Yes, Reader. There is a Virginia.
Still breathing. Just not blogging. Work has been a major drain on my time and energy. I leave the house at 7:30am and don't get home until 5:30. By the time I finish making and eating dinner, there are only a few hours left until bedtime. Except Wednesday nights. On Wednesday nights I have a class from 7:00 to 10:00.
Surfing the web from work is out of the question, because there's simply no down time. I'd tell you what it is I'm so busy with all day, but it's not exactly clear, even to me. The woman whose maternity leave I'm covering is a Project Support Specialist, which says everything and nothing all at once.
This is who I work for. More specifically, these folks. Fortunately, most of my co-workers are pretty nice, and being on the run staves off boredom. Nonetheless, I'm grateful it's only temporary.
Weekends I spend recuperating and trying to clear outstanding projects off my plate. Speaking of which, I must get back to those.
Comments
I work at a cube clone job at a large corporation which is also full of people with job titles like Project Support Specialist and Administrative Function Process Manager.
The most fascinating thing I've found, working there for a number of years, is that if I give all my attention to just getting work off of my desk and moving it on to wherever it needs to go next, that appears to be all that's necessary to get through job from day to day. Shades of Chaplin!
The poet Thomas McGrath has a line (in his booklength poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend), "going to work at the hornacle mine," or something to that effect. Years later, in an interview, he explained:
In the Army in the Second World War, he was stationed on an air base in the Aleutians. At the end of the war, he was assigned to write a history of his military unit (a lot of the various units were writing histories of themselves). He was given a desk in a quonset hut, which was otherwise occupied by some guys in the quartermaster corps, busy with shipment orders all day long.
At one point the shipping guys got a requisition for something called "hornacles." They weren't sure what hornacles were, but that by itself wasn't unusual, given the vast array of supplies and equipment in the army. They determined they didn't have any hornacles on the base, so they sent the order on to Anchorage. A few days later it came back, "No hornacles here, suggest you try West Region Quartermaster in San Francisco."
So they sent the order away to San Francisco, and a week or two later it came back, "No hornacles found in West Region. Recommend contact Quartermaster General's office in Arlington, Virginia." So they sent the order on to Arlington, and a after couple of weeks it came back: "Unable to locate hornacles at any quartermaster facility in U.S. Please advise."
So they checked into it again, and it turned out it wasn't "hornacles" after all, it was some other thing. "Hornacles" was apparently the result of messy handwriting on the original order form...
Posted by: Lyle Daggett | February 6, 2007 12:52 AM
Dongles, on the other hand, are quite real. Great story, Lyle.
Posted by: Ginger | February 7, 2007 10:34 AM