Aimless Wandering

They say that the first step is admitting that you have a problem - so “I have a problem”

What’s my problem?  e-mail.

I’m sitting here in the office looking at my inbox and I have about 20 messages on average that are always unread.  Now, in the grand scheme of things 20 messages probably isn’t a lot.  But, I’ve never had this issue before.

It used to be that I read just about anything that was sent to me - I was just so happy that I was cool enough to even get e-mail that I really didn’t care what it was, it was an e-mail - to me!  Yay me!

But where I am now - I get so much utter crap that it actually feels morale sapping to open some of my e-mail.  I’m not talking spam either, just overall crap that people either think I care about or want me to care about.  Unlike before when I thought it was just awesome to even get an e-mail, I now triage my e-mail and based on sender and subject line decide what to open when.  There’s a few levels in the triage:

1. Important stuff that if I ignore will come back to bite me in the ass.
2. Stuff from The Wife.  Besides being from The Wife, she’s good and rarely sends me drivel or stuff I dread opening
3. Stuff that’s important to me that the people I work for or with wouldn’t see as important
4. Other work stuff
5. Non-work stuff that keeps me from going insane (interchangable with 3 and 4 as needed)
6. Stuff from people that I don’t like or don’t want to deal with.  Also here is stuff that people think I care about or should care about but that I really don’t care about.
7. Spam.

The Spam filters here are pretty robust - I don’t get a whole lot of spam, so that’s not an issue.  It’s the level 6 stuff.
This is the stuff that I tend to dread when they arrive.  It’s stuff that as much as I would really like to ignore it I can’t completely because every once in a while there’s either something I need to deal with or should at least be aware of.  The trouble is that I dread getting this crap so much that I just don’t bother to open it unless I have to.  As a result it either clutters up my inbox until I get tired of it and delete it, or get asked why I didn’t respond and provide input.

Even worse is that I can’t figure out how to articulate to many of these folks that I just don’t care about most of what they send me, nor can I really tell them that I typically just ignore their e-mails unless I absolutely have to.

So, I have a problem.  In the grand scheme of things it’s not a big problem, but it’s a problem.

Maybe it’s just me - but I think John McCain’s wife looks a lot like a Barbie Doll…

Either she is significantly pulled, stretched, and Botoxed, or McCain married somebody siginificantly younger, or both…

Either way though she strikes me as rather - plastic.

So I’ve noticed that the volume of penis enlargement spam to all of my e-mail accounts has increased over the last 4 months…  But the two I got today take the cake.

One was from “Alvina Bramlett” and the other from “Vivian Choquette” both of these would appear to be female names…  The subject line of these ladies’ e-mails:

I used to have a tiny c0ck and it was embarassing, now im huge and loving it.

Ummm…..   eeewww!!! ick!!!!

We took The Boy to the Sacramento Zoo last weekend.  The Wife has a cousin there (in Sacramento not at the zoo!)  and this was an opportunity to meet up with him and his family for the day.  Personally, I would have preferred going to the train museum, but overall it wasn’t a bad option.  Plus zoo’s tend to be good for pictures.

The light wasn’t the best, but I still managed to find two really good subjects to take photos off.  One of my favorites happened to be this orangutan who was sitting and watching the world go by-

There were also some Red Panda’s that caught my eye.  Giant Panda’s may get all the press, but honestly I think that Red Panda’s are much more stunning.  The layout of the Red Panda enclosure made it difficult to get pictures, but I still got a few decent shots-

You’ll find more photos over in the Photo Gallery.

So back in August I was flipping through some of our publications and discovered that the instructions used by our night staff were horribly out of date and as a result pretty much useless.  I went to my boss to advise him of the problem and told him that I wanted to pull the publication and start working on updating it.  I knew what was missing and how it needed to be organized.  My boss told me that I was mistaken as my two predecessors had updated the publication “not long ago” and to not worry about it.  So against my better judgment I dropped the issue.

At the beginning of November my boss took a look at the publication after we had a problem and suddenly realized that it was horribly out of date and pretty much useless.  I did my best not to appear shocked by the revelation.  As a result he decided that he was going to revise the publication in question - not a problem except that he relies on me to oversee the daily operations and while he has a great grasp of the “big picture” of operations he’s no longer really familiar with the nitty gritty stuff.  As the boss I think that’s a good thing, but as the person writing an important operations guide for the staff it’s not so good.

Then there’s the fact that my boss is just a terrible writer.  On the plus side he knows he’s a horrible writer.  A small bonus is that he’s such a terrible writer that we can get away with some fun wording in some of our documents - take for example the recommendation letter that “came” from him with a phrase from Thomas the Tank Engine “…implemented processes that streamlined operations and resolved problems that have caused confusion and delay for customers”

So off he goes to do a comprehensive re-write of this publication - and unfortunately every so often showing just how out of touch he can be.  Just last week he called me in to his office because he wanted to know why we weren’t using a checksheet that he had just found.  The trouble is - we’ve been using it for the past two years…

After three months he sends me his completed revisions for review…  After 4 hours I only made it to page 9 - and you could count the number of original words left on 1 hand.  My boss swings by to check on my progress and sees how extensive my revisions have been.  He was shocked about all I had done but agreed that they were correct…

Then he asked me why he worked on it for the last three months….

I had to bite my tongue…

I know when I was growing up I used to play the game where you played your parents against each other - you know the scenario you want something so you ask mom and mom says no.  Since that’s not the answer you want you go ask dad in the hopes that he says yes….  While The Boy hasn’t started to really work that game, I’m sure it’s coming and while it will irritate me, in the grand scheme of things I’m ok with it.  It’s normal for kids as they’re growing up to do such things…

On the other hand, when you’re in your mid to late 30’s and trying such things on the job that game isn’t acceptable.  It’s childish and downright unprofessional, and yesterday somebody tried it with me and my staff.

We had a moron very novice computer user come to our Introduction to Excel class Wednesday - and by very novice I mean barely able to tell the difference between a keyboard and a mouse.  She told the class instructors and I that she really was looking for a way to allow users of her office to sign in on a computer and then use the information they provide when signing in to auto populate forms.  She wanted a way to get reports of how many folks used her office a day, and she wanted to be able to register students and track their progress through their coursework.  So we explained to her that what she really needed was a database and Access was the way to go.  We advised her to attend our Access classes so that she could gain a good working knowledge of the program, but while Access could easily do what she needed setting it up was rather complex and really would require the skills of an experienced database programmer - which we have on campus and available to her free of charge.

So she gets excited by the prospects and goes off on her way.

Now if you don’t know Access is a really powerful program - you could take a 40 hour class in the program and just start to scratch the surface of it’s capabilities.  Our Intro to Access class is 8 hours and really talks about the terms used in the application and builds a simple single table database and builds a form with the wizard.  The Intermediate class is also just 8 hours and covers editing forms, simple reports, and starts to explore relational databases.  By the time you complete the Intermediate class you know enough to start building simple but useful databases composed of just two tables.  However, we don’t go over things like building queries, custom forms, Visual Basic scripting and the like.  Heck some of that isn’t even in our Advanced Class.

24 hours pass and our novice user sends an e-mail to myself and the two instructors telling us that she was really excited to be taking on designing this database - and couldn’t wait to take our Intermediate Access class so she could start on her way.  The instructor again advises her that the scope of this project is very complex and really should be done by one of our in-house database programmers who were hired for just these types of jobs-

Apparently she didn’t like that response because she replied to that e-mail (and included her boss and my boss for some reason)  that maybe we should check with the other instructor first to find out what he thinks.  Never mind that the other instructor is also the least experienced and most junior member of my staff…  and that was when I snapped.

I sent her a response (and included my boss and her boss) telling her that everything she wanted to do with this project was well within the capabilities of Access…  However I’ve been teaching Access for several years and been using Access for several more years and what she’s looking to get out of this database is beyond my abilities.  With that in mind, I felt that the advice she was first given by us two days ago and again by the first instructor this morning was the best possible option.  In order for this to be done right she really needs to speak with the database programmers…

She responded only to me asking for the phone number of the database folks…

Ah yes the joys of manning our classrooms. We had a visitor yesterday in one of our classrooms looking to make a poster. I prepped him, he could make his poster on the monochrome printer so his posters would only be one color. No problem he says and starts printing his posters… Life was good.

Until he looks around the room and spots our color posters.

“How do I make this printer print my posters in color like those?” he asks me.

“Um, you can’t, that’s a MONOCHROME printer. It only does ONE color I respond.

 … because if you ask me again maybe the printer will do something different.