A Trip Down Mammary Lane

I did it: I called the clinic. I made the appointment. I am getting my first mammogram next Friday.

'Tis the season, apparently, for gritting your teeth and doing the things you need to do that really hurt.

I also took a certain teenaged daughter of mine, who shall remain nameless to protect her privacy, for her very first pelvic exam today. She probably dreaded it just as much as I am dreading my first mammogram, but I suspect I'm a lot nearer to being right. I scheduled her appointment with one of the practice's female doctors (my own OB/GYN, you may recall, is a delightful, fun-loving guy called "Buzz"), who was fortunately also young and cheerful, matter-of-fact and kind.

My daughter is about six months older than I was when my mom took me for my first pelvic exam, but not a jot more nervous. I had a dream about it the night before my appointment. "Look at this gorgeous spring weather!" exclaimed the doctor, after I'd finished changing into a stunning buttless sheath.* "What a shame to be cooped up indoors on a day like this! Let's go do your exam out on the lawn."

Right next to the street, too. Why didn't I at least dream somebody got into a car crash?

I had to make my appointment, though, because my IUD is about to expire. I'm not sure how I'll know when this happens. Maybe some sparks will shoot out, followed by a wisp of smoke; this could be either really cool or kind of embarrassing, depending on whether I'm in mixed company or not. Maybe it suddenly goes "ding!" and shoots out across the room - again, possibly in awkward circumstances. More likely, I'll be eyeing that really cute waiter at Green Pastures and suddenly find myself knocked up.

Whatever the case, I need to go see Buzz to have the matter looked into (hee!), but I can't go see him until after I get the mammogram, because last time he lectured me very sternly for not having done it yet, and beat me about the knees with his clipboard, too. Buzz takes my health very seriously.

I guess somebody has to. At least my daughter is okay.

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*Band name! Or album name - or something.

Don't Panic

The panicmonger has at long last been forced out - unless you want to believe the official story, which is that she resigned voluntarily, suddenly, without any notice, and without another job lined up.

I suspect the former.

Ernest, who is almost unbelievably still working there, came over this afternoon to give me the scoop. The group has been divvied up, the spoils of office politics, between the two rival managers in the section. I wouldn't want to work for either of those guys, especially the cheese-ass used-car salesman who runs the IT branch for the division. Ernest will be working for that massive tool now. He's excited about the change, which I suppose is a fair indicator of how bad things had gotten.

So I told Ernest a story today. I told him of the genesis of the Three-Martini Break Group.

When I started in that division, I told Ernest, our branch was deeply invested in a particular project. However, due to unforeseen technical issues (which really, really, really should not have been unforeseen), the project was on hold. We couldn't work on other projects, because that would entail updating data which would then be overwritten by data from the first project, when/if it ever got going again. So we were at. A. Complete. Standstill.

This is a bit of a hardship when you work for an agency that allows zero personal use of the internet.

So I learned about all kinds of things going on in the agency, or at least whatever was published on the agency website. Also, we're allowed to look at NOAA.com. I learned a lot about the weather. My coworkers - all intelligent, and terribly underemployed; all young, healthy, and funny; all energetic and all just marking time until they could make something better happen - my coworkers took the simple, 15-minute, twice-daily break and developed it into an elaborate art form. You know - kind of like a Japanese tea ritual, only with a lot more sexual innuendo.

Things weren't so bad for me. I was still shellshocked from the vicious day-to-day machinations of a small, family-run marketing company unexpectedly headquartered in Imperial Rome. A little boredom was not a bad thing; besides, pretty much all my new coworkers were young, male, and cute. Life could be a lot worse. A LOT worse.

We were dead in the water for months, so our boss - the panicmonger's predecessor - under increasing and hostile pressure from HIS boss, tried desperately to fill all that empty time with meetings, cross-training, and documentation on documentation on documentation. Nothing was enough. The project we were all waiting on was eventually scrapped altogether, and we all had to start actually working again. Not too hard, though. Every break was still an epic event. But 3MBG members began dropping like flies from sheer boredom. Still, I have to think those first few months after I started, when I had nothing whatsoever to do but spend hours every day hanging out with a bunch of bright, funny, dishy men, were some pretty darn good times.

And what do I have to show for all that now? Nothing, that's what. Well, except for a couple of years of happy memories, several ongoing and deeply rewarding friendships, and a busy, fun, challenging, but not stressful job among pleasant people.

Call it an object lesson on the pitfalls of ambition. The panicmonger doesn't even have anybody to go on break with.

Not Enough Rats' Asses in Detroit

Well, actually, there probably are.

When I first started working at Crazyland Corpus, I helped a consultant who was working on an assessment for the City of Detroit. They were in the market for a new website design, looking for advice on how better to attract site visitors and convert them, poor saps, into real visitors.

The existing website had links on the home page for residents and business owners in addition to their promotional material. One of the questions in the residents' FAQ, just one step down in the navigation, was "Who do I call to complain about a rat infestation?"

We advised them that this was not Best Practices.*

"Best Practices" was a phrase that got tossed around a lot by our sales staff, i.e. everyone except for the seven or eight peons who actually designed, programmed, or otherwise did stuff. "Industry Best Practices dictate that you should..." we'd begin, then either go on to recommend whatever it was we'd been told to sell that day, or dissuade a client from something that we didn't know how to implement. Once, after I'd worked there a year or so, one of the account managers actually found a definitive list of our Best Practices filed away in a subfolder of a subfolder on one of the network drives. We read them with glee, and forwarded them out to the senior sales consultants we worked under, who had been completely unaware that such a document existed.

What's funny about all this is that I hated that job so much, by the time I left, that I spent much of every day in tears; but I couldn't stop giving rats' asses, handing the damn things out like they were going out of style. I cared that I was on the crazy president's** shit list. I cared that the senior consultant*** I worked with didn't think I could schmooze clients****. I cared that I was giving the web designers***** more work than they could handle. I couldn't quit caring. I couldn't sleep nights.

Work is much less stressful when you don't give a rat's ass, though this is not the solution I'd recommend. (Best Practices dictate you find a job that you can care about, but which won't drive you completely up the wall.)

My guest speaker for the November safety meeting on Monday, a local "personality," verbally confirmed on two separate occasions about a month ago, but has not responded to emails or returned phone calls since. We've already notified attendees to expect him. My boss is panicking.

But I can't find that I really care. I checked out a safety video on the same topic he's supposed to cover, in case he doesn't show up, and notified the panicmonger that we have something to fall back on if the speaker doesn't come. Speakers have no-showed before, and this is just an internal presentation for a handful of construction site workers, to satisfy occupational safety requirements. It's not that big a deal.

"It will be a big disaster if he doesn't show," she wrote back, cc'ing my coworker, who knows the "personality," and who had approached him about speaking at our meeting. "Everyone is expecting him. Everyone is enthusiastic about him. The division head is coming to this meeting. Haven't you heard back from him yet???"

No. It's not a paid engagement; he agreed to do it as a favor. He doesn't owe us this. We've both called; we've both emailed. I guess he's busy. What does she expect us to do, squat down and produce the guy?

I read her email and shrugged. I just don't give a rat's ass. I appear to have run out, and I'm not planning to travel to Detroit to stock up anytime soon. It's not Best Practices.

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*It's "Whom"
**Fired
***Fired
****Mostly quit
*****All quit

Hope Springs Eternal

Rumor has it - ah, the joys of gossip! - that the panicmonger got chewed out by her boss last week for micromanaging her people into the ground, not letting them just do their jobs, and being generally difficult to deal with. Rumor has it that she's stated she's going to make serious efforts to find another position.

I understand a little bit about how the panicmonger thinks. I think that people who are naturally stress-prone tend to assume that relaxed, calm, laid-back people just don't care. If you're not freaking out, you must be a slacker. So she redoubles her efforts, again and again and again, to put more pressure on everyone, to make sure she knows exactly what everyone is doing all the time, to drive everyone else into the kind of panicked frenzy that she herself feels is the appropriate reaction to whatever situation is at hand.

Trying to soothe her, and telling her everything is under control, only reinforces her belief that she's the only one making any effort, and the poor woman - who is not necessarily unfriendly by nature - really can't understand why everyone is turning against her. And I really do feel bad for her.

All that said, boo-frickin'-hoo. I hope the door doesn't hit her in the ass on the way out.

Anyway, this was encouraging news for a Friday, even if it didn't end so well; but a good night's sleep makes pretty much everything look better, and damn I have some really sweet friends, and it's a beautiful morning. Chirping birds and everything! And my honeysuckle is still not quite dead!

This morning I sent an email to the music director of TEMP. Let me in... let me iiinnnnnnnnnnn!!!

Where's My Ejector Seat Button??

We use Novell GroupWise at work. It's like Outlook, only not as sexy. You can use it to set tasks. The panicmonger loves to do this.

I think she likes it so much because that way, she doesn't have to deal with her employees in person when telling them to do ridiculous shit that really doesn't need to be done and is only going to get in the way of their work.

None of us openly roll our eyes at her - not quite. But it's a very near thing. Of coure, we all realize that the reason she assigns these tasks is because otherwise she doesn't feel involved. She doesn't know how to do our job. She doesn't seem to be entirely clear on exactly what our job is. But she does know one thing: that, come hell or high water, by God, she's going to manage us - like it or not.*

When you receive a task notification through GroupWise, it gives you three options: Accept, Decline, or Delegate. There is of course a fourth option, which is Ignore; and this is in fact the option that most of us generally select. But due to an amazing lack of foresight on Novell's part, there's no button for it.

Fortunately we all have keyboards equipped with the latest in "delete" keys.

Still, I think the fact that GroupWise does not have an ejector seat button clearly indicates that Novell doesn't know the first thing about its users.

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*Not