Mutual Weirdness

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...

One of my jobs is to send out New Hires and Anniversary post cards. The new hires cards just have a little blurb on them welcoming them to the company and are sent out every month to all the people hired the month before which averages at about 30 cards. The anniversary cards are sent out every month also but to all the people celebrating an anniversary of their start date with us. So everyone who has been here from 1 year to 50, (yes we've had some here that long) they get a card. I send out about 200 of these each month but before I do I give the list of names to the Manager to mark the people he knows personally. I pull those out first and he writes a short note on them before they go out. All the rest just have a pre-printed messages and a printed signature. Back in June our Manager retired and the Assistant Manager has been in charge. Because of this all cards were changed to have the Assistant Manager's name on them. I just received a phone call from our print shop where ...

Because the Law office is behind a locked door and I'm their reception, documents for their office are often left with me. Pretty normal right? The ladies in the Law office log all mail that enters and leaves their office. The reason for this is of course in case something important goes missing they can immediately say if they received it or not or if it has left their office. Pretty logical. And in the log they write down specific information. Who the documents is for, who specifically hand delivered it, what office it came from, and what it is. Knowing that they want all of this information, when something is delivered that doesn't have it written on it, I would ask for names and write them on a note to attach to the documents. I would then call into their office to let them know I have something at my desk for them to pick up at their convenience. First thing this morning when checking my email I have one from my boss that was sent right at the end of the day on Friday that...

Part of my job is to save news paper articles that are about my organization to an electronic drive. We get the large local paper daily and the small papers from other local towns once a week. Our PR Director or someone in her office will go through all the papers and circle the ones they want saved then give them to me. For the large daily paper I can find the articles fairly easy online and simply save the page to the proper folder. The smaller papers though have to have the articles cut out and scanned to a PDF before the can be saved. It is a tedious and boring job and I tend to let the papers stack up quite a bit before I do anything with them as I can get through an entire months worth in a single afternoon if I need to. But when I go through them I make sure the articles are cut out neatly, that the name of the paper and the date are written on them so that when they are scanned it can be added to the file name and I take care to make sure to get all portions of an article as so...

I'm a bit weird when it comes to light switches. I like that when the light is on the switch is up and when it is off the switch is down. I don't know why, but it is a peeve of mine and I get annoyed if a room has multiple switches and I can't make them line up the way I like. This brings me to the main conference room in my office and the mess that is the light switches in that room. The conference room sits just off of the lobby and is entered into by a set of large double doors. The room itself is a large rectangle with the double doors on the eastern, long wall just south of center. There is a single door on the south wall by the east corner that is exit only and another single door on the west wall by the north corner that leads into our kitchen/break room. The lights in this room require 4 switches to turn them all on. In the center of the ceiling are rectangular florescent lights that have been divided into 2 sections requiring 2 switches to turn them all on. Along t...

I thought I was going to have a nice quiet Friday as usual. Then about 20 minutes before lunch I get a citizen who is a complete asshole. A middle aged black man (this is relevant later) comes up to my desk and asks to use the law library. At first I thought he meant that he's looking for court records as they have a computer to look up court cases on the 6th floor. I start to direct him there but he insists this is where he needs to be and wants to use the law library. Now the Law office does have what they call a law library but its really just a conference room with some law reference books on a book shelf. I let the man know this and that it isn't open to the public. He asks me if it is paid for with tax dollars which is is as is everything here but that doesn't mean the public can just come use whatever they want. I tried explaining this but he kept arguing with me. So I called one of the ladies in the office as I needed some backup in telling him no. She asked one of ...

Working in an office all day I'm obviously forced to use the shared lady's room through out the day. The one on my floor is actually quite nice compared to most of the others as we don't get as many people coming through to make it dirty as the day goes on. There is a window with a nice view outside and a few plants on the sill, a chair to sit in if the stalls are full, a full length mirror as well as a long one along the wall with a ledge under it where hair or makeup can be fixed away from the sinks. Of course there are also two stalls, two sinks with a mirror and a paper towel dispenser. In this building, all of the toilets are automatic flush and the sinks motion detected to run water. The soap and paper towel dispensers both have a lever to push. Most of the ladies on our floor us the room in the proper order in my opinion. They use the toilet, wash their hands, then use the paper towel dispenser to dry. But there are a couple of ladies who do not do things in this ord...

Directly behind my desk is the lobby area for my office. Along the back wall are 2 doors one on the left and one on the right. My boss' desk is directly through the door on the right as you face them, directly behind where I sit with a glass wall in front of her. She has a direct view of my desk area. This is important because when I am not at my desk she is supposed to watch it in case anyone walks up needing help. Two years ago when my desk was first moved here I purposefully made no mention of the possibility of getting a bell for my desk. Bells are abused when they are sitting on a counter. Not by customers who come by but by other employees who think its funny to sit and ring it a whole bunch just to annoy whoever is sitting there. And I know of at least 3 people who would ring it every single time they walked by. My previous boss would come and sit at my desk whenever I needed to be away for more than just walking to the back of the office. This meant there was no need for a ...

As I mentioned in my background post, my desk at work sits in the hallway and I act as reception for 3 departments. In return for me handling reception for the Law office, their admin staff cover my lunch break as the desk has to be manned all day. In order to accommodate this, the desk is very large and has an extra computer and chair just for the use of their office when they are out here. The only storage for the entire desk are small 2 and 3 drawer file cabinets called “peds”. The desk, when bought new, came with one 2 drawer and two 3 drawer peds. I myself had two 2 drawer and one 3 drawer one from before the remodel. My three peds are full to bursting. When we first started using this desk, the new two drawer ped was designated as the one to hold interoffice mail folders and a few other things. One of the three drawer peds was graciously put beside the work area the Law office uses for general office supplies they need when they are here. And the last ped had some odds and ends i...

It has been a slow week at work with out anything very interesting happening so I thought I'd give a bit of background about where I work. This way I don't have to explain it all with each post and can just refer back to this one. I work for a fairly good sized local government. I thought about leaving out that bit, but as I work in a court house, some of the most interesting things that happen are the people that come in for court appearances. So it's relevant. The way the organization is set up, is that there is an elected board of 5 members who are in charge of everything. They hold weekly meetings where they vote on the important decisions. They have Executive Secretaries in their office. Under the board is the Manager. He is the head honcho and takes care of all the day to day running of things. We have an Assistant Manager also. My boss is actually the Manager's Personal Assistant and I am the only Administrative Assistant in the department. We also have 3 intern ...