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Not sure who, but whoever it is did a darn good job. I just cannot get it out of my head that today is Friday. I keep forgetting, and having to remind myself it’s Thursday. I even asked for a report from the sales team, saying I needed it by end of day today, when really I need it Friday. Not that it really matters; all but one ignored me anyway.
Yeah - I’m that influential.

Today I was asked to create a phone list. A list of phone numbers of people in the office. Because, you know, that’s what I’m here for. To do all the things you’re too lazy to do yourself. What makes it all worse is we have an internal website, 411, where you can go to to get ANYONE’s number. ANYONE in the company.
Yeah - look at that degree go to work folks.

Besides that and the re-org issues w/ finance and HR, it’s been a relatively slow day. This morning was great! Slow, 10:30 conf call meeting lasted all of 3 minutes. The just before lunch things got goofy. Then everyone left for lunch, so I did too.
Now I’m back and just feeling grumpy. I hate it when that one little thing just makes you feel grumpy for the rest of the day.

Besides the grumpiness, I’ve also felt a since of longing today. I can’t say what it is I’m longing for, but I do feel like I’m missing something. I think it may be job satisfaction. Or maybe purpose in life. I don’t know. I just sat in my car after lunch, staring into nothingness, and longing for something that I could not define. (Wait; are those lyrics in some song?) Cake - The Distance…yeah.

Ok - so I swore I would never do this again. But it is inevitable. Work ranting just cannot be stopped.

So these are a few of the tasks I have completed today:

–cleaned the conf room in prep for big wig client (BWC)
–rearranged said conf room
–Made 3 pots of coffee (I hate coffee)
–tracked down and transported flip chart and stand from training lab to conf room on other side of building
–walked through building to ensure all is presentable for BWC
–escorted BWC associates to conf room (like a friggin’ secretary/receptionist - I hate that part, because I have to play that role, it’s the first impression I leave on people when they meet me - oh she’s the secretary/receptionist…errrrg - I HAVE A COLLEGE DEGREE AND AM HALFWAY TO AN MBA - WHY AM I DOING THIS!?!?!?!?)
–submitted 9 termination/reporting structure change forms (many duplicate)
–tolerated BWC’s uber big wig treating me like a receptionist here for his beck and call. (Ok so it wasn’t that bad, but it really irked me the way he asked for water after I greeted him and his 4 other associates and was escorting them to the conf room, where all the beverages were waiting for everyone, like he expected me to offer everyone tea, water, coffee. The general impression about these guys is that their all image and fluff, and they left me the impression of being misogynistic, but then that could just be me)

sigh - for those of you who are wondering, I’ve still got some stuff brewing, just have to be patient. The good news is that the fall back last resort option is looking very good. So it may be moving up to the front of the options, and may not take as long to get to either.

So last week was end of fiscal year. So as I shared in my previous entry, it was complicated by the merging of two companies into one.
So this week, we’re all playing catch-up/make-up for the things that didn’t get done as they should have last week.

I’m hoping things will eventually slow down. As it is, there’s just so much going on, I can’t keep up. Half my job has pretty much gone out the window, and it was the half I preferred most.

Anyway, I’ve said enough of that lately.

Do you ever put something somewhere you know you won’t forget, only to forget completely where you put it? I did that with my badge that gets me into the office this weekend. I couldn’t find it yesterday. I was sure I had either put it in Phlome’s car, where I would normally put my own, or it had fallen out of my purse and gone under his seat (my purse dumped most of it’s contents under his seat this weekend.) I was sure that if I had put it anywhere I would have put it in my purse, because you know, I would definitely be taking it with me to work, so I must have put it there, and it must have fallen under Phlome’s car seat.

Well it wasn’t under his seat. It wasn’t anywhere in his car. So this morning I was frantically searching for my badge. I even went to the dryer and searched through the jeans I wore friday, to see if I had left it in my pants pocket. Not in my jeans, not in the dryer, and not in the washer. I had pretty much given up (though Phlome was out searching his car one more time), when while I was applying my mascara, I had this little inkling of a memory of thinkint that my laptop bag would be a good place to put my badge, because I would have to take it to work with me. Except I had already dumped the bag yesterday when I first searched for my bag. So I searched again. I looked everywhere that I would normally put my badge. Then I looked where I would never put my badge, because I don’t put anything in that back pocket.

And yup, there it was.

So I’m at work. With my badge. Blogging instead of doing the work that needs to be done. And it’s such busy work. Crap ass scheduling and taking care of people, when I want someone to take care of me. When do I get to not be at the bottom of the totem pole. When do I get to have someone to do all my crap work?

Calgon please, get me the f out of here.

Today is Friday. Today also happens to be the last day of our fiscal year. Today is also the last day of at least 3 of our employees. At 4 today a bunch of people in the office are going to Happy Hour to see off 2 of the guys leaving.

All of these factors lead me to believe that it would be easy for me to leave early today, since eveyone would want to get things taken care of earlier in the day, or would have them taken care of already. And it was looking that way when I came in today. The VP is working from Home. I was taking care of all my stuff early in the day. Then at 1 it started. “I have to have this in by 5, can you make sure you get it to so and so by then.” “Oh we have to have all these changes submitted by the end of the day.”

Ok great - then get it to me ASAP and I’ll get it turned in. (In my mind I’m thinking. fuck you. You’re just sending it to me because you like the idea of having an assistant to send your crap to, when really it’s just one additional email to send through. You send it to me, I fwd it to the person who really needs it. Just send it to the person I told you to send it to!)

And soon, I’m gonna have to just say, hey, I’ve got to get my dog to the vet, I can’t wait around any longer. I’ve give you teh info you need.

I don’t know what the word is, somebody help me. Old fashioned isn’t right, antiquated? outdated perhaps? For chirssake, it’s rediculous. I understand that you’ve always done it that way in the past, but we’re tying to make things easier here. And waiting til the last minute, and throwing another person in the chain of events is only slowing the process down.

I really hope something falls through for me soon. I’m not gonna last long at this rate. I really don’ t want to be office bitch again. I left my last job because of it. I thought it would be different here. But I guess helpfull people just fall back into the same positions again. I need to practice my No’s and somehow get a little more self worth.

I hate being the youngest in the office, makes it hard for me to say hey - I’m better than what you think I am. But then I have to try and justify why I took this job that’s below me to begin with.

Sometimes i just want to start over.

Where’s my ctrl-alt-delete?

Last night I finished and submitted my homework. Yay! Which gave me time tonight to catch up on TV. TV that I rarely watch.
I got to watch Nip/Tuck. OMG Dr. Christian Troy is just so HOTT! And the new doc is rather yummy too. This is shaping up to be a great season. (Though there is something about the new lady in Christian’s life that I really don’t like - she seems a little to plastic to me. Maybe they meant it to be that way.)
I also got to watch LOST. To quote someone who I read online somewhere (my apologies).
LOST is a cock tease.
I almost don’t even want to watch it anymore.
almost.

I’ll give it one more week.

This weekend, maybe Friday night, we’re going to try and go see The Corpse Bride.
Next Wed. we’ll use my free pass to go see Into the Blue.
And everyone listen to 105.3 in the morning around 8ish to hear if I win the PSP from Live 105.

Barely.

This is week 4 of 8 of my finance class. It’s the last of my accounting/finance classes. The schedule for next session came out monday. I was trudging through the list of classes, looking for ISXXX, Information Technology for Managers, a class I expect to be farely easy, something I can blow through after these past 3 semesters of hell. The class is only offered on Thursdays. Which sucks, because I much prefer having my class early in the week. So I was zoning out in class looking at the list of professors, getting an idea to see how many classes they’re teaching. Then I see the Prof. of my Marketing class. I assumed it was the same class. But no! It’s New Product Development!!!! I know this means nothing to you. But it’s a class he strongly recommended I take because of my term project in the first class with him. He was impressed with my marketing proposal (GGAE - which is still out there on CafePress, but on hold due to high work load from school, and wedding planning). It’s been 3 sessions since he made that recomendation, and this is the first time it’s been offered (live anyway, I can just about always take it online, but I’m avoiding those online sessions, especialy if it’s a class I’m interested in.)
So these last 3 weeks of class + the final aren’t gonna be fun, but I have my next class to look forward to. I just have to survive 4 more weeks.

Maybe I should add another little countdown to the right for countdown to the end of my pain.

Also related to school, we had our first online test. It sucked. 2 hours to answer 10 test questions in which we had to fully explain our reasons for each answer (if mult choice), and show all work in if math. In case you’ve never tried it before, showing math on a pc is more consuming than doing it on paper. Esp if it involves variables with notations. Anyway, pointbeing. I got about a third of the questions answered when time ran out. It didn’t help that the 2nd question had 5 problems w/ in it.
Last night we learned that he’s giving us a 20% curve, plus we can retake a shortened, math only, no essay hand written test form 9 - 10 next week.
So now I get to study again.

On the work front, this week is the last week of transition from the old company + the new company to one combined organization. Our office will require the most integration. My work load has doubled and yesterday I asked for a raise. I also told them that I see no growth potential in my current position, and that as I progress in my MBA program I would like to look into transferring w/in the company to the Marketing dept. In the meantime I’d like to participate in anything we do related to marketing. Unfortunalty the marketing dept. is located at corporate in CA. But so much of this co. works remotely, I’m still hopefull.

This morning I was driving into work, and happened to have the radio tuned to 105.3 (which I generally only listen to in the afternoons and on the drive home). During a local station break (Howard Stern is played in the mornings) the local morning DJ announced a call in contest, to win the DVD Born into Brothels (Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature), and two tickets to see Into the Blue, the winner would also be entered in a contest for a drawing this Friday to win a PSP and 12 PSP movies. Knowing the audience that listens to Howard, I did not expect anyone to be excited about a Documentary DVD, so I thought, “What the hell, I’ll give it a try.” When I first dialed I got a busy signal. Then tried one more time, and the DJ answered saying I was caller 10!

Yay me!

Not only is Monday International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but this week is National Dog Week. Even Snoopy is celebrating!

So go visit my photoblog and see some of the latest pictures of Luna and Barley (yes we finally decided on Barley).

Or go visit some Blogs about Dogs:
BlogDog
Celebrity Dog Blog
DogBlog
Life With Dogs

My wednesdays now are made so much more tiresome by a meeting I have to sit through, yet not contribute to, from 10:45 - 1:15.
After next week, they should cut about an hour out of that. I hope. But when you get 6 sales people, and the management team in a room discussing potential money generating projects, with the VP forcing the sales folks to come up with more potential sales…it just gets long. There will be a lot of excuse making and bull sh***ing.

Anyway - so Wed. are boring. My back hurts from poor posture. I’ve got the near contstant (for 3 days now) discomfort of a UTI that seems looming but has yet to go full blown. I’ve got to take a defensive driving course soon for the ticket I got coming up beltline, where the speed limit has changed from 50 to 35. School is overwhelming me. The puppy wakes us up every night at 2 am and 4 am.
I’m really not getting enough sleep.

I’ll be glad when this semester is over, and the puppy is sleeping throught the night.
5 more weeks of school.

Thanks Halo for the inspiration.

I don’t want to confuse Luna by calling him bad dog. She already is confused enough with all the “NO!”s we keep saying. Poor Luna keeps thinking she’s in trouble, especially when he’s trying to eat her food. (And no, Monkey, we’re not naming him Torgo.)

Luna is so not an alpha dog. She’s already stopped snapping at the puppy when he tries to eat her food. So we have to keep him away. He knows he’s not supposed to eat from her bowl. He only goes after it when no one is in the kitchen. One of us just has to walk in the kitchen, and he pretends that it was the water bowl he was after and not her food. Sneaky little puppy.

No I’m not dead set on calling him Trogdor. I can’t imagine shouting that at him at the dog park. Heck, I can’t even say it outloud on the phone. I’m wondering how confused he’ll be if Phlome calls him Trogdor, and I call him Barley?

Anyway, he’s finally figured out how to make it up and down the stairs. It’s funny watching him follow Luna down the stairs. She has long legs, and trots down the stairs. Quite gracefully. He plops down. Both front paws, then his rear end, front paws, rear end - looks kinda like a bunny plopping down the stairs. The same way with going up stairs. He’s tried a coupel times to do one leg at a time, but one leg can’t quite pull the rest of him up yet. He’s still figureing things out. Nonetheless the house is now in peril. It was so nice for that one day when he was trapped on one floor or the other. There is way too much upstairs for him to get into. We’re quickly learning to shut doors behind us.
He’s also almost figured out the dog door - though it is rather too tall for him. Doesn’t mean he won’t try. Often he waits for Luna to start going through the door (opening the flap) and he follows or goes through under her.
Once we’re sure he can get in and out of the doggie door, and can be sure he’s not going to try to get out of the back yard, we’ll probably get some baby gates for the kitchen so he can come in and out of the kitchen (for food/water) and back yard (for playing pottying).

He has yet to express much interest in the fence area. Right now I imagine the yard is big enough to keep him distracted. As he gets bigger, he may want to explore further. We’re hoping he’ll get big enough so that digging under the fence to get out isn’t worth it.
He digs a bit in the sand under the hammock, but mainly just to get to the plastic lining to chew on. (The previous owners mounted a hammock with sand on top of plastic covered in fake grass/turf/outdoor carpet stuff - now it’s mostly a sand box for the dogs to play in).
He also seems to be quite private about his number 2s. He always goes somewhere along the fence where the grass is deepest, like he’s trying to hide from us while he does his business. I totally respect that.