(no subject)

Some mornings, I wish I could clock into my job with extra force. I wish for Extreme Timecards.

I feel like I should get -- not more money, but somehow a little stamp next to my name on days like today, when half the staff totally fucked off because there's two inches of snow on the ground and a light dusting of it in the air. If I made it here from the Sheridan El stop, which is an open platform three stories off the ground with no windbreaks, you bastards with cars can damn well make the effort. And if you won't, I should get a gold star next to my name when I clock in.

And a cookie.

BossBoss is in today though, good man himself. Yesterday we were LOLing just before I left work, because my mother emailed me that there was a "Snow Event" on its way to Chicago. My immediate response was "I hope there's live music!"

If we end up being the only two staff members in today we are totally going to hang out and watch streaming Doctor Who bootlegs in the conference room.

(no subject)

Dear Chicago,

Are you all new or something?

This is what happens in the winter, this white stuff falling from the sky. O'Hare closes when someone sneezes near a runway, so don't think that means anything to me. Yes, there is a ridiculous amount of snow, but you will note that the temperature is high enough to keep the roads clear and the ice off the pavement. You all have hats, or should.

DON'T PANIC.

Yrs Sincerely,

The Hitchhiker's Guide To Reality

(no subject)

Today, BossBoss and I wrote a book.

Well, ok, we've been writing it for some time. It's called the Big Book Of Awesome and it's basically everything inside my head and his head, puked up onto paper. There is no question the Big Book Of Awesome cannot answer.

Our company is not very good at information management, so it has taken a lot of research and time for us to get all this done. I know who to call, for example, if I can't figure out an invoice, but I don't know their title or why they know how to figure it out or even if it's their job. I just know if I call this person all will be revealed. So in order to put it in the Big Book Of Awesome, I have to find all that stuff out. It's been a long project.

This afternoon, BossBoss said, "Well, it's quiet. Let's make the Comic Book Of Awesome!"

"The Comic Book Of Awesome?" said I.

"Yeah! It's like the Big Book Of Awesome, only for idiots," he said. Let Idiots = everyone but me and him.

The Comic Book Of Awesome is basically the Big Book boiled down to the basics that everyone needs to know but nobody actually knows. Most of it consists of "If you need X, contact Sam" or "If you need Y, call the IT people" with a sprinkling of "It's not our job to tell you this but since the people who should be doing it can't be fucked to, here it is". I took a sharp knife to 83 pages of content and got it down to 22 pages, slapped a cover on it, and sent it to him; he printed it as a booklet and then we had a little "We Are The Champions" moment.

The Comic Book Of Awesome makes us look great, because 1. it proves we know everything ever and 2. it points up sharply that if you got a problem, yo, I'll solve it.

Because you can't yourself. Because we won't tell you how. Even though we know everything.

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

(no subject)

Last weekend, when I went to storage, I brought back a pair of photo albums from when I was a kid. My parents gave me my first camera when I was six and I took photos of eeeeeverything, and I saved them all.

Some are beautiful and very valuable to me -- photographs of my father, my Nan and Packa, my mum, even some of Bernard. People will totally let a six-year-old get away with bullshit an adult couldn't; you should see some of the faces my Nan is making at six-year-old me. Those I'm sending to a professional company to be scanned, because it's worth it to have digital copies and I don't want to scan them all myself.

The other two-thirds of them, on the other hand, are crap shots, places and people I don't recognise, double prints, and images of my thumb. They have no meaning for me; I don't even have any qualms about saying I don't want them.

I'm not sure what to do with them, however. No matter that they have no meaning for me, I grew up believing that every photograph is a story and holds a piece of life in it; I don't believe the camera steals a bit of soul, but I do believe that photos have a magic beyond my grasp. I don't want to simply toss them in a bag and into the trash. It seems like tempting fate.

Sam's random superstitious side comes out. :)

Still, I don't want them, and I don't want to make something out of them. Burning is usually best in a magical sense for this kind of thing, but unfortunately isn't really an option; it puts out a lot of toxic chemicals and I have no good place to do it. neifile7 pointed me to Joachim Schmid, who is a fantastic artist working with photographs but who unfortunately does not seem to have a public call out for donations of old photos, at least that I've been able to find.

I think the best thing to do would be to shred them, but again -- I can't use the shredders at work, because we recycle our shred, and photos can actually slow the recycling process due to their chemical makeup.

It bears rumination.