CafeChatNoir

A tiger female plays with her two 45-day-old tigers cubs in the Matecana zoo of Pereira, August 30, 2003. Three tiger and three lions cubs were baptised before being relocated in several zoos of Latin America. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

Lunch items, cat litter and lightbulbs have been procured. I can now see in the laundry room and we’re off and running to get a few clean clothes on hand before Tuesday morning rolls around.

Most of the needed picking up for the cleaning service is done, a quarterly estimated sent off to the feds, and things are generally calm. Heading out again in about 45 minutes to hear tales of San Francisco from little bro.

Time to go put some of that laundry away….

and mourning over the fact that summer is over.

Laundry marathon today and pick up for the cleaning service tomorrow. First, a quick trip to the market to pick up a couple things, including a slew of lightbulbs… Seems the storms we’ve had have resulted in a few power surges that took out several lightbulbs in the past few days, and I am out of replacements. Hard to get any laundry done when you can’t see what you’re doing…

Corn Festival was fun - less about corn and more about getting a TON of craft vendors & such in for the day. Had a torrential downpour right in the middle of it, but all the houses on the street it is on had covered front porches, so pretty much everyone was able to stay dry. gets the super good sport award for getting wet while getting the kettle corn for everyone and helping them keep their tent from collapsing. Wandered around some more and it started raining again towards the end. No quick end to this one tho, and we all ended just getting soaked. So, we headed back to our friends house, clothes all into the dryer. Scarfed down hotdogs and VERY fresh corn in borrowed clothes and bathrobes.

It was really good to see Linda & Craig again - I’ve known them forever, and they’re like a second set of parents to me. I know they’ve really been wanting to meet and see what was up with that. Since they told us we could come up and crash in their neck of the woods anytime if we want to do sightseeing/biking in the area, I am guessing he passed. :)

As is my custom at these types of things, I know myself well enough by now to know I will spend on fun stuff that I wouldn’t get under any other circumstances. So, I am now set with fancy dip mixes for the holidays and bath salts and handmade soaps, and zero guilt. I have one soap that I can only describe as smelling like a purple sweet tart. The cats also now have shrimp & crab kitty treats. There were at least 3 pet treat vendors there. All the animals have goodies from the trip.

So, if you happen to be in Shippensburg, PA on the last Saturday in August, be sure to check out the Corn Festival.

In the now three full months I have been in support…

– Some clients are really smart and will exhaust all options, keep every checklist you have ever sent them AND follow it, and document what did or didn’t happen before they call you.
– Some clients want you to just “do something to fix it”.
– I see how 4 billion dollar accounting errors happen. And it’s not the fault of the software.
– It’s very strange, yet rewarding, to be calling the office that you used to work for, and getting to talk to the jerk that always thought you were a total idiot - and tell him he’s wrong. HA!
– Everyone hates doing reconciliations. They hate being told that support doesn’t do reconciliations even more.
– A call that starts out with “Well, I ran these SQL scripts…” never ends well. Do you eat M&M’s you find on the sidewalk, too?
– It’s really cool to be able to fix something.
– It’s still very disturbing to see “Prefers ” at the top of the queue.
– It is SO much better than closing the books at month end.
– It amazes me how badly people can screw things up in this system. Honest, I never had these kinds of problems, and I’ve SA’d the system and been a user.
– Though the one person out there that flipped out and hung up on me was a guy, for the most part, women seem to be crankier clients.
– The words “well, we blew away the tables” is not a good thing to hear. If you’re lucky, you can reply to that with, “Well, we’re going to have to transfer this over to tech…”
– Having company sanctioned IM at work rocks.

The company is still impressing me. The president sent out an email last week with some really nice compliments to our internal IT staff for keeping the virus/worm situation completely in check. This week, it was announced that we’re getting flat panel monitors. Everyone. None of that “Level 03 and above” crap - everyone. Period. The rationale? “Well, we’re having a decent year and we’ve been thinking about it, and decided to just do it.” New monitors will be nice anyway, and flat panels will kick ass.

And I love the free bagels and donuts.

And thank god it’s a long weekend.

Had one call that started at 10:30 this morning. There is no good way to tell a client, “Well, you’re just fucked.” I spent most of the day working that call until I left at 6:45. Mind you, support closed at 6 this evening with the holiday weekend. Their database is just failing, and they’re having all sorts of random crap going on as a result. Did as much as I could, but we’re gonna have to send in someone to tune the database (and add some journal entry fluid while they’re at it) and get it a little more stable. To be honest, I was hoping the whole damn thing would just crash, so I could send it to tech.

Funny part of it - I did have to go over to tech, cause they did a call w/them last night to ask if the trouble they were having could have caused the new problems today. A definite possibility. Asked me how I was doing, told them I was ready to smack a client. Their response, “Wow, it’s taken you this long to get to that point?”

It’s hard to convince clients that we don’t have magic wands. Sometimes things just break. And you have to do some manual crap to fix it.

She sent me an email while I had run out to lunch. (I had to eat. Sorry, you don’t want to have me supporting you if I haven’t eaten. I will take your head off and write you a script that will bring a NASA satellite down on top of your car.) The email says that her boss was yelling at her - ok, her boss is a jackass if he doesn’t understand that there are software problems. Now, I was back on the phone w/her within 15 minutes of the email and still working the problem. At which point she said, “Well, you don’t have a boss.”
Huh?
“Um, yes, we do.”
“Oh. I thought you were all independent contractors there.”
“No, just plain employees.”
At which point I also had to explain that I spent 11 years on her side of the desk and I DID understand what was going on.

That was almost as good as the woman talking to my Training Partner In Crime the other day. TPIC is getting ready to outline the fix to her when she says,
“Well, none of you there are accountants, so I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
TPIC does a masterful job of explaining that we are ALL accountants in general support, without telling her to go piss up a rope.

But, I still really, really like the job. And I still hope that woman’s database just completely crashes.

Tomorrow, the corn festival!!

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=625823

some of my grey hair has a very slight blonde tint to it…

Still not a redhead. Guess my hair is too dark to start with. I wasn’t really going for full-on redhead, just trying to bring a little more red into the brown that’s there… This stuff didn’t even touch the grey hair that I’ve got…

http://fridayfive.org/index.php?id=P38

Edit: Apparently this was last week’s. But I like it better than this week’s anyway

1. When was the last time you laughed?
At work today.

2. Who was the last person you had an argument with?
Probably , but I can’t remember what it would have been about

3. Who was the last person you emailed?

4. When was the last time you bathed?
Sort of about 10 minutes ago. And again in another 5 minutes. And then we’ll also see if I am a redhead or not.

5. What was the last thing you ate?
See’s Bordeaux chocolate candy

OK, so I’m up and I made it to work. It’s just two of us for the first hour this morning - eep!! I’ve got some sinus/earache thing going on, so I’m not exactly at the top of my game, which sucks cause it’s Wednesday and that’s our busiest day. Have 4 calls still assigned to me that I can’t kill to save my life. I am singlehandedly destroying our resolution stats, LOL.

Last week of summer… *sniff*

Also probably the last slow week we’ll have for a while, and it’s started off quite well. 3 calls when we came in, now down to TWO - and both already assigned and in progress.

We haven’t had an Ag Fair up here in years, because we don’t have any Ag around here anymore. Closest thing is a small “working farm” owned by the county parks department that kids go to see on school field trips. (I’m not knocking it - it’s really cool, but it really is pretty much the only Ag thing in the county.)

So, this weekend we headed for the Shenandoah County Fair, about 80 miles west of here. It’s an area that still has a fairly substantial farming population, and the younger generation is definitely involved. The schools have active Future Farmers of America chapters, the 4H exhibit stalls are filled, there are signs made with pride thanking the buyers of their entries. Kids around here know that that hamburger meat didn’t start and end at the grocery store.

Picked up a cookbook from the Ladies Auxillary of the Star Tannery Fire Department. Between the fact that the first recipe I saw was for my favvvvvv hashbrown casserole, and the second was for fried rattlesnake, I couldn’t pass it up. I doubt that I will find the words “Low-Fat” anywhere in it, which suits me fine.

The exhibits. Great livestock, mainly cattle and sheep, and some hogs. One very upset baby cow who had been taken out of the stall and tethered up at the bath area. She wasn’t particularly interested in getting a bath. :) Still trying to figure out if the ‘coats’ they were putting on over the sheep were to keep them from getting dirty until they were shown, or if they had just sheared them and maybe they don’t adjust immediately to the temp differences?

The poultry hall is always a good place. You never realize how many different kinds of chickens are out there until you see them all in one place. And so pretty, too! Three entries for chicks - the tiny kids were oohing and aahing like crazy. “Mom, they’re so little!!” Great entries for bunnies, too. I always think that were the Eve’l Dog to walk in the chicken & bunny room, she’d just have a stroke right then and there.

About 60 entries for flowers. Gorgeous. Food. Ohmigod, the food. Easily 30+ plus for canning and probably another 50 for cakes/cookies/pies/yummy things. A whole hall filled with veggies and such. First prize pumpkin was spectacular.

Had tractor pulls as well. Very neat to watch. Didn’t go for the grandstand tix, just watched bits & pieces from the rails.

It’s a fascinating place to peoplewatch. These are men and women whose livelihood is at the whim of mother nature. These are faces that have seen years of very hard work, and have lifetimes of stories.

That was the sound of the weekend flying by…

Friday night was chill-out-after-work w/ friends that went waaaaaaaaaay too late.

Saturday, the fair. Awesome fun. Got to see all the 4H entries. :-D Played bingo for the first time (besides when I was a kid in school) Won 7 times. WOOT! (Spent all winnings on more games. Fun!)

Today, sold the little green car, went to the top of the Washington Monument, dropped the keys back off from petsitting to little bro, went back to get the check for the car, hit the bank to deposit said check, and then the grocery store for milk and kitty food.

For my troubles on the petsitting (which were truly nil), I received a Snoopy doll from the Charles Shultz museum and a one pound box of Bordeaux chocolates from See’s Candy. My absolute very, VERY favorites from that shop. Already had two while waiting for dinner to heat up. (It’s why I had to get the milk on the way home!)

Back to the house, it’s still light enough and cool enough to whack down the yard. Ended up arguing w/ neighbor over who was going to do this, LOL! Quickly realized it was going to end up a wrestling match over the weedwhacker, and graciously admitted defeat and let him do it. He doesn’t have his own weedwhacker (he said he is hitting Home Depot this week), and feels that if he borrows mine to do his tiny piece of grass, then he MUST do my tiny piece of grass as well. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve told him he DOESN’T have to do that, he can borrow the weedwhacker ANY TIME AT ALL without doing my yard, and lost every single time.

Finally got a semi-decent nights sleep!

Off to work momentarily. Then HH tonight, Hawaiian shirt day tomorrow (we’re not sure why - every Friday seems to be Hawaiian shirt day at the office, but OK), sell the car Saturday morning, and then off to the fair!

Corn Festival next weekend, Party & quilt show the weekend after that…

One week left of summer - that bites. The weather has just sucked rocks this season. You can already feel a tiny bit of fall in the air out there…

Starting to get seriously annoyed with my former mortgage note holder, Wells Fargo. I have yet to receive my refund off the escrow account. It’s about $1500, which is nothing to sneeze at, ya know? If it has not arrived by tomorrow, the angry phone calls will commence…

A six-year old female leopard and her one-month-old cub look out of their cage at the Xian Zoo, in China’s Shaanxi province, August 19, 2003. Three leopards at the zoo have given birth to four cubs so far this year. REUTERS/China Photo

Well, got heavily involved w/ a call from the west coast in the late afternoon…. A call that starts with “Well, I ran some scripts…” just never ends well.

Good news is that we got her 2,927 records back to where they should be. And a re-written script that if she ever uses it again won’t update the entire freaking table. And tomorrow, she’ll be getting instructions on how to use the interface IN the software so she hopefully will not have to mess with the scripts anymore. (But if she does, at least she has ones that will do less damage.)

Though I should have been off at 5, I was there til almost 8 on just this one call. Upside is that I wasn’t the only one there (have a couple people til 6, one til 7 and one til 8) and one of our other telecommuters on a different piece of software was going through his own hell with one of our consultants so we did lots of bitching back and forth on IM.

I think some of the senior folks have gotten a touch spoiled w/ me and my training-partner-in-crime (TPIC) around, LOL. We’ve been triaging calls like crazy so we were doing a large chunk of callbacks and they could cherry-pick from the notes. Worked well, they had less initial callbacks to do and got to pick what they were good at to deal with. Over time, the triaging has dwindled significantly.

One of the senior folks was giving us some (good-natured) grief last week that we were still triaging a few of them and not taking them all the way through. OK, point taken. So, no more triages.

Hmmm, so if we’re not triaging anymore, that’s less initial callbacks we can do and more that they have to pick up again. But it didn’t seem to be working out quite that way as yesterday I was doing callbacks and suddenly I find myself with six calls assigned to myself and new ones still coming in. Well, I’m off new calls at that point so I can clear some of mine out.

At this point, one of the managers comes out to me and says, “Um, do you realize you’ve gotten six calls assigned to yourself?”
“Yeah… I’m not going to take any new calls for a little while unless things get REALLY stacked up so I can get rid of these.”
“OK. Well, if you need any help, holler. Cause well, you’re new, and they’re not. And you have six calls and none of them do.” (Them being the senior folks.)

I think she was a little ticked that me & TPIC are madly taking as many calls as we can handle to keep the callbacks down as we have been, and still trying to see them through as well, and the senior folks aren’t stepping up to do the initial callbacks. We’re still getting the hang of “how long can you let a callback go before you look up and it has 10 more behind it”…

So, we’re getting there. It’s still hard as hell, and I still have some customers I’d like to toss of a cliff, but I really like it.

I once worked for a company where we had to actually put an employee on a plane, first class because it was the only thing available, with the proposal… We had a car meet him at the airport, who he then promised a $50 tip if he was willing to break any and all speed limits to get to the delivery point on time…

SELECT * FROM CUSTOMER WHERE CLUE > 0;

0 ROWS RETURNED

OK, so, it’s morning again. I’m up, but definitely bleary eyed.

For whatever reason, the trash people didn’t show up yesterday. Critters got into the bags all over the neighborhood. (Mine included.)

OK, time to get off my backside and go slog through the day. I hope I wake up soon…

Edit/RetractionThe trash people didn’t come yesterday. Nor were they supposed to. It was today. I put the garbage out *last night* not yesterday morning.

N.Y. Woman Sends Her Power to State Grid

Came into only 6 open calls today. For reference - starting a week out w/ less than 20 is usually pretty darn good…

I’m up. Not awake, but I’m up. :)

The house is ready for the cleaning service, I am somewhat ready for work, and it could be worse… I could have only gotten in from SC at around 4 AM like someone I know.

Well, got myself a burst of energy out of nowhere, and things are pretty much done for the night. However, my back is killing me, so I must have twisted wrong at some point or another.

Only thing left is to put a couple dishes in the dishwasher in the morning and get it started before I leave in the morning.

I gave up on the office - it’s about 2/3 of the way there - a *ton* of crap tossed out, just one corner left filled with 90% useless junk to wade through one evening.

Until then, it’s time to crash for the night.