Tag: anger management

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Sensationalism

I had a headache pretty much all day today which kind of gave me a mood, and maybe a bit of an attitude at work today.

Every time I would come through the shop this morning, Brice would be sitting in a chair doing something on his phone. I completely understand having to be babysat until his background check comes in, but I swear he didn’t even move for two hours. He can’t go anywhere near the kids without an escort, but surely there’s someone he could be shadowing or something he could be reading over while he’s sitting in the shop. Maybe I’m remembering my first week with arrogance, but I seem to remember at least trying to keep busy. Maybe he just already gets it and will jump right in once he’s cleared to do so, but that’s when he opened his mouth and said he was coming in 15 minutes early and leaving 15 minutes late every day this week to build up some comp time so he could take a day off next week.

Fucking what?!

We give Amanda enough shit over using all of her time off and having to make up overtime on the weekends to earn comp that I feel absolutely confident saying that in no damn way should this kid be cleared for coming in and sitting on his ass an extra half hour every day of his first week so he can take a day off before he’s even finished training enough to do a day’s work. I mean, we basically already paid him for six days before he started coming in to work in the first place. Did I get that? I honestly can’t even remember at this point.

I holed up at the junior high the rest of the morning and all afternoon. I simply couldn’t. I left him in the shop alone. Heather was at the front desk at least. I really don’t think anyone else was even there. That’s our fault. I offered to train him.

Summer had half of a sandwich left over, so I ate it in her room on her lunch, then sat with the girls in the library while they ate their lunch. I kept busy enough. Maybe even learned a useful thing.

After work, I took Eaddie to karate before heading home to clean up a bit. Then I picked her up and headed up to Summer’s for the evening. Autumn was non-compliant. Eaddie did okay. To wrap up my mood for the day, we sat up and watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show until bedtime.

If only we were amongst friends… or sane persons!

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That Time the Superintendent Took a Shit on My Lawn

During a day of unseasonable warmth, I rode the bike to work again. I got stuck in a polar vortex of doing things for the office at the junior high, which meant I started stacking up work orders from other people. I took a quick Taco Tuesday break with Dale, Zach, Gary, and Heather, and then ran home to get a helmet for Eaddie.

Near the end of the day, Ben sent us a pretty long email basically telling us that Brice was hired on a full four steps higher than any of us were allowed to hire on, which makes him one of the highest paid techs right out of the gate. I was bothered still by his start date a full week before he actually showed up. It didn’t make me much happier to see him sitting in the shop on his phone, but I couldn’t really blame him if he was just there to follow someone else around. I would have liked to see him trying to talk to someone instead though, since he’s got a lot of ground to cover regardless of how much he knows outside of our own policies and procedures. I certainly don’t remember being on my phone a lot during my third day on the job.

Demoralized, I left whatever I had going on to take Eaddie to karate. Summer and Autumn were at a quiz bowl event in Clarksville, so she and I got to ride the bike across town. I stopped by the shop to talk to Ben for a couple minutes, running into Ryan as I pulled in. Then I went to my parents’ house for dinner and to pick up some bánh bao. Zach called a couple times and we chatted about what we should do, and how we could possibly have a productive conversation without the lesser-intelligent bringing up irrelevant nonsense or flying off the handle. We didn’t have any great ideas.

Back home, I had lost power for most of the evening, so I took the opportunity to shuffle around some battery backups. It took me most of the night to fight through everything, and I guess I’m really no better for it.

Tell me again why I can’t be a part of that positive change.

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A Fault and Battery

It was frosty this morning, so I had to let the car warm up before I could get home. Somehow after all of that I managed to make it to work a bit early, but it didn’t take too long before my jacket got too hot. We all went to the middle school to hang and shuffle some TVs and touch panels around. I didn’t know until later, but Allen showed me that the first one we did ended up getting damaged somehow on the side, so I’m absolutely sure it’s just going to end up being a junked TV at some point. I’m hoping I can swipe it for my office, but I guess we’ll see.

Dale, Allen, and I went to KFC for lunch, as Autumn and Summer texted me from the Wendy’s drive-through. Then Jason’s plan for after lunch was for all of us to go to our buildings to scope out what battery components we needed in order to complete the upgrade. The problem here is that not a single one of those guys had any idea what they were even looking for. After milling around for a while, I ended up pulling all of the remaining batteries out of the graveyard and taking Allen and Amanda to the high school to meet Dale so we could scope out his closets. He ended up only needing one of the three spare battery expansions I found, and we switched over four of his closets before heading to Oakland.

They were in the middle of parent-teacher conferences, so all we could do was drop off three pairs of batteries before heading back to the shop. I asked Allen to go to his building now that we knew what we were looking for, and he kept arguing that he wanted to see what Jason had for us to do. I ended up driving the three of us over to the middle school to do it, and he ran around looking at his other closets while Amanda sat on the couch and I went to the truck to get the last two battery expansions for the controllers he and Jason had already brought to his office.

We ended up getting out right at quitting time, but then I had to put the truck away. I went downstairs to chat with Ben for a minute on the way out, and he asked how I’d feel about having my campuses shuffled. I don’t want to leave either of them, but it’s looking like there are other issues in play, and all I can do is hope that he’s not just moving a problem from one place to another rather than addressing it properly with disciplinary action.

Summer came over in the evening and we picked up some Tropical Smoothie for her dinner, then came back home and watched an incredible IMAX 3D documentary about the Hubble telescope, appropriately named Hubble. It was probably the best quality 3D I have ever seen because everything was super crisp and clear, and not blurred with fast-motion, high-action sequences.

You see, this is why I never really get stressed out. We are so very insignificant, and nothing that we do could possibly ever matter in the grand scheme of things.
But yeah, sure. I’ll get right on those TPS Reports.

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They’re Missing the Point

“The whole point of the conference is to get us out of there and get away from the work orders and the teachers.” Quote of the day, and at least one of the themes for the whole day. Jason was clearly only there so he could not be at work. Some may be puzzled by how this might make any difference at all.

Classes started at 8:30 for real this morning, so I grabbed breakfast and headed into my classes. I was really disappointed by two out of three today, with the first being mostly a sales meeting, or at the very least an introduction to what they do sell. The second class was actually pretty good, though not necessarily very useful since we don’t actually have any Extreme equipment. The third was another dud only because it was an hour class on how to perform fewer than six steps. I don’t even know why it was a class. It could have been almost anything else.

The lunch was buffet-style this time, and pretty awesome. Fried pork chops and baked chicken with tons of extras. It was way better than yesterday, and the carrot cake for dessert was awesome. I failed to win any door prizes, so we headed home right after lunch. I dropped Jason off at his house, then merged back onto the interstate right next to Dale and Allen. I think Heather and Gary left quite a bit earlier in the day, but I don’t know when.

When I got back into town, I decided to stop by the shop to talk to Ben and Zach. Zach got his Pixel 3 XL in, and it seemed pretty nice, but he didn’t seem too keen on handling it much. I’ll get some more time with it once it’s in a case. Once he left work, I headed home to unpack before eventually making it to Summer’s. She had me take her to the football game to be honored for quiz bowl during halftime, and then we came right back home where I unpacked my stuffed swag backpack before bed.

The point is to learn something that you can bring back and share with the department.

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Call Me When It’s Over

I started off trying to finish up my printer work this morning, but was interrupted when Ben called to see if I could look at the junior high’s phone system with him. He had just gotten to my office when I noticed an email from my counselor at Oakland about an issue during Aspire testing. I failed to create calendar entries for the testing dates and completely forgot that it was happening today, so I had to drop everything and go there to sit on my hands after she resolved the issue by restarting the devices.

I sat mostly useless until lunch time when Jason texted me directly asking about lunch. I assumed he needed someone to go with so he wouldn’t be lonely, so I let him talk me into Fat Daddy’s in London, but when I got to the shop, he and Allen were outside waiting for me to pick them up. I ate some overly heavy nachos that left me dissatisfied, and then made it back to Oakland for afternoon testing.

When that finally wrapped up, I headed back to the office and tried to absorb as much information as I could from Ben as he showed me a bit about the Avaya system. I felt completely lost and overwhelmed, but I know I’m going to have to become intimate with that stuff sooner than later, so I soldiered on. After school let out, he and I went to the junior high to finish what we tried to start in the morning. Once he figured that out, he came to help with my printer issue, which we ultimately gave up on, and resolved manually on each machine.

After work, I headed home to gather things for the conference before heading to Summer’s for the evening.

‘Til you died, but you’re still alive.

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Coaching Needed

I spent a good portion of today in the ceiling cleaning up some old cabling at the junior high. I spent more time there than I should have, but I was working with a cable that was only just long enough to do what I wanted. I went back to the shop to try and take Allen out to lunch for his birthday, but found out that he had called in sick for the day, so I went to McDonald’s to grab some fries, then went home to eat my leftover reuben from Arby’s last week.

When I got back from lunch, we had a conference call with some PaperCut people to go over some things that we mostly already knew. I felt like I had a pretty good grasp on it already, which was nice. Then I spent some more time finishing my work in the junior high ceiling before closing out what new work orders I had received.

Too near the end of the day, I got started troubleshooting some print issues the coaches were having in their office. I figured it was a quick in-and-out fix, but I ended up staying about three hours late and frustrated myself to the point of giving up until tomorrow. I’ll have to try and steal some cycles from Gary to figure it out, but I feel like I’m just missing something dumb.

Load Balancing Needed

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Instant Frustration

I got up this morning and watched as the whole day burned away. I did motivate myself enough briefly to clean up after the cats and do a partial water change in the aquarium, but otherwise we just laid around all day long. Summer picked up some Wendy’s for lunch on her way back from the gym. Then I started the old family classic Blazing Saddles half jokingly while she was in the shower, but we actually managed to finish it.

After the girls left with their father for the night, I tried making some chicken as my first meal in the Instant Pot Ultra. I didn’t realize the rice would cook so quickly and keep the water from boiling and building up pressure, so what I thought was going to be a 10-minute meal ended up being a multiple-hour shit show that ended with me transferring the entire thing to a couple of glass dishes to bake in the oven. Luckly the food wasn’t completely ruined and we could eat it for a super late dinner, but by that point I was so tired, hungry, cranky, and frustrated that I was just exhausted from dealing with it in the first place. Even cooking that meal the traditional way only takes about 45 minutes.

Can’t you see that that man is a nih?

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Shush!

I found myself getting frustrated a lot today. I had trouble getting traction on anything I would start, and I kept getting pulled away to do something else any time I’d start. I tried watching the Google hardware announcement live stream, but kept getting interrupted by people, or even by loud students in the hall outside my door. I missed my FedEx shipment again, though at least this time he left a door tag. I had to work on a stupid printer that I can’t really repair. I even skipped lunch because I just kept trying to get work done.

I ended up staying late after work because I thought I had to label some laptops that a coach didn’t label properly, but after fussing around town trying to find the labels I needed, he walked in and was about to write on the laptops in permanent marker. I had to explain again that they were a lease that had to be returned, and gave him half of the printed labels I made to place on the laptops himself.

When I finally left work, I stopped by my parents’ house to give my dad a flash drive, and had some ribs for dinner. I was starving, but it ended up giving me heartburn. It started to storm pretty badly, so I drove home past multiple tornado sirens. I spent a little time there, then headed to Summer’s for the evening where we debated on the Pixel 3 for a while.

Somewhere along the way I’ve lost sight of the minimalism I wanted.

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G.C. Phone Home

I spent all morning working on switching a single handset to a new Avaya model. The instructions were straight forward and overly simple, but that seems to be the only way to get others to follow them. Jason emailed me for status on several of my work orders that already had notes on them. I got a little upset, but mostly talked myself down from that just because I know I’ve had over 30 work orders since school started, while everyone else is down to almost nothing.

Sonic was doing 50 cent corn dogs, so I grabbed lunch there and ran into Keith at the drive-through. He got out and chatted with me for a bit, and then I was off to the shop to meet Ryan for some help with a couple issues I had with the phone swap in the morning. We got it halfway figured out, but he or I will have to talk to Ben about the other half later.

When quitting time finally came around, Summer left Eaddie with me, and we went home to clean the bike up before dark. We started by riding a quick loop around town before stopping at the car wash. Once I got my chain cleaned and lubed up, we went to Wendy’s so I could get a half salad for dinner, and I got Eaddie some fries to dip in a Frosty. She loved riding the bike so much, but we had to get home for the evening.

On the way back and still hungry, I picked up a couple spicy chicken sandwiches from Wendy’s after Hardee’s told me all of their chicken strips were frozen. I’m still not sure if that was just a polite way of telling me she wasn’t going to make them for me, or if they actually batter them in the store and can’t make them unless they’re thawed out. After eating, Summer and I went to the junior high to pick up Autumn, and somehow we made it back out in record time. Even more surprisingly, everyone settled into bed pretty quickly once we got back home. Hopefully tomorrow will be a nice day for a ride.

Wait… which one is farther?

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One Man’s Job is Another Man’s Work

I finally received the replacement sign computer for Oakland today from Vantage LED. Right out of the box, the standard power cable was completely dead. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a dead one before, yet somehow I wasn’t surprised to find one from them. The computer wasn’t set up for our specifications, and they told me it wouldn’t keep a configuration unless it could verify functionality first, which means I’ll have to plug it into the sign and run another monitor out there to use as a display to change the settings before plugging it into the sign. It’s the most janky setup I can imagine, and the invoice listed the device at $2,000. The video cable was invoiced at $75. Total bullshit.

I eventually made my way through McDonald’s and Wendy’s for a drive-through mix-n-match lunch, then got a few things done at the junior high. Then Jason called and wanted me to help Allen run a USB extender across a room. Evidently he was too busy, and me with over twice as many work orders as the next highest tech made the most sense. I didn’t mind the work, but the logic there just makes me shake my head.

After work, I came home and made some popcorn with the new popping oil we got at Sam’s. It was pretty good, but it’s still missing that buttery goodness I’m looking for. Once the girls got home, I ran through Chick-fil-A and Wendy’s for another mix-n-match cheapo dinner, filled up on some gas, and went to visit with them before bed. Team Lift first thing in the morning.

The internet made me this way.