Domestic Geek

I try not to complain about work much anymore because compared to other jobs, there's really not a whole lot to complain about. Unfortunately, there is one big problem. I hate it when my supervisor goes on vacation. The person who covers for him is the Friday – Sunday supervisor and when she's there on Monday, it feels like Friday and that makes for one hell of a long week.

I forgot to mention this, but yesterday my supervisor was hinting about something happening in two weeks. He said something about help coming for the archiving part of my job. I couldn't get him to elaborate, though. Am I being given more responsibilities? Will I get a raise? I don't know and it's driving me mad!

What sucks is I can't pester him all next week about it because he's going to be on vacation. Dang it!

Keep your fingers, eyes and toes crossed that it is a raise. A big raise.

So, last Friday was SysAdmin Appreciation Day and I tried really hard to drum up support for the holiday for Marcus. Unfortunately, I work with dolts.

First, I went to Marcus' immediate supervisor to get permission to decorate his door and to get her to drum up the day with the rest of the staff. Well, she didn't bother to tell me that she was going to be on vacation for most of last week. Hmph. Turns out she didn't bother to tell anybody before she left, either.

Then I talked to my supervisor and told him we should celebrate for Marcus and the prepress tech guy. It totally slipped his mind (so he says). Nevermind that I wrote it on the CALENDAR that he looks at every darned day.

So, Friday I stopped at 7-11 and bought him one of his favorite canned caffeinated coffee beverages and proceeded to decorate his door.

Apparently nobody I work with learned how to read. All day long, people wished Marcus "Happy Birthday." After a while, he got tired of telling people it wasn't his birthday. Others thought the mini CDs in between words in my HAPPY SYSADMIN DAY banner were letter Os. I thought they might have trouble with the banner, so I printed the sign at work that morning with the URL for the SysAdmin Day site. Clueless...the whole lot.

At least Marcus knows one person in the building truly appreciates him.

[more photos in the SysAdmin Day 2007 gallery]

I was floating on cloud 9 for a little bit at work today. A couple of week ago, I was asked to design a cover for a client's catalog. Here is the email the CSR sent my supervisor today (yes, she apparently has a punctuation problem):

Hi -

I have a Huge Compliment for LaDonna in pre-press - every year myself along with The lucky pre-press person get to design the cover of this catalog. The customer gives us a picture and tells us to go for it - Well, LaDonna did a great job The customer is extremely happy and says this is the best cover ever Please let her know how happy the customer is and thankful to her for her expert design work

Thanks,
XXXXX

One of my co-workers said such emails go into our files at work. I have some ammunition to ask for more money come raise time.

On my way home from work last Friday, I was driving with the air conditioning running because it was in the upper 90s. All of a sudden, my vents were blowing hot air and I look at the temperature gauge on the dash board and I'm red-lining. I pulled over right away and turned off the engine and let the fans run. After calling and venting to Marcus, I drove over to Albertson's to let the car get really cool so I could check to see if I had antifreeze. Well, I did have antifreeze. Sh*t. I decided to try and make it home. It took me 2½ hours to get there. I would drive a bit and then pull over for a bit. I drove the entire time with my heater on full blast to try and dissipate some of the heat. Not fun.

Well, I found all of my warranty paperwork and we dropped the poor thing off at the dealer last night. The funny thing was is there was another Baja just like mine that I parked next to. At least she had company instead of being all alone all night (Yes, I'm lame like that).

Well, I got the call from the dealer this morning that she had a couple of blown head gaskets. Yippee. Apparently it's a common problem and fortunately is still covered under the original manufacturer's warranty. Whew. Of course, they have to drop the engine to get to them, so I won't be getting my car back until later this week. Poo.

The Mercury Retrograde decided to have one last go before Mercury went direct today. We got to sit in the dark at work for an hour and a half. I was working back in the file room and heard my supervisor mention that something was up because the battery backups were starting to beep. I was halfway to where I keep my purse to grab my flashlight when I found myself standing in pitch black. Oh, and my flashlight is broken. Darned thing now won't turn off. I had to pull the batteries. Apparently one of the fuse things up on a power pole blew and Excel had to come out and fix it. Marcus and I spent the time working on his servers since they were powered down (adding memory, labeling and moving power cords, etc.). What sucked was the other employees harassing Marcus as soon as the power came back that the servers weren't back up immediately. They have no clue what it takes to power up all those servers properly. *sigh*

Tomorrow starts my 10 day countdown to the final Harry Potter book's arrival. I'm halfway through book 4 in my quest to read all six previous books before the arrival of book 7.