

Crawford and Oakland had their staff basketball game this morning. I thought it was after school, but they reminded me that nobody would show up if it was after hours. They all bussed all of their kids to the high school arena, and had a rowdy game with an eagle mascot, and cheerleaders, and everything. Ben was playing for Oakland, so I tried to get the others to join me, but nobody cared enough. I noticed pretty quickly that nobody was around taking pictures up close, so I jumped right into the photographer role again. All I had was my phone, which was pretty terrible at catching the fast motion of the game, but I did what I could. I should have tried turning off HDR to see if it improved, but it’s too late now. The game went into double overtime and ultimately they agreed to end it in a tie where nobody went home a loser. It felt like the perfect analogy for public school.

After the game, I went to the junior high for a while and took care of some things. Summer and Autumn were going to leave for lunch, but I got stuck working on a phone issue and then got frustrated with some whining, so I just skipped lunch and went by Oakland, and then to the high school to work on keyboard bezels with Dale. He got some news that Ryan accepted a job with Thomas in Bentonville and sent a video of me working on laptops. Ryan replied with something about a timer and I had been curious for a little while, so I checked myself in at about six and a half minutes.

I left there a bit early and went to the shop to drop off a Chromebook. When Jason left, Ben, Gary, and I went upstairs to check out the refurbished auditorium. It looked better, but not great. The reverb on stage was too much to handle, and made basically everything incomprehensible. From there, I went to my parents’ house and had some leftovers before coming home to get ready and pack for New Orleans. Travel anxiety is always worse with other people involved, but having a checklist premade from previous trips made it easier.

Traveling on a bus for this long is going to be a challenge.