Tag: frustration

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I Make a Penny

I’ve been bringing leftover Starbucks coffee to work lately, but having very mixed experiences with the USB heated mug. The Ember gets it hot once I get to work, but it’s annoying that the travel mug doesn’t work as well. We had someone from IK Electric and someone from Fortinet coming to set up some demo phones for us, but I wasn’t sure when they would be there. That meant we had a fairly slow morning waiting for them.

Randy had to disappear to deal with the Windstream folks, so I tried to lead some of the conversation with the phone guys. Maggie kept including herself in the conversation for some reason, which was annoying because it was difficult to get any more technical questions out.

Kyle and I met Randy and Jim at Shotgun Dan’s Pizza for lunch, and they appeared to be much busier than they expected, because there was only one server for the whole restaurant. She was struggling to get anything done, but at least the food was pretty good.

After lunch, Randy went with me to Central Office to “apologize” to Sonya. I expected to at least say something, but really he walked in and just started talking and never really quit. She didn’t seem very chipper, but maybe she’s just sassy like that. I couldn’t be bothered.

When we got back to the office, Randy realized his car was actually at the high school. We decided I could just take him back to his car after work, and we finished out the afternoon. I had to charge in the warehouse in order to get home, but it all worked out.

Summer made slow cooker chili, so I got home and ran with the dogs. It was pretty cool outside, and we were chasing daylight anyway. I was pretty frustrated when we got back, because Summer brought in Stilgar’s slow feeder that she had left outside. He literally chewed the whole food dish in half. I really liked that slow feeder, and I haven’t seen another one like it available on Amazon Vine. I don’t know how many times I’ve told her not to leave it outside. Stupid.

My new Pixel Watch 3 came in, so I spent some time setting it up. I didn’t love the color of the band, but I’ve ordered more from Vine. Otherwise than that, I spent some time on the phone with Johnny, and went to bed early.

My boss makes a dime.

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Human Retards

I was really early to leave the house this morning, but kept having idiots pull out in front of me just to go slower, multiple times on the way to work. I guess preconditioning took some battery power, so I pulled into the warehouse to charge all day. Things started out super chill, but quickly became ridiculous. “Everyone” was having trouble either printing or connecting to network drives. It took us all morning to figure out that it was the changes to Cisco Umbrella that Randy made yesterday just before we walked out the door.

Sonya called Maggie about a print issue that I assumed was the same I had been troubleshooting, but then went off about needing staples, and being an exception to the rule of our PaperCut deployment. She didn’t like any of my answers, became hostile and rude, and then hung up on us after threatening to get the superintendent involved.

Maggie and I went to Chili’s for lunch, where we were served by an old friend of hers. We didn’t think too much about the grief back at the office, though I did get a “nasty” email from Sonya. I had begun crafting a response, but Randy initially told me not to reply at all. He said he was told to have me apologize in person, to which I responded that it was odd that Human Resources would want an apology in person without a paper trail. We ultimately settled on a written response and an added face-to-face meeting to smooth any lingering tensions.

We fixed the Umbrella nonsense for the moment, but would have to revisit it later. Near the end of the day, we had to run upstairs to collect a TV that had fallen off of the wall in a conference room. As we came back into the office, Johnny called with some of his own drama. Then I ran home as quickly as I could to get some run time with the dogs.

Eli’s car was at the house, and Eaddie was in a bath when I got there. She texted that he wasn’t there, so I left with the dogs. Evidently she drove his car home because he picked her up for school, but then had to leave for some band thing and wouldn’t be back until late in the evening.

The dogs did great as we ran our course backwards. I wanted them to get some time at the basin trail before it got too dark. They had a dip, and then we went up to the roundabout before swinging back through my parents’ house. We talked with Dad briefly before making it home for some hot dogs. Summer was out back on the porch waiting for me, but then Brody called with questions about used Teslas. I talked to him a couple times before Summer and I got to chat about her day.

I had a burrito for dinner and did some laundry. Eaddie chatted with me for a bit and helped with some leftovers. Then I wrapped things up pretty quickly for bed after she left to get Eli.

Must be something in the water.

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Breakfixst

I didn’t sleep great last night, and it stormed for most of it. I woke up groggy, but made it out of the house early enough to take the drive a little easier. Surprisingly, Maggie beat me to the office and started talking about breakfast shortly after I got there. I made coffee, and when Kyle and Randy came in, she took orders from everyone and went to get food from BJ’s. I had a western omelette with hashbrowns and biscuits, and it was pretty good. I ate way slower than everyone else since I was trying to work at the same time.

I didn’t really get hungry until late in the afternoon, so I didn’t take a lunch. I just kept chugging away at SCCM, trying to fix PXE booting all day. I asked Randy if I could take off an hour early since I didn’t eat, and he just said not to make a habit of it after Javier had been taking advantage. I made it home quickly, and it had dried up, so I wanted to take the dogs out on a good run.

Summer had been home much of the day since the washes were rained out. She was working in her office when I came and left. I took the dogs to my parents’ house to sniff around the yard, then went to the basin trail, which was mostly flooded into one giant pond.

I let the dogs splash around a little bit, and then we chased off a big flock of geese. Stilgar was whining because he wanted to chase them so badly, but I knew he’d never come back. He could have so much more fun if he’d just have better recall, but he won’t listen. We ended up going out further, crossing 12th, and visiting Sequoyah Park. Then we made it around to the Boulevard before swinging back through the roundabout. It was nearly a five mile run at an 8.5mph average, so they got home hungry. I actually ran out of poop bags and had to come home to get a new roll after Stilgar left a big pile at someone’s house. Embassingly, the lady pulled up to check her male as I was looking around the yard to find it, but she told me she didn’t care and not to worry about it.

We got home for some hot dogs, I ate some leftover pizza, and then Summer and I sat down to chat for a bit before I opened up a couple more Vine packages. They keep coming out with “neon” signs that I love. I wrapped things up early after that, and actually managed to get to bed really early.

Silly goose.

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Negligence

Just before I went to bed last night, Eaddie’s car alarm started going off. I yelled across the house at her for her keys, and she just yelled back through her bedroom door to check the valet. I knew damn well the key wasn’t there, but I looked anyway. Fortunately the alarm quit, and I found no evidence of tampering. The rain must have triggered something in a sensor.

I finally got to sleep, and Summer woke me up a couple hours later because it was going off again. I found the keys, this time in Eaddie’s purse that she thought she left at school. Keys go in the valet, so we always know where they are. If nobody else is going to lift a finger, then I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

I slept in a few minutes and ran an alternate routine in the morning to get to work on time. I didn’t feel too awful for it, but it wasn’t great. I was the first one there, and started out with some coffee pretty early. I got through to lunch when Randy, Kyle, Jim, and I went to American Pie Pizza. Maggie said she wasn’t going, but then beat us there. She and I split a pizza, but she only ate two slices. Kyle and Randy split another pizza that I thought we might share from, but we each stuck to our own, and Jim got a salad. I liked the brick oven style crust a lot, but it made for eating half a pie.

The afternoon was spent on SCCM again, and I finally cracked the puzzle by setting a compatibility version on the SQL server. That got me right to the end of the day, so I’ll dive into it again first thing tomorrow.

Summer went home early in the rain and had dinner going for us. I raced there to get the dogs walked before sundown, but we still ended up in the dark. We had to go on an acoustic walk since the ground was wet and I didn’t want the Onewheel to kick water up at my leg the entire time, though the dogs wouldn’t have cared. I need to get a fender for those types of days, but I like the exposed wheel otherwise.

I had to take a beat when I got back because Summer said she left the grill cover out and the dogs ripped a hole in it. She overcooked four well-done strip steaks, steamed five potatoes, and made a huge bowl of salad for the three of us plus Eli. I was irritated and disappointed. The dogs will be dogs, but I’m tired of her absent mindedness. After dinner, I had to unload the dirty dishwasher to load it correctly, and she scolded me for having a fit, but I was really just trying to get it done, and frustrated that I was having to fix her mess again.

She went to bed and the kids stayed up doing homework. I eventually got outside to clean up the grill because I knew she hadn’t, and that’s when I discovered the burner had been on the entire time, wasting propane and keeping the grill hot. I sat outside with the dogs while it cooled down, and then managed to get the ripped cover mostly back over the grill. I don’t think they make that model any more, and the shape was pretty specific with the smoke vent, so I may just have to do my best to patch the thing up.

I don’t know when it turns from negligence to stupidity, but I don’t know how much more I’m willing to overlook.

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Hi, Sharks

I didn’t sleep well, and was predictably tired getting out this morning. I was a few minutes late, but showed up as the guys were checking out our new shop building that has finally been cleaned out. Humorously, I was still the first one to my desk to begin work. I had a bit of a false start when I accidentally joined my call with PRTG an hour early. When the call finally did start, I had audio trouble and had to join from my computer and phone for anyone to hear me.

The morning ran long as nobody came around for lunch. I was going back and forth with Maggie about what to eat when she suddenly said David was coming from Howard to treat us to an impromptu lunch at Saltgrass Steak House. I was excited to try that, but she talked him into going to Longhorn instead because she liked their lunch better. My New York strip ended up being absolutely terrible because it was overcooked and unbelievably tough. I had to saw it into thin strips just to chew the thing.

It took us a while to get started because we waited for Jim to join us, and then Maggie behaved embarrassingly with our waitress, asking multiple people for an extra plate and receiving too many, and then getting out of her seat to chase down our server to ask for something near the end of our visit. She’s been a very involved secretary, which I appreciate, but her lunchtime habits are unhinged.

We made it back to the office and I finished out the day mostly struggling to troubleshoot my audio issue. I finally left and made it home to take the dogs out for a quick run. We visited my parents, and then Stilgar had to lay down in the creek for a bit while we were in the basin. They behaved well though, and got hot dogs at home.

Once I cleaned up, I had to pry Summer out of her chair so we could take the Model Y to Superfast and finally fix the piece of the bumper that was out of place. I was right, and it was relatively easy to do, and it should have been done the day of the accident to prevent further damage to the paint.

We took a moment and let the car drive us around town to cool down from my frustrations, and unboxed a couple of fun things from Amazon Vine. Julie called about an earlier text message about a loan to buy an airplane. We discussed that with a predictable tone before I finally got to wind down for bed. Eaddie came in late, as seems to be the norm. I did well to crawl into bed before ten.

High risk; No reward

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Let’s Carve a Smile on that Face

It was a quiet, slow drive in today. I had a little note from Randy in my chair, thanking me for being a part of the team. I figure he was required to write it, but it was nice all the same, and the words felt genuine because they mirrored the comments he’s made to me ever since I started.

The guys came and went, but mostly went, leaving me alone for lunch. I went to Rally’s and had a pretty disappointing burger because they were out of bacon without any recourse for my prepaid online order. I ate it at my desk and waited for others to come around.

Randy texted and asked me to take care of a printer issue upstairs, so I rebuilt that from scratch. The HP printer has an incredibly annoying requirement to read a PIN from a hidden label inside the machine in order to get to the remote settings. It was clear that the initial deployment wasn’t done correctly, or at least not completely. She shouldn’t have any more issues now though.

The afternoon went by pretty quickly as we tackled various puzzles. I left a little bit late, and traffic was relatively light but unnecessarily slow. I got stuck under the speed limit for a few miles, and then got behind a gravel truck that was spewing pebbles through Conway.

Eaddie and Eli were practicing their instruments when I got home. I immediately took the dogs out for their run, ran through my parents’ yard, around the basin, and back home. They did pretty well and got their hot dogs afterward. Then I jumped right into making burritos for dinner.

I got pretty heated at Summer and the kids after I called to them several times. Evidently it’s my fault for not explaining to them that I won’t call them unless I want them to come to me. Nobody offered to help; nobody said they were on the way; nobody said thanks; nobody told me to pound sand.

I ate and excused myself to try and wrap up the rest of my evening. Dad eventually showed up to eat, and then we got to carving pumpkins. The mallet and “cookie cutters” I got from Amazon Vine were ridiculed at first, but ended up being a “hit” once they started using them. They were difficult to extract, but with some care, they worked really well. We got everyone cleaned up and shuffled off, and I made a speed run for bed.

Burrito Stuff

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Elon, Take the Wheel

I let the car take the onramp all the way to the offramp this morning, and only had to intervene once when it stupidly tried to pass in the right lane a block before it would have had to turn into the office parking lot. I just don’t get why it does obviously stupid things when it does so well at other times.

Randy wasn’t feeling well and ended up leaving after lunch. Nobody else came around, so I just went to Arby’s by myself and hung out there for the hour. I didn’t get into anything super complicated, and actually spent most of the morning waiting for Randy to show me a couple things, so I’m still feeling a little bit lost a lot of the time.

The morning happened to go by super quickly, so of course the afternoon dragged on. I decided to take the next two days off for recovery, so I headed home and then immediately took the dogs out for a walk. We went backwards this time, and went to the pond first to get a bit muddy. Then we stopped by my parents’ house before going up the hill and through Pinewood before making it home, where we took one more lap around the block before stopping.

Eaddie and Eli ate salad crap that Summer brought home, and I left out of frustration when I found an empty condiment shelf in the refrigerator. I ended up going to KFC to pick up a Famous Bowl, and then I went to the city park to eat at a picnic table. I sat there and enjoyed the weather for a while before going to the old house to check things out. There weren’t any toilets, so I ended up leaving sooner than I expected.

I didn’t want to go home though, so I immediately started Full Self Driving without a destination, just to see where the car would take me. I wondered if it would choose turns, or if it would just keep trying to drive straight as long as it could. It ended up taking a right at the stop sign, which made me think it was going to default to taking me home. It made it all the way across town, but then took the first exit out of the roundabout, which put me back on 12th Street all the way to Glenwood. There, it took its only left turn the entire night, and took me up to 2nd Street. There, it took another right and got through the stops all the way to the traffic light. It tried to proceed through green, but then hit the brakes hard right in the middle of the intersection because it couldn’t see the street. There just happened to be another car coming from the other direction, so the headlights probably didn’t help the matter. I pressed the accelerator to carefully nudge it through the intersection, and it continued on as if nothing had happened.

It ended up at sort of a dead-end, so it took a right and went nearly all the way to Oakland Heights before it took a sudden right to get back over to Detroit. Then we headed north, all the way over the tracks, and then took the first right out of the traffic circle on that side of town. It took me around the Parker Road bend, then all the way up the steep hill to get to Highway 124. We drove by the girls’ old house and ended up on the intersection of 124 and Weir Road. It took me back toward town all the way to Main Street before taking a right and going all the way over the bridge. After we made it through downtown, I finally told it to take me home, and it did. We made it just over 15 miles over the course of 35 minutes with absolutely no interventions, and I really only stopped because the battery was low and still hadn’t recovered from my drive back from work.

Summer was already in bed. Eaddie saw Eli out, I took out the trash. Eventually sleep.

Adventures with Machines

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Remap

I got out early today and had a leisurely drive to work. I made myself some coffee and tried to clear out some PRTG alarms while Kyle and Gary were waiting for the phone call with Windstream and IK Electric. Kyle gave up before the call even started, and went to his office to take the call. Gary seemed to know a bit about the phone, but I thought he was the one who called Kyle about it yesterday for help. Maybe it was Jimmy. I can’t tell any of those old guys apart yet.

I just kept chugging away, trying to be productive. I was on my own again for lunch, so I went to Arby’s for another deal. Then I spent the afternoon redesigning the PRTG map to make it more readable on the TV in the office. Maggie seemed to like the improvements anyway.

Dad babysat the restoration guys that went to the old house, and I left work a little bit early so I could get to The UPS Store back home and return some Amazon items. Coming into the parking lot, I guess the curb was sharp enough to push in the tire, and the back wheel bit the curb. It took a big chunk out of the wheel and also cut a strip of the rubber, though it was still attached. I haven’t been happy with the wheels on that car at all.

Summer was getting ready to settle into a bath when I got home, so I took the dogs out for a really good run, up to the point where another dog chased us from the end of my parents’ street all the way to their house. They were riled up while they sniffed around the yard, and then we continued our usual route through the basin trail. They got hot dogs and new chew toys, courtesy of Amazon Vine. Then I tinkered with the security cameras a bit before bed.

Tik tok, on the clock.

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Bathroom Blitz

I ran behind, but got out of the house early enough that I didn’t have to speed quite so much on the way to work. It was pretty chilly out, but that wouldn’t affect me in the office. Maggie was hungry, so she talked me into trying Panera Bread for breakfast. They had a four sandwich deal that worked out for the two of us and Charles.

It was a fairly leisurely day, but I still feel like I’m not really prioritizing correctly. I spent a lot of time rearranging PRTG again until Kyle came to the office to go out to lunch. He, Maggie, and I went to Eat My Catfish, which tasted good but had pitiful portions. The single catfish fillet I had was basically a quarter of a small fish.

The afternoon got a little bit exciting when the inbound DID numbers quit working, at least a part of the time. Maggie got on the phone with Windstream and IK Electric to see if anyone could see what went wrong. Kyle hung around the office for the rest of the afternoon too, but nobody in our department carried any stress over any of it.

Dad said the restoration people would be coming over the next day to start working on the bathrooms, so I ran home as quickly as I could and took the dogs for a quick run. They were super good, and then Summer got home just as we finished, so we went to the old house to bring the last remaining fish tank to the new house. We got it set up, moved the water and everything. Then I went back again to clean out the rest of both bathrooms. It took me a while, and I was up about two hours later than I wanted to be, but I guess I can nap on the way to work.

Are you ready Steve? Andy? Mick? Alright fellas, let’s go!

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Productive Household

Summer had to go to Greenbrier this morning, and I woke up with a pretty bad stomach ache before she left. I just stayed up, hoping I would be able to get to bed early in the evening, but procrastination finds a way. I spent the morning paying a bunch of bills and then trying to clean up around the house. Summer wasn’t gone terribly long, and then we hung the towel rack in Eaddie’s bathroom.

I made burritos for Eaddie and myself since Summer had already eaten and was cleaning her side of the house. Noah came over after work and generally made himself at home. I took the dogs out for a run around the block a couple times, and eventually got wound down for bed after everyone else beat me to it.

Sure, help yourself.