I don’t know if you’ve had enough time to recover from the news that I worked outside this weekend. It might be too soon for me to tell you this, but… brace yourself. I’ve signed up for an exercise class. I know I know! It’s shocking. It’s only one day a week. Here at work. A stability ball class. I think you try to balance of big balls and maybe not fall off. As you can probably guess, I’m not going to be very skilled at it.
Crap! I have a meeting! Damn DLS time!!
In attempting to present another fun filled episode of “what’s on Jodi’s t-shirt today” I realized, looking at the shirt in iPhoto, that I had put my shirt on backwards. The graphic is such that it shows both on the outside and inside of the shirt. That made me laugh, for a while. I haven’t done that in almost a year.
Friday afternoon, Evildeb and I went to an off-site work party. We were only marginally invited. But our PSM really wanted us to go. I spent my drink tickets on Dr. Pepper, while Evildeb spent hers on wine. We did a little mingling, and ended up talking to someone in Program Management, about some recent staff changes at the executive level, a vp was leaving. He asked me what I thought about that, and I said “Ummm… yeah, he was pretty good,” I had no clue if he was any good or not, “he used lots of corporate speak and anacronyms.” Everyone started laughing. I didn’t think it was that funny. He did… use a lot of both. I looked around at the group, and knew that I had done something dumb.
Evildeb: You said “anacroynm.”
Jodi: I did? [still not hearing what I had done wrong.]
PM: that’s good ANAC-cronym. That’s a great word!
Jodi still laughing with everyone else: well, you know me!! hahahahaa!
Evildeb: did you mean acronym?
Jodi – ashamed and not at all drunk: yeah. I did.
I’ve always screwed up that word. I have the hardest time saying it. But I looked into it, it’s a real word. anacronym. Sort of. People use it to describe acronym’s that are so old, nobody remembers what they stand for anymore. Like SCSI and ASCII. [Except for me, maybe. SCSI=Small Computer System Interface and ASCII=American Standard Code for Information Interchange] So playing it cool was the smart thing to do. When I got back to work, I found a website that explained the meaning of Anacronym, although I don’t think it’s in the dictionary. I mailed it to Evildeb and my PSM. Who forwarded it to the PM. Who still thinks it’s a great word and is willing to suspend disbelief that I meant to say it.
Louise is still intent upon teaching me to knit. She is actually making me knitting needles and found a pattern that is just crazy enough to make me learn. Only so I can answer when people ask me the inevitable.
“what are you knitting, Jodi?”
“Vibrator cozies” I’ll say, sweetly.
Evildeb is not down with this plan.
Evildeb: why would you want to make those?
Jodi: come on! it’s genius! we’ll make vibrator cozies and sell them at I heart rummage! They’ll sell like hotcakes! Sexy hotcakes!
Evildeb: I don’t think you should make that. What do I need with that?
Jodi: Well, it sounds like you should go right out and fill it! You’re a healthy girl, surely you have something that runs on batteries.
Evildeb: make iPod covers.
Jodi: NO! you can come shopping with us when we go buy the floor model vibrator for our sales booth. Nobody likes a chilly sex toy. [which may or may not be true, actually.]
In today’s episode of what is on Jodi’s t-shirt today:
It’s Slimey the Worm! From sesame street! Yay! Today’s t-shirt is an orange on orange ringer, paired with a black cashmere cardigan from the men’s line of Land’s End [treated very poorly indeed], levi’s, and black suede canvas one stars.
Right now, Evildeb [who’s boobies are known as Siegfried and Roy] is trying to do something genius. If she gets it to work, I will have to be her best friend forever. I’m willing to commit to that, because, if she accomplishes what she sets out to do, she’ll be THWARTING THE MAN! The same Man who is always trying to keep you down. In a geeky operating system parity kind of way. I can’t really tell you the specifics, because that’s Place of Employment [PoE] confidential. But, it goes something like this:
The Man: You must use this system. It’s crappy and slow and buggy and complicated and it sucks. It won’t do everything you want or need. But that’s just the way it is. Oh, and it only runs on Windows.
Jodi: Windows? but but…
The Man: YES WINDOWS!! quit crying, mac babies!
several months later, after Evildeb SWITCHED to the Mac as her primary machine…
Evildeb: you know…. there’s no reason we couldn’t run this on a mac. I just need to mumble mumble nameserver mumblle mumble java gui mumble mumble .ini file. I don’t want to have to lug around TWO laptops every time I travel.
Jodi: HOORAY!!
I really hope she figures it out.
I meant to show you this the other day. Oops. Nintendo Crime. It’s pretty brilliant.
The t-shirt I’m wearing today says this:
That is, in fact, a picture of the t-shirt as I wear it. Today. Which is why the text is all curvy. Like me. I’m thinking of wearing it to Easter brunch. Just to give my family a head’s up.
Dr. Stevil, Evildeb and I went to lunch with the PSM’s. We were invited as a way of saying thank you. For filling in for my PSM while she was on maternity leave. I told them they could just not invite Evildeb because she did not do anything. But they did not believe me. [which is probably for the best, as I was just kidding.] Ever since I got back from lunch, I’ve been in a food coma. Because I had french toast. In a greek restaurant. They have american food and serve breakfast… I love breakfast food! Besides, my favorite dish there is the tiny cheese pies aka: tirokopita. And we had those as an appetizer. French toast is not a dish that sends you bouncing out of your chair, raring to go and take on the rest of your day. It’s a dish that makes you want to curl up, contentedly, and take a wee snappy nap.
There is really no other point to this post. Other than to say, I had french toast, I’m tired, this is my t-shirt and I was going to try to take more pictures so I did.
EDITED TO ADD:
wait, there’s an ok reason for this post right here. Go check out some VR views of the neighborhood I work in, Fremont. You’ll need Quicktime installed.
You know, I never really look at my spam email. At work, we have a filter service. Every day it sends me a report of the spam I receive. About once a week, I go in and clean it all off the server. never even look at it. For some reason, this one caught my eye today:
Subject: Hi you :),. I miss you baby please come get me..
Hey baby. So whats been going on with you? Don’t you remember me? I loved the time we spent together I thought that you did too. I thought that you wanted to do all the things to me that we had talked about. I had a site made with more of my pictures in case you forgot about me. You can talk to me with the site too whenever Im there, which i Usually am, so I hope that you do. I hope to hear from you soon baby, please dont leave me like this I cant stop thinking of you
Evildeb says she does not have have all the sexually explicit spam that I have. She does not have email from Asslee Bendover. [I kid you not. It was from Asslee Bendover]. She did read off some of the other types of email. “Hot stock tip for quick surge.” I’m not entirely sure that isn’t something equally as naughty.
More Evildeb fun, I just received the following email.
Hi team,
My PC laptop, SweetyPi was taken away by an IT professional just after lunch today.
It was my fault for allowing her to have unprotected contact with the internet. She caught a couple of nasty viruses and had to be sterilized.
In the process of examining her the IT professional also discovered that her motherboard was damaged. This was apparently a flaw inherent to her type having something to do with an oversized “buffer”. Luckily she can be cured of all her ills, but she has to stay in the lab overnight so that they can monitor her progress.
Please keep SweetyPi in your thoughts tonight. We appreciate your kind thoughts for her rapid recovery.
Deb
The Man: I’m cleaning my cube.
*Jodi, Evildeb and KK giggle, because sounds like a naughty joke.*
Evildeb: Is that a euphemism?
Jodi: I’m CLEANING my CUBE. Anything can be a euphemism if you say it right.
Evildeb: Well, I’m installing Publisher.
Jodi: I’m INSTALLING PUBLISHER. Hmmmm… what would that mean?
Evildeb: It means I am wasting my time.
*Jodi and Evildeb laugh uncontrollably. Because it’s a Mocking Publisher joke.*
Jodi: From now it, is is a official. “Installing Publisher” is another way of saying you wasted time.
The Man: What would ‘Extracting a DMG file’ mean?
Jodi: Ummmm… that would mean that you had to spend considerable time in the facilities. The restroom.
*Everyone laughs because it’s a poop joke*
Jodi: You know what? I am going to share our new euphemism with the whole world!
Evildeb: Is that a euphemism?
Pretty soon I am going to have to create a jodictionary, to explain all my new words and phrases.
as we like to say in my family. Which is just more proof that i have a GINORMOUS brain. Knew it all long, after all, I carry the thing around on my neck every day. But if I had doubts, my headaches could squelch them. Woke up with a pounding headache, went through my day with a pounding headache, and left a half hour early with a pounding headache. You know, one of the things that does not help a headache is sitting at the computer all day writing and researching. The funniest part about my headache…. Evildeb wasn’t even in the office today. She went down to see the babytechs with Dr. Stevil. It was quiet as a tomb in my pod today. Maybe it was evil withdrawal. I came home from work, went to bed and slept until 9. Now I’m awake and experiencing the post headache high.
Evildeb cannot sit through meetings. It is physically very painful for her. If she is not an active participant in the meeting, little pieces of her soul can be seen leaving her body… floating away from the top of her head. If you expect her to listen and retain information, you’d better make it appealing. It’s not her fault, she’s missing a certain synapse in her brain. To prolong her pain, turn the lights off and show a presentation on the wall. Even better, make it a white background, black helvetica text. That’s it. Then she will be bored, tired, antsy AND depressed. God love her. So if I am sitting next to Edeb in a meeting, and there is a pad of paper between us, we’ll often scratch comments or questions back and forth. I know it may appear rude, but believe me, I’m doing everyone a favor… keep her captive in a meeting room for too long, and she’ll try to chew her own leg off to escape. Also, it just so happens, I am also miss firing at certain synapses. By providing me with a piece of paper, and an audience, I will be more apt to keep my sarcastic, but terribly witty, comments to myself. I have Meeting Tourette’s.
Bad Employee #1: you know, i bet he folds his underwear into neat, uniformly sized underpants packets.
Bad Employee #2: you forgot to mention they are white.
Bad Employee #1: You are right of course. Resistance is futile!
Bad Employee #2: Kill the humanoid!
I was fighting with someone on the überboard today. I was very angry by her response to something I posted. I mentioned a report I had seen on tv, in very board and general terms. Something I thought was interesting. But the response was more than just pointing out my mistakes, it was personally insulting. And, this time, I decided wasn’t just going to ignore the tone of the post. So, back and forth, back and forth. Arguing via bbs is somewhat like arguing via passed notes. They way we used to do, in school. I only said part of what I wanted to say, because the rest of it could blow the entire thing out of proportion. No satisfaction was achieved on my side, and I doubt it was on hers, although I would not presume to know what she’s thinking about this whole thing. [because… apparently… that is one of my many mistakes during this whole thing. shut up, jodi. leave it alone.]
The reason I bring this up is, immediately after all this angry posting, I had to go to a meeting. And in the meeting, I had to pay attention, and think adult thoughts, and say adult things. No one seemed to notice that I was currently operating at a jr. high maturity level. But I found the sudden about face back into adulthood jarring to say the least. I was so tempted to just explain the entire argument to everyone in the meeting room, so I could get their opinion. Just like one would do, in junior high. So you would know, for sure, that you are right and the other party is wrong.
Today was Sparkie’s birthday. He’s a coworker, and a bunch of us went to lunch. Louise was explaining to us how it’s socially acceptable to mock red headed people, in the UK. Not only socially acceptable, it’s expected. It’s the norm. They call that color hair “ginger” like the spice. But they call red heads gingers, with a hard G. And they are just generally considered less attractive. It would appear that girls pull of the ginger better than boys. Also, it does not count if you dye your hair red, “but who would want to do that?” It’s always cracked me up, this outlook on redheads they have. it just doesn’t make sense. If your child is born with red hair, in the UK, it would be best if you moved to America immediately, where red hair is considered attractive. At least now it is, I know it wasn’t always.
Louise was originally not going to go with us, to lunch. In fact, when we met up with her, she was carrying around a sandwich and fruit cup from the upstairs cafe. But, we talked her into it, and she put her lunch in the fridge. Later, this afternoon, she thought that a fruit cup would be a refreshing snack. But… duh-duh-DUM … someone had stolen her fruit cup and sandwich!! She was denied!
“Isn’t that a constitutional right?”
“The right to have a fruit cup as an afternoon snack? Yes, I believe it is.”
“And, do I have the right to bare arms, and protect my fruit cup?”
“yes… if someone touches your fruit cup, you get to shoot them.”
“touch your fruit cup… that sounds like some kind of dodgy sex thing they’d say to kids… like on Law and Order: SVU. ‘If someone touches your fruit cup, just yell NO!’.”
“and tell a teacher.”
I bet a redhead stole her fruit cup.
The biggest, most exciting news in my life? My cube, at work, will be moving to another location in the building. Sometime. Maybe in spring. Which goes to show you just how exciting my life is right now. I want to be placed in a dark, quiet, isolated corner.
Here’s a fun fact about Evildeb, I really enjoy listening to her talk to customers. Especially difficult ones. It’s not that she’s mean or rude or anything. Quite the opposite. She’s very calm and collected, but firm. I’m too nice. She’s talking to a customer right now. One who is a bit on the clueless side. One who keeps escalating because she doesn’t like the technical answer she receives. So I’m listening to Evildeb explain simple technical facts over and over again. Cute!
Evildeb, Dr. Stevil and I are notorious for our bickering. You wouldn’t think we were friends. In fact, one boss Steve and I had, came to me and asked me if he and I were having problems [I don’t think she had been our boss for long] because she heard us arguing. I explained that that was how we showed our love for one another, by trying to make the other one so angry, they started throwing things. Put three stubborn, dominate, opinionated people in a room. Make them each incredibly different in temperament. Give them each a different point of view, a different way of seeing things, a different way of solving problems, and a different work style. Make one of them a super genius like me. Make one of them pathologically unable to admit she is ever ever ever wrong, even if she is. And make the other one a crabby gay man with a great love for shoes. What do you have? Weapons of mass destruction, that’s what. So, I was very amused when an employee at our vendors, wrote a story about working with everyone here, before she left the company. I really enjoyed our paragraph. I hope she doesn’t mind I am going to paste that part here. By the way, there is a wizard in this story.
All Jodi could hear from her perch in the top of the tree was Deb yelling “You either get down here or I’m sending Steve up to slap you”! She looked down scornfully. It had taken her a long time to get her beanbag chair all the way to the top branch. And she was tired from her second trip up carrying the popcorn. “Yeah, yeah, you’ll never get me” she taunted, smacking her lips on the buttery popcorn she was shoving in her mouth. Steve was enraged and started scrambling up the tree. Deb pushed him from behind. “Stop pushing me” he said, reaching behind himself to wave her away. “I’m not pushing” she hissed, “I’m helping. Now stop yammering and get up the tree”! With a chuckle the Wizard grabbed them all, stuffing them into the bag with all the others.
So I’m back to work today. After almost two weeks, including those sick days. And I have to say, it’s not all that much fun to be here. Because I really enjoy not working. And I had reverted back to my natural time clock, which is almost completely nocturnal. I only got about 3 hours of sleep last night. What’s needed is an extra reason to come to work. Remember when you were in school, and you had a crush on someone. And just knowing you could walk by their locker and see them gave you reason to go to school? That’s what was needed this morning. That extra reason. But we don’t even have lockers here. And as I remained in bed, unable to convince myself to get up, I asked myself, “what kind of job would you be excited about returning to?” And I figured it out. Apple Pie taste tester. If i tasted apple pies all day, to determine which recipe was best, I would have been very excited to return to work this morning.
I was extremely lazy over my holiday break. I’m sure part of that was due to the sick. I watched a lot of movies. And a lot of tv. Please tell me I am not the only one who gets sucked into tv show marathons. I happen to flip by vh1, when they were showing back to back “I love the 90’s” and I was helpless to move from 1990-1993. After 1993, I did not really move, per se, but the channel moved over to a marathon of my favorite new addiction – Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Completely captivated, I watched hour after hour, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking diet sprite. I fell prey to one more marathon, and this one kept me in my pajamas all day yesterday. I tivo’d it. It was a Monk marathon. My new favorite show. I just started watching this show, and it kills me. I love it. I love mystery shows. With quirky detectives. My favorite kind of detective. I was a complete bean bag potato. It’s just not healthy.
Also, I watched the first season of “Oz” over the break. I had tried to watch it once, back when I still had HBO, and I think i came in on some intensely violent scene that intimidated me. I figured if I watched it from the beginning, and saw the violence in context, it would be easier to take. And I was right. What a great show!! Not for the squeamish.
