Hoo-ray, I tested Covid-positive today - first confirmed positive since the pandemic started.
So far, nothing worse than mild-moderate cold symptoms. Waiting to see if my croaker will write a scrip* for Paxlovid.
William Burroughs in “Junky” highly valued a doctor (croaker) who would write scrip, in his case for morphine and such. It’s become a catchphrase in our household.
Yeah, I didn’t get covid til this March. Fatigue and runny nose.
My company got scammed. Scammers somehow inserted themselves into an email chain with one of our major suppliers. They indicated that our next payment should be to a new bank account. Blah Blah we sent the wire to the new bank account. A BIG wire, like enormously big.
My boss, the CFO, and the Director of Accounting were both so overhwelmed with projects and turnovers and changing Payroll and ERP, and reporting systems, that they got bamboozled. They shouldn’t have been, but they were. It’s only by blind luck that we uncovered it quickly enough that the receiving bank could hold the money and open a fraud investigation.
So, boss has tendered his resignation, as much for his own health as recognition of this controls failure. He’s a good guy and good at the job, and the people up above who pushed down about 5 major projects onto his plate above and beyond just running the place will wash their hands of it all.
both original copies of my birth certificate were lost by LA County in their huuuge warehouse complex of records never to be seen again they were either shredded or were destroyed when said warehouse burned to the ground 20 years ago
… So now I have a 6th hand copy that I had to pay 30 dollars for because when Fort Ord closed all their records like that were shipped to Marin County… who lost the 3rd and 4th copies luckily the army used some microfilm type of preservation in case of WW3 happening so I still can get them but its more expensive because of it
Copy number 5 is sitting where ever they keep old HS school health records …
only 3? you lucky dog…in years past I’ve been on hold for so long the center closed and a recording told me to call back … but there’s a rule now that for calls or in office visits that as long as you were there 15 minutes before closing they have to serve you before going home … Its why the local offices close their doors and turn off the phone calls at 15 til close
Oh, and the "leave your number and they’ll call ya back " feature they tout? yeah, you get called back … 2 days later …
croaker is also a term for an underground doctor usually disgraced and licenceless that works for the illegal or legally shady types
Some practical and colorful uses of “croaker” here:
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/izsm4gy
I see that the Urban Dictionary online has really sleazy non-medical uses for the term, which I’ll leave for you to discover.
Thankfully my croaker came through with a scrip. In true 1930s gangster idiom he advised me to “lay low” for awhile (he made his bones in internal medicine).
You can pretty much count on this for anything in the Urban Dictionary.
I loved the fantasy book series The Black Company by Glen Cook which was about a mercenary unit, and was told from a military perspective rather than the standard “grand heroic quest” perspective of a typical fantasy series.
Anyway, the main character and POV of the earlier books was from a guy with the nickname Croaker, who was the surgeon/field medic for the unit. So when I hear the word “croaker”, that’s the first thing to pop in my mind.
(I highly recommend the series for any fantasy book fan who is interested in reading something very well-written and different from the usual fare. And now I have the urge to read them again, including new books I haven’t read yet; the last one came out in 2000 but there’s a new one supposedly coming out eventually.)
In the office at work, there’s an office manager and two office assistants. That’s the office staff. I used to work in the office and currently have a different job, but my office is next to the main office and I know how to do everything, so I help out when needed. So I work alongside the office staff, but am not technically office staff.
Last week, one of the office assistants quit and the other was fired. So the office manager (who should have been fired and probably would have been if that wouldn’t leave us with actually zero office staff) is the only one left.
So it’s been a funnnnnn week.
What happened is a long and pretty crazy story, but the result is that work is f’ing chaos right now and I no longer get to see the people I like and have grown used to spending most days with and am left with the one I tolerate. And boy, is she feeling sorry for herself.
It’s bad. The two office assistants did a lot of work without having to be managed and were taught by the previous office assistants, not by the manager. The manager has always been awful at her job and REALLY sucks at training, but her people have always been able to keep things sort of humming along in spite of her. Now, she has no people to pick up her slack and mask her incompetence.
I have this little fantasy that some part of her will go “oh wait. Maybe I have some responsibility in all this? And, if I don’t want something like this to happen again, perhaps I could… do better?” but realistically, has that ever happened to any bad manager ever in the history of the world? Nah.
Gnomes.
My bad for boxing it up with the other books.
Sorry love. It was my book. Gifted by a sister. 1977. Had no idea how much my 
enjoyed it.
Very often it’s the people at the top who fall for these. People lower down have been trained to verify new bank accounts via phone calls or texts.
Pumpkin Spice pine cones. A month ago, our local grocery store set a few boxes of these by the front door. GAG!
They went away last week when the actual pumpkins arrived.
My husband always gets aggravated by the super-intense cinnamon pine cones. He smells the cinnamon, thinks there’s some really appealing pastry nearby, then gets disappointed when he tracks the smell to the pine cones.
On the up side, he would not have mistaken this particular smell for something edible. You could tell what it was supposed to be, but it just wasn’t.
Not sure I’d continue to see a doc who’d “made his bones” in whatever his specialty was.
Pumpkin Spice Ovaltine…!
“You’ll shoot your eye out with that thing, kid.”
Naw, they knew. They were suspicious and intended to verify the right way, were convinced they verified it, and they didn’t. Just a failure of their executive functioning skills, overwhelmed with other things they thought they ticked the right boxes and they didn’t.
A side rant to the jerk honking at me to make a right on red this morning. There were a bunch of other people coming, your lack of planning doesn’t mean I have to cut people off.
I can’t tell you how THRILLED I was when I eventually made my turn and you zoomed past me, just to stop at the cash toll booth, while I cruised through with my EZ-Pass, winding up back in front of you. That put a smile on my face, MADE my morning.
I like 'em in front of me, where I can keep an eye on 'em.
Like drunk drivers on a highway… better in front of you than behind you…