Death.

So. Very. Tired.

The Great Moussaka Experiment with ai731 yesterday turned out very salty indeed. We think it's partly the cheap feta cheese, and partly the fact that we used regular table salt to drain the eggplant instead of sea salt, which has larger and coarser crystals.

Dear God, but it was salty. Chalk this one up to a learning experience. I felt a little bit like a slug in its death throes. ;)

Next time, sea salt. It'll be very good once it's not so salty.

I ended up going to bed at 11:30 and "slept in" until 5:30. I really really hope I didn't misunderstand ashforestwalker and that he is in fact coming to pick me up, otherwise I'm in a whole heap of trouble. Oh well. The standing agreement is that, if I don't hear from him, it means he's coming. Since I don't have an answering machine, I assume that means he would arrange to send an email or something if he truly couldn't come.

Work has, you won't be surprised to hear I'm sure, eaten my brain. I have a post in my head that keeps getting longer every day, but I think you may have to wait a bit before I can post it.

Off to make my sandwich.

Spoke too soon

That bit about being tired this morning? Scratch that. I'll give you three guesses as to where I was until an hour ago, and the first two don't count.

Yes, that's right, I was at work until 9:45 this evening. Thirteen-hour days rock. Factoring in transit times, that makes sixteen hours and change.

At least no one will bitch if I ask for a day off somewhere down the line.

So after I posted this morning, poor ashforestwalker called to inform me that, after a —wait for it— 19-hour workday yesterday, he was unable to come get me. No duh. I very hastily reassured him and made a wild dash for the bus, which was due fifteen minutes from then (I wasn't completely dressed and had no sandwich made yet), grabbing the handy muffins I made Wednesday morning to snack on, on the way to work.

I caught the bus by a minor miracle, and made it to work with twenty minutes to spare, as is usual when I take that bus. A later bus would, I think, get me there *exactly* on time, but the timing is so fine that I'm not willing to risk it yet. Also, having that extra twenty minutes in the morning these days is necessary for my sanity: it's twenty minutes during which I'm alone and can start my morning routine without having six people all asking me for stuff at the same time while I try to get my routine stuff done at the same time.

ashforestwalker showed up at work at the sensible hour of 9am, although in his shoes I might've stayed home altogether. He was put on stockroom duty all day, and so I got to see more of him than usual, although we were both stupidly busy and so didn't get to exchange much more than a greeting every so often. Still, it was nice to have a familiar face around.

Anyway, the day went pretty much as the previous three this week until about 2pm, when an angel of mercy otherwise known as Marie-Hélène came to rescue me from my ignorance-induced hell. Marie-Hélène is the previous receptionist at Dial-A-Husband, the one who knew what she was doing and set up the entire system. She very generously agreed to come in for part of one day to answer any questions I might have about the office.

She ended up staying nearly eight hours.

The thing is, I don't think either of us truly understood just how bad my training with She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named really was. SWMNBN is the name the guys in the office have given to the girl who trained me, because every time we say her name, Office!Boss develops this awful-looking throbbing vein in the side of his forehead. I'm half-afraid he'll have a stroke one of these days. I've also learned not to use the "L" word around him (i.e. "lost"), because I'm quite convinced I'll make his head explode. SWMNBN has lost SO many papers and files and important documents that it got funny, went way beyond funny, got funny again, and now is just plain sad.

So Marie-Hélène gave me three weeks' worth of training in seven hours, and then mercifully sat down with me and helped me to finish up all the overdue quotations to send to clients. Office!Boss was getting progressively more stressed about the quotations (because it's important to get them out in a timely fashion), but I was stuck for days with another slightly more important emergency. That emergency consisted of calling up an entire month's worth of Home Depot clients to schedule work dates for carpet and flooring installations. Turns out SWMNBN hadn't booked a single date since she'd started working, having got her wires crossed in a major way. So, crisis. I've spent three days doing nothing but book Home Depot installations, and I'm still not finished.

So the quotes piled up as a result.

I repeat: thank goodness Marie-Hélène came when she did. She showed me how to write up the quotes (SWMNBN didn't really show me how) and since there were about a dozen to be written up and sent out, she wrote up a whole bunch herself for me on another computer.

Her extremely patient boyfriend showed up around 7:30 to pick us up. Instead, Marie-Hélène sent him to St. Hubert for barbecue chicken (well, he said he was going and so she asked him to pick something up for us while he was there). He really was a model of patience. He put up with hanging around for about two hours while we did nothing but work on quotes and generally were stressed out about stuff.

Actually, she was far more stressed than I was: my stress levels went down considerably today. Suddenly things that hadn't made sense before began making sense. I found out about an entire filing system that I was responsible for, which SWMNBN had never mentioned to me at all. We took all the Home Depot stuff and fixed the borked filing job which SWMNBN had done on it. What I hadn't been able to figure out on my own about all the procedures got explained in detail along with the reason for which it was done that way (I like to know why I work in certain ways. "We've always done it like that," or "I dunno, they just told me to do it this way" are not satisfactory answers as far as I'm concerned), which made me much much happier than before.

So, in spite of my having spent nearly seventeen hours away from home today, it was a good day. I am going to be a wreck for the next few days, and the night I'd planned to spend at my dance club was shot, but on the whole I'm very glad I stayed. I am enjoying this job tremendously. All the guys I work with are super super nice, they've been tremendously understanding about all my fumbling and uncertainty on certain subjects, and everyone is being as helpful as they can so that things can start running smoothly again.

The little guy at Home Depot in Vaudreuil was ecstatic on the phone today. Remember what I was saying about there being no installation dates for carpets and floors? Well, he was the one practically having a nervous breakdown over it all. So when I sent him over half the installation dates he'd been asking for for a month in the space of less than two days, he was over the moon. He told me he loved me and that my arrival was like a miracle. Now there's a good way to boost a girl's self-esteem. :)

Yeah. All sorts of good external (and a fair bit of internal) validation is going on these days. Also, I far prefer being stupidly busy to the constant drudgery and boredom of the Bank. Yes, the people there were extraordinarily nice, but the work was deadly, and I think it was really beginning to get to me.

I am more optimistic than ever about this job, especially now that I have a better idea of what I'm doing. Give me another month, and it'll be like I've always worked there. Well, almost. ;)