back!

hey all you loyal readers, i'm back! i was out on vacation in lovely spokane, washington at the end of may, and then life got a little crazy and i needed a break from everything - even knitting! i know, that's just crazy. but it's true.

anyway, since coming back from vacation, a few things have happened:

• i switched shifts! from 10:30-7 to 8-5. it's been lovely carpooling with a friend/the receptionist in her convertible (top down on all sunny days, which gave me an excuse to buy sunglasses) and getting home at a decent hour, eating dinner at a normal time (as opposed to our old 9:00 dinnertime). 
• i got an iPod! alright, the story behind this isn't nearly as fun as you'd think.
•  DISCLAIMER: don't read this story if you have trouble thinking about surgeries or blood or anything like that. i don't hold back in my explanations. 
• story: if you didn't already hear, thane got the wisdom teeth on his left side removed last wednesday. he had scheduled a consult at 5:00, so he went there straight after work (which he could do, since i carpool now). they looked and recommended immediate surgery, so that's what they did. i got a call around 5:40 from thane saying he was going into surgery. now, i love my husband because he is awesome. he's so strong that he has a superpower called Resistance to Anesthesia. because of this, several novocaine attempts did not work. at all. so, he dealt with the pain, like he always does, only stopping to convulse in pain for a minute, and then allowing the dentist to continue. apparently, there was blood everywhere. it took about two hours total, and the dentist gave us a massive discount! not sure if it's because he felt bad or because thane is only on the school's insurance plan (i.e., nothing was covered) or because we went to college with his wife. :) 
• so, with all the money we saved from the massive discounts, we had some tax refund money to spend like it was ours! i bought an iPod and put in an order on Knit Picks. thane bought an Xbox 360 and the 2010 FIFA world cup Xbox game. 
• the world cup started! so it has officially been 4 years that thane and i have been together. we started dating in june 2006, and we just watched world cup games as much as possible. well, now we both have full-time jobs and can't watch most of the games, but it's still fun. go USA! i for one am completely satisfied with the moral victory over England on saturday. :)

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."

so many crazy people in the world!!

some of my favorite quotes from emails or calls that happened today:

• "five minutes ago i could see, but now i'm blind."
• "ok, but is it lupus?"
• "crack -- you know, it's a drug?"
• "ok, please explain to me how a chair caused your abdominal pain that made you go to the ER..."

and here's a fun conversation:

rep: "i can't just sit in silence while you think of a question. it's tying up the line. can you call back when you think of something?"  
caller: "ok, you don't like silence?" *starts singing* (and it sounds an awful lot like the Little Mermaid -- "ahh aahhh")
rep after the call: "the little mermaid gave me contractions!"

yesterday's song of the day: "if you want to be happy for the rest of your life" by jimmy soul

we had tons of fun yesterday trying to figure out the lyrics before some brilliant person Googled them.

i did have a song of the day for today, but now i can't think of it because of that catchy song about marrying ugly women... any help? it might have been the "chicken noodle soup" song we discovered today. apparently, there's a dance. 

in other news, The Office comes back on tonight! i can't wait. i'm inviting a ton of people over, i'm going to be knitting the Gryffindor scarf i've been working on, and i'm going to take notes for tomorrow's blog! ok, maybe not the last one.