Category: Work

Food, Humor, Office, Work

Some Perfidious Fiend…

“We should start a witch-hunt!’
– Daisy

Currently wailing in sackcloth over this thing...

…stole my favorite kitchen implement ever, my orange peeler!  The niftiest thing ever invented for a consummate citrus lover.  I left it with an orange to chill in our (fortified and limited access) dispatch room’s refrigerator and when I returned a couple hours later, it, my orange, several salad dressing packagers, and a bag of carrot sticks had been snatched.

In spite of the jokes and sitcom stories of this sort of thing, this is my first incident of food being stolen in nearly 3 years of office work.  Also, what sort of ruffian steals healthy food from the office fridge?  Aren’t the soda cans labeled “Property of T-Dawg” and the “secret” candy bars in the freezer usually the first to go?

So, orange peeler thief, you’re on notice.  Either return it unharmed and be spared, or suffer the vicious voodoo curse I am prepared to unleash on you!

Law Enforcement, Stupid People, Work

Physics and Philosophy

“Lawless are they that make their wills their law.”
– William Shakespeare

 

It would be an absolute falsehood to say that I find working with law enforcement to be my ideal job or that it answers the immortal career longings of my soul, but working where I do has given me an appreciation for job that law enforcement officers do.  And trust me, it’s not always a pleasant one.

We had another police officer hit by a car last night while directing traffic because the driver did not want to do what he was being told to and purposely struck him.  Nearly every one of our police officers and student employees were threatened or cussed out at the last sporting event.  This boggles me.  Everyone acknowledges that we need police officers, that the work they do is vital to the running of society for the keeping of law and order, but everyone seems to hate them.  Resent them, even.

My theory about this is that nobody likes to be told that they cannot do what they want to all of the time.  Of course people want to drive as fast as they’d like, they don’t want restrictions on where they can park, and they don’t want to be caught when they steal something…but most of all, people seem to hate having to acknowledge (when they get caught doing any of these things) that what they have done is wrong – even when they have hit another human being with a car.  On purpose.

They are constantly stunned when there are repercussions to their actions, and even after two and a half years of working here, this attitude aggravates me.  Every two year old can throw a temper tantrum when they don’t get their way, but shouldn’t adults be able to acknowledge that having to wait in lines is part of life, and that screaming obscenities and threatening bodily harm may not be the way to deal with it?

When dealing with police, everyone wants to be the exception – can’t you just not report this, can’t you please just let me cut off those 300 people ahead of me, can’t you just let me get away with this once – and the answer is, “no.”  We can’t make you the exception because you are the 47th person to make that very request in the last hour and if we didn’t say yes to them we can’t say yes to you.  And if we do say yes to you, we can’t say no to the next 47 people who ask.

But people hate being told no.  They hate being told that cannot act in they way they want.  And often they refuse to examine the reasoning behind that negative answer; i.e., if I allow you to drive your car through a barricade and in front of a oncoming mass of vehicles you may get injured, and you may injure many other people.  Your actions affect other people, and police exist because so many of those actions or their ripple effects are harmful.

We’ve all had a bad experience with a the fuzz, but take a minute to honestly imagine a society without them.

(Sorry, kittens, but as you can see we’re dealing with some pretty wretched stuff at the department today.  Humor will shortly return.  Hopefully.  In the meantime, let’s all strive to be a little nicer and conscientious today, eh?  There are already plenty of jerks in the world, let’s not them win.)

Humor, Office, Work

Hot. Mess.

“I’m at my best in a messy, middle-of-the-road muddle.”
– Harold Wilson quotes

If I were a superhero, pumpkins, my skill would be earthquake-causing klutziness coupled with a magnetic attraction to things that stain.

Oh, you're no help!

Yesterday I barely left my desk due to working on a particularly patience-shattering project (Susie, Hennessy, Wise, and I all tried several times, but Mail Merge simply would not work for over an hour), which meant I took breaks at my desk.  In a four hour period I spilled salad dressing, orange juice, copious amounts of water, and an open ink pad on my newish trousers.  The true miracle is that nothing stained it!

Fail, Food, Humor, Office, Work

Primordial. Soup.

“That’s disgusting…thanks for taking one for the team.”
“But I don’t want to take one for the team.  I want to leave the team to its moldy fate.”
– Student employee, C.

Hm, a nice little murder. Or maybe a drug bust? Heck, just a lost textbook!

One of the downsides of working at a university is that everything is time is cyclical.  The wheel of life and work turns by semesters and even though you are out of school, you are directly affected by this fact.  For example, I do most of my hiring and firing of students at the beginning of new semesters – kids graduate, have tough schedules, or sometimes even drop out and have to be terminated or replaced.  During Fall and Winter terms I’m involved with projects related to various athletic seasons.  When Spring and Summer terms roll around I, and others, will be beating our heads on our desks for whole weeks at a time for lack of work – you can only reorganize the supply closet, update your all of your forms, and rearrange your staplers so many times before you’re quite longing for heinous crimes to be committed.

But there is a sneaky week or two in the middle of every semester, after you’ve finished hiring all of your new students and finished your major projects, and just before you have to start ordering next month’s supplies and prep next term’s spreadsheets, that you are stuck.

It is at this soul numbing point that I start wandering about the office begging for work.  Susie is usually pretty good at giving me some filing or shredding, or handing one of her own projects over to me if she is swamped, but even her ideas can give out.  And so it proved this mid-Winter.

I had my annual employee evaluation and told her that since I began working here I’ve tried to streamline and improve processes and I’ve been successful – to the point that I regularly don’t have enough to do, especially during mid-term deadlock.  When she asked what sort of small project ideas I’ve come up with, I listed the various tasks I’ve given myself over the past year and declared without guilt that the idea well has run dry.  After a moment she said she had a job that needed doing but didn’t want to offend me by asking.  I told her I didn’t mind.

So today I spent an hour on hand and knees cleaning out the two refrigerators in the break area.

And let me just state for the record, there are mothers all over the United States today, wringing their hands and weeping as they try to figure out where they went wrong.

I pulled seven one litre bottles of soda that were up to a year old (and fermenting), three packages of cream cheese that had turned teal (and grown eyes), almost an entire pizza that had dried out months ago (and fossilized), and several tupperware filled with various rotting mush (that had apparently evolved highly enough to invent a rudimentary form of communication).  Let us not speak of the fish I found.  Really.  Let’s not.

Fashion, Humor, Office, Work

Ready To Run

“Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.”
— Marilyn Monroe

It’s official, poodles, winter turns your friendly household C. into a blithering idiot.  I suspect I have a touch of Seasonal Affective Disorder – come the cold and dark I get moodier, need to sleep longer, and can stay on the sofa for hours doing nothing and seemingly only half awake.  And my brain turns to mush.  I am sure of it.

We got another coat of snow last night so when I finally managed to pull myself out of bed (which is not exactly an easy feat when your SAD-affected mind and body are yelling at you, “If you’d just give in you could have a nice little bout of depression and not have to go into work today.  Come on, just because it takes you months to pull yourself out of it doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.  Give in just a little…”), I reached for my trusty Hunter boots.

Stuffing legs and trousers into them haphazardly, I clumped about the flat grabbing fruit and granola bars (and maybe a couple of chocolate chip cookies) before J. and I dashed out into the cold to scrape off the car and gun it for work.

Pictured: said evil Being.

But midway to the office, I was hit with the nagging, suspicious feeling that somewhere in the vastness of the universe there was a Being chuckling at my expense.

I cataloged myself.  Something was missing.  Bag, phone, wallet, all present.  Gym bag complete with gym clothes, check.  Water bottle, snacks, diary, all in their proper places.  My hair was done, I had no bra straps on display, I was even sporting a pretty new cardigan and fabulous bright red lipstick.  What was it?

Bending down to rummage in my bag again, I glanced at my boots.  The nagging, chuckling feeling got stronger.  It became downright malicious in fact.  Boots, I thought, why would that…drat! Because, naturally, I had not grabbed actual shoes to change into.

Thus, here I sit in sharp black trousers, red lipstick, freshly painted nails, lovely cardigan…and my old running trainers – which squeak badly when I walk.  Much to the amusement of my co-workers.

Humor, Work

The F Word

“When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.”
– George Bernard Shaw

By which I mean “Free Association Test.”  Why?  Where did you mind go?

Like most law enforcement agencies, we use the NATO phonetic alphabet to communicate over radios and such, but our student employees who work security for us and enforce parking are also trained on it.  Occasionally this can be a source of amusement (as we all know that things on the phone or radios can come off garbled).

Yesterday while patrolling a parking lot, one of our newer students apparently completely spaced on the alphabet and, panicking a little, starting making new phonetic codes up as he radioed in license plate numbers.  “V,” which is supposed to be rendered “victor,” became “Virginia,” etc.  But what really took the cake was his impromptu offering replacement for an “F,” which is supposed to be “foxtrot.”  What was the first “F” word that sprung to this kid’s mind?

 

Monsieur I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Or That You Still Read Those Novels With My Chisled Jaw and Windswept Mane On the Cover PS - Do You Remember When I Was Hit In the Face By a Duck, himself!

We are all positively dying to unravel his thought process on this one!

Humor, Work

You Be The Jury

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
– William Shakespeare, Henry VI

Alright, minions, what say ye?

Madame, what were your feelings towards the defendant, this law student before you?  Are you sure there was no animosity towards him?  You are willing to testify that you do not think badly of those who practice law?  Really?  You respect and admire all lawyers?

Exhibit A, your conversation of this morning in our office:

“Oh, I know him!,” you exclaimed, overhearing our employees talking about a third party person.  “He’s studying to get his Judas Doctorate.”

Ladies and gentlemen of the court, Freudian Slip much?

Humor, Office, Secretary, Work

Admirable

“I’ve ridden the tiger ragged.  That tiger, it’s rolled over on its blazing back and put up its paws and just asked me to stop.”
– Glenn Duncan, I Lucifer

I really was expecting a slow day today, kittens.  It’s below freezing so no one’s about, my phone has rung exactly twice, and until 11 this morning I was staring at my empty inbox wondering how I would fill the time.  Woof, was I misled!

Hennessy and I are wrangling dozens of student uniforms that have gone “missing” over the past few months since we have nothing to give to the handfuls of new students we keep hiring.  Shockingly, all these “missing” uniforms have turned up in the very locker rooms students and supervisors have sworn blind they’ve not been in for months.

I’m up to my elbows in paperwork finding arrest records, dating from before I was born, on microfiche, running background checks, and logging hours of training for our officers.  Goodness knows whether or not I’ll get lunch before 3 at this point!

However, that quiet time was semi-productive.  After a period of Wiki-surfing, it is now a driving ambition of my life to achieve this honor!

Can I manage this without moving to Nebraska?  Somehow I feel as though I mingle well with the august company.  Admiral C. Small Dog of the good ship HMS Guppy!

Health, Humor, University, Work

How To Get A Girl Pregnant (The Telephone Theory)

“Let it be a lesson to you to be less busy in the future!”
– Georgette Heyer, The Grand Sophy

Calm down, minions, I’m not talking about me.  Today we bring you a morality tale of A) staying out of other people’s business and B) not exaggerating.

We have an EMT internship program on campus and all of our kids are highly trained to assist in medical emergencies, often they are our first responders.  But they, like us, are often dispatched to non-emergencies because of faulty (not to say completely false) information.

Yesterday we received a call that there was a pregnant woman with vaginal bleeding on the floor of a restroom and non-responsive.

Our valiant EMTs burst into the bathroom, surprising the poor girl (who was not unconscious but bent over the counter and probably wishing she was dead from both pain and embarrassment).
“You’ve had some vaginal bleeding?” an EMT asked professionally.
“Well, yes,” she answered, confused.
“How many months pregnant are you?”

No, the other kind of hysterical pregnancy.

There was a terrible pause.  She paled and clutched at the sink.
“I’m pregnant?!”

It turns out she had been brought low by menstrual cramps, excused herself from her companions and went to the restroom.  A concerned friend relayed this information in a rather garbled way to a another friend, who in turn relayed yet a more garbled version to another friend, who in turn called 911.  Thankfully all was sorted out with some profuse apologies, pain killers, and a vigorous telling off for the person who called us without having a clue what was going on. And so, my likely-red-faced darlings, let that be a lesson to you: get your facts straight.  Otherwise people end up hurt.  Or pregnant.

Humor, Work

“You Keep Using That Word-“

“-I do not think it means what you think it means.”
– The Princess Bride, 1987

The word of the day, class, is “profiling.”

A member of the media came to the office the other day in a rage because his daughter had been given a parking ticket.  Apparently she was using his press/media pass to park wherever she wanted, which is all sorts of against the rules.  We tend to frown upon people claiming privileges that don’t belong to them, see yesterday’s post on decency.  But he came in all aflame with righteous indignation…and spoiled it all by lying and saying he was the one who had received the ticket and how dare we ticket him, and he would go to the administration with this –

Red cut him off by telling him that his daughter had already come in and admitted to misusing the pass, which took him aback, but he recovered swiftly and threw out an accusation.
“So, you’re ticketing my daughter for using my pass?  That’s profiling!”

Dear, dear. We seemed to have missed the point, haven't we?

Cut to yesterday in J.’s class, scene: a discussion of hiring and management.  A young man for some reason failed to grasp the problem in a case study of a manager refusing to hire a qualified applicant because he didn’t feel that “a timid Asian woman” would be able to handle the rigors of the job.  (Ah, shades of the Annual Anti-Harassment Seminar…)  J. pulled his jaw off the floor and tried to explain the many, many errors of this man’s thinking but to no avail.  His classmate came back with, “So a woman should automatically be hired even if she can’t do the job?  That’s profiling!”

Acquaint yourself with a dictionary.