Surprise!

It's snowing again. This time it looks like a fine powdery stuff. Have I mentioned lately that I'm soglad I don't drive to work? I have? Okay then. Time for more coffee.

Oh and my exciting plan for the weekend: I must do my taxes. I have no less than 4 (count 'em, FOUR) W-2's for 2006, plus a 1099. Yoicks.

In unrelated news, someone from Xinjiang, China looked at my blog! I think that's kind of cool. I guess I'm not blocked!

And in even more unrelated news, One of my co-workers had not one but two of her Macs go wonky on Monday (my day off, of course). She needs to keep an older one because of this old scanner we use... but anyway, apparently they couldn't wait for me to come back so they sent one of the other IT guys up to look at them. He couldn't figure out either one. So by the time I rolled in Tuesday, she was nearly in a panic. Fortunately I had both up and running again in less than two hours. She was so happy! I was glad I could help, and it did give me a little satisfaction that I could get the problems solved. The customer service manager huffed by and said "So you got her computers taken care of?" I said yup. He said "Heh, sure stumped the IT geniuses." In fact the IT director came up later on to quiz me on what was wrong with her Macs. Part of it was just the disruption of the fact that everything was torn apart over the weekend to put in the new rubber floor; part of it was some apparent rough treatment... and just random stuff. Hopefully I'm a wee bit more appreciated around there.

New Things

So I suppose the new job is going well... depends on how you define 'well' though. My manager (who is the department head, and who was my manager almost ten years ago and three jobs ago at a different company) came up to me last night while I was troubleshooting a job and said "Do you know anyone else who is as good as you?" I was a little taken aback, and I guess it showed (plus I was a little tired; it was 10:00 pm and I'd been up since 5) because he added "No seriously, do you know anyone who is as good as you at what you do?"

I paused for a minute and said "Not really; I was pretty much the only one who did this sort of job at the previous printing place. I just don't know that many people who do this kind of thing any more. And I'd be prohibited from 'soliciting' people from there anyway because of my non-compete."

He looked disappointed and said "That's too bad. If I had two more of you, I'd just get rid of everyone else."

Woah. On the one hand I was flattered since there are eight people in the graphics department. I also thought that maybe he was just flattering me because here I was staying late for the third day in a row. Not that other people don't stay late, and he regularly works a twelve-hour day (but he has a martyr complex; I do not). Then I thought, that's kind of harsh that he would just fire all those other people (most of whom I have been getting to like); he's not like that. Then I thought, nah he wouldn't fire N. (a very sweet woman who also worked with us back at the other job and has been with him during the intervening years while I was at the other place). Then I had a funny mental picture of three clones of me in this depeartment. And finally, I thought that maybe I should ask for a raise. They are apparently doing reviews right now.

In other news, Blogger finally let me upgrade to the 'new' Blogger (I had too many posts to do it before, for some reason). I don't see too much of a difference, except for the nifty labels feature. I'll have to experiment with that. Oh and spelling still doesn't work with Safari. Maybe I'll try Firefox later.

Do I use too many parenthetical phrases?