moderate pains
Jesus Christ, work is a pain in the ass lately.
I mean, having to work at the office yesterday wasn't that huge a deal, actually. Much as I do miss working at the office, working there yesterday brought back very little of the joy that it used to be, for two key reasons: first, by design, few other people were there (and none of the people I most enjoy working with were there); and second, I had to lug a tote bag full of my laptop, keyboard, mouse and telephone earpiece back and forth on my commute. To be fair, the roving desk I used had its own keyboard and mouse, but I had no certainty of that before going in. Besides, the mouse already on the desk was one of those ergonomic ones and, even if they are way better for you, I hate them. Oh, and speaking of that desk, I suppose that's a third thing: being that my monitors were at home, even though my own desk still exists and awaits my eventual retrun sometime next year (hopefully), I could not sit there, which of course I would have preferred. Both because it's my own desk, and because there were far fewer people in that section.
Robin, the Fresh Program Manager, is usually not in the office even under normal circumstances, but she was yesterday. Her desk is right behind that one I had set up at, and she was actually very courteous and didn't bother working at her desk, I presume to keep greater space between us. She took her laptop over into the lounge on the other side of the wall the desk I sat at was facing.
Anyway, all of that is sort of beside the point. I've got other issues going on this week. I've got maintenance tasks I'm three weeks behind on, and a huge backlog of new item entry I am struggling to make a dent in. A big part of that struggle is Steven taking PTO all of this week, which I did not know about until I got the Outlook calendar announcement just on Friday. It included no note for context or instruction, and his out of office reply did not at first even direct people who else to contact in his absence. (He must have logged on remotely and fixed that: I see now that it directs people to me for maintenance questions and to Justine "for urgent matters.") Also, when I first got the calendar item on Friday, I misinterpreted it to be PTO for only Monday; I did not realize until yesterday it was for all of this week.
I got no real heads up about this, aside from the calendar announcement itself—nothing about what kinds of HBC (Health and Body Care) issues might come up, nothing. And I keep having to field relatively consistent emails about HBC stuff I know literally nothing about. Only occasionally can I come up with any level of insight, and otherwise I'm just like, "Sorry, I have no idea."
And this is cutting into my already-too-large work load.
The biggest issue here, of course, is that PCC has refused to hire a new Associate HBC Merchandiser to deal with data issues, even though Steven has been promoted to replace Terry as the HBC Merchandiser. I knew he was already overwhelmed attempting to cover two jobs at once, and although I have zero hard evidence to support this, I have a feeling Justine at some point just told him to take a week off and relax for a bit, and I don't know, don't worry about inevitable shit that will come up in his absence, I guess? Either that or he had some kind of personal emergency, but I suspect it was something along the lines of the first idea.
And none of this is the end of the world for me, of course; nor is it especially overwhelming. It's just a pain in the ass, and it's making me take even longer to get through those new items Scott already asked last week to get an ETA on them getting done. Scott told me they'd try to "find me some help" if I needed it. I didn't bother saying this to him, but my only thought there was: help from whom? Who the hell is around who has the time and bandwitdth to key the Grocery new items I've been tasked with? I can't think of anyone, and I'm certainly confident there is no one else who could key them in as quickly as I can, if I could just get the fucking time to work on them.
And then!
I had to waste more than a fucking hour this morning with VPN issues keeping consistent remote access on my work computer. This is the last fucking thing I need. It started in the middle of a conference call I needed to be on with two people from IT at 10 a.m., and I kept disconnecting and breaking up trying to talk to them. It was well after 11:00 before I finally sent IT a screenshot of the little pop-up window that keeps appearing saying the VPN client has disconnected. This, after restarting my computer twice, and also manually disconnecting and reconnecting to the VPN countless more times than that, always necessitating third-party authentication and there is no consistency with the time it takes for the fucking pass code to arrive at my personal email account. This has just not been my day so far.
Of course, I have not yet heard back from IT, but my connection has seemed to hold relatively steady just since I sent that email.
What else, then? Shobhit and I just spent most of the evening last night watching TV. I first played this week's episode of Lovecraft Country—slightly less off-the-rails than last week's episode, and this episode set in South Korea during the Korean War felt a bit like a course correction, but the show is still teetering toward thin ice for me—and then finally took Laney's suggestion of checking out this HBO Max Original called Rasied by Wolves. It actually was very compelling. We finished the first episode and Shobhit commented on how all we do is watch TV. He watches a hell of a lot more than I do! But yes, even I have been watching a lot. I mean, what else is there to do?
Read, I suppose. I bused to the Central Library after working at the office yesterday, to pick up a scheduled pickup of a DVD (Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, which I had never heard of until I learned from a podcast a while ago that a Hitchcock movie had starred Julie Andrews and I was like whaaat), and they "made an exception" and let me pick up Shobhit's books he had ready for pickup today; I'm actually apparently supposed to fill out a form to do that, but after I provided Shobhit's name, address and birth date, they gave them to me. It was two John Grisham novels. Shobhit has the day off work today and he's been spending a lot of my work day reading them. Which is kind of a nice change from him just watching TV all day on his day off while I work!
[posted 12:26 pm]