Category: office work

hack

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

The building I work in is about two years old. Everybody tells me it must be so nice to work in a new building. Honestly, it’s not bad. There’s a kitchen on our floor now with modern refrigerators, two sinks, and a place to set up the coffee makers, and I have a window over my desk. So that’s nice. But the new building is just like the old building in one significant way: the heating sucks. You’d think modern technology would have come up with a way to heat a big building in the last fifty years or so, but no. It hasn’t. When the leaves turn and the winter winds begin to blow, everyone on our office starts dressing up in layers, and I’m not the only one who has a pair of gloves with the fingertips cut off so we can work our keyboards.

Then yesterday while I was drying my hands with a paper towel, I recalled how we used to hang damp paper towels over the thermostats at school to trick them into feeling colder than the already-chilly temps they were set at, and I wondered if that still worked. Guess what? It still does.

that second thing

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Woke up way too early this morning after a dream about work. Weird thing was, whatever it was I was doing it didn’t look anything like the work I normally do. Well, it looked sort of like what I do: I was finding computer records that were supposed to be updated but weren’t, and then I was updating them. Sometimes I do that first thing, but I don’t ever do that second thing. I woke up feeling a little confused and I kept thinking about it while I went to visit the bathroom and by the time I was headed back to bed I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it, so I just didn’t go back to bed. What a great way to start Monday.

no secret

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I was investigating some fraud earlier this week, because that’s what they pay me to do, and I had to find out which bank used a certain routing number, which is the number that’s printed at the bottom of your checks, if you still write checks.

Luckily, I work right next door to the office where they do a lot of accounting and I figured they used some super-official web site to look up routing numbers all day long, so I walked over there and asked one of the accountants if she would look up the routing number I had.

“Oh, I just google that,” she said. “Just type in, ‘which bank is routing number 12345’ and it will tell you. It’s public knowledge; they don’t keep them secret.”

Not only don’t they keep them secret; banks publish their routing number all over their web sites. After I found out which bank I was looking for and I went to their web site, it was printed right at the top of the page with the name of the bank.

And now you know.

talking back

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

When I was a younger lad with stripes on my sleeve, I used to work at a specialized computer that was especially intimidating to new trainees. I wish I could tell you why, but I’d be clapped in irons and sent to the gulag if I did. What this computer did was not exactly a secret. If you had made your home in the Denver metro area when I did, and you paid any attention at all to what was going on at the air base just east of town, you’d know pretty much all the interesting things there was to know. But I can’t tell you, now or ever, because I don’t like leg irons. Or the gulag. So you’ll just have to take my word for it that this computer was terribly important, and that hitting the “enter” key could be just a tad intimidating.

Trainees usually started out confident because they sat beside me for about a week and watched me point and click and tappity-tap-tap the keys. I wasn’t trying to make it look easy, or hard. It looked like a video game. A really nerdy video game, but not too different from any arcade game you’d pay a quarter for ten or fifteen minutes’ worth of fun.

So after a week of watching me play the video game and reading a training manual that was obviously written by someone with expository skills not much more advanced than they themselves possessed (everyone I’ve ever met thinks, “I could write that”), the trainees felt pretty confident about their ability to do this thing … and then I stepped aside and said it’s time for them to sit down and actually do it.

The first time they hit the execute button and it didn’t do what they thought it would do, they’d quietly mumble a clipped phrase under their breath, usually something like, “What the —?” before cutting themselves off. This is an important first step, but only a first step, because they were depriving themselves of the relief offered by a truly heartfelt cussing.

The next step I watched for to see if they were progressing was when they asked the computer a point-blank question. They’d bark out something like, “What’s the problem? There’s nothing wrong with that!” And then a light bulb would come on over their head and they’d start typing again.

The final step was when they just cussed outright, usually a good, soul-cleansing “FUCK YOU!” and it did exactly what they told it to, but they realized the moment they hit the “execute” button they did it wrong. I knew they were doing even better if they slapped the desk as they cussed. The louder, the better. If it sounded like a big-bore shotgun going off, they were ready to fly on their own.

My boss used the same yardstick to evaluate trainees. She would visit my desk from time to time when I had a new trainee to see how things were going. If she asked and I answered, “Pretty good, he’s starting to talk back to the computer,” she walked away pretty satisfied.

upgrade

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

The computer I use at work is a laptop that was shat from the arsehole of an IBM factory back in 2009, give or take a couple years. It worked okay when I was hired at the DOT but has been getting noticeably slower over the last year or two. My muscle memory even started to accommodate this: I’ve been double-clicking more slowly, and I tend to lift the tips of my fingers off the key tops after hitting “enter,” to give the computer enough time to do whatever I just commanded it to do.

As much as the management has been cutting costs, and they have been cutting relentlessly*, they somehow found the money to upgrade to Windows 10. In our office, I volunteered to be the guinea pig who tested all our applications in a Windows 10 environment to make sure they all worked, and I also became an “early adopter,” so my computer has been running Windows 10 for the past four weeks while the rest of my coworkers have continued to use Windows 7.

When I came in on the Monday morning after Windows 10 was installed on my machine, I noticed almost right away that it was noticeably slower than it usually was, but the drama of learning to navigate to all my programs and applications pushed that problem to the back of my mind for about a week. After I was settled in, though, the agony of how much slower my computer had become using Windows 10 was no less than excruciating. “I feel like I want to get out and PUSH!” I complained to a coworker, and thereafter I complained to everybody who would listen, not least of which my supervisor, who echoed my complaints to the IT people who might be able to do something about it.

They finally did something about it last week. One of the techs from IT tried some software magic first, defragging my hard drive and doing some other hocus-pocus, which I’m sure helped to a slight degree, but not enough to make a difference that meant much to me: I was still watching the spinning blue wheel of agony every time I clicked on anything, so I kept complaining. Finally, a tech stopped by my desk with a memory chip, because one of the things she noticed while she was digging around in my computer’s brains was that it had half the RAM of other computers in my office.

The change in my laptop’s performance after that was amazing! Applications actually appeared on the screen immediately after I clicked on icons! Functions were executed the moment I hit “enter!” I rarely if ever saw the spinning blue wheel again! Note to self: Complaining can pay off, big time!

There was one curious development that came to light during all this: When the tech came by to chip my laptop, I asked her a question about one application in particular. She couldn’t answer it right then, but took my question back to her office to research an answer. Turned out that application wasn’t supposed to be usable on my computer after the Windows 10 upgrade. “But we use that application almost every day,” I pointed out, “and I know our office isn’t the only one. What were you going to do for offices that can’t function without that application?” The official answer: Those offices weren’t going to get the Windows 10 upgrade.

Well, sure. I suppose that would work.

– – – – –

*Ask me about my ID lanyard.

smoothies

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Sometime last summer, My Daring B started making smoothies every morning. We took them to work with us. She drank hers almost right away; I think of smoothies as something you eat rather than drink, so I saved mine for lunch.

At some point during the summer, I started making the smoothies because B usually waited until after she’d had her shower, which didn’t give her much time. I figured I could make them while she was in the shower, a time when I usually twiddled my thumbs or picked my nose or something about as constructive.

Making a smoothie isn’t hard. At least, the way I make them isn’t. Two bananas, a cup and a half of chopped-up frozen fruit, about two cups of vanilla soy milk, then blend it all together in our Ninja smoothie-making blender for a minute or so. Takes five minutes, turns out a very tasty smoothie.

After we came home from our week-long vacation in August, I hit a little bump in the smoothie-making road. Come Monday morning, I forgot to make the smoothies. And Tuesday morning. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I just clean forgot about it. For two, maybe three weeks, I didn’t make smoothies. Now I admit that, somewhere in those two or three weeks, I recalled I used to make smoothies, and I thought, Huh, I should start making smoothies again.

But you know how hard it is to get back into the habit of doing something after you fall out of it? That’s how this was. Every evening I found myself thinking, I should make smoothies tomorrow morning, and then next morning I would be on the sofa twiddling my thumbs for five or ten minutes, vaguely troubled by a thought in the back of my mind that I was forgetting something, and next thing I knew we’d be on our way out the door and it’d hit me – Oh shit! I was gonna make smoothies! And that night I’d promise myself I’d make smoothies the next morning, and then next morning there’d be the thumb-twiddling and the oh shit moment, and so on.

Finally, one morning at work, B’s boss handed me a note with a smirk on her face, turned and walked away. The note said B wasn’t able to perform her duties as well as she had when I made smoothies in the morning, and that she would really appreciate it if I’d make smoothies again so she could have her best worker up to speed again. Something like that. I’ve been making the smoothies ever since.

jumble

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I needed some data for an investigation that I could get only from a computer in the Milwaukee DMV office, and that could mean only one thing: time for another road trip! This was about the worst news I got all day, because I had a ton of other shit on my desk to get done, most of it a lot more important that driving to Milwaukee to pick up a video recording. But the station supervisor was expecting to meet me at a certain time that day, so off I went.

When I got there, the supervisor showed me to the room where the computer was set up. There was the usual computer network gear, a rack next to the door that stretched from the floor to the ceiling and was filled with boxes of blinking lights, all linked together with thick bundles of light blue network cable that ran up the rack into the ceiling. Against the near wall was a typical office computer station with a keyboard, mouse and monitor set up on a pressboard desk and an overhead book case. And wedged in between them was the computer I was looking for.

The box with the processor and the rest of the guts of the computer was on a shelf screwed to the wall in the corner at about head height. The monitor was at about knee level under the shelf, perched on a box. It was not a new monitor. It had lots of dead pixels and a splotch of dead screen about the size of a half-dollar in the top center. The keyboard was mounted to the network rack and the mouse was on a narrow shelf behind the keyboard; I had to reach over the keyboard to use the mouse. It was like some comic-book version of what the writer imagined a hacker’s basement-computer setup would look like.

It was not what you’d call an ergonomically correct work station. I had to sit on a step-stool and lean in way past my knees to get close enough to the monitor to focus on it. Thank goodness I had to spend only ten minutes or so plinking around on it. Any longer and I would’ve been crippled for life.

perfect storm

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Our office had an electric kettle. I used it to make myself a hot cuppa tea every morning. It was perfect for making tea because I could set it so it would shut off when the water reached 190 degrees, which is too hot to drink but if I set the cup aside for five minutes, it was just the right temperature.

Not too long ago the kettle sprung a slow leak that got a little worse with each passing day, and last week somebody finally threw it out. Without the kettle, my choices were either do without my morning cuppa (barbarous!), use the coffee maker to boil water (and end up with a tea-coffee hybrid), or fill a cup with water from the tap and boil it in the microwave (not what I’d like, but better than the other two options).

I boiled the water in the microwave & took it back to my desk, where I added the tea and set it aside to cool. Then things got a little hectic.

First thing I have to do each morning is prepare a list of names and addresses in a spread sheet that one of my coworkers will use to print up a batch of letters our office sends out every day. The list is usually just four or five names; ten would be a lot. On this particular day, there were twenty-two people on the list. Not the most we’ve ever done, but it’s unusual. I looked at the office calendar to find out who was scheduled to print the letters so I could give them a heads-up, and what do you know: I had the duty that day.

Yay, me. To celebrate my great good fortune, I picked up my cuppa, which had been sitting about five minutes, and slurped up some tea. That’s when I was reacquainted with whichever physical law it is that says a cup of water at 212 degrees takes longer to cool down to a temperature that won’t burn my mouth than a cup of water at 190 degrees.

After a bit of huffing and puffing, I cleared the decks and got ready to print up the letters. It’s a little more complicated that just printing them; we have to copy & paste unique images into each letter, we have to track who sent each letter and when on a spread sheet, we have to add notations to several reports so management will know we sent the letters that day, and a second coworker has to check each and every one of those steps to make sure we don’t miss any of them. When there are just five or six names on the list, this can take more than an hour. When there are twenty-two names, it takes all morning.

I was in the middle of copying & pasting the images when my boss asked me for some information that she needed right away. Well of course she did. When does the boss ever say, “I need this information but I don’t need it right now; take your time and get it to me whenever you feel like it.” I’m pretty sure that’s never happened to anybody.

After I gathered the information, I asked my lead worker to review it with me so I could be sure I gathered the right information before reporting it. As I was explaining what the boss wanted, I poked the computer monitor with my finger. It went blank. Then it displayed the message “power saving mode” and shut itself off. I turned it back on, but it shut itself off again. I shut off the computer, disconnected the video cable, reconnected it and powered up the computer again. Still no joy.

At this point, I had less than an hour to get my computer monitor fixed, report the information the boss asked for, then finish the letters, before I had to be at an appointment across town. To top it all off, somebody pointed out that I was scheduled to do the letters again this coming Wednesday, when I would not be in the office to print them, so I would have to ask one of my coworkers if they would cover for me. I think they call this a perfect storm?

I’m happy to say this story has a happy ending. My computer is a laptop, so I disconnected the monitor and worked on the laptop screen. My lead worker found the information my boss needed, and I got the letters done just as the clock was ticking down to the last few minutes before I had to leave to make my appointment. Crisis overcome, victory is mine, I need a drink.

the moves

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I got to move to a different desk on Friday morning. Jim retired the middle of last month, and a couple days after he announced it, I asked Susan if anyone else had called dibs on his desk. Jim worked in a smaller cubicle but it had a raised desk top that he could work at while standing. I would much rather stand than sit all day.

When Susan said nobody had asked to switch desks with Jim, I allowed as to how I would like to switch, if it was okay with her. Turned out she was just fine with that. She had to make some arrangements with the IT department to move my computer and my phone, and in the end they messed up the phone move which now won’t happen until some time next week, but Friday morning there was an IT person at my desk when I went in bright and early, and about an hour later I’d finished moving all my files, bound manuals, pen cup, stapler, tape dispener et cetera, and cleaning up after myself.

It turned out to be as good a move as I thought it would. Standing is much better than sitting all day. I’ve been sitting behind a desk for nearly all my life, but for a little more than ten years now I’ve been much less active outside work. The Air Force had ways to motivate me to stay in shape, but after I retired from the military I had to come up with my own ways, and at this I have been sorely lacking.

And I mean sorely. Every evening for the past ten years when I got up from my office chair I felt a little worse than the day before. I could almost feel myself falling apart, but it’s not as if I had nothing to do with it. Sitting all day is bad, no question about that, but after work I would feel so exhausted that when I got home, the temptation to drop into a comfortable chair and sit all night was all but irresistible. I did not resist.

B and I got a membership at a local gym last fall and promised each other that we would go at least once a week at first, working up to twice a week through the winter. We had nothing but the best intentions. We even went to an introductory lesson, in which one of the personal trainers at the gym showed us how to use the machines that concentrated on building up core muscles. I’ve never before been in the presence of any personal fitness instructor who was more disinterested in our physical fitness. Usually they’re such hoo-rah cheerleaders that you can hardly stand them, but this guy excreted lack of enthusiasm from every pore in his body. We never went back, and I think neither one of us ever sincerely intended to go back even though we didn’t cancel our memberships for several months. Guilt is a crazy thing.

About two years ago we started going to yoga classes at the local community center. Yoga is supposed to be about getting your mind, body and spirit in shape. We weren’t necessarily thinking about mind and spirit, but getting out a couple times a week to a little light physical exercise didn’t hurt us at all, and surprisingly enough it relieved a lot of stress I was suffering from. I’d just started my current job at the DMV, investigating fraud, and was having more than a little trouble getting along with my supervisor. Somehow, I don’t know how, the practice of always taking deep, regular breaths eliminates quite a lot of stress from my life.

The poses seem to do me some good, too. I always feel more limber and relaxed after an hour of yoga, but I’d hesitate to call it exercise. The people who are really good at yoga obviously spend a lot of time doing what I would consider real exercise at a gym with weights and treadmills and such, and as I noted already I have issues with motivating myself to go to the gym. But even if the poses do nothing else, they taught me that I’m getting a pot belly because I let my core muscles get flabby. There’s a thickening layer of fat there, too, no denying it, but there’s also no denying that whenever I’m on my feet, I slouch and tend to lean on things because I’m literally out of practice when it comes to standing for any length of time greater than five minutes.

So I’m grateful, and I say this without one iota of sarcasm, to have the opportunity to slave away at my desk while standing. I stood almost all day long. I tried variations by standing on one leg or the other. I stood in tree pose, which is that yoga thing where you put the sole of your foot against the side of your calf and crank your knee around so it sticks out to one side. I did deep-knee bends. I did leg lifts. And occasionally I sat, just to give my knees a rest, which are not happy with my newfound enthusiasm for standing.

There are two downsides to my new location, though: the cubicle is located at the entrance to our section, so I’m the first person anybody sees when they walk in. When Jim worked there, he was answering questions from everyone who wandered in. The other downside is that the cubicle is right across from the break room, so every time someone toasts a couple of Pop Tarts or warms up some curry in the microwave, my stomach growls.

middle

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, for what I’m pretty sure was the first time ever at the office where I work now, someone stepped up to the middle urinal while I was at the right urinal and someone else was at the left urinal. I’m almost one-hundred percent positive that’s never happened there before. At least, not that I’ve seen. I’ve been working there a little over fourteen months. Maybe the old-timers know different.

This particular building went up in 1964, back when urinals stood four feet tall and were sunk into the floor. More to the point, they were very often planted so close together that, when every one of them was occupied, you rubbed shoulders with the guy beside you. I had to learn early on not to mind getting nudged while peeing. That hardly ever happens in modern buildings, where urinals are spaced far enough apart to put up a steel divider between them.

There’s a gang of three urinals in the men’s room off the elevator lobby, and like the rest of the men on our floor, I’ve always used one of the end urinals. Nobody uses the middle urinal, not even when they go in and find themselves all alone, because what if somebody comes in? And if you go in and find that both end urinals are occupied, you either pass by on your way to the toilets, or you do a one-eighty and go to another floor.

I’m not sure why. My first guess was that most guys think it’s gay, but I’m not sure that figures, when you think about it even a little bit. Most guys stand way too far from the urinal while they’re using it – that’s not my opinion, that’s a fact that a quick scan of the floor will confirm – so I don’t think they’re uncomfortable about putting their junk on public display. But maybe it’s the shoulder-rubbing that they’re uncomfortable with. I’m more than a little uncomfortable with it, to be totally honest. I don’t want to be rubbing shoulders with anyone other than my wife in any situation that isn’t a dire emergency.

My second guess, and this one seems a lot more likely to me, is that the social dynamic of the public bathroom has changed a lot in fifty years. Used to be that guys would gab a lot in the men’s room. Especially so at the urinals, probably because they were packed so close together anyway. If a guy stepped into the vacant spot next to you, he’d say Hi, How Bout Them Packers? Or he’d tell you the latest one he heard about the priest, the rabbi and the pastor, and you’d be expected to tell him the best one you heard that week. Doesn’t happen now. I’m not lamenting it; things change. But you can observe it yourself: Guys don’t talk much in the men’s room any more, least of all at the urinals, where they’re silent as gargoyles. About half of them are plugged into podcasts anyway, so you couldn’t trade jokes with them if you wanted to.

Which is why I was absolutely gobsmacked, and just a little taken aback, frankly, when a guy stepped into the middle urinal yesterday. I almost said something to him. Not about the score of the last Packers game, but something like, Did you even check to see if there’s an open toilet? Because I’m pretty sure he didn’t. And because he had Transgressed the Unwritten Law. It’s not like there are a lot of rules to using the men’s room, but this one has solidified over the years to the point that it’s virtually carved into the tiles above the middle urinal: Thou Shalt Not. Back Away. Do It Now.

And yet, there he was. Guy’s obviously too much of a rebel for unwritten laws. Or he’s from another planet. Didn’t think of that until just now.