The Revenge of Mondays

I think I've said I don't like Mondays once too often. Mondays are getting their own back.

Today was...very Monday. It started out with my worrying: Sookie had been feeling sick yesterday and hadn't been acting at all like herself. She was off her food, very lethargic and generally not at all Sookie-Sue like. I thought she'd be ok this morning but she was still very mopey and wouldn't eat so I felt a little worried when I went off to work.

Of course, then I decided to do some internet research to make sure she was ok. I knew one of the Dog Whisperer's beasts had Parvo not too long ago. Parvo is a very nasty dog infection that's highly contagious and, apparently, unless you bleach everything the dog comes into contact with, it's very hard to kill.

So, I did some reading and discovered that Sookie's symptoms resembled those of the early stages of Parvo. I panicked. I made an appointment at the vet for the end of the day and proceeded to worry until I went home for lunch.

At lunch time, Sookie seemed somewhat normal. She ate a little, played a little and seemed mostly back to herself. Feeling like a very overprotective pet parent, I decided to cancel the vet appointment and just watch her to see how she acted.

I went back to work feeling better. Well, except for the fact that our President had scheduled yet another one of his infamous "impromptu staff meetings."

These, as I've mentioned before, are usually scheduled for the entire staff with less than 24 hours notice. This one starts at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow. In our company, these 'invitations' to the meetings are greeted with much dread and paranoia. I've mentioned this. It stems from the fact that these meetings a) Never, ever provide good news, b) follow several closed-door conversations between my boss- the V.P of the company and his boss- the president of the company and c) are sprung on us with little warning and little reassurance.

As I've mentioned, these staff meetings usually bring bad news such as:

• We're being sold, we're being sold and it's likely that we'll be closed.
• We're being sold and though we won't close, we might lose our jobs.
• We won't lose our jobs but we have to change our attitudes and start making money.
• We're not making enough money and we need to make more
• We are making some money but we're merging with another company and it's possible we might lose our jobs.

So, you can see...these meeting invitations are met with paranoia. What amused me is less than 3 minutes after getting the emailed invitation, I had three simultaneous instant messages from coworkers, all with the same.. "Oh No" in them.

I tried not to be paranoid even though I was informed that I'd missed the fact that our company president had just met with our boss in a very, very quiet meeting with the door closed. Normally, when those two talk, even with the door closed, you can hear the sound of voices even though you can never hear what they're saying. Trust me, my coworker and I have tried to hear and it's impossible. This one was so quiet, my coworker wondered if they were miming.

This, of course, inspired an inappropriate fit of giggles from me as I immediately pictured our president dressed as Marcel Marceau and doing that creepy box thing that mimes do. On the plus side, this made me feel much better. On the down side, since it won't actually happen, no one will understand why the words mime and our president's name will always inspire a loony grinning fit from me unless I explain. And, even when I try to, they will still look at me like I'm crazy.

I digress. To top things off, our boss ended up rescheduling our department meeting until after this staff meeting. He only does that when he 1) either is afraid that we'll ask questions about why we're having a staff meeting or 2) Needs to discuss the meeting with us after it's happened.

Either way, it doesn't bode well. My only hope is that if they're going to schedule a meeting at 8:30 a.m., there better be awkward bagels.

So, on top of my dog feeling poorly and the paranoia that Something Bad is going to happen, I also managed to accidentally delete some rather important information. In my defense, I feel like I was doing my job. My boss and the poor programmer who is responsible for the information don't really agree.

You see, I've recently taken on the responsibility of trying to test our software for vulnerabilities. While I'll never be a hacker because I'm simply not smart enough, I use certain hacker tools to help search for them. Hacking isn't all bad. Bad hacking is called Black Hat hacking. Good hacking is White Hat hacking. The point of White Hat hacking is to try to make sure it's safe against the Black Hats. I'm learning everything as I go along but am having a lot of fun doing it. I've found some nifty tools. One of these tools checks websites for vulnerabilities. Except today, one of my tests apparently deleted some information. I was chastised because I logged in and a real hacker wouldn't have that access. I tried to politely explain to my boss that just because we didn't create accounts for hackers to do bad things to our software, they're usually pretty adept at finding their way in. This is simplified by us by using some not so hard-to-crack encryption for passwords. They couldn't see that I'd helped them out by finding something a hacker could find in less than five minutes. They only saw the damage I'd done.

Fortunately, it's fixable. Unfortunately, I'm in the dog house. I should probably feel bad but I really don't except for the fact that the repairs have to be done by someone who is rather busy and doesn't have time to fix my damage.

Finally, to top it all off, I end up getting scheduled for meetings all afternoon. I dislike meetings. I especially dislike them when I think I'm invited because someone finally realizes I should have been invited all along because I have the same responsibilities as my coworker who is always invited only to discover I'm only invited because she's going to be out of the office on a day when she needs to be there. I wouldn't mind except she really doesn't need to be out of the office. As usual, her and one of her clique have contrived to make it seem like she has to go to this crucial meeting when, really, she has very little to do with the meeting; she just wants to go hang out and support her friend. It would be ok if she didn't have, you know, responsibilities in the office that day, responsibilities that she made sure she made sure she had and I didn't. Yes, I'm bitter. If it wasn't such a regular thing, I wouldn't mind so much.

Ah well, there's no point worrying about it. Life will go on. So will the meetings. They go on. And on. And on. I ended up being rather late home which made it fortunate I'd cancelled the vet appointment.

Sookie seems to be feeling sorry for herself again. I don't know if it's to milk attention or she really does feel under the weather. I think I'll spend the evening keeping an eye on her, just to make sure. Maybe it'll stop me thinking about the meeting tomorrow which, hopefully, will be much ado about nothing.

And, if it is much ado about something...I'll just picture it with mimes.

Happy Tuesday.

Small Changes and More Awkward Bagels

The strange thing about a new year is that even, as I said, it's just a date, it's a time when, for me, at least, there's a little expectation that things are going to change immediately. In a way, I can't complain- today at work, two things changed. One, I got my chair back. If you remember the Saga of Captain Monkeypant's Chair, you'll remember that it got broken in the move from our old building to our new, I got accused of breaking it myself and then our HR manager took it to glue it.

Well, the gluing didn't go so well. Apparently, my HR manager had trouble getting the glue to dry. She discovered that the chair was under warranty and so requested a replacement back to repair it. In the meantime, I was relegated to the Most Uncomfortable Office Chairs in the World. At one point I did inquire as to my old chair and our HR manager offered it back to me with the warning that 'it's still broken and it's worse than ever." Well, given that it was pretty bad before, I politely told our HR manager that I'd hate to have to file a worker's comp suit if my chair did cause me to take a nasty spill. Yes, there is irony in the fact that I had to remind our HR manager of things like that. Today, when I got my chair back, I was happy. My coworkers mocked my enthusiasm but, let me tell you, until you lose a really good chair with back support to a crappy one with no wheels and no give, you don't know how much you're going to miss.

The second thing that happened was that my boss finally wanted to talk to me about the issues I brought up over a month ago. These were issues where I told him that I wasn't feeling like I was being utilized in the best way and that I needed to do other work as well as my regular duties because I was bored. Well, one meeting later and....well, the nice thing about having no expectations is that you're not disappointed. Essentially, I was told to continue just as I was doing. So...yeah...that happened. There's nothing like a meeting where you walk out wondering what the point was.

However, as I said, I no longer have any expectations. My current mission is to do my job well, let the irritating stuff roll of my back and enjoy the fact that I can escape from my office at the end of my day.

It was, however, a promising start to the year. At least my boss remembered I wanted to talk to him. Ok, so he did, as usual, invite my coworker to join us in the meeting which took away from the fact that I'd talked to him personally about my responsibilities but, well, he tried, right? It was progress, at least.

It is a decent start to the year. The bad part is that one of my coworkers, someone I actually like a lot, lost her sister on Christmas Eve. It was a similar situation for her family as one I went through with some good friends almost two years ago. It's hard to know what to say to a person who is grieving as hurting as much as my coworker. There's a desire in me to be that person who knows the right thing to say or not say, to give a perfect combination of words that shows wisdom, friendship and caring. Unfortunately, there are no perfect words, no perfect gesture. It's just a matter of letting her know that we're there for her, that there's nothing to fix the badness of the situation except time and even then, it doesn't get fixed, just merely distanced just a little. It made the air feel a little more somber than usual, no one knows what to say because it's impossible to know. She's someone who is usually the life of the party, the person who can always come up with a joke. Seeing her try but not have her heart in it was a slightly heartbreaking thing to witness.

It was even more awkward because the day started with an Awkward Bagel Situation. We have another new employee. This one is a receptionist. She seems nice. Her boss is our HR manager. I already feel sorry for the receptionist. Our HR manager did bring in bagels to our Awkward Bagel Meeting. Unfortunately, we weren't actually allowed to eat them during the meet and greet because we might have got crumbs on the table so we had to meet, greet and then go grab bagels before we went to our desks. I find this ironic and slightly amusing. At least when we have bagels, we can make conversation about the bagels. Today everyone shuffled into the conference room, half the staff had to stand up because there weren't enough chairs. Then our HR manager barked out the order for our new receptionist to tell us about her. Then we had to go around the room and say our name, just like any awful first-day-of-class. The thing with situations like that are that, well, they're awkward. The poor newbie knows he or she will NEVER remember anyone's name until they interact with them and even then, she'll still get confused about which one is Bob or Chris or Alan or whoever for at least a couple of months. There was the mandatory joke about whether she'd have to take a pop quiz later or not. She laughed. We laughed. That's what we do, you see.

Then we were immediately dismissed to get bagels. Personally, I think it might have been a wee bit smarter to take her around and introduce her to us at our desks. That way she can at least have some idea of where we might belong at least by where we sit.

Still, there were Awkward Bagels and that made it worthwhile which is probably the point.

All in all, it was a rather strange yet interesting start to 2010 in the office. There were some changes but I know the big ones are going to be down to me. I'll keep looking forward. Maybe there will be more bagels in the future. At least next week, there will be cookies or cake. It's my birthday, you see, and I'm encouraged to bring treats to share. I plan on baking. I say plan because sometimes plans because waylaid by lack of time, lack of ingredients and, most commonly, lack of desire. Still, right now, my intentions are good.

I think I might just leave the cake in the kitchen and tell people to help themselves. I think an Awkward Cookie/Cake Day would be rather worse than bagels because what if they don't like the baked goods? I always have this fear that when I bake, I'll be pelted with the leftover cookies that people don't eat because they take one bite and decide it's the worst thing ever.

On second thoughts, maybe buying cookies might be a better idea.

Happy Tuesday!