Did you fill out any paperwork? At minimum a W-4? If not, you might not be legally employed there.
Found out during an all staff meeting today that my boss is leaving. She’s been there less than two months. Apparently she got called up out of the blue with an offer she could not refuse. She’s a good boss. I am sorry to see her go. I dread how this is going to look to funders. We’ve had constant turnover for about a year now.
She said she wanted to call me but was afraid to break the news during my vacation. She made the right call, I think, but it still sucked finding out that way.
I’m here because I like my work and because they give me so much flexibility with childcare related disruptions and my schedule. And I’m paid well and have a ton of vacation time. There are a lot of reasons to stay. But it doesn’t inspire confidence.
After months on the waiting list, we finally heard back from one of the Autism Evaluation Centers to get my son on the schedule. This is an insurance requirement even though he’s already been diagnosed by a developmental psychologist and the school district. Today in going through the paperwork I learned that this evaluation will require five 2-2.5 hour sessions. And we’re stuck with most of the bill.
Oh, fuck me.
Blue Cross you greedy fucking worthless heartless bloodsucking assholes.
I did fill out the W4.
Dammit dammit dammit! And dammit all to hell!
I thought I had found the perfect keyboard! And cheap, too!
The absolutely frustrating thing is that it is very, very nearly almost the perfect keyboard. The keys have the perfect feel, it’s quiet, it’s ergonomically designed, and everything about it suggests quality. I don’t especially care very much about the lights, but they look pretty cool – when they’re on, the keys appear to be floating (you can’t change the colours but you can adjust the brightness). It has has a solid feel and is built on an aluminum chassis. The keys aren’t programmable but it has an alternate “FN” mode for the function keys that invoke common applications like calculator, default email, and default browser. Just an all-around great keyboard.
Everything is perfect, except for one fatal flaw. Something about the key layout causes the left side of my left hand to keep hitting the “CTRL” key. The keys don’t have an especially super-soft resistance, and to me have just the right feel for fast typing. I’ve looked closely at my other keyboards and the layout is the same, but somehow this one invites my hand to keep hitting the CTRL key, which is a serious problem because when I’m typing fast it creates all sorts of undesired control sequences that could potentially destroy an entire document. (And incidentally, thanks, Microsoft, for creating all these powerful shortcut key sequences that I never use but which I frequently invoke accidentally, with frequently ruinous consequences.)
And yet I love this keyboard otherwise.
What to do, what to do? I’d saw down that CTRL key if I could, or just disable it or remove it altogether, but that seems silly. I’ll give it another day or two to decide. Maybe I’ll somehow get used to it.
Dammit.
Why can’t we just have nice things without any fuckups?
Okay, so not that dodgy, I’d give it a chance then. Honestly, I’ve held a lot of jobs of various kinds over the years, and only in one job did I literally punch a clock. In every other job, I had work hours, and got paid for them, and as long as I was reasonably on-time and stuck around until I was supposed to be done, I got full credit for all of it. It might be fine.
Understood. But the way he put it was a bit rude. Hey, free coffee. Hopefully, I can eventually interact with customers. Its my skill.
Assuming you’re on Windows you can convert that key to be inoperative in software. Then you just need to train yourself to use the right Ctrl key when you really need it.
See
Just don’t. We all eventually learn that birthdays can sometimes be worse than other days, not better. Your son is too young to understand the concept but you can hide the fact that you know the truth. You can still make it a good day for him by doing something to celebrate. Take him to the zoo. Or bring an appropriate toddler treat to daycare. Give him a box of animal crackers or show him how to blow bubbles. He really won’t remember it, but making much of him on his day is the important bit.
I think you will. He sounds like he is giving you the shit detail to see what you are made of. Is that bad? Maybe. I suspect it’s because he has been burned by employees refusing to do the dirty work along with the nicer stuff, such as schmoozing the customers. Because holding a job like this means there is dirty work to be done. He doesn’t need employees who won’t pull their weight and slack off doing their share of the dirty work. I suggest sucking it up for a week or two and seeing if your willingness to work hard doesn’t put you in a good position with him.
Of course. I dont have the option of not working and still being able to pay the rent.
I enjoy doing dishes.
Don’t sweat it right now. It’s been a Long day…
Yep. And I must get up at 5.30 to be able to eat before I catch the bus.
Can the key caps be removed? If so, you could maybe replace that one with a lower-profile one. Or just take a file card, fold it up, and jam it under the ctrl key to shim it, to keep it from accidental presses.
Excellent potential fix, but before I saw that, I had implemented a “hardware fix” related to the one below …
Yes, they’re removable. They’re very similar to the keys on the Corsair keyboards. I switched the troublesome CTRL key with the ESC key which is narrower, and that seems to have helped.
I was also surprised to find that I rather like the lit keyboard at night, a feature I never thought I’d use. I have the brightness down to minimum which is a nice soft glow, and I prefer that to turning it off entirely.
Is this ex as in ex boyfriend or is it ex husband? If the latter, has the court ordered alimony?
Here’s an odd one: a mini-rant about actual bugs in June. Early this week, my school’s adminisration informed us all that there’s an infestation of some critter called in English “blue leaf beetle” which just loves to swarm and to munch on either the elms around the campus or the Peking willows around the campus (I forget which). We’ve been warned to not crush them when they decide to swarm onto us humans because if you make them pop, they’ll stink to high Heaven. This on top of the 41c (106f) temperatures is not making the holiday this week all that holi.
The ex boyfriend. He had promised he was getting me a loveseat last year and never did, but anyway, I am over him and developing self esteem and listening to my head and not my heart from now on.
News says Lake county Ohio is expecting lots of mosquitoes this season.
Hmm. When I was in Oklahoma eons ago with USAF I learned about “wheat beetles”. Small bugs that look about like coffee beans with little short legs. Pretty innocuous, almost cute. But every Spring they simply burst into existence one day in their trillions, kinda like cicadas. Suddenly the walls and floors and airplanes are all covered in brown walking coffee beans. Not a lot of flying was done for a couple days; it was too hard to keep the bugs out of parts of the planes where they’d cause trouble.
I don’t recall them stinking especially until they all died. Or were eaten by the very excited local birds who then pooped up a storm everywhere which stank.
Still, it was one of the eerier bits of Mother Nature I’d yet seen in my young-ish urban / suburban life.
Lost a boyfriend, gained mosquitoes. #TradingUp