Mutual Weirdness

I work in a courthouse. My desk is in the hallway on the third floor so that I can assist people who get lost in the building. This actually happens a lot. There are actually 3 courthouse on this same intersection. The County Courthouse (where I work), the Historic County Courthouse (where we have some offices and Small Claims Court) and City Hall where they hold their own court for the tickets they write. The court rooms in the other two buildings all happen to be on the 3rd floor while in my building we have no courtrooms on the third floor, they start on the 4th floor and go up to the 10th. I've realized over the past couple of years why I need to be in the hallway to help people. Because nobody else is helpful, or if they try to be, they don't know enough to actually be helpful. I've had so many people show up on my floor and when I tell them they need to be in a different building, they tell me that the people down stairs (information desk and security) told them it wa...

One of the major functions of my job is that of reception, mainly, answering the phone. Between the two offices that I do this for, there are 26 people (including myself) that the call could be for. On top of the actual calls I get for the offices, I get numerous wrong calls throughout the day of people who called the wrong number. When I am unable to answer the phone for some reason my supervisor as well as the interns act as my back up. Nearly every call that comes in gets transferred somewhere. When a call is transferred, the caller ID on the phone I'm transferring to will show the number the call came in on which is normally the main office number (I have a separate number for people to call to get me directly). Now on to the reason for this post. In the law office there are 2 lawyers who, upon coming back to their desk after being away, will look, see they have a missed call, look at the caller ID, see it came from the main line and immediately call me to ask me who called fo...

Over spring break in March, my husband and I drove down to Louisiana to visit his family. It was a 10 hour drive to his parents house which we did all in one go over night arriving at their house around 6:3o Saturday Morning. This was our first visit in about 7 years. That Saturday happened to be my birthday and the next day was one of hubby's aunt's birthday so we all went out to dinner that evening. The little place we went to had all you can eat catfish. I didn't think to take a group picture of all of us, but I did remember to take a picture of the fish. Yum! I ate a ton of catfish it was so good! The next day we went over to Shreveport to the Boardwalk which is just a shopping are on the Red River. It was a lovely day. My favorite shop was a little place called the Chocolate Crocodile. They had all sorts of chocolate truffles and other candies. I spent a bit much there. Floating Casino on the Red River. The river is red because of all the red soil it travel th...

Not everyone has great computer skills. The Assistant Manager where I work is one of them and as the office admin it is my job to help him out. He brings to me what I like to call "Art Projects", documents that have been cut apart, taped back together in another order with hand writing all over them. I then have to turn these into proper documents. Sometimes he would have the original that he took apart electronically to save me some time, but not always. Yesterday he brought me the mother of all art projects. Normally I can finish one he brings me in under an hour, this is a 3 day project. It is a hand drawn organizational chart that I have to try and create electronically with no org chart software. But it isn't just one org chart, its 9 org charts. Well, really there are about 5 as half of them are variations of one another so I'm able to copy and paste then make the small changes. The first was the worst as it was the entire chart and took me 4 hours to complete. ...

So there have been some rather big changes going on at work for me lately. About a month ago now our Director of Communications and Community Initiatives was asked to resign. Her position has been eliminated. She had been here for 30 years. It was quite a shock to everyone, most of all her I'm sure. And we had to keep quiet about it for weeks. Everyone in our office knew she was gone, but we were not allowed to talk about it until an official announcement was made. That didn't happen for 3 weeks when finally the media figured it out and published a story. Though because we were not allowed to talk about it, of course everyone knew. Her email was shut off almost immediately so anyone trying to email her would get a bounce back. If that doesn't tell you somethings up, nothing will. On the heels of this change, I found out that the new manager has decided to reorganize pretty much the entire way departments are set up. He wants fewer direct reports and wants to change who is u...

This morning the Law office is holding a huge hearing regarding the Fire Union contract. They are using the commission board room down the hall as well as our two conference rooms to hold people. It's quite the mess and I have no clue really what is going on. But you would think as the receptionist and admin person for the office I would be kept in the loop about the plans. But no, I guess I'm just supposed to sit here and look pretty because nobody has told me jack shit about what the "plan" is. I thought our two rooms were just going to be for over flow, but no they actually have specific people they want sitting in them. So any effort I could give to be helpful is wasted because I don't know what the "plan" is. More and more I wonder what the point of my position is. It seems I'm just here to answer phones and direct traffic on the floor because for the most part I don't have anything else to do. I have my odds and ends that come up here and t...

So yesterday I answered a phone call from the CFO who asked to speak to the manager. I ring the manager's phone and it rings and rings and rings. I know he's back there but he isn't answering. Suddenly he is right beside me and asks me what he can do for me. I let him know that the CFO is on the phone and would like to speak to him. He goes back to his office and I transfer the call. The silly part is that he was in his office when I rang him. He heard the phone, looked at it, saw that I was the one calling and decided to walk up to my desk to see what I was calling about rather than just answer the phone. All I could do was laugh and shake my head.

I mentioned in my background post that I work for a local government, it is a county government to be specific. Where I live the county handles all 911 (emergency) calls. They dispatch for both the county and all of the cities within. They also handle all EMS, though the major city has first responders on their fire department. The county has its own fire department also to handle calls that occur outside any city limits. Because the county has such a large force of emergency personnel, it was decided long before my time that the county would never close outside of weekends and holidays. 20 Feet of snow won't close our offices. The reason being that it would cost the county half a million dollars to close down for one day. This is because any time we close outside of weekends/ holidays we have to pay emergency personnel at minimum time and half (though more likely double time) and pay over time. If an employee feels that conditions are unsafe for them to travel to work, they can wo...

Two years ago when my office was remodeled to put my desk in the hallway, the then Manager struck a deal with the then Head Lawyer in regards to coverage of my breaks and vacations. Because the Law office was able to eliminate their reception position and have me answer all of their calls and greet all of their guests they would be responsible for providing someone to cover my lunch breaks and my vacations. Pretty good deal right? They don't have to pay me yet their calls still get answered and all they have to deal with is someone losing a small bit of productivity for an hour a day. That is unless I take a vacation or I'm sick. In that case they have two options. They can all work together to split the time that I'm gone or they can hire a temp. When I went on vacation over the summer and I was gone for a week, they choose to hire a temp. I am taking a vacation day on Christmas Eve. This is something that I've done every year that I've been here. In the past the c...

On Friday I went with my family to the local botanical garden here which is simply called Botanica. Every year at this time they decorate nearly every inch of the gardens with lights and call it Illuminations. The weather was perfect on Friday. Mid 50s and no wind. So of course everyone and their dog was there. Traffic was backed up on three different roads trying to get there. We didn't even try to park close and went straight to the over flow parking a mile away which was already overflowing also! The line for the shuttle was long so we walked the mile over to the garden. I didn't take as many pictures this year but I did take quite a few. This tree is always so fun with all of the stuff hanging from it. This large screen is actually made up of thousands of color changing Christmas lights. They had a bunch of different song clips from movies playing on it. Just some of the fun lights from around the gardens. And this was really neat. There was a ...

Yesterday the Board held their annual Holiday Open House at work. It last for two hours in the room down the hall. It's just a meet and greet with cookies, pretzels and punch. My office for whatever reason always buys the refreshments for the party and this year I was in charge of ordering. Not a big deal as I just pull up the invoice from last year, call the caterer and order the same as before. When the cookies arrived I wondered if I had made a mistake as the cookies were not up to the quality that I would have expected for $2.50 a cookie. I took a few pictures. But this isn't really about the bad cookies, its about what happened to them today. After the party we had tons of left overs as per usual. We pack up the cookies and send them off to departments that have 24 hour staff that aren't able to come. But we always keep a few for our office. This year we kept 1 large bag of cookies, maybe 2-3 dozen and a large bag of pretzels. These were placed on the break r...

This is just a quick update on the newspapers that disappeared from my desk. As I mentioned in another post, the PR Director has decided that she will just take care of these herself. I can only assume she got tired of seeing the pile of them on my desk. From what I can tell, she is cutting out the articles and then just saving them in folders. She isn't scanning them, not sure that she could even if she wanted to because as far as I know she doesn't know how to use the scanner. So all the articles are just sitting there. I'm fairly certain that they will come to me for scanning at some point, but so far they haven't. The main reason for this update is because of something I've observed over the past week or so. A huge pile of newspapers on the table in her office. There is at least a week and a half worth of papers sitting there. It may be more than that as the pile looks to be a fair bit larger than anything I ever had sitting on my desk. So she has taken the pape...

On Friday I had my annual performance evaluation. I am pleased to report that my boss had nothing bad to say and I even talked her into giving me a couple more easy responsibilities. She's been so swamped with the start of the new manager that many smaller things are slipping past her and I made sure to remind her that I'm here to help. We also discussed the PR Director a bit in regards to the news papers. My boss spoke to her about it and all she could get out of her is that she has decided to take care of the papers herself. She didn't give any other explanation. There probably is another reason, but since she didn't disclose it, nothing to be done. My boss let me know that she is intimidated by the PR Director also. So it isn't just me that feels like she looks down on them. So I'm in zero trouble there. And because I had a good evaluation I'm guaranteed a % increase to my pay for next year. Probably no more than 2% as is the normal, but it's better t...

The new head honcho boss officially started work yesterday. Not a bad guy so far. He comes to us from the Military where he was a Brigadier General. This title was apparently a huge selling point for him getting the job from what I can tell. I'm certain he is qualified, but the chairman of the board has made a big deal out of the fact that we've managed to hire a Brigadier General. This has become apparent to me though the fact that the chairman insists on using the title even though the Manager does NOT want to use it anymore. He has left the military and just wants to be a normal guy with a job. To welcome the new manager to the community, a reception has been planned for Dec. 1 and invites have been printed to send out to the local community leaders. It is my job to print labels, stuff envelopes and make sure they get sent out. I was working on this yesterday. Around 3pm I started sealing the envelopes and as I am about halfway through I'm told to stop, wait. The invitat...

On Monday mornings we have a staff meeting at 8:30am. I prepare for this meeting by setting out water and coffee in the conference room. Normally on Monday I make 2 pots of coffee as with the meeting we'll end up drinking it. But today I only made one as the main coffee drinker in the office is on vacation this week and a second pot this morning will just go to waste. I put most of the single pot in a coffee pitcher and put it in the conference room leaving about two cups worth in the pot on the burner. I did this because the CFO comes to this meeting and will always get coffee from the pot rather than pitcher. I have no idea why. He also always grabs the largest mug he can find in the cabinet rather than using the disposable cups I put in the conference room with the pitcher. This annoys me to no end but I've learned to deal with it. After the meeting is over I cleaned up the room as normal but upon going into the kitchen with the coffee pitcher to put what was left back in th...

As coffee is the main life line for many office workers we of course of a coffee maker in the office. It is fairly old, but it gets the job done. This is what it looks like: We do not use the burner on the top though as that end of the machine is under the upper cabinets in the kitchen. But two is plenty as we have never needed to have more than two pots of coffee going at once. Water is poured into the opening at the top right and comes out at the pot in the bottom left. The general rule for our office is that the first person in in the morning starts the first pot of coffee. Most of the time that's me, no big deal. Just put some coffee in a filter, add some water and we have coffee. So simple that I'm amazed at how many people have trouble doing this. Before I go home at the end of the day, one of the things I do is make sure that the old filter and grounds have been dumped out and that one of the pots is empty and ready in the bottom left burner for coffee the next mo...

Saw the most infuriating thing on my way to work this morning. The road I take to work has 2 lanes each way with a turn lane in the middle, effectively 5 lanes wide. The speed limit is 40mph on this road. It is a major road in the town. We are going along in the far right (outside) lane when it suddenly comes to a stop with no stop lights in sight and the inside lane is moving just fine. So when a gap opens up we switch lanes to keep going as do several other cars. We get to where the blockage is and some ass hat in a huge SUV has shoved his nose out into the road to force traffic to stop so that he could cross the road. He obviously started by going out just far enough to block the one lane, and he was completely blocking it as we went by. And he kept creeping forward until he was able to block the second lane also. This idiot couldn't be bothered to wait for a proper lull in traffic so he created his own backing up early morning rush hour traffic for blocks and was damn lucky he ...

Loot Crate is a monthly mystery subscription box. For about $20 you get approximately $40 worth of goodies related to various games, movies, TV shows and other pop culture references. Just before the start of each month they announce the Theme for the following months crate as a clue to what will be in the box. This allows members to unsubscribe for a month if the theme isn't something they are interested in. I had seen advertisements for Loot Crate for a while but the items never looked very interesting to me until now. The October theme was Time and with the Back to the Future anniversary this month I knew there would be some items related to it in there. Also, you can't have a time crate with out Doctor Who and I'm a big fan there also. Most unboxings are done as a video but I simply don't have a good set up for that, so still pictures it is! This is how the box arrived via FedEx SmartPost, meaning it started with FedEx but the home delivery step was completel...