Saturday, October 22, 2011

Take me with you

Tailesen these days either becomes very upset when I'm trying to leave.  He's very adept at spotting when I'm getting ready to go and the other day when I was trying on new gloves to see how they fit with my coat he became very upset thinking I was trying to leave and insisted I hold him and read him a story to reassure him I wasn't going anywhere.  The other day when I was trying to gather things up to go he brought his shoes to me and sat down for me to get him ready to go to.  I think he'd really like to just come with me.

I think I've figured out a large part of why he wants to spend so much time outside, is fascinated by bicylces, and tries to get me to carry him to work.  Its the same phenomenon as when I can sometimes get more work done if I mostly close the office door than if I close it.  If its closed he knows he's been denied access and therefore tries his best to demand entrance.  If its open but mostly shut, he's more likely to think I'm just being boring.  Going to work or school with me is something he never gets to do.  Repeatedly denying access just reinforces that it is something special.  Also, he sees me bike away at one time of day and then hours later sees me come back still riding the bike.  I bet he thinks I spend the whole time at class zipping around on the bicycle.  If daddy loves the outdoors and bicycles that much, it stands to reason he should like them too.  Maybe one day we'll set up a bicycle trailer and I'll have enough time to take him zipping around town.  So far, its not happening.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Heritics of Dune

I think I've decided to give up on the Dune Chronicles.  Books 1-3 were pretty amazing, but I have trouble making myself really want to finish Heritics.  I mean, the earlier books had lots of misogynistic elements in them but the focus in the books wasn't on those elements and they could thus be more or less dismissed as a background or backdrop to a story that wasn't about them.  But in this last book its as if the author tried to pull every nasty female stereotype he could imagine and inflate them to explosive proportions so that some of our characters are apparently mind controlling seducing manipulative freaks who want nothing more than to rule the universe with ultimate power while devoting themselves to being breeding masters over a subjected male subclass who is there to provide sexual submission, sperm, and worship.  Oh, and did I mention this character class is only a slight variant of other groups who are long term members of the story world?  Bring on the bored worm emperor gods any day, Leto was at least interesting in a bored sort of way.  I have to be able to find some character I like and sympathize with or who have goals I can moderately assume to be moderately justifiable before I can find a story accessible.  Maybe if I read farther into the book I would find that magic moment where the story clicked, but I went fairly far into it without finding it, so I'm giving up.  New author and new books here I come!

That's why...

I finally figured out why there is so much broken equipment at my work compared to the previous site and why the place is so... dirty.

They don't have an onsite janitor or IT repair person.

You'd think, no big deal, they probably simply have someone come maybe once a week when the place is closed, right?  No, they really don't pay for janitorial services.  I saw the building cleaned a few weeks ago for the first time in the nearly year since I had been working there.  They took a bunch of team leads and even some ops managers and they dusted and vacuumed.  Given that my boredom routines at work had developed into a habit of scrubbing my work station keyboard and computer vents of  thick wads of dust and scraping the gum off the bottom off the desks so my legs aren't brushing against it all day long I shouldn't be surprised, but I mean really, aren't there people with dust allergies at the place?

And then all the times a computer goes weeks or maybe months with a sign on it saying "don't sit here, (fill in the blank) doesn't work" when new training classes come out and the floor is so crowded I get excused tardies because it took me 5-10 minutes to find a seat again I shouldn't be surprised that they wait till they have a good full days worth of important work before they attempt to call in an outsider to do repairs.  I think this might have something to do with the entire row of desks that is used as a stowage place for broken chairs.

Over the last few weeks as they have started installing luggage padlocks on the headsets to keep people from stealing headsets off the desk, it begs the question, does a dirty broken down environment encourage unprofessional behavior?  Might it have anything to do with the half eaten pop tart I found shoved behind my cubicle computer?  Or the guy I saw today who was resting his feet on top of the desk surface?  I know they care more about having a "low operating cost" than about improving work place intangible values just like on my calls I'm 'supposed' to focus on the tangible value of the service provided over the intangible services I might provide, but I really find my work place kind of disgusting sometimes.