Royce's Random Thoughts

At my workplace, our latest hire is an ex-Navy corpsman. She's been here a few months and is extremely likable and picked up her job here (okaying pharmaceutical claims for pharmacies and prescribers) pretty fast. She's also got a lot of stories from her time serving aboard the Coral Sea and the George Washington. Such as when the ships would be involved in training exercises, especially with other vessels.

Now when engaging in simulated combat, the carriers of course would take hits and have to deal with simulated damage and simulated casualties. Which meant sick bay would have to simulate treating injuries. Unless of course they were fatal in which case the poor fellows would just have to stand around until the exercise ended.

The extremely technical term for the state of existence is apparently "Pretend Dead."

Sometimes of course the entire sickbay would be declared Pretend Dead, and they couldn't treat the Pretend Casualties. Fortunately the Navy is sensible enough that if an actually injured person shows up, the medical personnel were allow to drop out of character and treat their patients (usually people on fire duty who got overheated in their protective gear).

I can just imagine them trying to stay Pretend Dead though, and declaring all the medics and corpsmen are actually zombies... ;p

How cheap is the company I work for?

Aside from "temping" for the past five years with no pay raise, this week they decided to remove the coffee maker, since they won't be providing free coffee to the office anymore.

I don't even flipping drink coffee and I'm pissed off about this. We have less than twenty people in the office, how much can it possibly cost them?!

So naturally my office still has the air conditioning cranked up. I'm under a fleece blanket and wearing my jacket and I'm still cold.

Also I think Captive of the Red Vixen is getting ready to shoot ahead of Unexpected Diversions in the sales dept. Apparently Furry Romance tops Elf Pr0n.

So I got the news before lunch that we have to take 40 hours of mandatory unpaid leave this quarter and another the next quarter. This quarter I'm covered. I was already going to take five days off for a vacation at the end of August. I've got the time so I'll still be paid. But now I have to find another five days to take off between 9/1 and 12/1. The only bright spot is that I don't have to take them all at once.

This is turning into one of Those Days.

So yesterday Tom was running a fever of around 102 with no other major symptoms. It knocked him down hard enough that he went down for a nap at 4pm and didn't wake up until 9pm. Tracy stayed up with him, catching about three hours of sleep after I woke up at 3:30am. Ultimately Tom didn't go to sleep again again until noon today. So Tracy had a long day and I thought my day would be relatively easy.

Until of course I got to work and found out that somehow on Friday my computer had picked up a virus, not two weeks after we got a lecture at work about surfing the net (which my boss pointedly reminded me about). I didn't get back onto my own terminal until noon.

Then I had to go home and finish shopping, since BJ's was closed Sunday. And the hardware store, to try and find reflective tape to convert Tom's black coat into a "Hunter" coat from Left 4 Dead. They didn't really have any. I may have ask at a fabric store what kind of material they use for those reflective bits on paramedic coats.

Life: The turned the heat on at work this week, so just my toes are freezing off and I don't have to wear my coat inside. Seriously, it was a frigging freezing in there, to the point my hands were feeling arthritic. Otherwise not much happened.

Nano: Has been pushing along nicely. As of today I'm about 5 words short of the halfway mark, and I'm about three days ahead of schedule going by the nano calculator. I'm fairly impressed with myself. I don't think I've ever put this many words in such a short time. I've consistently finished at least above the minimum, though I haven't managed anything like my first day when I put in almost 2500 words. Only downside is that at least during the work week I don't really have time to play any games on the computer. If I can manage a slower pace after NanoWriMo is over, maybe 500 to 1000 words today, I've got confidence that I can actually complete an original novel in a reasonable amount of time.

Now if I could just format it correctly and find an agent...

It helps that I finally figured out what my very vaguely thought out plot macguffin was going to be, thanks to some brainstorming on the part of the sjgames.com forum when I entered a technical question. Hurrah for steam geeks. :)

More to the point, I hate how it confirms in my head that I'm an idiot who can't be trusted to follow simple rules to do the job right.

I just want to go home now and torture Rolas.

This is how my day went. Went into work after taking two days off for Georgia's fever (the snot was normal and running around like a loon Thursday of course) expecting to get bitched out because of my absence. Turned out there were bigger things that were annoying my boss.

Specifically: It turned out that some of the benefits (ie: stuff any normal office would give as a matter of course) that had been agreed upon between ACS and my temp agency turned out to be... more strong suggestions than anything. It turned out the temp company was billing them for stuff like our fixed holidays, floating holidays, vacations, sick time, when ACS thought those were the temp agency's responsibility. Which is what led to the penny pinching cost saving measure of cutting back our hours.

Well, now that ACS informed the agency that they weren't to be billed for those, our hours have popped back to forty a week.

Strangely enough, "due to the economy" my temp agency has now had to cut back on certain things. To wit:

Paid holidays are limited to two days, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Every other one is unpaid, including our now two (from four) floating holidays. Oh, and we're limited to one week of vacation and sick leave each, with appropriately pitiful accrual times.

I shouldn't be whining about this that much. My nephew is/was in the construction business, so he's been on state unemployment for a while now, down in Georgia no less. There are lots of people who have it worse than him, but all I can think about is me right now. I've got to find a way out this place.

I'm not happy about that. I was less happy with the e-mail that got forwarded to me around noon informing me that my elder sister's husband looks like he's got lung cancer. No surprise given how he smokes, but it's still scary. No idea how far along it is just yet, only that they see something on his lung.

Argh.

So my workplace, after some two and a half years, decided in its great wisdom that everyone there needed to be drug tested. Bear in mind that I work in an office environment, and while we do have important responsibilities (approving doctors' drug requests for patients), it isn't like we're driving forklifts or anything. I'm more likely to keel over from aspirin abuse.

"Dominique" is a perfectly lovely name.

For a female.

Then again, they could be transgendered...