Mutual Weirdness

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...