Summer Dog Days

Well, I'd say it was a better day because at least it wasn't Monday. Maybe that's true but it could, in its own way, have been a Monday.

Our impromptu meeting today was short. There were no bagels, awkward or otherwise. There weren't even any doughnuts. I was quite disappointed. If you have to sit through a staff meeting first thing in the morning, at least provide sustenance!

Nevertheless, we ended up being in our meeting for less than 15 minutes. It was scheduled in order to tell us that our president, aka Marcel Marceau, was resigning.

I have to admit, I wasn't shocked. I wasn't even that surprised. When you merge two companies and one is dominant enough to force us to rename everything after them, you have to see where the power lies. We'll never know why our president decided to resign. He's not the type to tell us that. My guess is that, like us, he's tired of the changes and since he'd lost some modicum of power, he was ready for something new.

He then announced that he'd be staying through the end of the year. People were already crying. They continued to cry. I, Captain Monkeypants, had the insensitive thought of "well, he's not going yet! We're stuck with him for four more months!"

I am obviously not the majority, I'll admit. I think there are things our president has done that have been smart. I believe those people in our company who tell me how different he used to be. I, however, have only known the stressed-out, moody, favourite-playing president who, up until recently, barely gave me the time of day. He can be fun, I'll admit that. Yet there was this teeny voice in my head that said, "Well, maybe it's for the best. Maybe the new president won't favour the same people and things will change."

For the rest of the day, following the meeting, there was a somber air about the office. I'm not sure why since it's not like he's leaving tomorrow. The regime is changing but...not yet. We still have work to do. I, especially, have work to do since my coworker is skipping out on her project and it's fallen on me to do it. It's a lot of work to get done in two days which is why I was infuriated when the same coworker whose work I am doing hosted a loud gossip session at her desk with four people for about 40 minutes when I'm desperately trying to keep on top of 'her' work. I tried to convey that I was working but they were oblivious.

I think I'm just grouchy. That's really what it comes down to really. It's the hot oppressive summer heat. It's hard to have the energy to do anything. Everything feels stagnant and the air is heavy. Normally, I wouldn't let my job get me all crotchety like this because it's just the way things are. Yet, at the moment, it feels good to glare and snipe. Well, not good but better.

I don't think it's just me. I know lots of people who are feeling similar. Even the puppies seem to be sniping at each other more. They play but they get annoyed with each other far quicker. The annoyance lasts just long enough for one to cross the room and the other take a flying leap to pounce on her but its definitely there.

Though Sookie is feeling better. She proved this to me last night by the fact that I took her temperature and it was normal. Of course, having to take her temperature was not fun for either of us. The ear thermometer was $39.99. The rectal one was $7.99. Payday isn't here yet. You can put the equation together. Hmm...that may explain her short temper. I suppose if someone did that to me, I might be waspish.

Still, she managed to prove even more that she felt better later on last evening. I happened to look out of the window and notice she and Rory were tossing something around. Curious, I went outside to investigate. Somehow, my fearsome hunters had stalked and captured a bird. It was dead and still mostly intact. I confiscated it and threw it away. They were not happy with me and proceeded to spend the rest of the evening stalking other birds. They gravitate towards the chirping and they watch. One thing about dachshunds is when they're on the hunt, they're dedicated. They sit very still and just wait. And then, when the moment is right, they pounce.

I have to admit, I didn't expect them to actually catch a bird. After all, birds can fly. I wasn't sure whether I should be impressed or horrified. However, since the bird was dead, I settled for an impressed shudder as I put it in a plastic grocery bag, double wrapped it and threw it away.

The dogs were very annoyed for the rest of the evening. Normally, when they decide the day is over and it's time to sleepy, they get up on the sofa with me until it's time for bed. Last night, the both slept on the floor, side by side, their backs to me.

Perhaps there really is a reason why they call them the dog days of summer.

Happy Wednesday.

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.

Off-Kilter Days...

There are just some days where, no matter how much you force them, things just don't happen the way you plan them. Something feels off-kilter, not quite right and even though you try to continue, it just doesn't go quite right.

At the moment, I'm trying to send out a query letter to agents. I sat down to do this a while ago. I have a good query letter, I just wanted to find some agents to whom I could send it. It seemed like a great idea in theory. In practice, it turned out that perhaps tonight was not the right night for it.

It started with my computer. I have a Dell Mini and a desktop. As much as I love my Dell Mini, it seriously lacks memory and I'm currently limited as to what I can do with it. I really need to get a new memory chip for it but at the moment, there are bills to pay. My desktop is a nice machine. I've had it for a while. The trouble is that it's running really slowly. There are some days when I open up some windows and the whole thing just freezes and churns for about five minutes while it unfreezes itself.

Somedays, I can just walk away and let it sort itself out. Other days, I really need to use the computer and I get very frustrated. Simply opening a Microsoft Word document causes my computer to panic and I have to wait until it's ready to show it to me. Tonight, it did that during every stage of my attempt to get my query letter out. Then, it turns out that though it used to be that agents only wanted a query letter, they now want at least a synopsis and usually the first three to five chapters. This is all well and good but it takes a lot of time. Also, I haven't got a synopsis for my novel yet. I just have to write one. So I thought, "hey, I'll do that!". No such luck. My computer froze again. Then when it let me type, it was lagging so badly that I had typed a sentence and had to wait for a while before the sentence appeared.

So, I thought I'd edit my first three chapters and get them ready to send out. Same thing. It took a while to open the file.

I think the only way to deal with it is not to deal with it tonight. I had a goal to get ten letters out tonight but, alas, I think I'm going to have to be patient and make sure I get everything right. If I do it in a hurry, I'll end up screwing something up. I just have this sense of incompletion because I had mentally told myself I'd get it done tonight.

This week has felt a little off-kilter in general. I don't know if it's because it's the first week after the holidays but things just seem a little off. It's all silly little stuff. For example, yesterday, I thought I'd dress nice again so I pulled out this gold blouse that I've had for a while. I had a matching hairband so I thought I'd match the two to look coordinated. Then, when I got to work, I realized that instead of looking sophisticated and smart, I looked like a giant, shiny gold blob. My blouse was not flattering in the light of the bathroom mirror and my hairband did not match as well as I thought. Sometimes all it takes is a bad wardrobe day to make you feel off-kilter. For me, that was yesterday.

Today, things were thrown off-kilter by an impromptu staff meeting. Every time we get an invitation on our calendar to an impromptu meeting, my heart races a little. I consider it Post-Traumatic-Impromptu Meeting disorder. My entire first six months at our company were filled with impromptu meetings where we found out that our being sold was not going well and, most likely, we'd all be unemployed. As I've said many times, fortunately things worked out. Yet, the impromptu meetings always left us frustrated, stressed, angry and worried. Even though things are better now, the old fear comes back when we're told we have to be at a staff meeting.

Today's, fortunately, was not too serious. Well, it probably was to people who, uh, care a bit more than me. It was a meeting to discuss the financial state of our company. Basically, long story short, we need to make a lot of money. That was pretty much the entire summation of the hour and a half that the meeting took. There were a lot of numbers in there, spreadsheets on the overhead projector, that sort of thing. I sort of listened but I'm not really a numbers type of girl. I tried to listen but there was a period in the meeting where I realized I had completely zoned out for a full five minutes. I'm not talking daydreaming type of zoning where you can still hear the drone of our president's voice. No, I'm talking about that scary 'not-in-that-room' anymore type of zoning that almost felt as if I'd been asleep. I know I wasn't asleep because I spent the time writing a query letter in my head and figuring out how to go about finding agents who might be interested in my novel. It was quite a productive five minutes. Just not so much in terms of the actually meeting. By the end, we were all told at the end that we need to work hard and we're all responsible for the company's success.

I think I'm helping the company in my own way. After all, as one of the lowest paid employees, I'm not taking a huge chunk of the budget, so that's a good thing. Also, I didn't cost them a new computer so another bonus point to me! Also, now that I'm not allowed to do anything but work, I no longer waste frivoulous time enjoying my job by having a quick surf on the Web every now and again. I think I'm actually doing my part to help the company.

All sarcasm aside, it was a bit of a weird meeting. Tomorrow is going to be, likely, another weird day. We did get an updated Bad Weather Policy from our HR manager. Basically, it boils down to the fact that we can only work from home if we're physically unable to make it to work or there is a level 3 snow emergency. We have to ask our supervisor first though. Since my supervisor told me two days ago that he didn't like his employees working from home, I know we can only ask sparingly. Of course, it didn't stop my boss from leaving early and working from home tonight though. I suppose that's why he's the boss.

Nevertheless, tomorrow should be interesting. It's supposed to start snowing after we get to work. I'm not that worried anymore. If that's the case, if it gets bad enough that people are leaving, I can monitor the conditions and see if I should leave or not. I do feel sorry for the commuters though- if driving is going to be as horrendous as the weather forecast states, I would NOT want to drive home on roads like that. Hopefully, they can get a break and do what's safest for them.

I suppose the week began on an off-kilter note with the Awkward Bagel meeting. Then the next day was the Giant Gold Blob of a Monkeypants. Today was Impromptu Money Meeting and tomorrow is going to be Big Snowstorm Day. I'm not sure what Friday will hold but given the way the week's going, I'm sure there will be something.

I'll just have to remember not to wear that shirt again.

Happy Thursday!