Work

When You Wake Up Unemployed…

26 Comments / Daily Dose, Work /

The world is weird. Very weird.

When you wake up at 3am and can’t go back to sleep because your head is so congested you actually wish it would explode, you get up and take some meds and wander out to the deck with your phone waiting for the meds to kick in.

But, there’s only one email box to check and it’s unsurprisingly empty because you’re an inbox zero kind of person and you cleared it a few hours ago and nobody sends newsletters at midnight.

There’s also no Convo (the messaging platform your little team uses to communicate throughout the day) to check.

There are no Facebook groups or pages to manage.

There are no feeds that you need to catch up on.

The internet is always slow at 3am but it’s much, much slower when you’re unemployed.

And, when you wake up again at 7:30am and open your browser … only two tabs open instead of 12.

There’s still only one email box to check, instead of three.

There’s no spam to pull. There are no problems to solve.

The internet is apparently somewhat slow at 7:30am, when you’re unemployed.

So you wander off to mow (most of) your front lawn.

And then you get your paperwork taken care of for the company you’re no longer employed by. As you seal up the company phone and get dressed so you can run it over to the UPS drop off, you discover a small problem with the aforementioned paperwork but that’s solved within two minutes. So you drive the 1 mile to drop off the box and spend 10 minutes wandering around the little five and dime store that is home to the UPS drop off and smile because you live in this tiny little town with this tiny little store. A line scratched off of my to do list and a happy little diversion, too. #Win.

When you get home, you discover a potential issue in your inbox but even that one is resolved pretty quickly so there’s nothing left to do except file for unemployment benefits.

As frustrating as that little task is, (error messages on submit, hahahahahahaha, welcome to my life), it still only took 30 minutes.

And suddenly, it’s 4:30pm and I wonder how in the hell that happened.

An entire busy day where I worked in service to myself or my family and not my company or my community. How weird is that?

So weird, for me.

I haven’t gone one single day in the last 10 years without assisting a member of my community or a co-worker. Not one. Weekends, I worked. Holidays, I worked. Vacations, I worked. I worked the day my daughter got married. I worked the days by grandsons were born. I worked the days I moved to Chicagoland and then back to Florida. I didn’t work all day, some times it was just one email or one text message or one Convo message or five minutes of pulling spam. But I have always done SOMETHING work-related.

Waking up unemployed… crazy weird and I get to do it again tomorrow. Better yet, I get to figure out LinkedIn. Oh good grief, LinkedIn. Sheesh.

When You Wake Up Unemployed… Read More »

Mac and Me

4 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Work /

After many years of looking longingly at MacBooks, I took the plunge and bought a MacBook Air. It was a bad Windows update that killed my beloved Toshiba that pushed me over the edge. I had to buy a new laptop and I was so annoyed at Windows that I sucked up the extra price of the MacBook and I just bought it. And, immediately felt guilt over having done it.

Whatever. It’s done. Moving on. Money grows on trees, etc. No big deal.

The learning curve, my friends, has been great.

Besides the weird trackpad scrolling that I haven’t turned off because I mostly like it and just haven’t completely gotten used to it, I am constantly struggling to figure out how to do things. It’s particularly annoying when I’m doing a screenshare with other people. I’m pretty sure I look like I need to go back to remedial mousing classes because I have no control over my cursor. And, if I’m training someone to do something or showing someone how something works, I’m pretty sure the other person is wondering whether I really know what in the hell I’m doing (I DO, just not with the Macbook) because holy hell, it’s hard.

All of the times people have said that Macs are so user-friendly and intuitive… yea, not so much really. Or maybe not so much if you’ve lived on a Windows machine for a zillion years. I certainly find the iPHone and iPad to be more user-friendly than the MacBook.

Programs I’ve used forever in Windows don’t look or behave the same way on the Mac. (WHERE THE HELL IS THE TRASHCAN IN EVERNOTE ON THE MACBOOK? I can find it on my Toshiba. I can find it on my iPhone. I CANNOT FIND IT ON MY MACBOOK. WHERE THE HELL IS IT???) I have no idea what I’m going to do about image editing. Maybe I don’t need to edit images for work anymore? (I have a new job, yea — I’m sure I’ll never need image editing again. So I’m just going to not think about that at all.) My desktop is a mess because I can’t figure out how to easily move shit into the folders I want them in. The process seems so damn difficult all of a sudden.

OK I’ll stop now. I do love my MacBook. I also love not worrying about corrupt Windows updates. I’ll get used to it. Sassymonkey says so. I believe her. Mostly. I think.

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Pinterest Frustration

5 Comments / Community Chest, Daily Dose, Day to Day, Work /

Like all new social media platforms, I joined Pinterest without really thinking about how I might use it, whether I might use it for the rest of my life and whether I was going to find myself with a mess if the darn thing took off like wildfire and became the next big thing that STICKS.

So, years have passed and Pinterest is a thing. A thing that should be used. Properly. Or at least in a way that makes a little bit of damn sense. Having not enough boards or the wrong boards has been making me CRAZY so I finally decided that I either needed to FIX it or STOP USING IT and since I obviously can’t stop using it, I’m fixing it.

I’m making new boards. Deleting old boards. Moving pins to the proper places. Getting rid of pins to dead content or pins that I don’t even understand why they were pinned to my account in the first effing place. What was I thinking?

I started out saying I’d spend 30 minutes a day on Pinterest, fixing my damn account. But after 15 minutes this morning, I was feeling a lot of anxiety. I don’t really LIKE Pinterest, lol. So I’ve decided forget that 30 minutes a day, I’ll just do 15 minutes. I can handle 15 minutes and when it’s all fixed — I’ll feel better about Pinterest. Right? RIGHT!

Do you have boards that make sense? Do you have too many, not enough or just the right number of boards? Do you tidy your Pinterest account regularly or just pin and forget about it?

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The Week After

1 Comment / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Work /

Why do I always forget that the first week after a BlogHer conference is maddening, exhausting, and overwhelming? Probably because if I didn’t forget, I’d curl up in a ball the week before a conference and refuse to move until it was over?

It takes a good five days to adjust, to catch up, to get back to normal. Today is day five and I’m almost there. ALMOST.

I’ve got no less than five assignments due and they are all five have finished. This is not how I generally work and I need to get my shit together and go back to getting ONE thing DONE completely AT a TIME.

But first, I need more coffee. A lot more coffee.

The Week After Read More »

Re-Entry Is Hard, Y’all

1 Comment / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Work /

At some point during my little vacation, I saw my co-workers convo’ing about how quickly the day had gone. I chuckled because I often have days like that.

This is not one of those days.

I’ve been at my desk for almost six hours and am wondering why the day is dragging along so slowly. It’s not like I don’t have a ton of work to do — I definitely do, and I’m getting it all done in a timely manner. But good grief, when will this day end?

And the dogs have been royal pains in the ass. TW finally got two of them down for a nap (and yes, I know I sound like we’ve got toddlers or something) but Lola had to jump the gates so she could go into the other room and bark at squirrels which woke Buster Butt up and now I’m sure he’s gonna wonder around acting like a Butt again.

WHEN will THIS day END?

Remind me of this when I’m cursing about how quickly the time is flying later this week, ‘k?

Re-Entry Is Hard, Y’all Read More »

I Had All the Fun

1 Comment / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Work /

I had an exceptionally nice 4 day break — I worked maybe a total of an hour over four days. That’s… crazy. I worked more than that when JMP was born and I was on vacation in Hawaii. Hah. (Thank you, Sassymonkey.)

I got a lot of odds & ends done. TW and I had fun by ourselves, with the girls and with the puppies. I did some housework. I didn’t read very much and I realized yesterday that I never did put any time in my schedule to work on JMP’s stocking which really made me laugh because Sassymonkey pointed out out that my PTO to do list did not have any stocking time on it. I told her that’s an every day thing, not a PTO thing — and then it promptly fell off of my normal schedule, in favor of other things. So, I had to re-create today’s to do list and add that back in. Sheesh.

I’ve got two more PTO days coming up in a couple of weeks but I’ll be working more than an hour since Sassymonkey is traveling a bit over that weekend. I’m still very much looking forward to that break, though because it will be #readathon time!

I think April might be my favorite month, or it would be if we didn’t also pay $18K in taxes this month but let’s not think of that and ruin my nice vacation high, ok?

I Had All the Fun Read More »

I’m Thankful For PTO and Clean Floors

2 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Pets, Work /

I’m on PTO right now (paid time off) which I almost didn’t take because our original plan to go to Lake Geneva for a couple of days got sidelined by the adoption of Buster. All of the funds for a mini vacation went to his adoption, his vet bills, his extra dog food and all of the darn toys he eats. (Well mostly Skeeter eats them after she takes them away from him, which causes him to need more toys for Skeeter to take away and eat. Vicious cycle.)

I decided to go ahead and take the PTO because gah, all of the things have become ALL OF THE THINGS and I figured I could at the very least sleep a little later, read a few more books, work on JMP’s stocking, take the dogs to the dog park, get some stuff to the post office and maybe even do something fun in the city with TW.

I’m not sure how many of those things I’ll get done but they’re all still on the table. But first, I realized I needed to do some housework. There was no way I could sit in the living room and watch Dawson’s Creek (or Superman) marathons and work on the stocking while the living room was trashed with aforementioned dead dog toys and all of the sand tracked in by these mutts from our backyard sand pit.

So I’ve spent the morning on that. It didn’t take much more than an hour to do the floors in the cold room, office, kitchen, our bedroom, our bathroom, the dining room and the family room. The Dyson DC56 makes it pretty quick and easy. I was feeling all good about how clean everything was and getting ready to turn on the first of my tv marathon when I realized Buster was covered in mud.

Of course he is.

It’s raining and he was outside trying to chase Skeeter around the mud pit in the backyard. My clean floors will only be clean for about another ten minutes so I’m probably going to have to do the floors again tomorrow morning before I settle in with the stocking and the video marathon watching.

Thank goodness for PTO, right?

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Is a Break from Work Really a Break?

6 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Work /

I have been trying to take at least an hour, every day, away from my desk. I do this by scheduling myself a three hour break in the day — which guarantees me an hour. (Don’t ask questions, just go with it.)

But my breaks generally look like this:

– Play a couple of words in WWF.
– Play a couple of lives in Candy Crush.
– Read a chapter of my book.
– Fold a load of laundry and put away four loads of laundry.
– Move a load of laundry from the washer tot he dryer and start another load of laundry.
– Clean the dead leftovers out of the fridge, load the dishwasher and start the dishwasher.
– Answer three emails.

If I’m really lucky, I’ll also squeeze a shower into that hour break.

At the end of that hour, it doesn’t really seem like I’ve had a break … ya know?

I think I might be doing this wrong?

Is a Break from Work Really a Break? Read More »

No Recap?

2 Comments / Community Chest, Daily Dose, Women, Work /

Is this the first year I haven’t written a post-BlogHer conference post? I think it might be. Which probably tells you something about my life right now. I hope it doesn’t lead you to believe I didn’t love the conference, because I definitely did. Some of the keynotes during ’13 will probably go down as my all time favorites.

Don’t believe me? Go watch some of the BlogHer ’13 videos and see if you don’t agree.

I’ll start you off with this one, Facebook fangirl that I am.

No Recap? Read More »