Corner of Bourbon & Division

I am literally living at the office this weekend. The Truckers' "Freedom Convoy" is in town this weekend, ostensibly to protest the vaccine mandates that are forcing truckers entering Canada to prove they are vaccinated or else to quarantine for two weeks. This was announced January 15th, and the USA followed suit a few days later, and apparently following public health ordinances is an affront to personal freedom, or whatever.



( Yelling about the convoy )

I blinked and six days went by.

 I find it really difficult to carve time out of my day to update my journal, even when I have the day off. I feel bad about leaving KK "alone" after I basically abandoned her all day to deal with my dogs or whatever else is happening that day. I'm falling back into the pattern I always seem to have when I live in the same house as someone else, which is to worry that my entire existence is inconveniencing the person I live with, and that if they'd known what a horrifying ordeal it is to share a home with me they'd never have agreed to it. (No, it's not rational, I know.)

I need to find a ladder and get over myself. I think I'd probably feel less terrible about things if I made more of an effort around the house, which means I need to either find a source of energy on the weekends, or sacrifice some sleep during the week to get more things done. I haven't found the magic key to unlock energy or motivation on that score, but I guess if something changes I'll let you know. ;)

My boss told me yesterday that I am going back on shift for the next three months or so (and honestly, probably longer, but he's pretending it's temporary and I am allowing him to pretend), which is not great news for me. He's also officially pulling me off the project that my previous boss gave to me, and has assigned me another project. So now I have a full-time project to do while also working full-time on shift, which is actually a pretty cool project. Too bad it means trying to work two full-time jobs simultaneously.

Okay. It's way past my bedtime (hence the difficulty of updating here, it usually means getting less sleep). I am working nights tomorrow, but I have a full day beforehand. I am going to go for a run, among other things, because I am getting back into running in order to get into some semblance of better physical condition, and ideally I'd like to get in a nap before work, but I also have errands, and it's either run them tomorrow or wait for the weekend, and I have other things to do this weekend. Bleh.

Good night, friends. Catch you on the flip side!

We're very short-staffed at work, so rather than working my "normal" 9-5 these past couple of weeks I've been back on shift, with few breaks because I don't have a normal schedule. I have to say, I did NOT miss working shifts, and going back to twelve hours at a stretch combined with night shifts has been super rough on my body. I am absolutely knackered.

We're all running on fumes at the office these days. We have three people on long-term sick leave on top of the vacant positions, and right now we're functioning at about a 35% level of staffing (8 people working out of a possible maximum of 24). It's not great, and we're all working a lot of overtime to compensate for it all.

I got used to working eight hours a day and sleeping at night over the past year and change, and transitioning back is proving a lot harder than I thought. I just don't appear to be as resilient as I once was. I had plans to immediately start on some self-improvement goals last week (in order to not fool myself into waiting for the New Year), but I've barely been able to manage sleeping, getting to work, and keeping the dogs more or less corralled. I'm going to have to figure out a way to conjure energy and motivation out of thin air if I want to accomplish anything, is the conclusion I'm coming to--either that or give up on my goals right off the bat, and I'm not quite willing to do that just yet. I want to end 2022 in better shape (metaphorically and literally) than I started, and that means figuring out a way to make it all work. Just how I will do that remains to be seen.

I have to go back to bed now, and I will drag myself out of bed tomorrow so I can get the garbage and recycling out before pick-up time, and then bring the dogs to daycare. I have grocery shopping to do, as well as plans for cooking before I go for another overtime shift at work tomorrow night, and somewhere in there I'd like to have a nap before work so I'm not completely fried.

Good night, friends. Catch you soon!

I was off for ONE DAY on Friday. ONE DAY.

Footage of me coming back to the office today:




Today was mostly the day of Problem Employees, combined with more technological/technical difficulties, and it all kind of felt like swimming through molasses. I'm still super tired from the weekend, which probably didn't help with my overall feelings about today.

Here's hoping tomorrow is better.

I am going to have to make this a very short filler entry, as I spent most of the evening working on a job application. There are non-zero odds that my Director won't be able to make good on his promise to find me something else within the unit, and I deeply do not want to go back to work for my manager after this, so applying for other jobs is a thing that has to happen. *sigh* I hate applying for jobs.

Now it is bedtime. Catch you later, folks!

I have noticed that my angst about work doesn't seem to necessarily be directly tied to how well or how badly my days are going. There are some days when I am reasonably productive but still feel as though I am behind the eight ball, like today. I deliberately worked more hours today because I wanted to be in early to greet our newest employee and then I stayed late on purpose to discuss another employee with her supervisor (who was working a night shift, which starts an hour after I normally end work), and arguably I got a lot done. I followed up on a bunch of things that needed following up on, I finished revising a document that I promised for someone last week, I sorted out the employee pay, solved two separate computer mysteries, and set up a whole bunch of meetings over the next few weeks. In spite of all of that, I spent the whole day feeling a general malaise about everything, feeling as though I was prioritizing the wrong things anyway.

What likely didn't help was the news that yet another employee is 90% likely to be leaving for another job at the end of July. *sigh* He has to pass one more test to qualify, but the odds are good he will pass, so that's that. If he leaves and the employee I mentioned the other day also has to go on sick leave (which he will, sooner rather than later), we will officially no longer have enough staff to run the unit 24/7.

I hate that this is happening on my watch. None of it is under my control, but the stupid anxiety voice in my brain keeps telling me that when the manager returns in the fall she is going to use this as "proof" that she was right all along and that I'm actually incompetent and that the unit failed because of me. The thing is, it's not entirely unlikely that she will act that way, even though objectively speaking all of the employees who left in the last year did so of their own accord in order to find better jobs and KK left before I was even the acting manager (because *she* was the acting manager at the time!).

I've half-joked that this feels a lot like the glass cliff, that I took the reins just as we're about to collapse under the weight of being underfunded, understaffed, and mismanaged for the better part of a decade, and that joke isn't feeling all that funny right about now.

*sigh*

In way better news, Peggy successfully slept in bed with me last night! She didn't destroy anything, didn't pee on the carpet, and didn't declare war on the cats at 1:00 am. She was a bit wriggly, but overall she cuddled up like a champ and slept most of the way through the night. I am very pleased, and I am going to try again tonight. Yesterday she was VERY tired from playing all day with her friend Shadow, so we'll see how she does after a quiet day at home while I was at work. Time will tell. :)

So KK and I had our first buddy productivity session tonight, and it was definitely a success on my end. We started at 18:00 and I stopped just shy of 20:00 so that I could have food. We chatted away the whole time, and I emptied the dishwasher, cleared off all the kitchen counters and the stove, dealt with the recycling, cleared off part of the dining room table, and washed all the countertops and the stovetop. KK's plan for tonight was to do her taxes, so that she can use her refund to pay for the move, and I don't know if she submitted anything, but I know she got all her information input in the right places, so definite progress on that front too.

We have three weekends before she moves in (June 18th is a Friday). So this coming weekend I'll be going over on Saturday, and I'll go over for a day on the following weekend, and then both days on the weekend of June 12-13. I mentioned in a previous post that I'm going to try to get a day or two off that week as well, hopefully at least the 18th, so that I can be here to help coordinate the move. It will depend on our staffing levels at work. One employee is going on parental leave the following week, so if baby decides to come early we might already be short-staffed.

I also found out some pretty bad news about another employee today. He's not directly my employee, he's someone from elsewhere in the unit who has been saving our collective bacon by going on shift even though that's not his actual job. Without him, we wouldn't be able to run the operations floor because we simply wouldn't have enough people. Anyway, last year he underwent successful treatment for prostate cancer, and now his doctor suspects it may have returned and metastasized to his colon. He's going to undergo a colonoscopy soon (tomorrow, maybe? I'm not clear on the details) to figure out what's what. This is obviously super shitty news on a personal level--fuck cancer, seriously--and also because I can't completely turn off my manager brain, I have no idea what we'll do if/when he has to take time off work to take care of his health (which of course he should, there's no question there).

This basically just highlights the problem I've been telling people about from the start: we are flirting with disaster, and are perilously close to just having to shut down the unit due to lack of staffing. It's so bad. /o\

In totally unrelated news, I had another detailed dream last night in which I and at least two of my fandom friends (possibly more, but definitely two that I remember) were renting a really shitty apartment somewhere in France. We had two roommates who I think were foreign students (foreign to France), one Chinese and the other from somewhere in the Middle East, I can't remember where. The rest of the building was also home to lots of young single Chinese people, probably students. I and my two fandom friends introduced them to some trendy TV show and got them hooked, so that everyone would crowd into our apartment to watch it when it aired and comment about it and talk about fan theories and the like. The TV was small, and looked like a model from the mid-1990s, and no one else in the apartment building appeared to own a TV, but the dream didn't take place in the past because I had a smart phone. It was mostly a fun dream except for one part that was very stressful: I was trying to show one of my fandom friends a Supernatural video (of Dean Winchester) on my phone, but she was impatient and felt I was taking too long, so she kept snatching the phone away from me and trying to type in the video URL herself. We had a brief argument about it: I felt it was rude to grab at people's property without permission, and she felt it wasn't rude to be more efficient than me at typing on a phone. "Type faster if you don't want me to do it!"

I keep meaning to get myself a notebook to write down my dreams. Maybe I should actually get around to doing that. :P

I had work drama. I don't know if I posted about it when it happened, but a couple of months ago we had a major issue in which my unit accidentally deleted the ONLY copies of some audio files of interviews conducted by investigators (it was a combination of human error and technological failure). Thanks to my knowing a guy who knows a guy, we found someone who performed technological wizardry and recovered the files, but it was an honest-to-God miracle.

Today the same investigators came to pick up the recording device they left with us over the weekend, and it was nowhere to be found. Anyway, ANOTHER series of unfortunate events, a combination this time of being short-staffed and human error, had led to it being put in an envelope and accidentally given to the mail carrier. The operator who was working that day was on a break, so someone else who was working in the room next door decided to be "helpful" when the mail carrier came. Except this helpful soul apparently couldn't tell the difference between the cubby marked "outgoing mail" and the cubby marked "in-person pick-up only." Even more helpfully, the envelope containing the device was marked in such a way that the mail room thought it was meant to go to London, Ontario. THAT'S RIGHT.

Luckily, yours truly is a fucking awesome problem solver, so we figured out what had happened before the highly sensitive original recordings were shipped off to another city. *headdesk* I had to drive across town to where the mail room is located in order to retrieve it, but retrieve it I did, and all is well again. I've sent an email to the head investigator to discuss putting a better SOP into writing, because this is all getting quite ridiculous.


In non-work news I bought a new crate for Peggy yesterday and picked it up today, and not a moment too soon, because when I came home she'd broken out of the crate again. Luckily this time I'd secured the door better, so she spent the day harassing the cats instead (I assume) of going on a joy run around the neighbourhood. I've put up a baby gate to the "cat room" (the smallest bedroom in the house where I've set up the cat tree, some cat beds, and all the cat food and dishes) so that the cats have somewhere dog proof to go, and we're going to give "sleep in the same bed as Mama" another try tonight. If she decides to try to eat a cat at 1am again I have put the new crate together, so she can go in there if push comes to shove.

What can I say? Never a dull moment.

I keep being told that perfection isn't attainable, but I keep being mad at myself for not being perfect anyway. Intellectually I know that it's a waste of energy and probably counter-productive to boot, but it's very difficult to convince my brain to not fall into patterns of telling me just how much I suck for every single thing I do wrong, for every single thing I say I'll do and then don't, for every thought that goes through my mind that I don't like. Yes, my brain is mean to me about my own brain. It's a whole thing.

I stayed way too late at work today finishing up stuff. Part of me is glad I did because I did get things done, but getting home past 7:30pm on a Friday is not really my idea of fun. Cue my brain being mean to me about taking too long to do one of the work projects I had for this week because I should have just buckled down and powered through it, and then because I didn't it took me until the end of my normal work day. Then I had to write my end-of-week report

Anyway, I'm going to try to do nice things this weekend. I'm going to KK's house tomorrow to help out, but I also want to take Peggy for a long overdue run in the fields. I'm thinking of hitting up a garden centre too, if I can find one that's actually open, and picking up a bunch of nice things to plant in the garden for the summer, and maybe also some plastic fencing of some kind to keep Peggy and Lidan in the back yard over the summer without requiring tie-outs. I haven't quite worked out how to do that yet without it costing an arm and a leg, but I will see if inspiration strikes while I'm looking at materials.

I'm also going to shop around for the start of my indoor planting project, I think. Maybe start with a single mini greenhouse and go from there. And now, for bed.

Short entry tonight because it turns out I may have to go back to work. 

Our access to the secure phone that is owned by DND malfunctioned this evening, so one of my employees called and opened a support ticket. She got a call back saying that there had been a policy change "as of today" that support requests had to come from me (that's how she put it, but I'm not sure if they want the manager or the ISSO to make the request, because I am the former but not the latter) over a secure network. The guy also told her that if they get a request from anyone else now that it's considered a security incident. 

My employee pointed out that we hadn't heard anything about a policy change. His response? "Oh, yeah, I don't think we've told any of our clients about it yet."

*beats head on desk repeatedly*

I'm awaiting an email with more instructions from DND, and I guess I will see how that goes.

But for FUCK'S SAKE.