First Evidence

So you need more proof that I am sitting on a throne of lies otherwise known as my desk chair.  Well how about this tidbit.  You know that very first official document you get at any new job?  The W4?  The Boss handed me a W4 on my first day and I immediatly started to panic.  I've had lots of jobs and I've never known how to fill this damn thing out.  How many deductions?  What is this worksheet?  Will I look like a total loser if I take the time read it all over and actually fill out the worksheet?

My guess was yes.  I will look like a poser and I am already on shaky ground.  So I filled it out quick (have NO clue how many deductions I put down. Eleven?) and gave it right back.  Now I'm sure he looked it over and if I REALLY screwed it up he would have pointed it out.  I would have a made a cutesy joke and blown it off.  But he would've known and I wouldv'e have known that he knew and it all would have been tense, for me at least.

He didn't say a thing.  So I guess I did it right.  Or passable.  Doesn't matter.  I'm still here.  One week until tax time starts!

Pained Squirrel

The Boss is out of the office quite a bit.  He rolls in late.  He takes off for meetings and lunch.  In general, he's just not around much right now.  Not that there's a lot to do, right now.  Inevitability when he's out of the office, a squirrel or two shows up looking for him.  Mostly they have stuff they need to drop off.  That I can handle.  I can also pretty efficiently take a message that they need him to call them back.  I'm terrific at that.

Today a squirrel stumbled in not looking so great.  "Where's the boss?", he asked in a shaken up voice.

"Out with a client", I cutely smiled. "Can I help you?"  (This is the most dangerous of all sentences I can utter, because, as you know, I'm pretty helpless.)

"I was in yesterday and he gave me a list of things that he needed me to get together.  But I lost it and I can't remember what was on it."

"What kinds of things?", Part II asked from across the room.

"Account numbers and documents... I don't know.  It's all causing me pain!"

Quite a thing to claim! To be fair, he did look like he was in actual pain.

"Well how about I take your name and number.  He'll give you a call when he comes in."

The Squirrel nodded, gave me his infomation and left the door mumbling, "I just don't know where that list went...".  

The Boss was pretty unaffected by this story when he came in.

"Pain, huh?  Just getting me his bank account numbers?  What's going to happen when he sees the bill?"

Nesting

The person who used to sit at my desk left a lot of shit behind. I spent the first week just working around the cup of mostly dried up pens, the plastic canvas cow box full of business cards and dried up rubber bands, the weird scribbled up post-its, the grubby paperclip cup with only one clip. On my sixth day of work, I threw it all out. Just cleared the deck. It felt so good just to toss it all. It was right up there with putting a picture of my cat on my wallpaper and making my Firefox Persona have blinking Christmas lights. I was making this space my own.

But it wasn't my own. There was a problem.

Check out the layout.

Are you seeing my problem? Anytime one of the other three of them wanted coffee or cocoa or hot water, they were all up in my mug. Invading my space. And here's news: When that Keurig is refilling I can't hear a damn thing and that's when they want to have chit chat about the weather.

The day of the scanner test ended with the scanner getting moved in order to reach an outlet. So then it looked like this:

At first you might not see this as a big deal. Just a juxtaposition of the now fully functional non-magical scanner and the coffee situation. But what I cannot create for you is how the power cord to the coffee maker practically had to go across my lap. Or how over the course of the day the whole coffee area kept creeping closer and closer to me. It was spreading like syrup.

That afternoon after work, I took my kiddos back to the office and loaded up the two ancient monitors, the dusty keyboard and the pile of toner cartridges into my van and took them to the recycling place. My time. My dime. Completely worth it for what was happening next.

The next morning, I set about rearranging the room. Part II helped which made things so much easier. She could have easily just sat there and watched me suffer. No one is ever up in her mug over in her corner.

In short order we had the room rearranged to this:

Notice the wide open area to my right. It's quite heavenly.

I should have filled in the big green circle in the corner is the huge plant. It's happier now too. It has it's own little room right by the window!

My actual desk doesn't have drawers, so I claimed one on the coffee desk. Chuck full of my stuff that I will actually take with me when this job is over.

That's how I roll.

First Things First

I've been working in the office for two weeks now. I have a brand new computer with my own work email address. I'm not so fond of Outlook but I'm hoping that we can find a way to be friends. I'll admit that I'm prejudice against things that are ugly. Outlook is not pretty to behold.

The Boss installed Quickbooks. It didn't work at first and he had to fight with it. Then he installed stamps.com. It also put up a fight. He wanted me to listen to some tutorials on the tax software but I couldn't hear anything because there was no audio drive installed yet. More time working on that. He wanted me to study tax concepts with a program called Fastax. It worked on the first day, wouldn't open on the second. More Boss vs. computer followed.

So basically I spent my first few days at work watching him fight with my computer. While that happened I tried to find ways to keep busy.

• I went through the magazine basket and tossed everything in it older than 2008 in recycling. That ended up being everything in the basket. New assignment: Get fresh magazines for the basket.
• In the spare desk, I found a drawer that only held binder clips. There was another drawer that was mostly binder clips in my desk. Then I found a basket that was filled to the brim with binder clips. They're all together now in the spare desk. I'm a bit concerned that the combined mass of all those binder clips just might be producing their own gravity.
• I found Christmas decorations and put them up.
• I watered the plants. Again.
• I drank a bunch of hot cocoa.
  

Finally, I had a fully functioning computer system with all of the programs I could ever need working in perfect harmony.

Last Wednesday The Boss gave me a stack of pages to scan. I hadn't touched the scanner yet and had literally no idea what to do with these pages. But the way he put them down and then walked away, I could tell that this was some kind of test. Could I possibly handle something as trivial as scanning without needing help?

There was a problem right away.

"Is this a magical scanner?", I asked in my most sincere voice.

"What?"

"Well it's not plugged into anything. Not the computer. Not even a power source."

That proceeded with a lot of grumbling and rooting through a box of various cords in order to get it hooked up. Then he loaded a program called Vuescan. You guessed it. It's didn't work. About an hour later I got those documents scanned, all by myself.

That's right. I passed the test.