Well, I was certainly surprised, but in a good way, yesterday at Crown Tournament. (SCA, we're completely harmeless, trust me.) I feel like a bird that just flew into a plate glass window - you know, not so hard that the bird dies, but it has to sit on your porch for a couple of minutes before it can go back to normal.
More to come when I'm done resting on the porch.
I drove by a "Free Will" church yesterday. Isn't that an oxymoron? I also drove by a humane society with this sign - "Neuter your male - only $5". How many wives do you suppose checked out that offer?
While I was driving I was sweating. I know you people buried in snow don't have any sympathy, but it's in the 80s here with humidity of 90%. In March. I'm going to have to mow my lawn and get my car A/C recharged, these are not things you should be doing in early March. Fricken' global warming!
There are giant billboards all over town with Dr. Phil's image on them. There he is, the current icon of pop psychology, looking down on major intersections, hovering over the Wendy's. There's just so many of them - it's really quite scary.
When I was a small lass in the woods of Ohio, the father of one of my little playmates was a podiatrist. One time she told me that her father was a foot doctor and that he would cut off my foot if I didn't bend to her will. When I reported this to my dad, he told me to tell her that he was a head doctor, and that he would cut off her head if she didn't do what I wanted her to do. Mom disapproved. I did it, though, and didn't have many problems with her after that.
Today I asked Uncle Chuckie if he knew of any nice restaurants in New Orleans, since he had just spent the previous ten minutes telling me about a condo there that he spent a week in once during some seminar. He told me the names of a few. Then Chuckie mentioned a bistro with outdoor seating, and told me that he was eating out on their patio once, when a bird flew overhead and crapped on his plate! He had just finished eating, so the meal wasn't ruined as much as it could have been. But just imagine if he had just sat down to a plate of spaghetti with alfredo sauce - he may never have discovered the bird's transgression!
Not the vacation from which I just returned, though it had a couple of ups and downs. Sorry I didn't put a "gone fishing" sign here to explain my lack of posting.
I got a call from my soup-ervisor on my cell phone when we were just out of Tallahassee last night.
Seems there was a lay-off (also called a staff reduction) Thursday afternoon. Among the 16 victims of the staff reduction were Office Stalker, Uncle Chuckie - and Yours Truly.
Business has been bad. Very bad. The daily sales reports have been in the tank for some time (thanks a lot, Enron). So this wasn't a total shock. However I thought I had some time to find a new gig on my own before the ship started to sink.
Now, I'm a low-level marketing functionary, but Uncle Chuckie is an engineer extraordinare - it's weird that they let him (and another engineer with the same job, different division) go. At least I'm in good company. There were cuts in every department.
We are all getting a severance package, which I've never had before, and I'll have insurance until the end of April.
Apparently Soup was frantic to reach me, because she didn't want me to find out about the lay-off via the Fed Ex envelope they sent me with all the fun details when I returned home. (Cell phone was out of range, not to mention out of charge.) But if she had reached me, she would have totally trashed my vacation - Friday was the best day, and that's when she called!
So I have to go in to clean out my cube later this morning. I'm not devastated, but I am worried about finding another job, what with war and the economy sucking and all.
The weirdest thing is, I think I'm actually going to miss Uncle Chuck.
So, at the urging of the VP of Marketing, I went to a company-sponsored "You've been laid off, now what?" type seminar this morning. It was held in some crummy Holiday Inn near the office. I got my hopes up when I saw a Dunkin Donuts delivery van in the parking lot, complete with a giant donut strapped to the top of it. No donuts for us, just crappy Holiday Inn danishes. As I sat, bored while the facilitator was telling me fascinating things like, "use action words in your resume", the HR person came and got me out of the meeting. "Our web designer has turned in her resignation. We want to talk to you."
Now, this is very cool except I have very little ability in the web department. And, as I sat with the two HR people and my Soup, I was very honest about that. I know basic HTML, and little else. I would need to take a Dreamweaver class or two. That was okay - they were willing to pay for that, in fact. They sent me home, telling me not to get my hopes up. Meanwhile, I lunched with Lisa and attacked Mount Laundry.
I just got the phone call inviting me back officially as web designer. That was the quickest rehire in history, I think. I'm honestly nervous about the new position, but all parties concerned know what we're all getting into. The current web designer is a GLOM (one of the Gorgeous Ladies of Marketing), so I'm going to be picking her brain for the next two weeks, to say the least. And, I got a raise. So, for the moment anyway, it's all good. I just hope the economy turns around, or I could be in the same boat in a few months. At least I'll be able to add to the ol' curriculum vita.
Yesterday was the easiest first day on a new job ever. I got to make lots of jokes about not being gone long enough for people to miss me, or introducing myself as the new web designer. Fortunately I left my boxes of office crap in my car, so moving in was a breeze, though I'll probably be switching cubicles when my predecesor leaves next week. Hopefully cube feng shui will not be too affected. The worst thing is that I deleted all my bookmarks. Oh well, I probably won't have too much time to spend on the Internet in the next few weeks.
You guys are right, Dreamweaver seems pretty intuitive - man is it easy to put links in with that thing! - and I do get that stupid song in my head. I've found the copy of the CD I was given with Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks, so my computer technician will be installing that at home tonight.
Jeff tells me that now that I'm a web designer, I have to cut my hair and dye it black, and wear those tiny little eyeglasses. He also says I'm not pale enough, which I find hard to believe.
Spam is a bad word at my office. We do not send spam. We send "e-mail blasts". Referring to our "e-mail blasts" as spam is an offense punishable by firing. The first thing I got to design in Dreamweaver yesterday was an "e-mail blast", to my shame. At least we don't sell our e-mail list, and we really honor the opt-out option.
At a charming 7-11 type business in Tallahassee, they have a beer cave. It's a walk-in cooler with all kinds of beer, decorated in a jungle cave motif. I was captivated. I almost panicked when I found that there was no handle to the inside door of the beer cave, but found that a gentle push was all that one needed to leave the cool nook of malted beverage delight.
This was the same establishment that featured American French vanilla-flavored capuchino.
I've heard each of these used in various newscasts over the past week:
The war in Iraq
The war on Iraq
The war against Iraq
In slightly related news, every time I hear the city of Nasiriyah mentioned, my brain thinks of the tune 'Macarena' - discuss. Oh, and Dubya was in town today, so glad he flew into the airbase rather than the int'l airport. That screws up traffic for miles around. (Nothing like telling the hostiles where the Commander in Chief is on any given day, either.)
I made my famous steak sandwiches for dinner last night, to celebrate surviving my first web site-related encounter with Mr. B.
Mr. B is the octogenarian who owns the company I work for. Like many smaller companies, there is someone (or several someones) on hand to run the company. However, there are some projects Mr. B takes an interest in, sections of the web site being one of them. He brought me into his office, which is furnished with some 'interesting' art, the most notable being a painting of an old cowboy smoking doobage. (Oh yeah, and an autographed photo of Bill Clinton, thanking Mr. B for his support during Willy's first term of office.) He and I sat on the same side of the desk while he wrote out and explained what he wanted. Manageable stuff, except he is very hung up on the 'print screen' key working, which, as you probably know, has been somewhat of a misnomer with the advent of Windows. The modus operandi of the current Web Chyck is to ensure that the pages Mr. B is most likely to print fit on a page, even if it means removing standard sidebar-type menus and such. Hey, it's his company.
By the way, I have learned that I am not the "Webmaster" at the office, but I am "in charge of maintaining the web site". Which, as long as I'm a neophyte web designer, is fine by me.
Isn't it stupid that humans can become allergic to things like dust and pollen? Did the cave men get hay fever? What about the indigenous people of prehistoric Florida, did oak pollen drive them nuts this time of year, too? Or is this just a curse on those of Indo-European descent? This time of year is the worst, usually I wind up with bronchitis as a result of all the crap in the skies around here.
Jeff wouldn't let me mow the back yard yesterday, just because I was sneezing and wheezing and such. That makes me sad, I find lawn mowing a liberating experience. I am woman, see me mow.
