One good thing about today

I made my first training video for work with iMovie without needing geeka’s help – and I was able to complete it in under an hour!

 

Bonus gift: I was even able to export it and get it be viewable on a Windows Machine!

Pray for Me

I know – me the most unreligious person around, is asking you to pray for me. Well, I’m going to need it today. Let’s just say, this bad day started out yesterday when I got an email that said, “It looks like the loader might be failing I will give you a call tomorrow.”  This would be our tape autoloader at work. This would be the tape autoloader at work that does all of our backups for all of the servers we have in the building. *This is really bad news!*

 

Since that email, things have just been going down hill – and fast. I have a special eNewsletter that I’ve been working on this department that can only find things wrong. It looks great, but the company we use, for some reason has problems with apostrophes, hyphens, and quotation marks. Of course, this department does not want to rewrite their text because then it will look to “FORMAL” and they are more “informal kind of bunch”. Fine, I can try to figure this one out – it is just an email to the company, no big problems.

 

Then overnight, I got 40 messages from our antivirus software about a full quarantine and items that have expired and items that have not been able to be scanned. WTF? WTF? Yeah, so this scares me and of course no one has ever showed me where on the 10 servers we have where to go look into this. I did this once before, when I only had 3 servers to work about.

 

I have changed 4 passwords this morning and I am booked almost every second of this day with meetings and such. Add to the fact that two coworkers are after my head right now and they just want me gone – even though they were the ones that were entirely wrong. Another coworker is upset at me because I think she is breaking dress code and of course one of the people who wants me head told her that I’m the only one complaining about her clothes (ah, truth is, about 8 people say she wears bathing suits to work).

 

So, maybe I need to pray to the god of computer gremlins. Maybe I need to pray to the god of ‘just let me get thru this day’. I don’t know. But I need it – NOW!

My First Meme

This is my first meme. I've been tagged by Image Goddess who is my PT-buddy and who has been battling the summer-crud that has been going around.

Rules

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
2. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog

Random Facts

• When I was in middle school, I wanted to be a physical therapist/athletic trainer because I was so into sports. Needless to say, I probably would have been able to save myself some grief and money in physical therapy had I done that career path!
• I am one of the first members of my middle school’s Sports Hall of Fame for participating in softball, swimming, and soccer. It is one of the rare things that I still display from my sports life.
• I started to write fan fiction for a television show named La Femme Nikita almost a decade ago and I still write fan fiction based off of that show today. In fact, I would almost say I have a fan base of readers who get nervous if I don’t post at least a chapter a day (if not more).
• I prefer to be around my father’s family rather than my mother’s side of the family. This all sounds nice, but is the most impractical thing for me. My mom’s family is all in the Pittsburgh area while my dad’s family specializes in spreading across the entire United States and moving around quite frequently.
• I used to color in coloring books while in my college sociology class in order to stop myself from falling asleep.
• I love to take photographs and I feel that even with the digital camera, nothing is as good as actual film and photographs. In fact, I really like to take black and white photographs as it is more difficult to do.
• I have published poetry – call it young teenager angst.
• I’m really good at putting the borders together on jigsaw puzzles, but often become too bored to do anything more with the puzzle.

Now, I'm supposed to tag 8 people but the problem is I don’t even read 8 blogs. I have two places that I go all the time and I have not branched out at this time. I know, it’s time to start reading! So, I’ve answered but regrettably, I cannot tag anyone else to continue this on. Any suggestions on fun blogs to read – I’m game for it!

Practical Jokes

Some times I like to pull practical jokes and lately, it has been my pleasure to be able to do this with customized ring tones on our phone system. It is one of the neatest things to be able to do to our phones. I have control of the ring tones and most of them are the normal ring tones and a few fun ones. But there have been so people that just needed specialized ring tones.

 

First there was mine and the “Payroll Bitches” ring tone. I was able to get the Wicked Witch of the West saying “I’ll Get You My Pretty, and Your Little Dog Too”. It’s great – it matches my personality. Along that same time I got our CFO an Elvis ring tone… he sings “I’m All Shook Up” whenever her phone rings. It gives her a smile – which never hurts with the CFO. She controls the money so keep her happy

 

It didn’t end there. I have this woman in the development department named Marci. Her given name is Marcia, but she hates it. Well, I was able to find Jan Brady saying “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia”. What makes this better, is that we got this onto her phone and we turned it ALL the way up. At first, she thought we were doing something to make her phone play that way. She had no idea that it was now her ring tone. She hated it at first, but the nice thing is… she has embraced it as something unique that she can really hear with the ring tone down lower.

 

I tried to get the Facilities Coordinator a new ring tone but he won’t go for it. Often, he saves the day around here, so I was able to get Mighty Mouse’s theme song. You know… “Here I come to save the day!!!!!” It’s perfect for him, but he wants us to record women talking sweet to him. Yeah, he sits next to me so that isn’t going to be happening anytime soon!

 

I also got Mork going Nanu, Nanu… but on one has selected that one.

Of course, when the PG got wind of this custom ring tones and he came up with someone harder for me to do. All these other ring tones were sort of already shortened for me. But no… he wanted a Disco ring tone. Specifically, “Boogie Wonderland”. So the search was one. First, the files really need to be wav files to make this easier. It’s insane to find this, but after about 20 minutes of searching I found a full length version of Boogie Wonderland (that was the real song singing, but not some stupid synthesizer) and then I had to edit it down to a ring of the length of about 4 to 7 seconds. I was able to pull it off and he enjoys it.

 

But now we’ll get to the real practical joke. That would be on Ms. Texas. Yep, my girl Texas who is so against the Steelers its unreal. She is Cowboys through and through. Well, she is on vacation this week and we were wondering what we could do to her. Everyone wanted to decorate her desk, because that’s what she does to us. But, that didn’t seem like it screamed out something we would do. Then I remembered that I wanted to make a Steelers ring tone. Well, it is now done. The ring tone starts out with the fans screaming “Here We Go Steelers” then a robot saying “The Pittsburgh Steelers” and ending with “And The Towels Are Up!”. It’s brilliant! It’s awesome. She is going to hate it. But I know others in this building will use the ring tone too, so I feel that I did something for everyone… not just for a practical joke.

 

And some days, this is what I have to remember. I can work somewhere where we pull jokes like this all the time. I work in a place where I have the power to control the ring tones and the hold music. I have some fun that can make the long days when I want to slap the PG silly. So, I know that I have a long day planned today, but I wanted to share the fun of my ring tones. Who knows what will be next. I will get a feeling someday and just will do it. Maybe I need to get a man recording the “breathless” women for the Facilities Coordinator. Now that would be a hoot!

Why PG's Shouldn't Be Bosses

1. They lie to your face
2. They lie to other people behind your back
3. They like to micromanage.
4. They hate being bothered about stuff that they want to micromanage but don’t know enough about
5. They like to jump the line in a “To-Do List” to be most important
6. They like to make you work on the holiday
7. They think of stupid video concepts that are going to take a gazillion hours to do and not take any of your other work off of you
8. They go to stupid baseball games that they don’t even like in order to socialize rather than work
9. They like to tell you that you don’t need more training
10. They like to get you to do all of their work and take the glory
11. They like to get you to do all of their work and all of the blame when it isn’t exactly done the right way
12. They like to make comments about exercise
13. They notice the color of your toenail polish
14. They call you and leave you messages of music
15. They really, really, really, really like the song True Colors
16. They don’t make anyone else do any work
17. They don’t understand deadlines
18. They are too small to see how big a problem truly is
19. They leave you to deal with political nightmares
20. They let you get so much work that you feel like you are drowning and then they tell you that you are rude and need an attitude adjustment
21. They hire people that should be under you in the chain but decides to make them the same level as you so you have no control over what they do because the PG is the boss and he doesn’t manage the person
22. They suck!

Blah, blah, blah

I have been such a bad blogger of late. It is because as I started to see the light and start planning for my future, I get awful projects thrown onto my desk. I have been swamped with things that are just going to take so much extra time. Some of these used to be things that I liked to do and I would think if I wasn’t under pressure to do, I would like. I would like it even better if I got to make the CREATIVE decisions.

Instead, I am going to be stuck doing a pop-up video to True Colors. Ok, I don’t know if any of you have been to Disney World and Epcot Center during the 80’s. That’s when Michael Jackson was still partially black and mostly liked. His 3-D movie Captain Eeho (or something like) was the rage and would have horribly long lines. But when you got into the preshow, they had this wonderful picture show to True Colors (and I believe it was the Phil Collins version and not the Cyndi Lauper version). It was a stunning piece of artwork and I liked *THAT* more than I liked the 3-D movie. So, even though this sounds good and creative, in the back of my head, I’m thinking that anyone who has ever seen THAT preshow, this is going to suck. And it is stuck in my head. I know how great it was. I remember how stunning the pictures were. I remember the cute little pictures of kittens. I remember the giant balloons soaring in the air. I remember the rainbows and lightening pictures that were featured. There is absolutely NO WAY that mine is going to even be 10% of what that preshow was. It depresses me. It makes me sad. It makes me not want to do it, but I don’t have a choice. The boss has spoken – this is the way it is going to be.

 

So, I plan to get back to my blog. I’ll get rid of the poll that is causing all the popup ads (and since I had to put on a song today for the hold music that wasn’t even in the running, I may not have as much control of the hold music as I thought I did). I’ll do the 8 things you don’t know about me soon. I swear!

 

And then you will get to hear all about the horrible process of making a video that I don’t want to make.