Let It Snow
Hello World,
Well, for those of you out there who might not live in the local area, if you've been watching television at all, you know what kind of week we've been having around here. The snowstorm that was predicted to be just a nuisance for commuters on Friday turned instead into the Blizzard of 2006 on Sunday, setting a new record of almost 27" of snow in Central Park, since they began keeping records in the 1870's. I would like to point out that when everyone else has been saying, "Oh, this has been such a warm winter and now we're going to have an early spring," I kept saying over and over that there was plenty of winter left to come, and I wouldn't pack up the parkas and snow shovels just yet. But even I couldn't put any stock in the forecast, as I said to Bill, because the idea that we would have so much snow that they would actually cancel church on a Sunday that I had to Usher, was just too impossible to imagine. But sure enough, even the diehards threw in the towel and gave up the ghost. The Holy Ghost, that is.
Meanwhile, anyone who braved the elements on Monday to get to their jobs had nothing but complaints about the local roads, but I would have to say that at work, they somehow managed to outdo themselves by not only doing nothing, but actively making things worse. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I saw dump trucks coming and leaving more snow than there was to start with. Of course, the hospital certainly has a plan in place for snow storms, if only because they have a plan for everything that might or might not actually ever happen in our environs. Their snow removal plan can be summed up in one word: Spring. This is why it's so very hard for the rest of us to understand why we have 50 people working in the Engineering department, not to mention, a Bobcat and at least two tractor-like vehicles with plow attachments, and skids upon skids full of rock salt clogging up the hallways by Receiving, if no one is going to do anything about the snow around the campus. I think they have one little old lady volunteer who shovels out a path for the President of the hospital, from his car door to the front entrance, and after that, they figure the rest of us can just fend for ourselves or die trying. I mean, it's only a hospital after all, it's not like we have to stay open 24/7 or anything ridiculous like that.
While we're on the subject of work, it was a few weeks ago that I found myself being hounded by someone in Finance, who in a weird coincidence, has the same name as a famous fictional character on a long-running TV show. This is a serious young man, and lest anyone think that he would find humor in this situation, well you can believe me that they would find themselves woefully mistaken, and I know that from first-hand experience. Anyway, he was after some purchasing transaction report that our clerk would do, but didn't because she's on the DL for the time being, and it was before the temp arrived, so I told our Vice President that it was not a happening thing. He said I should go ahead and just "make up some number" for them to use, and get them out of my hair without actually having to do the report. I decided to do one better, and take the last three months of reports, add the totals together and divide by three, to get an average of what could reasonably be expected in any given month. I did that and turned it over to Fred Flintstone with a happy heart. I was more surprised than anybody when he came back to my office that very same day, with the unwelcome news that when he added up the actual purchasing transactions, he came up with $23,570.14, while the report I gave him said $58,319.62. Everyone knows that I'm much too polite to laugh (although it was a near thing!) but even I had to wonder why we've been adding up this whole report, just to give it to someone who apparently adds it all up all over again, instead of just letting them add it up for themselves in the first place. And I said to Bill, if I had asked someone to do something they obviously didn't want to do, and then they gave it to me later with an error factor of over 200%, why would I bother to go back to them and expect them to correct it? I mean, you don't have to win the World Poker Tour Championship bracelet to realize that you have to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em, and that's not just a lot of yabba dabba doo.
One day at home, I found myself saying, probably for the hundredth time, "In my next life, I'm not going to put all the stuff I use most in the smallest room of the house." We have an enormous living room, four good-sized bedrooms, dining room and finished attic, most of which are just piled with irrelevant nonsense, while our itty bitty den is crammed with three computers, five bookcases, four file cabinets, four turntables, four printers and a 300-pound marble statue, not to mention the old family double-pedestal wooden desk. Mind you, all this is in a room that already includes a fireplace, bathroom and bay window, besides two doors and a 48-inch-long pipe radiator, so you can imagine that wall space is at a premium. So I finally decided, "Enough is too much already!" and made up my mind to move at least my desk and computer out into the living room, where there would be some elbow room for a change. It was at this very moment that Bill spotted a couple of small storage cabinets that were being unceremoniously tossed out by the hospital, and I thought, why that would be a handy addition to my plans, perhaps keeping one at work and using the other one at home. I scoped them out the next day at lunchtime, and they seemed in good shape and none the worse for wear, and a manageable size to be able to move them, in fact, one of them even had wheels on the bottom. (By now, I know that everyone is wondering where Daffy Duck is in this whole scenario.) You notice how all of these elements together had inexorably lulled me into a false sense of security. So one night after work, I pulled the Tempo into the courtyard by the dumpster with the idea of wrestling the cabinets into it. Not so fast! It occurred to me later that I suffer from a chronic malady that could be described as "auto dysmorphia," which is that I have a totally distorted idea of the actual size of the car that I'm driving. What appeared at first to be two small and innocuous cabinets that anyone could pick up and put into a car, instead when I attempted to do just that, somehow transmogrified themselves into some dense and gargantuan monoliths, which no amount of wrestling was ever going to fit into the Tempo at the same time. They turned out to be much too heavy to handle, so putting one in the back-seat was out of the question. The one with the wheels was so much bigger than I thought, that I knew it would never fit in the trunk either. I finally jammed the smaller one into the trunk, with nothing but brute force and some bungee cords to hold the trunk down, and manhandled the bigger one into the front seat, kicking and screaming, not to mention, using language that would make a longshoreman blush. I think we've all been down this road before, so it will come as a surprise to no one that after I was finished and could actually close the passenger side door, there wasn't enough room in the front seat to move the shift lever in the console to anything but Park and Reverse. ("Calling Daffy Duck!") When I finally got home (I did not drive in reverse the entire way) Bill, who is the soul of patience, unloaded the recalcitrant cabinet for me, so at least I could drive like a normal person while I decided what I wanted to do next with my ill-gotten gains. And I think we can all expect for my birthday, that he will give me a tape measure to keep in the car, that I can use as a sort of reality check before I come up with any more of these hare-brained schemes, especially if Daffy Duck isn't going to show up when he's supposed to.
I know everyone thinks I'm exaggerating when I say that you take your life in your hands when you try to cross the street from the hospital to the parking lot, but even with the yellow blinking light at the Emergency Room entrance, traffic comes flying at you from every direction there is, and occasionally from some there aren't. There are six streets that all converge in what turns into a very busy intersection, and you honestly need mutant alien eyeballs up on stalks above your head to swivel around 360 degrees and see everything coming before it slams into you at 90 miles an hour, because no one pays any attention to where they're going. I'm always very careful when I cross, and look all ways, and even still, I almost got run over this morning. Apparently, this driver who had already pulled through the intersection, decided for whatever reason, to back up and take another swipe at the pedestrians in the crosswalk from behind, and nearly ran me down from a direction that I wasn't in the least expecting. I mean, it's bad enough looking out for the traffic that's going the right way, without having to keep out of the clutches of traffic that's going backwards. I tell you, you just can't make this stuff up.
I find when it's very cold out, the skin on my hands gets so dry that it cracks, and I'm sure the cheesy soap they give us at work doesn't help either. So I try to remember to use hand lotion before I go to bed, to try and repair some of the damage, while "sleep knits the raveled sleeve of care" and all that. Last night, I must have put on a little too much, and even though I thought I rubbed it in well enough, it was apparently not, because when I went to turn off the light on my night table, the switch kept slipping through my fingers and wouldn't turn. I finally had to get a paper towel and use that to turn the switch with, just so I could get to sleep. After all, I'm unraveling fast enough these days without losing sleep besides, and if you don't believe me, just ask Fred Flintstone.
Well, for those of you out there who might not live in the local area, if you've been watching television at all, you know what kind of week we've been having around here. The snowstorm that was predicted to be just a nuisance for commuters on Friday turned instead into the Blizzard of 2006 on Sunday, setting a new record of almost 27" of snow in Central Park, since they began keeping records in the 1870's. I would like to point out that when everyone else has been saying, "Oh, this has been such a warm winter and now we're going to have an early spring," I kept saying over and over that there was plenty of winter left to come, and I wouldn't pack up the parkas and snow shovels just yet. But even I couldn't put any stock in the forecast, as I said to Bill, because the idea that we would have so much snow that they would actually cancel church on a Sunday that I had to Usher, was just too impossible to imagine. But sure enough, even the diehards threw in the towel and gave up the ghost. The Holy Ghost, that is.
Meanwhile, anyone who braved the elements on Monday to get to their jobs had nothing but complaints about the local roads, but I would have to say that at work, they somehow managed to outdo themselves by not only doing nothing, but actively making things worse. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I saw dump trucks coming and leaving more snow than there was to start with. Of course, the hospital certainly has a plan in place for snow storms, if only because they have a plan for everything that might or might not actually ever happen in our environs. Their snow removal plan can be summed up in one word: Spring. This is why it's so very hard for the rest of us to understand why we have 50 people working in the Engineering department, not to mention, a Bobcat and at least two tractor-like vehicles with plow attachments, and skids upon skids full of rock salt clogging up the hallways by Receiving, if no one is going to do anything about the snow around the campus. I think they have one little old lady volunteer who shovels out a path for the President of the hospital, from his car door to the front entrance, and after that, they figure the rest of us can just fend for ourselves or die trying. I mean, it's only a hospital after all, it's not like we have to stay open 24/7 or anything ridiculous like that.
While we're on the subject of work, it was a few weeks ago that I found myself being hounded by someone in Finance, who in a weird coincidence, has the same name as a famous fictional character on a long-running TV show. This is a serious young man, and lest anyone think that he would find humor in this situation, well you can believe me that they would find themselves woefully mistaken, and I know that from first-hand experience. Anyway, he was after some purchasing transaction report that our clerk would do, but didn't because she's on the DL for the time being, and it was before the temp arrived, so I told our Vice President that it was not a happening thing. He said I should go ahead and just "make up some number" for them to use, and get them out of my hair without actually having to do the report. I decided to do one better, and take the last three months of reports, add the totals together and divide by three, to get an average of what could reasonably be expected in any given month. I did that and turned it over to Fred Flintstone with a happy heart. I was more surprised than anybody when he came back to my office that very same day, with the unwelcome news that when he added up the actual purchasing transactions, he came up with $23,570.14, while the report I gave him said $58,319.62. Everyone knows that I'm much too polite to laugh (although it was a near thing!) but even I had to wonder why we've been adding up this whole report, just to give it to someone who apparently adds it all up all over again, instead of just letting them add it up for themselves in the first place. And I said to Bill, if I had asked someone to do something they obviously didn't want to do, and then they gave it to me later with an error factor of over 200%, why would I bother to go back to them and expect them to correct it? I mean, you don't have to win the World Poker Tour Championship bracelet to realize that you have to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em, and that's not just a lot of yabba dabba doo.
One day at home, I found myself saying, probably for the hundredth time, "In my next life, I'm not going to put all the stuff I use most in the smallest room of the house." We have an enormous living room, four good-sized bedrooms, dining room and finished attic, most of which are just piled with irrelevant nonsense, while our itty bitty den is crammed with three computers, five bookcases, four file cabinets, four turntables, four printers and a 300-pound marble statue, not to mention the old family double-pedestal wooden desk. Mind you, all this is in a room that already includes a fireplace, bathroom and bay window, besides two doors and a 48-inch-long pipe radiator, so you can imagine that wall space is at a premium. So I finally decided, "Enough is too much already!" and made up my mind to move at least my desk and computer out into the living room, where there would be some elbow room for a change. It was at this very moment that Bill spotted a couple of small storage cabinets that were being unceremoniously tossed out by the hospital, and I thought, why that would be a handy addition to my plans, perhaps keeping one at work and using the other one at home. I scoped them out the next day at lunchtime, and they seemed in good shape and none the worse for wear, and a manageable size to be able to move them, in fact, one of them even had wheels on the bottom. (By now, I know that everyone is wondering where Daffy Duck is in this whole scenario.) You notice how all of these elements together had inexorably lulled me into a false sense of security. So one night after work, I pulled the Tempo into the courtyard by the dumpster with the idea of wrestling the cabinets into it. Not so fast! It occurred to me later that I suffer from a chronic malady that could be described as "auto dysmorphia," which is that I have a totally distorted idea of the actual size of the car that I'm driving. What appeared at first to be two small and innocuous cabinets that anyone could pick up and put into a car, instead when I attempted to do just that, somehow transmogrified themselves into some dense and gargantuan monoliths, which no amount of wrestling was ever going to fit into the Tempo at the same time. They turned out to be much too heavy to handle, so putting one in the back-seat was out of the question. The one with the wheels was so much bigger than I thought, that I knew it would never fit in the trunk either. I finally jammed the smaller one into the trunk, with nothing but brute force and some bungee cords to hold the trunk down, and manhandled the bigger one into the front seat, kicking and screaming, not to mention, using language that would make a longshoreman blush. I think we've all been down this road before, so it will come as a surprise to no one that after I was finished and could actually close the passenger side door, there wasn't enough room in the front seat to move the shift lever in the console to anything but Park and Reverse. ("Calling Daffy Duck!") When I finally got home (I did not drive in reverse the entire way) Bill, who is the soul of patience, unloaded the recalcitrant cabinet for me, so at least I could drive like a normal person while I decided what I wanted to do next with my ill-gotten gains. And I think we can all expect for my birthday, that he will give me a tape measure to keep in the car, that I can use as a sort of reality check before I come up with any more of these hare-brained schemes, especially if Daffy Duck isn't going to show up when he's supposed to.
I know everyone thinks I'm exaggerating when I say that you take your life in your hands when you try to cross the street from the hospital to the parking lot, but even with the yellow blinking light at the Emergency Room entrance, traffic comes flying at you from every direction there is, and occasionally from some there aren't. There are six streets that all converge in what turns into a very busy intersection, and you honestly need mutant alien eyeballs up on stalks above your head to swivel around 360 degrees and see everything coming before it slams into you at 90 miles an hour, because no one pays any attention to where they're going. I'm always very careful when I cross, and look all ways, and even still, I almost got run over this morning. Apparently, this driver who had already pulled through the intersection, decided for whatever reason, to back up and take another swipe at the pedestrians in the crosswalk from behind, and nearly ran me down from a direction that I wasn't in the least expecting. I mean, it's bad enough looking out for the traffic that's going the right way, without having to keep out of the clutches of traffic that's going backwards. I tell you, you just can't make this stuff up.
I find when it's very cold out, the skin on my hands gets so dry that it cracks, and I'm sure the cheesy soap they give us at work doesn't help either. So I try to remember to use hand lotion before I go to bed, to try and repair some of the damage, while "sleep knits the raveled sleeve of care" and all that. Last night, I must have put on a little too much, and even though I thought I rubbed it in well enough, it was apparently not, because when I went to turn off the light on my night table, the switch kept slipping through my fingers and wouldn't turn. I finally had to get a paper towel and use that to turn the switch with, just so I could get to sleep. After all, I'm unraveling fast enough these days without losing sleep besides, and if you don't believe me, just ask Fred Flintstone.
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 8:35 PM
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