I work 11 PM to 7 AM at a nursing home. This makes me nocturnal and an insomniac, I come home wide awake and stay that way until about 6 in the evening. This makes days really really long for me, i.e. one day for me lasts from 11 pm one night until about 6 pm a day or two later. :dubious: Or something like that. Night shift makes you a little crazy too, I haven’t been right for the last three years.
I also get the overwhelming urge to help all old people I see. I want to tie their shoes, help them walk, and put their jacket on. Every time I see an old person look like they are walking somewhere near the exit, I have to fight the urge to corral them back to their room, even in wal-mart.
I also forget that people don’t want to hear my gross stories over supper, my husband also works in a nursing home so he doesn’t mind. Everyone else tends to turn green when I start talking.
I also answer the phone at home ____Nursing Home this is Mrald, How can I Help You?
Whenever I see that someone has tested positive for cancer, it gives me a little thrill of joy, because it means that at least the damn PCR is working right today.
I work for the post office, and the “sanctity of the mails” (ie. no theft or tampering) is drummed into us. I even took an oath when I joined many years ago. I CANNOT open a letter addressed to another person, even when it was my live-in girlfriend of five years, and she’d ask me to. I just can’t do it. It might have been sometihng mundane like an electicity bill, and if she opened it and stuck the contents on the fridge, then it’s no longer “mail” in my mind, and I’d read it easily. But in that envelope, no way.
I teach Taekwondo and have for many years. As we enter and leave the workout area, we always bow in and bow out. My cow-orkers find it highly amusing when I come into a meeting and without thinking, stop and bow as I come through the conference room door.
That is to say, I’m not under any oath outside of my employment, but my brain just protests too much when it comes to opening a letter for somebody else - even with their permission.
Let us hope so.
I work with a computer program called SAP. It’s basically a huge database with lots of built-in functions. My work consists of:
- figuring out how does my client do things without SAP
- figuring out which of SAP’s functions do they need to use
- taking their old data, cleaning it and putting it into SAP
- teaching the client how to use SAP
Two of my biggest strengths are Cassandra genes (I can see disaster coming from 9 months ahead) and being a helluva Process Nitpicker (still have to see a process where I couldn’t think of a single improvement).
I have serious problems remembering that when acquaintances whine to me about work-related paperwork, I’m not expected to suggest ways in which they can reduce the amount of forms needed: all they’re looking for is sympathetic noises.
I cannot fail to answer a ringing phone. Can. Not.
I can, however, quote the United States Tax Code and associated Regulations at length.
I routinely answer my home phone with my Work Phone Voice. This freaks out my friends and relatives, as my entire voice changes.
Plus, normal people don’t answer their home phone “Good afternoon, how can I help you?”
I’m a policy analyst for the government, and lately I have found myself managing my personal relationships through briefing notes and options papers and stakeholder analyses and so forth.
It’s made talking about relationships with me pedantic and boring, sure, but everyone hates talking about relationships anyway. Overall it’s actually been a surprisingly effective strategy.
I work in Food Science, mainly research for new products for my company. I have on more than one occasion found my ingredient list short of a few things and have gone to the local grocery store to get a few things. One day I was working on a cherry blueberry cobbler. My test batch was 1000 pounds, but I needed some chopped pecans that never made it in from our supplier. I went to the local store and purchased every bag of pecans they had, 10 pounds worth. The lady at the register looked at me funny and asked me if I was making pecan flips (a type of candy). I said no, that I was making cherry blueberry cobbler. She looked at me funny and asked me if it had a lot of nuts in it, and when I replied no, only 1%, she really thought I was crazy. Sometimes I forget that when most people cook, they don’t make 1000 pound at a time…
You can say 2 or 3, you see a 2, and think “two,” you see a 3 and think “three.”
I deal poker. It is a deuce and a trey. There are no twos and threes in poker. I can not stand to see mortals shuffling or dealing cards, all I can think of is “egads, that will ruin the cards” or “geez, they will never get the hands out.”
I also can not imagine an elderly person living on catfood because social security isn’t enough when 90% of our clientele lose more money a week than I earn. Did I mention the day the whole table was talking about their pensions (My wife gets 36K a year on her pension and they do regular cost of living increases, yeah, it has been great since we retired, we have 3 houses now, how many times have you been to Vegas this year?) I dropped the hint that pension wasn’t a word in my generations vocabulary, they didn’t get the hint.
Relics from old jobs: I can’t carry something normally that can be carried like a waiter tray.
I feel a compulsive need to provide tech support to everyone that mentions a computer problem (Check the CIR guarantees before you sign up, no, finding an off shore co-locate isn’t difficult, the difficult part would be finding a credit card processor to take american credit cards, the rates will be exhorbitant, you did encrypt that didn’t you? Do you have a static ip address?)
Shoes: I always notice when someone is wearing shoes that are the wrong size. It irks me to see heels or toes sticking off the edges of a shoe.
ANSWER THE DAMNED PHONE!
You’re not alone Antigen!
I work in research with mice and rats. On a typical day, I may spend 4 to 8 hours “gowned up”: gloves, smock, shoe covers, face mask and hair cap thingy (the offical name escapes me). When I’m not working with the animals, I wear a hat because having my head uncovered feels wrong!
I do software usability research and interaction design, which means that I spend a lot of my time looking at systems to determine what’s crappy about how they’re designed.
Going shopping for consumer goods is sheer torture for me.
My job has given me ADD. Or maybe it has severely exacerbated a pre-existing condition…
Working in Abuse/Fraud investigations for a large ISP for close to 8 years has left me pretty much as assimilated as Captain Picard when it comes to intraveneous interface with the internet. I can and do function without it all the time for all sorts of reasons, but when it comes to communicating or needing/wanting information of any kind, why even bother with anything else?
My coworkers and I are also known for fits of incredulous yelling at our screens when forced to confront the mind-boggling behavior of the average internet user. With the next breath we’ll be gawking with admiration at the intelligence and cajones (albeit misguided) of a hacker/spammer/phisher/cyber-con-artist.
We also tend to have severely warped facets in our senses of humor, being exposed to what we are exposed to in our daily jobs. We’ll find the same things funny as a random sample of other folks, but very very very few people would find humor in most (if not all) of our inside jokes, even if they knew what we were talking about. It is more likely that a casual observer would want us committed or fired.
Throwing metaphorical peanuts and tomatoes at poorly designed UI, and instinctively performing spellchecks on any UI strings that might be floating around. This is because I’m a technical writer with a large focus on UI design.
This also includes reviewing any written material around me for grammatical and spelling errors. sigh
I’m an acute care nurse. Besides now evaluating everyone for adequate veins for blood draws and IV starts, I find I have messed up my memory.
I am so used to taking in alot of info on someone(s) and using it for 12 hours or 2 days. I only work PT, and so it’s never more than 2 days in a row. Now, some of this is contextual, but for the most part, after that time period is up–I can’t remember a thing.
This is making my other life difficult. I have almost no memory of oh, my kid’s when they were little-if I look at a pic, I can remember the pic and maybe the events surrounding the pic, but I seriously will not remember a post I made last week here, a conversation I had a month ago etc.
Alzeimer’s, here I come.
But my working memory is as strong as ever-it’s like a button is pushed and the screen is wiped. If someone keeps after me, I will eventually retrieve some stuff. Weird as hell, and irksome, too.
I work for a subtitling company. By protocol, we break up sentences at logical points so that they flow better and are easier to read. Every now and then I’ll come across a sign that says something like:
and I’ll get annoyed and silently bitch at whoever wrote the sign for not writing it as
or
This renders many, many signs unreadable to me.
Wow. We have about the same job. We probably work for direct competitors.
My job used to include a bit more database design than it does nowadays and I often found myself subconsciously designing and normalising data structures to contain everyday objects, such as the items on my plate at dinner.
I did the same kind of thing with objects and methods, for a while; the door had an ‘open’ method which could only be invoked if the ‘locked’ property was set to false.
Either that or you’re in adjoining cubicles.
Just thought of one from my old job at the puzzle factory. One of the things I had to do was check text that was going to be encoded for cryptograms – you need to look for unkeyed letters (letters that appear only once in the chunk of text – for instance, in the sentence following (“for instance, in the sentence following”), the r, the h, the l, the w, and the g are unkeyed). Do that for a while and you can’t stop checking – billboards, signs on trucks, magazine ads – anything, I’d start looking to see what was unkeyed.