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clarentineSeven things you need to know about where my brain has gone, and why it’s unlikely to be more than scatteredly online for the next couple of months:
Toward the end of last month, a coworker passed away. He was young, and it was one of those deaths that could have – oh, should have – been avoided, and he is very, very missed. He was so full of energy and talent. His grasp of technology helped us survive some challenges and avoid some others, and he was one of the best case management backups I have had.
Because of budgetary concerns, there was some sense that Upstairs might drag out the filling of this suddenly vacant position...which would have been an extraordinarily bad thing, given that my other case management backup is retiring at the end of December. I have been contemplating what few means I have of forcing the issue, if it came to that. We got word late last week that we have been given permission to interview to fill both positions. (Which is not the same as actually filling the positions, but it's a step in the right direction.)
That Budgetary Thing. Yeah. After pitching a fit at some members of a national-level survey team here to see where the office could be made to run better, and pitching a second, louder fit at a team from Upstairs detailed to resolve the issues pointed out in the first event, my division finally got some office supplies...like, paper clips. Envelopes. Letterhead, for dog’s sake. (This division is charged with responding to state and federal court orders in habeas corpus and appellate cases, which means we don’t have the luxury of waiting to file something when the supplies come in. The court says we must file something, we must file it. Doesn’t matter if we have to “borrow” supplies from another floor to make that happen.)
The office has finally arranged for a “refreshing” (read as replacement) of our copiers. See above for background on why it’s so essential that our office environment function. You’ll love this one: on the day they took our big copier, the one we use to produce appellate briefs and print PDFs because our 20-year-old HP laser printers simply couldn’t keep up, the new copier crashed twice. The next day, it crashed every other time we tried to use it. I spent half my day unjamming the damned thing. One of the copier company shirts, in the office to supervise training, went so far as to suggest that the problem was that the floor was uneven. He was lucky I had not yet hit enraged and so did not laugh in his face. That afternoon, a tech showed up to install a plate across the faulty hole-punching unit which the company was well aware was faulty (here is where I hit enraged). It was the wrong size. This was Friday afternoon, by the way, which is always an especially busy time for us. He came back, finally, on Monday morning to install the correct plate. As of this writing, one week later, the correct replacement for the faulty part has still not been installed.
The office has also finally been forced to budget for a complete replacement of our office computers. Back in August, I got sucked into an advisory committee to help prioritize our limited budget for the replacement (I’m the lead of the Training subcommittee). The time suck continues. The rollout is scheduled to begin in early November and run through the middle of December, and my subcommittee is tasked with managing the campaign to build a sense of positive urgency in the staff. The novelty for me: we’re moving to Windows 7/Office 2007...which I have never seen, given that my home environment is (quite happily) Mac. My section has several essential pleading formats which must work the first day we have the new software. I have a coworker bringing in a personal laptop today for me to see where the bugs are going to bite.
On the home front, our oldest dog had been on borrowed time for a while due to age and a tumor rising between her shoulder blades. She stopped eating last week. We took her to the vet’s for a final time on Friday. She was seventeen, a very old dog, and will be missed.
My son’s beagle has been to and from the vet’s a couple of times in the past several weeks, too, having either sprained or pinched something in her neck. She’s a very little beagle, and she loves being up on furniture to be closer to the people she loves, which is bad for very little beagles. I, of course, am the designated medication-giver, so I’ve been monitoring her treatment. Unlike the old dog, who bit me when I tried to administer antibiotics to help with a suspected kidney problem, the beagle looooves cheese and doesn’t even care if it comes wrapped around pills. She appears to be on the mend.
The ledger is tilting very decidedly toward the negative side, energy-wise. I’m exhausted. I haven’t been sleeping all that well, both for listening for the old dog when she was still with us and out of a combination of yowly cats, bright moonlight, and earthquake aftershock reactions (we are up over 40).
...and Switchback, the new novel, is still poking at me. >:-) I’m up to ten pages, about 2500 words in SMF (Standard Manuscript Format). I am, scarily enough, making good use of a plotting outline.
So, if you haven’t heard much from me, any of the above is probably why. If sooner has become too much later, raise a flag. I’ll be along.
Toward the end of last month, a coworker passed away. He was young, and it was one of those deaths that could have – oh, should have – been avoided, and he is very, very missed. He was so full of energy and talent. His grasp of technology helped us survive some challenges and avoid some others, and he was one of the best case management backups I have had.
Because of budgetary concerns, there was some sense that Upstairs might drag out the filling of this suddenly vacant position...which would have been an extraordinarily bad thing, given that my other case management backup is retiring at the end of December. I have been contemplating what few means I have of forcing the issue, if it came to that. We got word late last week that we have been given permission to interview to fill both positions. (Which is not the same as actually filling the positions, but it's a step in the right direction.)
That Budgetary Thing. Yeah. After pitching a fit at some members of a national-level survey team here to see where the office could be made to run better, and pitching a second, louder fit at a team from Upstairs detailed to resolve the issues pointed out in the first event, my division finally got some office supplies...like, paper clips. Envelopes. Letterhead, for dog’s sake. (This division is charged with responding to state and federal court orders in habeas corpus and appellate cases, which means we don’t have the luxury of waiting to file something when the supplies come in. The court says we must file something, we must file it. Doesn’t matter if we have to “borrow” supplies from another floor to make that happen.)
The office has finally arranged for a “refreshing” (read as replacement) of our copiers. See above for background on why it’s so essential that our office environment function. You’ll love this one: on the day they took our big copier, the one we use to produce appellate briefs and print PDFs because our 20-year-old HP laser printers simply couldn’t keep up, the new copier crashed twice. The next day, it crashed every other time we tried to use it. I spent half my day unjamming the damned thing. One of the copier company shirts, in the office to supervise training, went so far as to suggest that the problem was that the floor was uneven. He was lucky I had not yet hit enraged and so did not laugh in his face. That afternoon, a tech showed up to install a plate across the faulty hole-punching unit which the company was well aware was faulty (here is where I hit enraged). It was the wrong size. This was Friday afternoon, by the way, which is always an especially busy time for us. He came back, finally, on Monday morning to install the correct plate. As of this writing, one week later, the correct replacement for the faulty part has still not been installed.
The office has also finally been forced to budget for a complete replacement of our office computers. Back in August, I got sucked into an advisory committee to help prioritize our limited budget for the replacement (I’m the lead of the Training subcommittee). The time suck continues. The rollout is scheduled to begin in early November and run through the middle of December, and my subcommittee is tasked with managing the campaign to build a sense of positive urgency in the staff. The novelty for me: we’re moving to Windows 7/Office 2007...which I have never seen, given that my home environment is (quite happily) Mac. My section has several essential pleading formats which must work the first day we have the new software. I have a coworker bringing in a personal laptop today for me to see where the bugs are going to bite.
On the home front, our oldest dog had been on borrowed time for a while due to age and a tumor rising between her shoulder blades. She stopped eating last week. We took her to the vet’s for a final time on Friday. She was seventeen, a very old dog, and will be missed.
My son’s beagle has been to and from the vet’s a couple of times in the past several weeks, too, having either sprained or pinched something in her neck. She’s a very little beagle, and she loves being up on furniture to be closer to the people she loves, which is bad for very little beagles. I, of course, am the designated medication-giver, so I’ve been monitoring her treatment. Unlike the old dog, who bit me when I tried to administer antibiotics to help with a suspected kidney problem, the beagle looooves cheese and doesn’t even care if it comes wrapped around pills. She appears to be on the mend.
The ledger is tilting very decidedly toward the negative side, energy-wise. I’m exhausted. I haven’t been sleeping all that well, both for listening for the old dog when she was still with us and out of a combination of yowly cats, bright moonlight, and earthquake aftershock reactions (we are up over 40).
...and Switchback, the new novel, is still poking at me. >:-) I’m up to ten pages, about 2500 words in SMF (Standard Manuscript Format). I am, scarily enough, making good use of a plotting outline.
So, if you haven’t heard much from me, any of the above is probably why. If sooner has become too much later, raise a flag. I’ll be along.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 12:58 pm (UTC)