May 18, 2025 - bloghan 47

What do I even say about this week? "What just happened" or "why did that just happen" or something else? I don't know if I can really accurately describe this week due to how many times I felt the need to black out memories. Here's how this week necessitated that underrated feature of the human brain:

Tier list of the week

This week's tier list: colours. Specifically, these 16 that have been preselected for me from the whole RGB color scheme thing. I don't really get how it works. Here's the tier list:

Ordered tiers, unordered wthin tiers. Green is my favourite colour for sure, but I can't lie that I've been growing more and more fond of deep sky blue the more and more time I spend looking up at that very colour. Yeah, I do like the winter, but the spring and the summer is growing on me to an alarming rate. Also, yes, pinks and purples ARE that high, because I think those are fine colours. Purple was reserved for kings at one point, after all. Colours in B tier are kinda just colours which I recognize are necessary, but I don't really care too much about them. But the ones in C tier... they're just so needlessly garish. I don't like them as much as what's above... I hope that opinion isn't too trite or anything.

Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)

Today was going to be a big day at work, as the new temps would be joining us. And yet... I was still feeling so drained from staying up as late as I did last night. I was not very excited to go into work since I was still very stressed about the coursework I needed to do, but that's a problem for later. I guess. At work things were mostly normal. The space request from last week needd more follow up because apparently there's a whole new process I need to follow, and my mentor needed some more details on how one of my Absconder tools made some other file. New temps started filtering in just before noon, with the two that would be sitting with us in the corner being the first we met. I wasn't expecting to really intereact with the mmuch, and was trying to be a bit cold with them, but once I found out that one of them was from my home region like the compatriot? Well, that sparked a real long conversation about said region, and I guess we're going to get along well. What about the other guy (the replacement for my co-DM)? Well, maybe not as much. Eventually, my work rival called a grand meeting or whatever in the meeting-room-turned-7-desk-nightmare (I will henceforth call it "the cell") and everyone packed themselves in there to introduce themselves. There wasn't really much opportunity for introduction though. 7 people already sitting in a room, plus another 10 or 11 trying to pack themselves, all sort of talking? Yeah, there wasn't much productive going on there... As we all left them to their devices, I did interact specifically with my successor, telling her she can come by my desk and that I was the one she was replacing. She asked if there was a way to contact me, and I just told her to use the organization's regular communication channels. She didn't seem to infromed by this answer, so I threw in that she could always visit me, but then I realized that she probably doesn't know where I work. I brought her over to the corner, and once I told her that she would be inheriting my desk, her frist question was "do I have to keep the monitors vertical like that?" Should've told her yes, but today I was choosing kindness so I assauged her fears. I handed her some notebooks that I consider "passed down" from previous people using this desk, and sent her on her way. I sit back down at my desk and work a little more on some of my Absconder things, since there's currently a little weirdness surrounding them, and I manage to distract my work rival with the question "how many five-year olds could you beat in a fight at once" to get him out of the corner. When he comes back, he brings some others with him, and we all start moving to go down for lunch. At first we think to invite the new temps, but once we see that they're all already eating lunch together and getting to know each other there, we just go down ourselves. At the lunch table we played a couple games of poker, with the fanatic cleaning out two people in the very first hand with a 7-high straight. Wow. My work rivla complained about the various people who would go all-in when they wanted to focus on eating, but I really don't care about anything that man complains about anymore. This was probably the best game of poker we've played here yet, but it did keep us for quite while. Once I got back to my desk, I had to take a call from an IT person who was managing our space request for the new project. He explained to me that I had not followed the new procedure for requesting space for the new project, and he showed me how. Apparently, in the original form I filled out, I was not supposed to back out of that login prompt to an entirely different website?? Crazy. Right after that, another team meeting with my work rival's team. At first, I thought that once again I was not going to be all that relevant, so most of this meeting was spent poring over that new website the IT guy told me to use, and messaging my manager about how I was going about it. Near the end of the meeting though, I was surprised by people asking about my progress on another task, the A,B,C,D file problem. Oh yeah. I do have to do that. The meeting ended, and I headed upstairs, where I mostly did a little bloghan and a little bit of running a bunch of Absconder things to ensure they were all going alright. My work rival and I also visited the cell to let all the new temps know about the 'Jeopardy' event happening on Friday, but even though he opened with it he started yapping about a whole bunch of other stuff like where everyone was from and what areas were rough or not He even just spread misinformation about the work from home days that they get, distracting them even more! Later on in the day, I revisited the cell with my work rival to make sure that everyone got the message about 'Jeopardy' on Friday, but apparently they all got it right away??? Man... my work rival won today, but I'll get him for something later. I left the cell before he did, walking just slowly enough to hear him present me as a cartoon villain of sorts. Well, at least he got the villain part right. Before I left work that day, there were two notable things I ended up doing. First, I had to give my manager an update on the space request (which I had figured out how to do on the new platform), and so I went to his desk to do that. There were some fields in the first quarter of the form that I had no idea how to fill, and while he seemed a little frustrated that I had to ask these questions, we got through it and got access to the rest of the form... which turned out to be an exact copy of the other forms we've already submitted for this. My manager muttered about what a waste of time this all was, and I realized that his frustration was not at me, but at this whole process becoming more lengthy for no reason. At least, I think that's where his frustrations lie? In all likelihood, he could be frustrated with me from a lot of things. Once the form was finished, he asked me to submit once I asked the IT guy a couple clarifying questions, and I left for my desk to continue working on it. Secondly, in the time between returning to my desk and leaving work, I had a pretty extended conversation with my co-DM, the fanatic, and the replacement for my co-DM. It was mostly about work and simple stuff, but pretty soon it ended up being me listing out all the people in my life who I have beef with, where I named most of the other temps, most of my family, and a lot of people I know back in my home region. I guess I just don't get along with most people? Makes sense, given the type of person I am, I suppose. After this, I made the bus trip home. It was a nice sunny day once again, and the trees that I passed by were even more green than last time. The passage of time always bites me back in the end, doesn't it? Once I got home though, there was no time to spend on those kinds of thoughts. Now it was time for work. I finally started on the email assignment, writing a complete draft that I thought was pretty good. Now that I'd actually started the assignment though, I actually had some things that I needed to get clarified. I like how the assignment is a little open-ended, but a lot of the requirements feel hidden. But I guess that's how it is with grammar, right? Before you've written and read a lot, you can't really know all the grammar rules of ENglish perfectly, so it's hard to know what you're missing until someone points it out to you. I spent more time this evening drafting an email to the instructor to ask these questions than I spent writing the email for my assignment! Both emails ended up keeping me up until 3 hours past midnight, and that already told me that this is just going to be how this week goes, isn't it? Well, that's what I was planning as I was going to bed.

Tuesday had me waking up the same way, and after preparing myself in the morning the same way, I made my way to work in the same way. I sagged into my chair in the same way, but throughout the day I actually stayed here most of the day. After all, my successor would be visiting me sometime today, and I didn't want her to find a chance to do so while I was out of my seat yapping on the clock like I'm my work rival. My work today was focused on repairing the wrapper that would run one of my Absconder tools overnight, since it had just stopped doing that. Well... the real reason was that I disabled the nightly part of it while I waited for the not-manager to make his updates, but even after I re-enabled it following his updates, it would not work. So, I looked into it, diving deep into the language I was using, constantly testing, changing little things, but having to set the timed start to 3 minutes in the future everytime to see if the automation part would work (it didn't). Now, I know I said that I would stay in my desk the whole time, but I did break that just a little bit in the morning to talk with the people in the crossword cubicle. One of them, the gregarious, had worked on something similar, so I thought I would ask her for advice on my problem. Maybe she could help me figure out why it wasn't running overnight, when it was working just fine manually? While I managed to get a little help from her, some good ideas of what might be wrong and some ideas on how to test it in the future, the more memorable thing was meeting one of the new temps sitting in the crossword cubicle. He's replacing the gregarious (I wonder how happy she is about that situation?), and I was quite happy to hear about how he's also from my home region: not just that, my home city! However, he came to this city a couple years ago for his education, and ended up hired here. So, his nickname is going to be "the traitor" from now on. Hope that's ok with him if he ever reads this! We mostly talked about thigns from our home city and about school and work, but when the others in the crossword cubicle got involved in the conversation, interactions with the traitor got a bit stranger. For example, I reiterated the "weight loss" bit with my co-DM and the gregarious once again, talking about going from a certain amount of kilograms to pounds, but the traitor took it all at face value. He started suggesting me stuff about the gym and about diets and calorie tracking... I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for not realizing the joke, but it did make me want to say this: I am actually pretty happy with my weight now. Every joke I make about converting my weight in kilograms to pounds is now actually a joke. And to take it one step further, I am actually quite happy with the shape of my body too. I don't wear baggier clothes for the purpose of hiding my body shape out of shame, but now I do to keep some weird comments about it at bay. I don't know how much more "your hips are so snatched~!" I can take. Like, my waist is right there. Can't you say something about that? I like its shape better than my hips! But yes, I would say I have a more healthy relationship with food when it comes to weight and body shape. If you ever catch me skipping out on food, it's because I'm trying to cut down on the amount of sweets that I eat (for the sake of my teeth and to prevent sugar rushes), because I'm not really all that hungry, because I forget to eat, to save money, or because it's really late at night and I'm really tired and don't feel like making something to eat before I go to bed. Does that clear everything up? Back to what's going on with the traitor, I just really didn't like his whole approach to what he thought were my genuine concerns. It's one of those things where (if it was genuine) I wasn't looking for advice. But, I never specified that! That's the key here. So really, there's no hard feelings at all. I left a little bit after the conversation died down, armed with a new approach to the nightly Absconder thing at least. The various people visiting my cubicle seemed a bit surprised how locked in I was on a Tuesday. My work rival was out and about the office the whole day, barely doing anything that seemed productive. I did manage to introduce him and another one of the new temps to the cult of the analog guy (the person in the picture frame on my desk), looking through his holy texts (reviews) and I even got to share related parables (stories from his class), and I fully converted them too! After getting a little more work in (and seemingly getting even farther from succeeding), I went down for lunch. I would have invited the people in the cell to join us, but they were all gathered around one person's screen to watch a training video like it was a movie screening, so I just left them to their devices. Today, there was no card game I participated in, and in fact no one pulled out any cards. It was mostly just walking and discussion about plans, discussion I stayed out of because I already knew that my work rival would be touting some anti-new people and anti-inclusive stuff. I just stuck to myself, ate my sandwich, and read 'One Piece' until I went back up. I did have a short conversation with my equivalent about 'One Piece,' where he claimed that I gaslit myself into enjoying it only after enduring bad chapters. Uh.... well, no? I enjoyed it from the very first chapter, so no gaslighting could have happened in the first place??? There was another "conversation" with the traitor, where he pointed at my sandwich and told me that's why I couldn't lose weight. Ok, so first, that's something I really don't want to hear/be said in the workplace lunch room. Second, we weren't talking about that, you just decided to point that out to randomly critique me. Is this what negging feels like? Eh, probably not. It's coming from the same place as his initial comments this morning. Whatever... After heading upstairs, there really wasn't all that much more that happened. I kept trying and trying to get my ABsconder to work, and after one specific round of testing I did get it to work! ...when I modified the tol to not use any Absconder at all. UGH. What I ended up doing was retranslating the tool back into the original language, and when I eventually shared this with the gregarious, she laughed a bit but told me she had a feeling that would just work. And indeed, it worked. This is what I spent the entire day doing at work huh. There wasn't really any other thing of note to talk about, but there was something that didn't happen that I thought would: my successor visiting me. She never did? I told the people who visited me throughout the day about how I was expecting it though it never happened, and eventually I was told that my predecessor and the fanatic were the ones teaching her some stuff today, just in the cell. Ohhhhh. I guess that makes sense. Maybe it makes more sense to give her assistance by going to her, rather than making her come to me? EH, probably. After an accusation from my work rival that I was jealous of not being the one to help her (HA! AS IF), I headed home. Once there, I made a whole bunch more revisions to that assignment, really going down to the nitty gritty nof the potential errors provided in assignment documentation and the textbook. There were actually quite a few things I was learning, and I realized that my email would not be marked very well if I had just submitted what I made on Monday. This kept me up very late once again, but as much as I wanted to get it all done today... I knew there was a lot more I needed to do.

I finally got punished for staying up late on Wednesday, where I ended up waking up late. Well, that's fine. I'll just rush out of my place and... completely forget to bring a lunch. Fine! I'll buy a lunch! Once at work, my focus was back on trying to figure out if my Absconder ran last night. It did! Partway? AAAAGH. Another morning spent on debugging, figuring out why things weren't working fully. I did also visit the cell at one point, catching a bunch of my coworkers in there just yapping, and I met with my successor once again. She apologized for not coming by yesterday, saying that she heard I was looking very focused on a task and that she didn't want to bother me. Ohhhhhhh. That makes sense. We got to talking a little bit more, and I shared some more stuff about the work she would be doing very soon, and a little about what I was doing. I also told her a little about our team structure, also trying to encourage her to maybe not go randomly visit my manager whenever possible (just message him!!). We got to talking a little more, and I was starting to realize that she kind of reminded me a lot of myself, with a little bit of my sister and Greyhair mixed in. Like, what are the chances? As the conversation continued into the things we did for fun, my favourite instructor (the analog guy, of course!), and where I was from, I somehow got reminded of a fun fact of some kind. I don't even remember what that fun fact was, but my successor looked at me with the most extreme excitement I've ever seen depicted on someone's face - and I'm a 'One Piece' fan! She asked me if I had any sort of special interest I was obsessed with. Is... is she asking if I have a hyperfixation? Like from neurodivergence? I'm about to answer with my standard 'Love Live!' introduction response when she finishes her sentence with "because mine's mormonism."

??????????????

What???? What??? What?? What? What??????????

What am I supposed to say after that???????????

How am I supposed to bring up 'Love Live!' after that???? Or anything, at all, for that matter????

Desipte my face displaying a state of shock I'm sure rivals that of Monkey D. Luffy himself, she continued on to explain. As I gasped out various "whats," she shared about her endless and bottomless curiosity concerning the religion, the interviews, the documents/manuscripts, the documentaries, so much of it. I'm still having trouble processing all this. Mormonism? I felt like that guy who had a friend transition and want to change her name to Mildred. Mildred??? Mormonism??? Huh?????????

Eventually I recovered, but the shock of hearing that kind of thing? Well, I ended up back in my chair at my desk. I don't remember how I got back. I don't remember how long the gap in time was. I don't remember who was there. Only that I was back. My memory was blacked out as a result of that revelation, except for one word: mormonism. Mormonism? Of all things, mormonism? Mormonism?

Well, it's as I say: "if it's loved, it's alright." To be honest, I guess my special interests are a bit out there too. I mean, an anime made for high school girls, crosswords with strange and cryptic wordplay, writing documentation and derivative fictional works outside of the norm of fanfic, D&D, and being a terrible trickster? Ok actually, I guess those aren't too out there, it's just the combination that is, alright? At this point, people were coming by the corner to ask about lunch, which is when I revealed that I didn't bring one! The group that regularly goes to buy a lunch had already left, so I rushed out to join them. Unfortunately, I was a bit too late., as I was heading to the restaurant in the other building across the parking lot, I saw them already leaving it. I still intended to go there, but my equivalent asked if I liked sandwiches, since I almost always have one for lunch. Well, I usually make sandwiches because they're easy and quick to make, not particularly because I like them a lot. He told me to visit the building across the street instead of the one I was heading to, becuase there was a sandwich place in there. Well... I guess I'll give it a try? After a very uncertain but quick jaywalk past some construction workers, I walked into that other building. Wow! It was the exact same building as the one I worked in from the outside, but on the inside? The lobby was so clean, so posh, so shiny. It felt like a fancy-schmancy hotel lobby. I think I actually said out loud that I wished I worked here. Clearly, I am not immune to propaganda. The restaurant was in the back, and it was very bougie. I ended up ordering the reuben with arugula, and since it was unclear where it was that I should wait, I took it as an opportunity to find a good spot to scope out the whole place. There were some nice tall windows, a TV screen inlaid in some sort of thick central pillar feature, and quite a fancy tile floor too. The sandwich assembly stuff just behind the counter looked well-laid-out, but looking around, I noticed that the cheap brands were used for the chips and fridge drinks. Though, that clashed with neat wooden tables and a menu filled with cursive text. My conclusion: a pretentious place, for sure, but it probably tastes good. My order was called out, and I got a tiny little bag; I walked out, and after waiting out a police car, I jaywalked back to my office, and quickly made my way to my desk. I was a little worried about the weight and size of my bag, and I was right to be worried. It was a very small sandwich, cut in half. It would have been difficult to put the pieces together, but if I did it would be about the same size as my palm. While the sandwich made up for its small size by the way it used it in tasting SO GOOD (the meat and the cheese used in a reuben match so well, and I had forgotten how much I like the taste of thousand island dressing in a sandwich, not to mention the arugula being a great balancer to the savoury part of the sandwich), it still was a little too expensive for me to ever consider going back to that place. Oh well. Welp. Back to work! The not-manager had messaged me about how long my Absconder made for him took to run, and he gave me a great suggestion on how to speed it up, so it was time to work on that! He also finally asked what was up with the thing not running at night, but at least he asked today! I could actually tell him that it was about to be working! He questioned what the issue exactly was, but since I didn't know what the issue ever was in the first place I just told him that it was fixed now, just requiring testing. He left it that. Thankfully. Phew. The only thing left to do today was to meet with my manager for our monthly meeting. I ended up showing up to the meeting room early, but I couldn't figure out where the lights were (well, more like "couldn't be bothered to find them"), so my boss walked in to me doing some work in total darkness. Once he showed me the light swtich behind the door (yeah, that checks out), we got to talking. But... there wasn't really much to talk about. We both kind of realized there isn't much for me to do, since I've basically completed almost all of it. There's only various fixes I needed to submit for my various Absconder things, which I could do as soon as this meeting was over, and then the A,B,C,D file task. The rest of the meeting was just awkwardness between me and my manager, as always. Some small sharing from him about our future work, and what of it will get assigned to me. Some ramblings from me about how much I like living here and how I've helped out my successor so far. We never fail to get awkward with these meetings, huh? After this though, I kind of just wander around the office ot do my work, mostly to avoid my work rival as I have grown extremely tired of his antics. I go to the crossword cubicle for a bit and talk about my awkwardness with my manager, but once my work rival makes his way there I move to the cell. I mostly work on my own stuff in there, and the noise is quite loud in here (especially when the fanatic shows up), but at least they didn't feel like sticking around too much. There was a point where I was worried about my work rival staying in the room for a bit after walking in, but it turns out that he simply just forgot his laptop?? The thing he needs to do work with??? He just forgot it in the cell??? I don't even know what's going on even more. There was some conversation to be had in this room: my successor was SO bored with her training and was trying to find any conversation that she could to get out of it, so we talked a little about my work. I also warned the group a little bit about some of my work rival's more... extreme views, and to not bring up certain topics around him because they might hear some things they'd rather not hear. Soon though, it was time for me to head out, an hour early at that. I really had to do some work today so I was skipping out on D&D and the last hour of work. Not just the email assignment, but the quizzes, and probably another email to the instructor as well! On the bus I got a text asking if I had the character sheets... oops... I forgot them! Oh well. Today I managed to get home with two buses and barely any walking in between, so when I got home I could just do stuff. I didn't end up doing those quizzes, but instead I essentially finished the assignment, albeit with one thing left to clear up: parenthetical comma usage. I had no idea if a sentence like this was grammatically correct: "My friends Riko and Mari want to go to the zoo tomorrow." Like, do I need parenthetical commas around the two names? This quandry only kept me up for a little bit, because I decided to end my suffering and late night grammar searches with an email sent to the instructor asking specifically about these commas. Yet again, I had let it get really late, but at least this time I was feeling very comfortable about my assignment. Once I had the answer to my question, I could submit! I just really hope the instructor will get back to me on time...

Thursday morning, against all odds, was a refreshing one. Did it have to do with how I was no longer all that stressed about the email assignment? Maybe... At work, I had yet to figure out what was going on with my Absconder not running fully overnight. Then, I tried to run it manually in the morning, and it ran partially there too. Aha! So it was fine overnight, but it must've been my implementation of how I did the not-manager's suggestion that was incorrect. I'm glad that my manager told me to prioritze my easiest task right now, because if I could figure this out quickly, then I could avoid messages from the not-manager when I'm busier for a long time! The error only took like 5 minutes to find too, just a hanging holdover from a previous speed-up method, one incompatible with the not-manager's suggestion. Must've forgotten to remove it, I guess. After applying the fix and starting to test, I started getting a bunch of messages from my successor, long strings of random chracters. Ah, she's accidentally sending me her security key inputs isn't she? Those things type in some random garble of letters followed by the enter key when they're touched (though I set mine to "when it's touched for 3 seconds"), so I guess she had my chat window open when she picked up her laptop. She seemingly got lost on the way to my desk, but I overheard my predecessor telling her which direction to go, and soon enough, she was here in the corner. After we grabbed a chair from an unoccupied cubicle, we put our laptops down on the poker table and got to work. Yesterday I had offered to teach her some stuff regarding our version control and the submission process, and I had decided that a hands on approach would be best. We discussed quite a lot of confidential stuff and a lot more stuff that would just weigh down this bloghan with jargon that doesn't really need to be known to understand, but this went on for a good couple of hours. My successor seems to be pretty good at sponging up information, and I really don't know what she's talking about when she says her handwriting is messy, becuase she's literally doing cursive as I'm explaining things?? Like, have you seen my handwriting? After the first 2 hours of instruction, we headed off to have lunch in our own floor's lunch room, with some of the new temps and some of the old temps being there. It was my introduction to some of the new temps, but to be honest, it just felt like a normal lunch? THere were no cards being played, and most of it was my successor takling to everybody as I tried to escape into my phone. I found my instructor for the communication course had emailed me back about the parenthetical comma stuff, but I will probably act on that later. There wasn't really anything memorable about the conversation, except for one little bit where it was revealed that my successor has the same habit of forming beefs with people that I do! Or, I guessnot habit... maybe affinity? Yeah, she shares that affinity with me! Somehow, they had hired two people just like that in a row. But, what do I really care about that? It's time to eat my sandwich, and now that my sandwich is done, it's time to head back to my desk. My successor eventually makes it back to the corner herself, and we continue to work. I teach her some small tricks to our mutual text editor, about the shortcuts my predecessor and I have already embedded in our flows, and I got her to learn how to check her work and check it again (becuase I wish I knew how to do that when I started!). Some friends of hers from other floors came down to visit (how does this girl already know so many new temps??) and as she talked I jsut got back to making sure my fix was the one to... well, fix things. After regaling them with tales of the analog guy, they left and my successor and I could continue. Once I had showed her how to edit and check things, I let her go ahead and be the one to make the change to my Absconder work and submit it (after I had determined it was a working solution, which took an embarrassingly long time). Unfortunately for her, her submission had to wait for tomorrow due to someone else on the team submitting something causing the project to fail all the tests. Ah, I hope my team never changes. There wasn't much left for me to teach my successor, nor was there much for me to do today (except introduce the proper usage of the parenthetical comma to the people around me), and eventually I just went home. I applied what I learned from the parenthetical comma email to... my email assignment, then joined my friend Blue-haired and Grey-haired for another one of our weekly calls. Now Blue-haired wouldn't show up for a bit, so I shared some of the stories of this week with Grey-haired to start. With her ability to break things having affected most of her tech, there wasn't really much we could do. She brought up drawing, and I came up with a little game: I would choose some random fictional character and try to give her instructions on how to draw them. I would not be allowed to look at her drawing as I did, and she would not be allowed to see the image I was using as a reference. It was very fun game, and Blue-haired joined in partway to "help" (I was trying to get an accurate picture though, Blue-haired... you can troll in round 2). I wasn't feeling very confident in my description but it turns out that it wasn't actually so bad! It came out pretty close, though maybe that's because I chose a character with a rather angular face (Mihawk from 'One Piece'). For a character that only I have seen before, it was pretty good! The next round consisted of Blue-haired giving the description of Sans Undertale to Grey-haired in the worst way possible, but she eventually caught on when I started berating her for saying things that went against the principles of bald rights. Can't win them all... The call ended soon after that, and so did my wakefulness on that day. Tomorrow was going to be busy, after all!

Friday was a work from home day, and most of my exhaustion from staying up late had dissipated from sleeping in a little. I logged in to my work laptop to see that my successor's change got submitted overnight, so that meant there was no further interaction necessary in the morning. That meant I was free to do other things: namely, the quizzes for my course (I got one question wrong that I only got wrong because I was rushing, but I won't make that mistake again! I quickly shaved (somehow, no cuts!) and got dressed in my fanciest clothes. Grabbing a freezie and stowing the work laptop I had yet to do anything on today into my bag, I rushed out the door to make the bus, since even though I was rushing the quizzes somehow I took way longer than expected to do them. It was such a nice day, and it almost was a shame that the bus tones lined up so nicely to the point where I barely had to walk. I guess it was a good thing though, because then I would get my nice formal clothes all sweaty. I made it to my desk with no fanfare or however that phrase goes, and worked on updating my documentation for the Absconder stuff I did this week. I had to convert the language of one and reflect the implemented suggestion of the not-manager. During all this were some jokey conversations I held with the new temps in the corner, some extended bit about forming a band that became one about forming an Irish start up to connect potential band members together called "McD-on-lads." Don't ask me how that came about because I have no idea. Once my documentation was finished, I went to go visit my successor to let her know about it. When I leave this company, she will be responsible for all the Absconder stuff I made, so it's good for her to start looking at it now. I went to visit and saw her bored out of her mind reading some document. After sharing my documentation with her, I somehow ended up in another extended conversation with her about other things. Now I don't really mind those sorts of things, but the mormonism thing had me on guard. Even so, it didn't prepare me at all for the force-friending U was about to go through. My work rival and the fanatic were in and out of the cell throughout the rest of the day, and each time they did, the volume level in the room kept rising and rising. At some point in our conversation, my successor asked me about browsers, and I let her know she could use the browser of her choice and that I personally use Firefox. THat same look of extreme excitement returned to her eyes as she shared that she had done a bunch of open source contributions to Firefox, and I took this news a little strangely in her eyes. I mean, it's pretty cool to me! It just feels strange, because I dont think people are usually used to meeting people who contributed to the creation of things they use daily. After telling me I should try open source development for Firefox this week (HA! NO! the weekend isn't for that, not this one at least), the conversation got a little more crazed/unhinged from there: the volume in the room kept rising, and in the next 30 seconds, my successor told me that we were going to be friends from now on about 5 or 6 times. I gave her abunch of responses along the lines of "I mean, sure, ok." Then she started going on about how she was going to call me a whole bunch after I leave this company ("uh ok well I mean you'll be working so I don't know-), then asking me about my long weekend plans ("uhhhh I don't know probably writing my blog since i Let it fall behind by-"), then telling me that when (not if) she visits my apartment in two or so months we could do something like that ("but I have to clean first")- what just happened? What?? I felt so confused, so dazed, as if I was being attacked from all angles and sides. Unlike last time I received whiplash from a conversation with my successor, I ended up getitng out of this conversation by something intense happening elsewhere in the cell: one of the new temps found the interview notes of their team. Oh boy... Within seconds, everyone in that room was gathered around the screen (except for my successor), trying to read all the notes and find out about what their interviewers thought of them and all the rejected candidates. My work rival walked in at that moment becuase it was nearly time to start heading downstairs for 'Jeopardy,' and he wanted to make sure we all knew. Then, the new temps told him about the interview notes. I think that was the loudest I've ever heard him say "WHAT!?" Ever. Ugh, we're going to be upstairs forever... I tried to convince people to start heading downstairs, but my work rival was riling up the temps and the temps were riling up my work rival. Then, he dragged in everyone from the crossword cubicle and surroundings, and that's when I left. It's a little disgusting to me that they were all so ravenous about this kind of thing. This is private information that shouldn't be available to us temps, especially that of the failed interviewees. I mean, I'm sure a bunch of those temps knew some of the people who were given rejections, and.... I don't know. I just odn't like it. The gregarious agreed with me for the same reason. It took use another 15 minutes to finally rally people to go downstairs, with the last person we were able to get going being my equivalent, who was desperately trying to find the interview notes of our year. Yeah, good luck with that one buddy. This whole situation... yuck. Somehow, I left in the middle of the group heading down to the large meeting room we would be holding the event in, but I ended up being the first in the room. All the chairs had been put away, the projector was off, and the screen was fully drawn. Well, I guess I'm going to be responsible for setting up all this too, huh? First order of business was the projector, trying to figure out how to turn it on and draw down the screen. I had to fiddle around with the control panel embedded in the wall for a bit, but luckily for me, that's when people finally started to filter in. My co-DM immediately recgonized that I needed help, and got people to start pulling out chairs from the racks, as well as managing team generation. I had the projector all set up, now I just needed to connect my laptop to it. My Japanese coworker and I were looking all around for an HDMI cable to connect to my laptop. I've used this large conference room for 'Jeopardy' before, but I couldn't remember how exactly I had done it in the past. There was a tiny little HDMI cable in the lectern, only about half a foot long, but we couldn't find any ports in the wall or anything. The teams had now started to settle a bit more, and the arrangement of chairs was beginning to take shape, so I didn't want to keep people waiting for too much longer. Then, a full-time on Steve's team appeared and handed us a very large cable already coming out of the wall, and the memories came flooding back. Yeah... that makes sense. My co-DM then yelled to get everyone's attention (did she always have that kind of voice? she made me flinch every time she used that yelling voice) and I gave an explainer of the rules and how it all worked, because apparently a lot of people had never heard of 'Jeopardy' somehow???? There were people on my floor, new temps from many different floors and even some from the other building, and a couple of full-times too. It really was the whole group put together! We started the game, and the first round was very clearly the most balanced 'Jeopardy' board I had ever made. In all honesty, I was impressed with what I had done. No group was able to completely take control and sweep away the entire game, and all sorts of people were able to answer questions. In the middle of the round, the head admin gave us a giant box of snacks, and I went around asking everyone their name, team, and a random personal fact too. My work rival took multiple snacks erven though everyone before set up the fact that you were supposed to take one (does he have no shame!?), and a couple people had to leave a little early at this moment, including my successor. A little sad, but I choose to blame this on how there was a delay in starting due to the interview notes thing. The second round started after the mid-roll introductions, and this one was slightly less balanced than the last board, allowing my predecessor's team to dominate and take over the game. Ah well, it was bound to happen eventually. There was also a temp on his team that was covering for his knowlegde gaps nearly perfectly too, something that my work rival was very frustrated about. That specific temp was not originally invited to the event due to being from the other building. He was invited by... my successor... Well, I'm sure I can explain things to my work rival and he'll understand a bit more, right? The final round was a little bit on the easier side at least, so everyone was SUPPOSED to get it (it was a question about the first few devices that used transistors, so WHY DID MY WORK RIVAL'S TEAM SAY "LIGHT BULB" ???????), but the end of the game showed my predecessor's team way way way ahead in the front. People really enjoyed the game from what I saw during the match, and I talked with a few of the new temps about how I just did all that (use the resources of the past and have stage experience I guess?) as my co-DM asked who wanted to go to dinner. She asked a little bit too late though, because as soon as the game was over, almost all the new people immediately got up and left. Barely any stayed behind, only the ones who were talking to me. In fact, the only people who wanted to go to dinner were my generation of temps. I was growing a bit concerned about future 'Jeopardy' events: if their first experience with the game was "well, one guy is just going to run away with the game and you'll only win if he's on your team," would they ever bother joining us in the future? I liked having them around! The dinner group walked to a Chinese restaurant nearby (that group being: myself, my co-DM, the gregarious, the fanatic, Steve, my equivalent, the compatriot, my work rival, the cable guy, and that full-time on Steve's team) and I expressed my concern. Surprisingly, a couple of them were unhappy with the new temps for immediately dipping on dinner plans and for gumming up the game with a bunch of extra people. Wait... which ones were unhappy about that? Let me remember... it was the compatriot and my work rival! Oh wait. Nevermind, it makes perfect sense that THOSE two were upset about that. The others said that it looked like the new people had fun, and I realized later that we didn't actually tell those new people anything about our dinner plans. It was a nice and sunny walk at the very least, though I kept my hoodie fully zipped up and flipped over my head on the walk. The restaurant was just as good as the last time I went, back in December or something, and this time no one shamed me for being inexperienced with chopsticks. They actually encouraged me to just use a fork instead of making fun of me for my lack of any level of skill with chopsticks. There were a few interesting conversations going on, but I tried to avoid some of them due to my voice hurting a little after 'Jeopardy.' Opinions started forming about the new temps (most people seem to agree on disliking my successor... I'm leaning towards liking her, even if she scares me), my work rival started asking if it was racist to have a racial preference when it came to dating, and my work rival got very scared when the people in charge of ordering suggested getting a vegetable platter, thinking they wouldn't order any meat. We walked out of the restaurant just before sunset, and we decided that once we got back to the office, we would go to the highest floor we could access to see if we could get a better view of the sunset. We did find a meeting room that faced the right direction, but unfortunately there was a condo in the way. You could still see the gradient of the sky and about half of the sun's main ball form shape thing though, and I think it came pretty close to "a sunset that can house my pain." Still though, not quite enough to meet that goal for 2025. We all sat around the meeting room table at that point, none of us quite yet ready to leave the company of those around us. We got to talking about our summer plans, about the new temps and how we didn't really want to involve them too much in those. They already seemed to be doing their own things in their own group anyways, so... I guess? As they talked more and more about what they wanted to do this summer, the conversation just kept distracted. We kept jumping between plans and topics, leaving things not fully talked about, distracting us and making some really cool plans not get fully planned out. So I took matters into my own hands. I took out my work laptop, opened Notepad, and started taking meeting notes. We organized our discussion, starting with an ideation phase where I listed out a bunch of ideas and possible implementations, then we had a phase where we went over the plans that we had generated, deciding on what was and was not happening. I took the role as the meeting minutes taker person (I don't know what you call it), making sure we stayed on track and also assigning proposals, presentations, and deadlines to certain meeting attendees for some of the more complicated plans. It actually turned out to be a very productive meeting, and I think we'll actually get a bunch of these plans going because of the fact that we organized it all. This meeting somehow lasted 90 minutes, long enough for night to fall, and that's when we decided to vacate the premises and finally head home. I got driven back to my place, and when I got home? I was TIRED. I could barely stay awake. I went to be an hour BEFORE midnight. You know how bad my tiredness has to be to make me go to sleep before MIDNIGHT??? I don't know how I held it together in front of all my coworkers today, but maybe it had to do with how it happened all at once? I could barely hold up my head, and soon it became being barely able to STAND. So fine. I won't stand. I'll just lie down, in the dark, under the covers.

For the first time in a while, there was actually nothing exciting to say about Saturday and Sunday. They were days wholly dedicated to writing. I mean, I guess I went to the grocery store on Sunday to buy chicken? And on Saturday I had an ice cream sandwich? Oh and Sunday evening, I played poker with Blue-haired and we both nearly got cleaned out by a dog! Not to mention that someone in the neighbourhood had bought a whole ton of firecrackers and was letting them blast all of Sunday night. But to be honest... almost all I did each day was catch up on bloghan. In fact, I didn't do enough! Despite going to bed extremely late on both days, and waking up rather early comparatively, I only managed to catch it up about halfway. I am going to need Monday to finish it off completely. Good thing Monday's a day off!

Future plans

What a week! Did I get my total list of two (2) things done? Let's see:

• E-mail assignment: Yup! Done!
• Door: no progress
• Quizzes and notes: So I didn't do the notes, but I did do the quizzes!
• Document sleeves: ...shoot
• Mop: ...shoot

Huh, I could've sworn the list was only two items long... man, alright, now it's time to really get focused. Monday will be the perfect opportunity to catch up this bloghan and mop my washroom. I want to get my next assignment (a presentation) finished this week, so that next week I can get started on the next few things. I'd also like to clean my kitchen counter. I think that would be nice. Finally, I'm thinking that I'll cook a large batch of butter chicken for dinner this week too! Surely I can do all that, right? agh... you already know that something's probably not going to work out.

Song of the week

'Only the Good Die Young' (https://youtu.be/Crif5E67ar0) by Billy Joel is the song of the week. Like last week's song, this one is mostly being shared here because it's a song I listened to this week that I really liked. I mean, it kinda connects to my life in general, maybe not so much this week. Just look at the title. As much as I hope to die when I'm 30 or something, I have a bad feeling that it won't happen for another 60 or 70 years at least. 51% lucky, as always. Or is the phrase "the monkey's paw curls" more relevant? But I didn't wish for a long life... I'll need to think this one over a bit more it seems.

Until next time

If the first week of the new temps ended up like that, I'm not sure if I should be excited or not for their second. I know I'll survive, but... You know what? That's enough. That's enough for me. See you next week!

- bubbler

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