theories

there's a very nice, quiet woman who started here a few weeks ago. at first, everybody was confused. when she arrived for her first day of work, none of the managers knew who she was, and the receptionist was very frustrated.

because of this mystery, several people offered their theories. (you'll remember that we're very good at those; just search "theory" in this blog using the box on the right!)

• Theory #1: she's related to the president of the company, who is paying her under the table.
• Theory #2: she's related to someone else in the company, and she may or may not be paid under the table.
• Theory #3 (and my favorite): she's actually the president of the company, a la Undercover Boss, since she and the president have never been seen in the same room at the same time.

turns out, she's an extern! not nearly as exciting as the Undercover Boss theory, but still a little mysterious. i admit that i had no idea what an extern was, so of course i Googled it! here's what i found:

²ex·tern

 noun

Definition of EXTERN

: a person connected with an institution but not living or boarding in it; specifically : a nonresident doctor or medical student at a hospital

but we're not a medical institution. and nobody lives here. well, i can't be too sure about that, because it seems like some people never leave, while others are never here (or so it seems).

anyway, this one was more helpful:

Externship - Externships are experiential learning opportunities, similar to internships, offered by educational institutions to give students short practical experiences in their field of study. In medicine it may refer to a visiting physician who is not part of the regular staff. 

ok, that makes sense. and that would explain why she followed one employee around for days when she started here. i mean, it's normal for a new employee to shadow an experienced employee while they work; it's a whole kind of weird that the new employee shadowed the experienced employee to the bathroom and back... 


word of the day: cacophony 

today's lunch

today's lunch was awesome because i used my hot pot to boil noodles in water. i feel super resourceful.
i wish i had taken pictures, but my hot pot looks like this:


yeah. it was fun, i promise.




word of the day: notate

quote of the week: "my daughter goes to the doctor on a regular periodical basis so she needs the coverage worser than i do."

random urban sentence: that lady got out of pocket, so i got in my bag on her.

siesta

i get tired at 2:00 every single day at work.

here is my work day routine:

8:00 clock in for work
11:30 i feel hungry so i eat a snack, usually involving sunflower seeds and Yogi Breathe Deep tea.
12:30 clock out for lunch, eat, browse the internet, sometimes knit
1:30 clock in from lunch
2:00 crash
2:30 try not to fall asleep
3:00 ask people to repeat themselves when they talk to me
5:00 clock out and thank God that the day is over so i can go home

here is my new lunch routine:

12:30 clock out for lunch, eat food (outside when the weather is nice)
12:50 clean up
1:00 naptime in my office (not even kidding)
1:20 alarm goes off, get up, do a little sun salutation to wake up, drink water, eat a Hershey's kiss
1:30 clock back in and work productively

today was Day 1 of my new lunch routine. it went rather well, except that i took some time falling asleep. i didn't turn off the light in my office, and i think the darkness will help induce sleep better. i also slept with my shoes on (what was i thinking?) but i won't do that again.

acknowledgements: thank you to siestaawareness.org and wikipedia for helping me understand that my body temp drops and i make more melatonin in the middle of the day, so it's perfectly natural that i want a nap after lunch. i'd also like to thank the people involved in giving me a one-hour lunch break.most of all, i'd like to thank God for giving us the gift of sleep.

urban dictionary word of the day: pop off

more reasons to enjoy my office

today, i realized that my manager has a girlfriend named Holly.



word of the day: superfluous

how to land a job

x

it's that time again! the customer service department is hiring, and i realize that i have enough experience with this process to put some important tips out there. so, if you're reading this and you've been recently laid off and need a new job, please take the advice of someone who has spent a lot of time reviewing resumes, interviewing, and training new hires. this is the real world. put on your grown-up pants!

applying for the job

• write your resume.
• make sure there are no spelling errors.
• check your grammar.
• keep formatting consistent. if you're listing your jobs in bold, list all of your jobs in bold.
• make sure your phone number is on the resume.
• re-check grammar, spelling, and formatting.
• if there is an application to fill out, answer all the questions.

interview day

• show up. (you'd be surprised at how many people find this step difficult.)
• smile.
• answer every question. if "i don't know" is your answer, make up an answer.
• look interested.
• ask at least one question. if you don't have any questions, make one up.

date of hire!

• show up. (again, this one is often missed, but it's crucial to having a job.)
• try. or at least look like you're trying. 
• texting or checking your personal email while you're supposed to be training does not look like trying. 
• taking notes does look like trying.
• come back the next day. repeat. 

anything i'm missing? feel free to comment and add your own!

frequently misspelled word of the day - misspell

fun abbreviation of the day - CID - Consider It Done

2 Office-like stories

oh man, tonight is The Delivery episode of The Office. only two hours. my sister is bring over her knitting club, and my neighbors are coming over, too. it'll be a full house, but i like it that way. i know they're a fictitious couple, but congrats to Jim and Pam on the scheduled birth of their baby! (hey, that's pretty realistic to me. i mean, preggo #2 in our office had her appointment at 7am and she's still on maternity leave - shout out!)

ok, our Office-like story today is about a call taken by a Customer Service Rep that will not be named (but we'll say it's a girl, since the probability of this rep being a female is just that high. if you work in an office, you know i'm right).

this poor girl took the call at 10 minutes till 5pm. anybody in customer service dreads taking calls right before the end of the day, hoping that the odds fall in their favor and the caller has all their information ready and only has one question. well, this was the other kind of call. it was about 10 after 5pm when she asked me to take over the call, since she really needed to go. i understand wanting to leave at the end of your shift (last night, my phone rang with one minute to go. nice woman, tons of questions. 10 minutes.)

i took the call. i was a little scared already, since this girl was either laughing or crying, which was causing the other of the two. i wasn't sure of the cause, and that makes a difference in how you want to answer. and then i answered. and i couldn't help myself. i had to hit the mute button just in case my laugh actually vocalized. although, i was warned. when transferring the call, the rep said, "country." i should have listened better. but i couldn't understand more than 2 words at a time. have you ever talked to someone who slurs together their words so badly that "a" and "i" sound the same? i have.

bonus Office-y story!
i just remembered this, which happened yesterday. i went to make a new pot of coffee in the kitchen. i was talking to a couple people in there, so i was distracted (not an excuse, just a description of facts).

anyway, i went to make half a pot of coffee because it was 4pm, most of the office was leaving but since i work a later shift, i wanted some coffee with the half-cookie i had vultured from the kitchen when the visiting company was done with their Panera-catered lunch. yum. so, in the process of making coffee and talking at the same time, i half-filled up our little pitcher with water from the sink. and then i went over and poured it into the coffeemaker.

yeah, i forgot to empty the old coffee out of the pot.
yeah, i forgot to replace the filter and put new coffee grounds in.
but wait - there's more!

so the person i was talking with comes to help. together, we manage to take the old coffeepot from its place in the coffeemaker, allowing the water -- which is running through the old coffee grounds -- to spill onto the table on which the coffeemaker is sitting, and throw the old coffee grounds into a bowl that had just been washed. utter chaos for about 3 minutes, while we run out of paper towels and get more, and clean up the re-dirtied bowl. 


in the end, i did do it the right way and got my well-deserved cup of coffee. so, happy ending. :)

word of yesterday: fictitious

word of today: "atchit" - pronounced like "hatchet" without the "h" and tacked on to the end of a verb. as in, "Google-atchit."

what a disappointing pretzel day

so, here's what went wrong with my master plan:

first, the new girl didn't start today. apparently, she starts next monday. i just wasn't told. so, absolutely 0% chance of her going to the beet farm or egging a building.

there were no toppings for the pretzels!! in fact, there was nobody guarding the pretzels at all. they were in a box on a table in a conference room that nobody knew about until today. i even came in early today! i was so excited. the pretzels were supposed to arrive at 9:30am. it turned 11am, and then somebody found out they were down the hall, past the men's bathroom. i would like to thank the person who finally found the pretzels. they must have been eagerly searching for them, because there's no need to walk down that corridor past the men's room. if you're a man, you miss it by a few feet. if you're a woman, you're even farther away. and if you've got the munchies, the vending machines aren't even as far down that hall as the men's restroom. so i really wonder how someone found it... unless they were a man (or very observant woman) walking to the restroom, and they happened to notice someone walking out of that room with a pretzel in their hand. they might have asked, or they might have gone to investigate. or, maybe they weren't in need of rest at all, and they were deciding how best to spend $1.25 -- a can of coke or two packs of gum? i think i like this situation better, because the person had a better chance of spotting someone in the know, because a really indecisive person (probably a woman) could stand there for at least 3 minutes and not be conspicuous.

anyway, back to the room without a pretzel topping man. yeah, nobody there. just pretzels -- cold pretzels -- in a box. with some mustard that you could squeeze onto the pretzel, if you so desired. at least there was some variety: they had yellow mustard and Dijon mustard. but nothing else. did i mention that they were cold and just sitting in a box? i could have taken that box and walked away, and nobody would have known! except for my company, because we have security cameras. i'm pretty sure all of the other offices in the building are small and don't have security cameras.

my manager didn't even have a pretzel because he didn't want to break his diet. and i forgot to get him to do a Cosby impression.

not the best day. maybe tomorrow will be better.

word of the day: conspicuous /kənsp'ɪkjuəs/

Synonyms:
adjective: prominent, noticeable, notable, marked, outstanding, striking, salient, obvious

1. If someone or something is conspicuous, people can see or notice them very easily.ADJ ADJ-GRADED
   • Antonym inconspicuous
   • The most conspicuous way in which the old politics is changing is in the growing use of referendums.
   • You may feel tearful in situations where you feel conspicuous.
   • conspicuously ADV ADV-GRADED ADV with v ADV adj
     
     1. Britain continues to follow U.S. policy in this and other areas where American policies have most conspicuously failed.
     2. Johnston's name was conspicuously absent from the list.
2. If you say that someone or something is conspicuous by their absence, you are drawing attention to the fact that they are not in a place or situation where you think they should be. PHRASE
   • He played no part in the game and was conspicuous by his absence in the post-match celebrations.

bathroom upgrade

today, the office restrooms got a little makeover -- in the form of automatic soap dispensers! plus, a few weeks ago, they upgraded on the paper towel quality, which was so nice! it doesn't rip, and i don't have to use as much...

is it weird that we get excited over these things?

tomorrow, a new episode of The Office! :)


word of the day: guesstimation 

a sticky situation

this morning in the kitchen, there was a free treat! some sort of pie-crusted, danish-topped treat. two co-workers were in the kitchen discussing it with lots of "yums" and such.

a third co-worker popped his head in the kitchen and said it sounded like an X-rated film in there.

what a crazy place.

today, i switched my default printer to the front one instead of the back to mix it up a little.

also, there was an insurance questionnaire that one of our customers filled out. the question was PPO or HMO? they answered "idk."

word of the day: cacophonous /kək'ɒfənəs/
If you describe a mixture of sounds as cacophonous, you mean that they are loud and unpleasant.

currently reading: The Kite Runner

the finer things club met last night. we discussed The Lovely Bones. interesting conversations about death, heaven, and being pregnant...

more bathroom encounters

story #1: earlier today, i went to the bathroom. (actually, i went to the bathroom a lot today, because i've been drinking a ton of water, because i'm sick. but maybe that's tmi. forgive me, i'm on ibuprophen at the moment, and i think it's making me just a bit loopy. but this is about one specific trip -- to the bathroom, not a drug reference. ok, back to the story.)

on my way to the bathroom, i noticed a woman walking from the opposite end of the corridor toward me. (the ladies' room is about halfway between the two far ends of the hallway.) she was listening to an iPod, which i thought was strange, since usually only young people listen to their iPods all the time, even on trips to the restroom.

anyway, i went in to the bathroom, and when i came back out (after washing my hands with warm, soapy water for 20 seconds to prevent swine flu), i saw the same woman walking toward the bathroom, listening to her iPod, only she was about 5 feet closer to the bathroom than when i had gone into it.

oh my goodness, i seriously thought i had time warped, that the door to the bathroom must have been some kind of portal to a wormhole and when i walked back out through the door, it spit me back into our dimension but 5 seconds of time had gone by instead of a few minutes! then i noticed that she was walking up and down the corridor. it must have been her lunch or something. but it was a gorgeous day out today, and i would have been doing that outside if i was her. but i'm not. and i don't have an iPod.



story #2: co-worker trish told me this story after she came back from the bathroom about half an hour ago. she walked out to the ladies' room. as she approached the door, one of the cleaning guys (the one she says looks like the red stapler guy from Office Space) came out of the very same women's restroom. not holding anything, no trash in hand, nothing. maybe he just likes the aroma of the citrus air freshener in there or something.

anyway, trish chose her stall and sat down. then she heard the door open again, and then there was a thud. a mop head slid under the little door, invaded her stall, stopped, and then retreated. the door opened and closed, and when she left the bathroom (after washing her hands with warm, soapy water for 20 seconds while singing "happy birthday" to herself twice to prevent swine flu), the cleaning guy had disappeared.

word of the day is still vicarious.

i'm not going to the finer things club tonight, due to a micommunication with my darling husband about plans. oh well. it's ok, i wasn't too into Atonement anyway. so,
currently reading: Connecting by Larry Crabb



tonight's world series game, i will be voting for the phillies.

sock thief

ok, i didn't have time to write about this last week, but it's just a really funny story.

one of our CSRs keeps slippers under her desk. (i'm ok with that. makes work a little more enjoyable and a little less confining. working in an office makes you appreciate little things like that.) well, she had taken off her boots and put them aside, and she had also taken off her socks. to let the socks air out, she hung them over the trash bin under her desk. whatevs.

along came the cleaning lady. now, according to a later account by an actual witness, the cleaning lady stood there for a little while, just staring at the floor before she cleaned out this particular trash bin. in hindsight, i guess this is acceptable. she must have been thinking, "oh no. this was not part of my training." but probably in Spanish. and what would you have done? most people don't like feet or things that touch feet, and it was cleaner to just take the edges of the trash bag and let the socks drop into the bag. (fyi, however, i am not one of those people. i think feet are beautiful, and i feel really bad for them because most people take them for granted and then hate them on top of that.) so, there was a dilemma, and it took a while, but a decision was made. no turning back now. exit cleaning lady.

enter sockless customer service rep.
enter awkward moment.


word of the day (and, really, the whole weekend): vicarious

currently reading: Atonement by Ian McEwan for The Finer Things Club, which is meeting this Wednesday. i'm only about 1/5 of the way through it. meh.

the case of the missing mug

so, for the past week (about 4 business days), my blue mug that i got from wal-mart has been randomly MIA off and on. i stop by the kitchen pretty regularly around 10:30 each morning, and sometimes it would be there, and sometimes it would be not there.

there's another person in the company who has the exact same model of mug. i figured she was probably taking it hostage, completely oblivious to the switcheroo.

but then i couldn't find my mug for a whole day! i had to feed my coffee addiction, so i killed Mother Earth a little bit by using poisonous styrofoam cups from the kitchen.

then, yesterday, i found my mug on the kitchen counter -- with ice water in it. i walked up to it in a daze (probably from the lack of caffeine/sugar: i mean, my mug is a beast and those little styrofoam cups only just meet my addiction quota), and i said, "is that my mug?" sure enough, the three tiny identifiable scratches rested on the bottom. i said, "that's my mug!" while pointing at it. meanwhile, the kitchen was half-full of people, and one of them took ownership: "i'm sorry! it was in the cupboard, so i thought it was free game. i'll wash it and put it back!" to which i replied, "no, it's ok. i was wanting to get a new one anyway." which is not a lie.

so, last night at wal-mart, i bought a pretty green mug that is non-translucent, so you can't tell how much coffee is in there from any angle; you actually have to look inside the mug. and it's a square on the bottom but a circle on top, and i think that is pretty nifty.

anyway, the mystery is solved and i now have two mugs at my disposal in the office. this has been a pretty productive two days.


song of the day: "horchata" by vampire weekend

Spanish word of the day: ajena/ajeno

The Bug Situation

today, thursday, october 15, 2009, will forever be known as "the day of the bug situation." here's what happened:

a bug fell from above onto a customer service rep's shoulder this morning. our office, like most offices in the united states, are mostly female. so, this rep was a female, and she did was most females would do in her situation: she freaked out. apparently, dead bugs fall out of the vent over her head all the time. so her neighbor suggested that there might be dead bugs in her hair. so she threw off her headset and shook out her hair. with the permission of our manager, she called the vice president of the company to investigate. they brought out a ladder, and there was some discussion about moving the vent by switching the ceiling tiles around... why do i never have a camera at times like these??

so, the vice president informed our front desk person that maintance would be stopping by to check out "the bug situation."

cue the maintenance guys, who brought in a ladder of their own and pulled out a little flashlight to check out the scene of the crime.

i cannot believe i left my camera at home!

anyway, we were discussing solutions to this epidemic. this is what we came up with:

• hang an upside down umbrella (ella, ella) from the ceiling to catch the intruders. but that's bad luck, so the idea was quickly rejected.
• hang a bedsheet to catch the dead bugs before they can contaminate our rep and her stuff. i like this idea because i had a rainbow brite canopy bed when i was young that i absolutely loved. it made me feel like a princess, and all those bright colors must have stimulated my brain to make me into the smart young woman i am today. so, yes, i very much support this plan, especially if the sheet has a pretty pattern on it.
• we're open to suggestions if anybody can think of a better idea.

word of the day: ungently

MLIA of the day: Sunday, at church, during the children's sermon the Pastor asked "What do you have to do to go to heaven?" Immediately one kid answers "Die." Everyone burst out laughing for the next five minutes. Greatest children's sermon ever. MLIA

random question of the day: someone brought in red velvet cake with white icing to celebrate the phillies' win on monday. why does red velvet cake make me think of a bleeding armadillo? 10 points to whoever answers this because it's going to drive me crazy until i can remember. it must be from a movie or tv show or book or something...

coffee in the morning

highlight of the day: one of our CSRs gets extremely hyper on caffeine on a regular basis, on top of being a crazy person in general. therefore, a neighbor of hers decided to email said CSR's mother to warn her against the dangers of coffee in the morning and to plead with this mother for the sake of the department.

the mother in question replied and is now known as mama rita in Customer Service.


word of the day: discretion

NO TIME!

what a crazy busy day! i'm still trying to catch up, and i only have 15 minutes left... ok, i know that writing this right now isn't helping my production, but i've got to post a couple of things before i forget!

poor pregnant girl #2 had a really, really bad day. every other call was an angry person who just needed a punching bag - and she happened to be the one to pick up the phone. i tried to help by showing her notalwaysright.com. it's really nice to know that other people deal with these kinds of things, too. check it out. it's a really nice way to spend your lunch time. :)

word of the day: unreadable

spanish word of the day: coqueto

p.s. there are STILL leftover treats in customer service, so if anybody is reading this and just needs a really good sugar fix, come visit!