August 2002 Archives

Somebody please buy me this T-shirt in a size large.

Then help me figure out exactly where it might be appropriate to wear it.

No? Okay, just get me the sticker... I already have the book.

I looked out my window today to see a Tall Ship entering Boston Harbor. It was followed by two little tug-type boats and they all came quite near to the wharf. Then the boat stopped and shot off a couple of cannons. Apparently they're pirates.

Yar.

(rOD - For your own sake, don't read this. Trust me.)

So I got up this morning and got dressed, bleary-eyed. In attempting to put on my pantyhose, I got a huge run all the way up the left leg, so I either had to pick something else to wear or go buy pantyhose. In that today is laundry day, I didn't have many choices at my disposal, so I started to pull on a pair of jeans, thinking I could just buy nylons on the way to work. As I was buttoning my jeans, my thumbnail slipped and I SLICED open my left forefinger. I'm oozing bright red blood and it gets all over my ripped nylons and it's all one big mess and I think to myself, "Yeah, Joy, you're so *dainty.*"

Klutz. bigtime klutz. That's me.

This morning I moved my desk for the seventh time in my two-year tenure at my company. But this time, things have changed.

Yes, I still have a gray-walled cubicle and a job that sometimes makes me want to pull out my hair. But now I have a view!!

A half-turn away from my desk affords me a view of Boston Harbor from the thirtieth floor. I can watch boats coming in and out and planes taking off from Logan Airport. I have a bird's-eye view of the Children's Museum, complete with the giant milk bottle beside it and Arthur the Aardvark sitting atop it.

Life is good.

So, I just spent an hour writing this marvelous witty blog about my nephew's fifth birthday party and then I attempted to post it, but my computer hates me and I really haven't quite mastered the blogging thing yet, and thus I am ranting instead of sharing with you all the glorious details of pinatas and bouncy castles.

*shaking fist at the sky*
Damn you, technology!!!

I'm tired. I was up too late, got up too early, and (as I said yesterday) am not really stimulated at my job, so I feel like I might nod off at any time.

Tired.

I'm sitting in my little cubicle attempting to stay conscious. It's not working.

Tired.

Man, I must just sound like the whiniest person. I'm not. I'm just tired.

I am slowly coming to hate my job.

I have been at my company for two years now. It's a small company that does market research. Basically, if you call up a mutual fund or annuity company, you may hear the automated line say, "This call may be monitored or recorded for customer service quality." My company does the recording and monitoring of many of these places. Basically, we're corporate spies.

For the first year and a half that I worked here, I was a service analyst. I got to evaluate what the customer service reps were doing right, and what they were doing wrong. I also made calls using a fake ID - essentially I got to pretend to be someone that I wasn't in order to interact with reps. It was fun - a little acting was involved and it broke up the day. Then my job changed and they took that part out, leaving me with just the evaluation part. That was fine for a little while, but then I really needed to move to something more challenging.

It took me months to be convince the company that I should even be able to interview for the position I now have. They wanted to hire outside the company for whatever reason. I took the bull by the horns, got the interview, got the job, and loved it for five months. It was a job that offered lots of creativity - there were deadlines and there was multi-tasking and there was always something new. I was creating new methods of evaluating our data - I was like Q to the James Bonds of the corporate spying world! I was in heaven.

Then my boss got pregnant and decided to leave her job. My new boss is a guy who has a history of being somewhat... cantankerous. He came into the department not knowing a whole lot about the operations end of our business, but with a whole lot of ideas for how everything could be "improved." His improvements are making me into a mindless drone.

Now I get to be creative once a week, at best. The rest of the time I pretty much just listen to calls. I listen; I log what happens in them. Yippee. I feel like my brain might actually implode from lack of stimulation. I got really excited today when somebody asked me to read something they had written so I could check it for proper grammar. That's just sad. I crave real work. I want desperately to just DO things. I stare at a screen all day watching sound waves and wondering where it all ends. Make it stop!

*breathing*

Maybe I am making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill, maybe this is just a transition phase, maybe there's light at the end of this tunnel... but in the meantime, it just sucks.

I have really small veins.

They're small and they're jumpy.

I've known this for quite some time, mind you, but it was abundantly clear to me today when I went to my doctor's and had to have blood drawn. The phlebotomist took about ten minutes feeling one arm and then the other before settling on the right. I have a freckle right at the crook of my elbow, and I know that the best place to hit a vein is about a half-inch to the right of it. I pointed this out, but she insisted on plunging the needle in further over and further down. She didn't hit anything so she opted to poke the needle around under my skin in the hopes that by treating my arm like a flank steak she might find a vein. She finally gave up, saying that she just didn't understand where my veins were.

But of course, she still needed to get blood out of me. Fine. So she has me put the left arm up on the table and feels around for two minutes, then asks me if she can try my right arm again. I glared at her. She followed this up with the question, "Do you mind if I try going through the back of your hand?" Yes!! Yes, I do mind! I have to TYPE with my hands. So I pointed out exactly where the good vein on my left arm is. It's not at the crook of the elbow, but further out on the outside of the arm. It's a painful place to get poked, but hey, that's where the vein is. I showed the phlebotomist, who looked skeptical until she actually felt my arm and said, "Oh, there is a vein there." Well, duh.

So she stuck the butterfly needle in and lo and behold, there was blood. She finished up and sent me on my merry way, not saying she was sorry but informing me that I might have some bruising.

Now, I am a very pale person. My skin is practically translucent (you'd think this would make it easy to see the veins, but no). If you poke around beneath my skin, I am not just going to bruise, I am going to bruise BADLY, in many colors, from yellow-green to purple-black. And because I will be bruised in both arms, I am going to look like a heroin addict for the next week and a half.

Nice. Very nice. I get to look like a junkie and I don't even get the drug high. Sigh.

I really haven't been enjoying my job much lately. I got a promotion in January and loved my job for about five months, until my new boss took over. He decided to make some sweeping changes that occasionally want to make me tear my hair out by its roots. So I have begun to think about what the job market might hold for me beyond my little company.

I tried monster and hotjobs but I really think that I found my niche when I hit this listing.

Frankly, I think I might even be overqualified.

If I become a citizen (read: cult member) of this "country" can I declare myself a princess?

None of my finger paintings ever went for this much cash. Maybe I just needed to grow a trunk. Who knew?

And thus, I have a blog.
I confess, I have no idea how this works. I had a blog once before - I think I made two entries and I am sure that nobody ever looked at the damn thing. So this should be interesting.

Consider these first couple entries my practice round. This is the point in blogging where I figure out how to make a link. Hopefully, if I did that right, you can now enter a search and find random filmographies.

I really like the word filmography, as well as a variety of other long words such as glockenspiel, onomatopoeia, and archipelago.

I'm crossing my fingers and hoping against hope that all of that worked. If not, I look like a big dork. If it did work, I owe it all to my boyfriend. His blog is a hell of a lot of fun, so check it out. Yes, now.

Gaw, that was exhausting...

This is Joy's new blog.