A Cat By Any Other Name

Today, for the first time, our team of five split in two. Richard and one other continued doing the sessions we’ve done all week, and the rest of us (two trainers and the training manager) headed off to the computer labs for some hands-on training. Since there were two sessions, that meant that we each [...]

Months ago, my younger sister made plans to come down and visit over Halloween. Back when I was working for The Company to be Nicknamed Never, it wasn’t going to be a problem because at least I’d be home in the evenings. With the new job, and the fact that training started this week, this [...]

Richard drove back down to Santa Clara on Sunday night, since training started up again there on Monday. I, however, got one extra day to laze around the house and be completely unproductive before I had to leave. Actually I wasn’t completely unproductive, because I did manage to not only track down my absentee ballot, [...]

We had a few glitches in the second half of training today, mainly because first of all it hadn’t occurred to any of the resident mollusk handler managers that we might actually need someone to unlock the door to the computer room, and then once we finally got into the room where we were supposed [...]

When the clock radio clicked on yesterday morning, the reception was pretty fuzzy, but I could understand enough to hear that they were talking about election results. I focused long enough to hear that Grey Davis was reelected, at which point I heaved a huge sigh of relief that California was at least not saddled [...]

Before we left last week we went to the library and so this week I headed down with a small bag overflowing with books, intent on doing a lot of reading. Each night this week I’ve done my usual email-and-journal reads and then I climbed into bed and read one book a night. They’re all [...]

A while ago we bought season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD and industriously worked our way through the entire set. A few weeks ago, Richard tracked down season 2 and in the days between our travels recently, we’ve been watching episode after episode. It’s been an eye-opening experience, considering that at least [...]

The last week of October and first week of November I spent training the mollusk handlers on the new system. It was interesting, in a frantic, exciting, vaguely stressful sort of way. The past two days, however, have been an exercise in patience and extreme boredom. This is because the past two days have been [...]

Aside from the sheer boredom of having nothing to do most of the day, there have been a few random interesting moments to alleviate the rest. The mollusks, of course, are always interesting. Some of them come in with little kids – cherubic little faces under fuzzy pigtails or wispy mops of hair. Sometimes we [...]

In my week-long search for a Starbucks (or somewhere with decent coffee) I got into my car this morning thinking that this day I would finally succeed. There is a Starbucks, they told me, just across the freeway from the offices we were to be in today. I set off in search, but the fog [...]