I was speaking to my friend A at work today and told him that I’d be turning 30 next week.? I asked him if there was anything I needed to watch out for.? His answer:? 17 Year olds.

Man-o-man, what a week this has been.? It all started out normally enough - work was bad on Monday, but it’s nearly always bad on Monday.? That’s the price we pay for being closed on Saturdays and Sundays.? But once Monday had come and gone the stress lingered across the call center floor.? You could read it on the faces of the agents - they’ve just about had enough.

The Company (our client) has a habit of not communicating with itself very well.? This week we had a mailing go out that was worked on by four or five departments.? There were no fewer than five documents going to four groups, and the information contained was nowhere close to being consistent across them all.? This generated a huge number of calls for our department to handle.

We’ve also started a marketing campaign that, though slow to get off the ground, has begun bringing inquiries in every format possible.? All this extra volume has forced each department to fend for themselves, even my grossly understaffed team.? A lack of time to follow-up with customers has made the calls even more difficult.

And so we have the perfect storm and tempers are beginning to flair. Today we nearly had a fistfight in what is normally one of the easier departments, had a supervisor’s meeting degrade into a screaming match and an entire team pulled to talk about the degrading of the inter-personal relationships.

To add to things, I’ve had my own personal issues that have kept me from being able to put on a strong face for my team.? I know I shouldn’t let my home life get into my work life and vice versa. But when neither one goes right they sort of get hard to separate.

So forgive me if I don’t have any funny stories to tell.? This week its all been for not.

Last week at work we were talking about our favorite comedies and naturally Monty Python and the Holy Grail came up.? E, a girl who I only casually know, and I started sharing our favorite quotes with one another in bad English (and sometimes French) accents.? Yeah, I’m one of those.

So today E came running across the call center floor telling me she had something for me. She presented a brand new Holy Grail poster. I was very grateful and its now proudly hanging up at my desk so she can enjoy it when she stops by to ask questions.

I’m always sort of surprised when people do nice things, especially random nice things, for me. If you haven’t already figured it out I’m some what of a grouch and at times I can be downright mean, though its almost never intentional. I’m just not the first person you think of when your looking to purchase a present, especially if you have to work with me.

So thanks E. You made my day special.

This was a question on Jeopary tonight. It seems rather profound even thirty-four years later.

We will have peace with the Arabs when they will love their children more than they hate us.

- Golda Meir

Sorry about the lack of posts this week, especially to all you new visitors. I’ve been trying to find a solution to the problem with the second post aligning with the lowest item on the sidebars. I even went as far as to post on a forum looking for help and had a brief exchange with someone who I thought was going to helpful before they lost interest. I’ve even toyed with the idea of starting over and just rewriting the whole thing - but this does not seem like an acceptable solution. I like the new look and don’t want to have to go through all this again.

In other news I’ve scrapped another personal project. I had decided I was going to try to grow my hair out a bit and see what a pro could do with it. It was getting really hot though so last night I went out to my sister’s house and got a hair cut. I also took the liberty of using her clippers to take out my beard. Maybe I’ll give it another go through the cooler months. I’ve requested some recent photos of me before the trim so I can post a before and after.

I’ve managed to get an .rss feed going. I’ve tested it in snarfer and in google’s browser based reader. For those of you who don’t know rss feed readers act a lot like Outlook, or at least the one I use does.? It retreives new posts from sites you subscribe to and it ‘feeds’ you new posts from sites you visit.? They call it browser-free but I don’t see how its really all that diffrent, except you’re automatically notified of new posts.
So thats it fow now kids. Sorry about the inactivity this week. Check back tomorrow for our Sunday Sampler.

B is one of the guys on my team. He’s really smart, really nice, really quiet and does his job with little or no intervention on my part. Days can go by and all I’ll do is have casual, informal contact with him.

This morning someone asked me if B was going to be in. I looked at his schedule and saw that he was scheduled off for the day as well as yesterday and tomorrow.? This struck me as odd because I thought for sure he’d been there the day before. I asked R if he had been there the day before and she assured me he had.? I asked another of my team members what she thought, T said he was there too.

An informal poll gave us final results of 6-1 in favor of his having been there.? Thing is, he wasn’t.? I don’t know if this says more about B or my attentiveness as a supervisor.? Either way I don’t think I’m going to tell B this story, but I’m sure one of the girls will.

So in an effort to figure out what the heck is wrong with my theme I visited w3.org’s xml validator. After considerable effort and I brief scare with the site going black for a few minutes I’ve validated the xml on the site. This means that everything should work correctly…but it doesn’t.

I have earned the right to be smug though.

My friend Sunny lives in Prague where she works for a missions group.? Her blog talks a lot about local people and events but every now and then she busts out some takes on living as an American in Europe.? This post really struck me as funny.

I wrote this one just after I finished reading Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. If you’ve never read it you should give Chronicals Vol. 1 to get an idea of how Bob writes. Neither one is an easy read but at least Chronicals isn’t sureal.

So I can’t remember my reasoning behind the spacing. I guess I was trying to be William Carlos Williams or T.S. Eliot. Seguir leyendo »

Another week has come and gone and its time for another Sunday Sampler.? I’m sure you noticed yet another new layout for the site.? This one I think I’m going to keep for a bit.? I like the three column layout and it seems to be working okay in Internet Explorer.? Even the single page posts are displaying correctly.

Anyway…

• We’re Not Afraid is a worldwide effort to show terrorists that their tactics don’t work.? Though I question the effectivness of the campaign I do like the idea. The thing is, today’s terrorist isn’t worried about whether or not we’re scared of them, they just want us dead.
• In an effort to actually conform to blogging standards I’ve decided to start a ‘blog-roll’ for the blogs I read regularly.? Hopefully they’ll be kind enough to do the same.? I’ve linked to a few in prior posts, but this one is new.? WaiterRant.net is the story of Waiter and his insites into humanity through the eyes of a server.? Funny and sometimes embarrassing - especially when you see yourself through his eyes.

That’s it for this week kids.? Have a good Monday!