26 March 2009

Today was a pretty good day. I set my alarm clock last night for five thirty this morning so I could go to the gym. And when my alarm clock went off this morning, I got up, re set it for seven and fell right back asleep. I just wasn’t feeling like it at all. And My shins hurt after the hike yesterday morning. And I haven’t taken a day off in a while… so that’s how I justified it.

I went into the office around eight and my friend Ashley had arrived a few hours earlier. Mike and I asked her about the training she had to do the day before and she was mad. Real mad. She had gotten stuck training some of the new people in Boston at the last minute, even though the people taking over part of her job knew over a month and a half ago that she was leaving. The directorate that was supposed to take over the project had backed out at the last minute and that left Ashley to have to pull an all nighter the day she was supposed to leave in order to make it all better.

The three of us were supposed to go to one of the nearby offices this morning so that we could take care of computer issues and also get our Kissimmee credentials. Why this wasn’t coordinated in advance is obvious. The Kissimmee folks are really in a bind with their lack of manning and with their lack of resources. I hope that when our replacements get here, we can take care of a lot of this in advance.

So we jumped on the bus and rode over to the old offices to get to work. And it was a real mess. It took the three of us four hours to get (almost everything) taken care of. I should mention here that Tony went with us, but was absolutely no good at all. We have figured out that Tony is an ‘all talk and no action’ kind of a guy. And he’s lonely. We tried to include him in what we were doing, but all he did was complain about this and that… eventually we just ignored him. He’s not going to get many friends like that. It was actually kind of embarrassing how he was griping like a little kid.

And since Tony is more senior than me, it wasn’t really my place to say anything to him. But I did talk to someone else to talk to him some other time.

We had to wait about an hour and a half since we missed the next bus, so we walked around and did a little window shopping. I need to buy some plastic drawers for my closet. I don’t have any drawers right now and I have everything stacked in neat little piles or stored in boxes. Living like this is going to get old after a while. While we were there, we picked up the mail that we had sent back in Boston. So now I have some more stuff to mail back to Boston.

We got back to the office to find out that no one had gotten any computer monitors or phones for our office. I don’t know how we are supposed to get to work when we don’t have computers or phones. This isn’t the business we had 20 years ago. Nothing really gets done without technology. And speaking of technology the internet was down at work. I couldn’t believe it. Work was coming to a screaming halt. Additionally, we could make local calls but our long distance capabilities were down as well. What the heck were we supposed to do?

Well, we cleaned. I was bored, as was Mike and Ashley. So when Spencer started sweeping, we found the cleaning supplies and we swept, Mike mopped, and I dusted everything. My allergies have been acting up again. The dust and grime and crap that is in the air was coating everything. The dusting rags were turning brown and sticky and I cleaned as many of the flat surfaces that I could see. I also cleaned the baseboards and got in the corners to get everything that I could. Here’s the kicker… Even while Spencer was cleaning, Tony just watched. That really got my goat.

Mike and Ashley found out that there was some place nearby that was playing music and asked if I wanted to go after work, but I wasn’t feeling like it. I wanted to get into the boxes that I picked up and find out what I didn’t need and what I could mail back. Also, one of the boxes has my clippers in it and I wanted to cut my hair tonight. I found my clippers and typed this up. And so I’m going to sign off.

Oh! I just remembered, Chip told us that we should have internet in our apartments in a few days. The contractor that was hired to install our wi-fi bought the wrong type of routers compatible with the buildings that we live in. With everything else that hasn’t gone right since this office opened, I wasn’t surprised.