DO ALL THE THINGS!

Well, it happened.

My company took a sizeable financial hit in the second quarter. Some people were let go. I am very grateful I was not one of them. The rest of us--the whole company--are cutting our hours.

Of course, this means more work in less time.

 But you know what? It could be worse. Far worse. We're all taking it on the chin and stepping up and accommodating each other and trying to keep everything going despite the sudden uptick in, well, everything, really.

 Anyway, today is Wednesday, which is our busiest processing day of the week, and my brain is fried after all that plus yesterday and the day before and the Thursday and Friday before that...so there we are. 

This, too, shall pass. We think. Maybe?

It's Too Darn Hot

 

VIDEO: Ann Miller in MGM's Kiss Me Kate, 1953, music & lyrics by Cole Porter

 Stay cool, kids!

Overreliance

Though it may be difficult for us to own up to, there really is no argument anymore for the majority of the human animal being entirely too dependent upon technology. I’m writing this at my work desk at my office to fill the time until our IT department figures out what’s wrong with our entire system and gets us up and running again. We’re dead in the water right now, on the busiest payroll processing day of the week. It’s not a good thing.

In the past, there would have been a way to get around this, or at least a way to get some of the work done while waiting, but since everything we do now is web-based, we’re at a standstill. Paralyzed. Incapacitated. Do not process payrolls, do not pass “GO”, do not collect $200.

I did initially think, well, I can work on stuff that’s saved to my local drive. Not a bad thought, right? Well, it wasn’t, until I realized that I need to look something up--on the Internet.

Bang went that idea.

So here I sit, filling the time, hoping not too many clients call in because while we can answer the phone, we can’t do much more than that.

Like it or not, an Internet connection is required for just about everything these days. Scheduling appointments, paying for goods and services, running your most basic office functions--everything is connected. Some people even connect their refrigerators, for crying out loud. I mean, what happens when your “smart” home connection is severed? A power outage is one thing, but an Internet outage might end up being just as bad. I’m sure those things have some kind of backup to traditional power sources, or some kind of fallback so you don’t get locked out, but backups do sometimes fail. When you really don’t need them to. Like when you’ve popped out to grab the paper in just a towel because you’ll “just be a second!” but in the time it takes you to spring to the end of the walkway and back, the Internet does a powder and your “smart” front door lock freezes and now Mrs. Henderson at #23 is clutching her pearls, staring at you from her front stoop, scandalized.

Then again, this scenario straight out of a ‘60s cartoon is less-than-likely to occur in these technologically advanced times, because y’all get your news through the web, too, so printed newspapers are headed the way of the dodo. Though perhaps the person in my vignette still subscribes to a print-paper for ironic reasons.

There’s another aspect to this outage that depresses me, and that’s the human element of the equation. In times gone by, an outage like this would have seen everybody out of their cubicles and into a common area to chat and pass the time until things start to work again and you can all get back to business as usual.

That hasn’t happened today.

No, everyone sat in their spaces and dicked around on their phones. Even in a pandemic, we could have stood up and conversed from an appropriate social distance with our masks on. But no, for the first hour of this nonsense everyone was glued to their phones. It’s been a while now, so people are starting to move around and get chatty, but I can’t help but feel that we could be being more social.

Says the person hand-writing a blog post at her desk.

Look, I had to write one anyway, it might as well be now, okay?



FYI: Our IT team got our systems back on line between 12:30 and 1:00 and my team kicked some serious payroll tuchus, and we all got to go home on time BECAUSE WE’RE AWESOME LIKE THAT!

Jumping on mushrooms just never really did it for me

I am not much of a video gamer. I never have been. I think I like the idea of them more than the actual activity itself.

At some point in 1995 or ‘96, I used my birthday money to purchase myself a ‘Play It Loud’-series Game Boy--the one with the clear case so you could see all the circuitry. I had three games for it: Super Mario Land, Kirby’s Dream Land, and a Star Wars game I could never figure out how to play. Generally speaking, the Game Boy would hold my attention for all of thirty minutes before I would get annoyed at my lack of speedy thumbs and go do something else instead.

You’d think this would have indicated something to me at the time about my level of interest in video games.

It did not.

Not too long after the Game Boy made itself at home on my bedroom shelves, the Nintendo 64 console was released, and everyone I knew was all a-twitter about it. I had indulgent grandparents, who gifted me one for a birthday or Christmas--I can’t remember which. Game play was much the same story as my Game Boy. Half an hour, tops, before I lost interest and went to read a book instead. Fast-forward several years to high school, at which point I traded my N64 to a friend for her 3-CD changer stereo...we’re pretty sure the ol’ 64 is in the storage pit under her parent’s garage floor. Maybe someday it will make a triumphant return.

There had been a Super Nintendo in my life by way of my maternal grandparents. My grandfather had played the PGA Tour golf game at a buddy’s house and decided he needed to own it. I have no idea how much it got played at the time, but I do know that the system basically disappeared for many years and was unearthed when we moved my grandfather to an assisted living facility, at which point the SNES came to live with me. And collect dust. But it’s vintage!

As an adult, I have owned two other games consoles: a Nintendo Wii and a Nintendo 3DS. (Are you sensing some brand loyalty, here?) The Wii was a joint purchase with a boyfriend, and since he already had an X-Box, I got to keep the Wii when we broke up. The 3DS was a present from a different boyfriend. Between the two of them, the Wii got significantly more use, because the very nature of the system was to get the players to interact with each other. I really enjoyed my Wii, but over time it got used less and less for its intended purpose, and the streaming services it supported started to peter out, and eventually I sold it to make room for an all-in-one streaming box and DVD player. I was sad to see it go, but drunken Super Smash Bros. nights had ceased to be a thing, and playing on a Wii by yourself just isn’t as fun.

The 3DS is in a box waiting to be sold to the same place I sold the Wii...someday...when we’re allowed to leave the house again…

In my life, there has been one game, and one game only, that I have played to completion, and that is a little game called Monument Valley.

https://www.ustwo.com/work/monument-valley-mobile-games

It’s a beautiful puzzle game that doesn’t rely on brain-to-button speed, and I LOVE it. I love it so much that every so often I search around to try to find something that’s similar.

Two weeks ago, a friend introduced me to Gris.

https://nomada.studio/

Cue giant awestruck anime eyes.

Courtesy of the same friend, I now have a laptop that will allow me to play, and I fully intend to.

Only this time I’m pretty sure I’ll make it past half an hour.