Only two days this week where I went home wanting to have left the 'I resign' note on AJ's desk - so a good week this week. Tuesday was a bad day.
Monday: LeeAnn came in 7 minutes late - missed the first bus.
AJ called us together and said he'd decided over the weekend to implement an "environmental office" policy. He told Fiona to arrange for the plastic plants to be taken away and said Head Office had already ordered some real ones to replace them. We'll all have to have at least one plant to look after. LeeAnn asked if she could have a cactus as they were sort of cool, but AJ said we'd have to have whatever they brought in. Amy said she didn't want any flowering plants on her desk as she suffered from allergies. Fiona said it was because she ate white bread and if she switched to wholemeal she wouldn't get them. James said there were bound to be some leaf-only ones coming; she should have one of them.
We have two formal staff meetings every week - the Monday morning one's the exciting one. AJ started having it first thing so he could tell us what latest idea he'd come up with, and we all know he reads management books and talks to other CEOs at weekends. It's always an adventure coming in on Mondays as we never know what we'll get this time. Each new policy lasts about a week before he loses interest and we can let it slide.
Most of the informal meetings we hold start off when two or three of us are just talking something over. The rest listen in, and then jump in and get involved too.
Tuesday: AJ came in and said his PC was broken again. I followed him into his office and he showed me the screen was frozen up. The explorer had died on bootup so I closed it down and rebooted it. While we were waiting he said it'd already had some sort of error message this morning (he couldn't remember what it said) so he'd switched it off at the mains and switched it back on again, and then he'd gotten a blue screen with a moving bar on the bottom. I explained the scandisk screen to him again. He said yes, I'd told him that before, but he thought I'd have fixed it by now.
Nearly got caught out when AJ was bored and wandering around during the afternoon. I was writing up the report on the error message he'd had this morning and he came in and asked me what I was doing - I told him and he asked to see what I'd written so far. I hadn't had chance to edit it up into the "easy reader" version I give him, so I had to show him the "technical" version I'll be sending to Guru Bob. I'd written down that AJ was NU when he hit the problem, so he asked what I meant by NU. I lied and said it was the American spelling for "new" and meant the problem was new to him when he hit it. He said OK then and went off, so I didn't have to tell him that it's really my shortcut way of writing "No Use."
Wednesday: LeeAnn came in 7 minutes late - overslept.
The big printer wasn't working after the lunchbreak. Mike had done the same thing as last week - pulled the plug out to put his mobile on charge. Walked over, pointed it out to Mike, pulled the mobile charger and plugged the printer back in.
Amy said she won't go down to the new filing room on her own any more - she heard rustling yesterday and is worried about being leapt on by big rats with 'teef lifk thif.' The door's a spring lock one so once you go in it sloooowly closes behind you. LeeAnn volunteered to go down there with her from now on. She said she won't go in herself - she'll just stay on guard with a yard brush ready and hold the door wide open so Amy can run for it if the rats come.
Thursday: LeeAnn came in 7 minutes late - stopped to give directions to a van driver.
It was the firm who maintain the plastic plants, and they'd come in to take them away. There's been no sign of the real ones and nobody knows when they'll be coming. AJ was wandering around getting in the way of the plastic plant people. As soon as he'd got the "leave us to get on with it" message and gone back into his office, Donna ran around and lifted six plants! She told us they were hers, as she'd brought in six real ones instead of having plastic ones, so I said I'd help her and Lee-Ann carry them down and ask Stores to find some place to hide them. We arranged with Steve in Stores to leave them in the back of Store One. He's said they'll be OK there over the weekend.
Friday: Donna stopped off to water her plants on the way in this morning. When she came up she came over to me and said I'd never guess. One of the red-leaved plants still had the water in the pot from where she'd watered them last night, so she'd checked and found she'd lifted the wrong one. I said it was OK, nobody would ever know, but she said the plastic plant people were going to guess when one of their plants started wilting. I said if they traced it back to us we should just deny it.
Friday's always a good day for me, I can relax on Friday. We have a staff meeting at 10:00, and most times the discussion gets more general than work-related. We all go back to work about 11:30 and carry on until the lunchbreak. That's from 1:00 to 2:00 - I get a full hour. If I haven't got something out the door by 2:00 it's too late, so I can leave it until Monday. AJ leaves straight after the lunchbreak for the Friday afternoon meeting at Head Office. It takes him ten minutes to get there, the meeting's from 2:30 to 3:00, and it's closer to his home than here. There's "no point" in him coming back so late, so Friday afternoon is uninterrupted SysAdmin time. One of the better things about this job is I work 8:30 - 5:00 Monday to Thursday, and finish at 4:30 on Friday! I'm still getting that guilty feeling for not coming in Saturdays, but I'm working on it and it's lessening.
to read 00/07/24-28