At my old job, we had an overhead paging system, and the normal routine was for me to answer the call, park it on a line accessible from anywhere in the office, and page the person the call was for.
A couple times, I must have missed a button somewhere, and I ended up parking the call on the overhead system, so the whole office was listening to whatever was going on on the other end of the phone. The worst part was–there was no way to undo this, short of getting the caller to hang up. But you couldn’t pick up the line to tell the caller that, and in the meantime, whatever they’re saying to their secretary, to the guy in the cube next door, to themselves … it’s all on the overhead.
Luckily, the two times I actually did this, the callers were people in our Philly office, and I was able to call the receptionist down there and say “For the love of God, go tell Alisa to hang up the phone–I can hear her humming, and she’s never going to live it down if she starts singing.”
Just fake them out–put your activity first because you have to pick something up at a certain time, and then “remember” when you get there that it is another day, so you just go ahead and do your activity. If you are nice, then you do theirs. If you are evil and cruel, you are too tired after your activity to do theirs. Either way, you win.
I am also extremely busy with boring stuff. Some of it is conference calls, and I have to do the lizard thing where I adjust my temperature down and just exist for a while to get through it.
Oh, well, there are worse things than being employed.
How do you do this? I wonder if it’d be possible at Wal-Mart. How you page on the overhead there is #96. If I press Transfer, then #96 and hang up? Hmm…
That might work, donkey. I just remember laughing hysterically when I heard the receptionist walk into the caller’s office yelling “Hang up! Hang up NOW!” like the phone was going to explode.
Who was asking for excitement?This happened just blocks from my house. I hit the roadblock on the way home Tuesday night, but just figured there had been an accident in one of the intersections until I swung into the WaWa and they told me it was a hostage situation. Turns out it wasn’t, though, they just thought it might be.
How’s that? I mean, there’s murder, a standoff, and a clerk from WaWa, but no tear gas or hostages. Oh, well, you can’t have everything.
Ladies and gentlemen, stand in awe! I ACED my exam! Go me! Not that it matters much - they’re just going to shred them tomorrow (it was a Secret exam) but I guess it proves I learned something in class this week.
Tomorrow morning, we do our presentations, then “graduate” and go back to work. Woohoo!
Me go first? What a novel concept. Yicky family dynamics require me to always go last or risk a huuuuuge blow up. Besides, they’re my family, I love them and would never be sneaky, which means that though they’ve pulled this a zillion times, this time they won’t. Right? Yeah, I’m a quart low on cynicism.
Yay FCM! Of *course * you aced it, you’re you!
Taters, I think maybe not finding your favorite cigarettes is a sign that the universe doesn’t think you should have them. The good news is the universe does want you to have that fudgesicle in the freezer chest next to the cash register.
Lessee MagicEyes, stories about the Psycho Beast from Hell. She really was crazy, with what, we’re not quite sure. Well, you should know that she was a very devout Catholic (though with very interesting interpretations of the meaning). Oh she never went to church, but she was very devout. She and my sister had agreed that boyfriends wouldn’t stay over more than three days a week, preferably on the weekends, and to always give the other a head’s up about a man being in the house when he came over. So Psycho’s boyfriend was over every night of the week, leaving only to buy alcohol and pick up drug shipments and go beat up people who needed drug-related beatings.
Psycho saw nothing wrong about this. Yes, she agreed that he wouldn’t be over more than three nights a week and he was over every night. What’s your point? He accidently walked into my sister’s room when she was sleeping, all the time. He accidently walked into the bathroom when my sister was showering, all the time. Why do you mention this? He threatened to hurt my sister when she complained. He threatened to hurt her when Psycho was a week late with the rent again, or had eaten all my sister’s food, or ripped up the carpeting or gouged a huge hole in the wall, and my sister suggested these were not good things. My sister was trying to get rid of her, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Eventually, Pycho, who was a very devout Catholic, found herself pregnant, because as a devout Catholic she couldn’t use birth control. Why do you bring up no sex until marriage? What a non sequitor! Psycho dissappeared for a couple of months then reappeared. At what was surely the last possible moment she had an abortion, because as a devout Catholic, bringing an illegitimate baby into the world would be wrong. Abortion was wrong too, which was why she waited so long.
The whole time Psycho’s boyfriend had people coming and going at all hours of the day and night. They refused to believe the boyfriend wasn’t there and my sister couldn’t sell them drugs because she didn’t have any. The police were called often. Psycho broke up with her boyfriend but they still slept together since he was the father of her poor little dead (aborted) baby. Boyfriend abruptly dissappeared and Psycho stopped leaving the apartment, then stopped leaving her room except to answer the door when food was delivered. She would put the money in an envelope and leave it on the doormat, the delivery person would leave the food and take the money. He would leave the envelope, ALWAYS leave the envelope! My sister heard her threatening to call the police when one delivery guy took-- stole-- the envelope.
Finally my sister tracked down her parents and told them what was happening. They were completely unsurprised, it was why they’d asked her to leave home. The good news is they came over and got her. They told my sister she could keep all of Psycho’s stuff, yay! Dirty nasty garbage all for herself! A few months later my sister ran into Psycho on campus and it turns out that Psycho loved my sister, they’d had just the best time as roomies, you know.
Her new roommie wasn’t nearly as much fun, but the apartment was closer to campus which was important because she didn’t have a license. What happened to her licence? Psycho had trouble driving one night and drove into a couple of people’s homes. She was found to be DUI which made no sense because as a devout Catholic she would never drink to excess and put other people’s lives at risk. But somehow the police were able to convince a judge she’d been drunk and not just having trouble with her glasses and he took her license away.
About a year later my sister learned that she’d wigged out in a lecture, which she had attended wearing only a bath towel and sweatshirt, and hadn’t been seen since. People still showed up at my sister’s apartment, demanding drugs, until she moved out nearly two years later. My sister learned to get references and not discount personality quirks so readily.
This is my favorite part of the story! Did she wear the bath towel like a skirt, and the sweatshirt on top? College students sure dress funny these days. Psycho is an understatement! You never know what you’re getting into when you get a roommate. It’s kind of like getting married, but without some of the benefits.
It’s an exciting evening here in MagicLand. It’s laundry night, so I have to go put stuff away. I wish my clothes would wash themselves. I had pimiento cheese on toast and a big juicy pluot for din-din.
Yay FCM! You’re so s-m-r-t!
Draelin, your story made me laugh! I’m glad I don’t have to use the intercom, because I’d probably broadcast really embarassing things to the whole building. I wish I could repeat some of the conversation I heard today, but I couldn’t understand most of it, but that made it even funnier.
It’s not the actualy doing of the laundry that bothers me. The sorting, the washing the drying (I have big machines downstairs that do both of those chores), the putting away- all no big. It’s the folding I hate. Fold, fold, fold. It takes forever!
It took even longer when the boys were wee bairns. A whole bunch of those little Muppet-sized clothes could fit in the washing machine. Then it took a really long time to fold them all. Well, not fold so much as straighten them out some anf separate them into appropriate piles. Now that the boys are bigger there’s less laundry per load, so less folding. But more loads per week since their clothes are bigger so their laundry baskets fill up faster. It’s win/win!
And that anime stuff… It bugs me. Not the style or the plots or anything, but how my local video rental store doesn’t stock any and the video buying store stocks them, but they are kinda pricey. 30 clams a pop! And you can’t just get one DVD and be done. No, no, no! They always come in these big, long series.
Like this one series. It’s about a nun with big boots and a big gun and she shoots up demons. (You know which one Winnie.) Who wouldn’t like that? But there’s five or six DVD’s in the series now. There might even be more. That’s a lot of scratch for a cartoon. And I don’t think they fill each DVD all the way up.
I did just see Steamboy. It was OK. But come on! It’s a cartoon! You can blow up more of Victorian London! It’s not like you’re laying out the cash to build sets, or anything. They really could have blown more stuff up. (Since there was no cartoon nakedness.) Blowing more stuff up would have served the story and it would have been more interesting.
I have a phobia about the intercom. Like I’m suddenly going to develop Tourette’s and say something awful. One time I started paging someone, then sneezed. Three coworkers called to say “God bless you.”
I also recently had a moment where I answered the phone, and once I had transferred the call, the woman in the cube across from me said “You know what you just said, right?”
I vapor-locked. What had I been thinking about before I answered the phone? Oh … oh, no. I had been e-mailing with my best friend about how we were going to go see Red Eye when it came out (which is tonight, by the way) because Cillian Murphy is pretty, and I’d watch him do dishes, if somebody filmed it, and then I went into this whole scenario involving him and me and my kitchen counter and oh my Gods, what did I say into the phone???
Apparently, I said “Good afternoon.” Only it was morning. Whew.
Whenever I’ve had to use our paging system at work, I’ve been snarked by coworkers who say I sound like I’m calling out the blue light special. :dubious: I have a very deep voice. (All those past ciggies make me sound a lot like Marge Simpson’s sister, Patty. I hope it gets better now that I’ve given the sh*tty things up.) Anyhoo, I’ve been called “sir” more times than I care to tell.
Way to go, fcm!! ::Throws confetti and dances wildly::
winnie, the day before we moved into our current house, we learned there had been a home invasion just a couple of doors down. Then, the night of our move in, my daughter, who was taking a bath in the master bath underneath the big frosted window, reported that somebody was right outside!!! :eek: Mr. Anachi bravely went out to confront the alleged peeping tom, but it turned out that it was the cable guy who had wandered to the side door instead of coming to the front. Mr. Anachi advised him to be very upfront for a while in the neighborhood. As it turned out, the home invasion was perped by a relative. Nothing quite so exciting as that since…well, except for the hurricanes last summer.
ashes, that sounds like living hell! I had some bad roomies back in the day but nothing compares.
rue, it doesn’t get any better when they start doing their own. THEY never fold their clothes…the stuff just get transferred from dirty basket to clean basket. That’s IF you can get them to remove the clothes from the machines at all. :rolleyes:
I had one of those bad lazy living-alone moments this morning. I got back from the gym and my apartment smelled. I can’t be the type of person who lets her apartment start to smell! Only slobs do that!
::sigh::
In other news, I’m having lunch with **Anaamika **today! Yay!
…I mean, isn’t it nice that we’re both thinking the same thing?
Ex, Bountiful Bread is a bakery/lunch place in Stuyvesant. Very good soups and sandwiches and stuff. Their website is here. It’s kinda expensive - Panera-ish prices - and it’s very busy at lunch time, but their soups are worth it. And their baked goods probably are too, but I’m so full after the soup that I’ve never had any. :eek:
Oh, and speaking of baked goods, the restaurant week dinner at Jack’s last night was great and the chocolate cake for dessert was AWESOME. Chocolate orgasm. Seriously.
My turn - we went to Savannah’s for the same Restaurant Week, and it was really cool because Savannah’s is not a place I would have ever noticed otherwise. It’s a tiny, personal little place, with a great ambience. Sort of a jazzy-blues sort of feel to it. The food was yummy, especially the jambalaya soup (with mis-spelled andouille sausage!) and like **taxi78cab’s ** experience, the dessert was diving…cheesecake with chocolate syrup. YUM! And I had baked catfish for my entree…and baked brie for our appetizer.
Boy, cheeses sure are an acquired taste, aren’t they?
Oooh, that sounds so good! I’m trying to skip lunch today so I can leave early, but this is making me hungry! Baby carrots just aren’t the same as baked brie. Bountiful Bread sounds really interesting. All we have is Panera (lots of Paneras, actually), and their baked things are mostly not very good. I had the worst muffin ever at Panera.
taxi, I thought I smelled something! Maybe you need to get yourself some Febreze. Or Lysol.
At least you’re not advertising the red light special!
TGIF!! I’m sleeping all day tomorrow. And maybe Sunday. I’ll get up when it’s time to go to work on Monday.
(I’m kidding. Ow, stop hitting me.)