The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
For the Minnesotans of the family:
At 6:46 this morning, all of the New Mexico Environment Department (of which the Air Quality Bureau is a part) got an email from the Deputy Secretary saying “Santa Fe offices will be in a 2 hour delay.” I was on my computer and saw it right away.
Whooo-hooo! 2-hour delay! Since the delay was due to ice rather than heavy snow, I suspected my employees might not all have thought to check to see if there was a delay. And they may not be checking their work email that early. So shortly after 7:00, I sent them all a text message to their phones; “2-hour delay!”
At 9:01 we got a follow-up email, “The 2 hour delay stated below is rescinded.” What does that mean, rescinded? What do I tell my confused employees? Were we supposed to be in at 8:00 after all? Do we turn back the clock? Jump in our time machines? Or are we now expected to be at work at 9:01?
I promptly left for work, but it took me 40 minutes to go 5 miles. The roads were still ice and slicker than shit. It then took the rest of the day to get it all sorted out with HR. Instead of just having us all report 2 hours of administrative leave, they asked all the managers take a poll of every single employee. They’re going to give each employee the exact amount of time off that the snafu cost that particular individual, in 15 minute increments.
I think NMED has approximately 600 employees. I don’t know how many of them saw the original email (or had their boss text them) and came in late. I’m guessing about half of them. So that’s a lot of special cases for HR to process. And tomorrow is the end of the 2-week pay period, so the timesheets have to be right. HR truly must be scrambling. What a snowy, slushy mess!
The garbage man wasn’t on a 2-hour delay.
I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks because life continues to be difficult. There’s too much going on, and I’m going around constantly at the brink of overwhelm, which is no way to live life. And the irony is, just now when I logged into this blog to write about how there’s too many new and difficult things in my life, I discovered that they’ve completely changed the format.
I don’t want to be one of those old people who can’t deal with a minor computer change. But it’s 6:30 AM, I’m skipping my exercise routine to write, and the last thing I need right now is a completely unfamiliar wordpress interface.
Everything is fine, but there’s just so much. Actually, Robert is not fine, and that tragedy is just hanging out there, just out of reach, just beyond comprehension. But everything in my own immediate daily life is fine, it’s just a lot.
At work my boss gave 3-days notice last month and left. So I’m doing some of his job. Another one of the managers in our section is struggling in her job (she has a challenging team), and she is planning to take a different job soon. So I’m also trying to take on as much of her job as possible. We’re chronically understaffed, can’t get all our work done, and things slip through the cracks sometimes.
Yesterday some handwritten notes by one of my team members were accidentally forwarded by someone on a different team TO THE CUSTOMER. In our case, “customer” means “a facility we regulate”. The notes had to do with the questionable legality of an exemption we allow that’s critical to them. As soon as I realized what happened, I had to alert the Bureau Chief, because she was undoubtably going to get panicked calls from the customer. There was fall-out from that all day yesterday, and probably continuing the rest of the week.
Also yesterday, one of our dogs (Kai) had a seizure. He’s ok now. He’s had about 5 of them (that we’re aware of) in his 12 years of life. He always recovers, but it’s hard to watch. He got woosy, and slumped to the floor and shook for awhile (a minute or two – it seemed like forever). Then he was a little disoriented and subdued for about 5 minutes, and then he was completely fine. I assume he occasionally does this while we’re at work and we’d never know. But I also assume it’s not too frequently or we’d see it more often when we are home.
He’s being cute at the moment. They all just discovered there’s an inch or two of snow outside this morning, so they’re running in and out the doggie door.
Last week I had an off-site training course for 3 days, which I missed half of because I had to keep up with my job as well. So finally, with the help of John over the weekend and a coworker yesterday, I managed to get the coursework completed and sent in. But I’ve been working a lot of extra hours.
I’m also trying to get some medical things done. I’m fine, it’s just deferred maintenance, lol. I’m getting glasses and contacts. And I went to an expensive doctor about my migraines (not covered by insurance). She ordered a million tests and wants me to go to two specialists in Albuquerque, and I just can’t even. It’s too much. I’ve got way too much going on. I haven’t done a single test or anything. Luckily my migraines are doing really well lately.
Also, my car has been in the shop repeatedly. Finally I’ve discovered a good mechanic, so I won’t be wasting time and money at the dealership anymore. My car has multiple issues, and the new mechanic did a great job of fixing the issue I asked him to fix. So now I’d like to take it back for him to fix a different issue that the dealership has repeatedly failed to fix. But I’m just so tired of having my car in the shop all the time.
Of course it’s Christmas. You all know what that means. Sending cards and buying gifts and cooking for holiday potlucks and getting a tree and all of the things. We couldn’t find our tree lights, so I’ve had a bare tree up for a week.
I have the ornaments, but I can’t put them up until I have the lights! The lights go on first. At least we didn’t lose our ornaments again. That was tragic when we lost all our ornaments, including the ones I made as a child and my kids made as children. You’re probably wondering how does one lose all their Christmas ornaments? Like, where would they go? That’s what happens when you move every year. We never did find them, and have just been buying new ones for the last couple of years.
We’re currently missing a lot of random household items. I’m optimistically assuming they are at John’s house (and he’s optimistically assuming they are at my house, but he’d be wrong). Someday we’ll have it all sorted.
I’m very stressed about the task of getting the Placitas house on the market. It’s not in good enough condition to list yet, and John and I aren’t on the same page about what needs to be done and how to do it. We know we’re going to lose money on the house, it’s just a matter of how much. It’s going to take an enormous amount of work to get it ready for the market, and there’s nothing more discouraging than pouring time and money into a house you’re not going to keep. Also we’ve tried to sell it before, so we are imagining the same thing all over again – it sitting on the market for months and months.
Oh my gosh, I just discovered we’re on a 2-hour delay! I have no idea why. It can’t be more than an inch of snow.
There must be a sheet of ice under it, which wouldn’t surprise me. It was fairly warm last night. Whoo-hoo! Two hours. Two completely unexpected, completely empty hours.
I’m going to go for a jog in the snow!
Ok, never mind, I’m not going jogging in the snow. I took two steps outside just to get more dog food from the garage, and I could barely stay on my feet. There’s a thick sheet of ice under the snow.
Not only am I not going jogging, I doubt I can even go for a walk. That explains the delay. Now I’m wondering if 2 hours will be enough!
At work I’ve been helping a coworker conduct interviews. She’s got three open positions and we always have a lot of trouble getting positions filled. New Mexico is an impoverished state with a poor tax base, so the state jobs don’t pay well. We have almost no leeway with how much we can offer job candidates. We fight with HR for the highest possible offers, but we fight over extra pennies, not extra dollars.
Meanwhile, Santa Fe has huge numbers of multi-million dollar second homes for ultra-rich people who are not residents and not paying taxes here. So the cost of living in Santa Fe is at least as high as Denver or Austin, and nearly as high as the San Francisco Bay Area in places, but without the local incomes and tax base.
Because of the low pay and high cost of living, high employee turn-over is our Achilles heel. In addition to doing everything I can to keep my own employees happy, a huge part of my job is interviewing candidates.
One of the sets of questions that we ask in the interviews is about what they are looking for in a job, as well as what things they “would like to avoid” in a job. It’s amusing to listen to them try to answer that in a professionally positive and politically correct manner.
Speaking of stupid – my whole team (plus two other teams) all have training next week. The all-day training is being held here in Santa Fe, but it happens to be in a different state building than our regular office building. They are making all the employees fill out a form for permission to drive themselves to that building in their own vehicles, rather than driving themselves to our regular building, checking out a state vehicle, and then driving the state vehicle to the other building. This is when most of us live much closer to the state building where our training is located, than the state building where our offices are located.
The form requires proof of car insurance, proof of licensing, and proof of having passed a defensive driving course. One of my new employees has passed his course but hasn’t gotten his certificate yet. So now what? Once we get everyone’s forms filled out correctly, we have to route them up through the management chain all the way up to the Deputy Cabinet Secretary for signatures.
I’m sorry, but that’s stupid.
Meanwhile, we have a sour gas plant in our jurisdiction out in the San Juan Basin that appears to be spewing NOx, VOCs, CO2 and H2S. Some of their primary pollution control devices have apparently been deliberately removed, plus others are intermittently failing. They’re probably overwhelming their emergency flare, which they are apparently now relying on as one of their primary controls, and we’re fielding complaint calls about locals ending up in the hospital. My team is going through 3 years of extremely complicated pollutant data and permit history to nail these guys. We don’t have time for stupid shit.
So yeah, in answer to questions, I did. I sat and drank my coffee in the coffee shop with my coworker on our lunch hour and NEVER NOTICED I was sipping through two lids. I didn’t notice until I got it out of my fridge to reheat the next morning.
Which in itself is funny – or maybe just sad? In addition to being the type of person who doesn’t realize they’ve got two lids on a paper cup, I’m also the sort of person to save and reheat coffee. I took it back to the office and refrigerated it at work, then brought it home and stuck it in my refrigerator after work, and noticed the two lids when I got it out to reheat this morning.
Here’s another coffee joke:
