The Productive Week - So Far and a Rant About Dial Up

I'm so tickled because I've been incredibly productive this week - or at least I feel like it. I have only two things on my To Do list at work. Okay, I moved three things to next months list, but it was necessary. The funny thing is that I couldn't tell you what those two remaining things are. I'm clueless.

Monday we had a training day at work - Department Of Transportation, Safety, Cost Containment, etcetera. We fit it all into a day long meeting where everyone is in the building and we're not making any money. The upside? We only have to do two of these meetings a year because I'm anal and have managed to require monthly, weekly and tailgate meetings that we document. Yea, ME! I had this meetings lunch catered. I used a great company, Sackits Hot Shot Catering, and they did an excellent job. We will be using them again.

Tuesday we had a company-wide CPR/1st Aid Training. Okay, so I lied about having only two huge meetings a year, every other year we have these CPR things so nobody dies on the job (or at home). That's stretching it a bit, but it's good for us. This meeting is held off-site and when I didn't show up with the usual breakfast goodies - danishes, bagels, cinnamon rolls, fruit, coffee - they were all very disappointed. The boss didn't approve continental breakfast in the budget this year. Too bad, I like to be the hero.

Today I was really busy at work. Go figure, I hadn't really done any work all week. I caught up on projects that were coming down to the wire - did I mention that I procrastinate? There was a Safety Qualification Questionnaire package that had to be in Massachusetts tomorrow or we'd be taken off their approved vendor list - I waited until the very last second to send it FedEx.

I had lunch with Crystal, it was fun and seemed longer than the hour we both have for lunch. I was so busy this afternoon that when 3:30 came around it felt like I'd just gotten back from lunch. I LOVE days like that. I called C and the very first thing she said to me was, "You did not get off work early, did you?" and then she looked at her caller ID and saw I was calling from work. We talk at work a lot. She used to work for a big company here in Fort Collins, that's now closed, and her bosses (yes, as in more than one!) never paid any attention to when she was on the phone or who she was on the phone with since she wore a headset. We'd call each other when we got bored or when my boss was out of the office (I have a very boring job most of the year) and laugh about whatever was going on.

Now we email - yep, I moved into the 21st century - kind of. I have dial-up at work and broadband at home. The dial up is out of necessity since we have a 13 year old phone system that makes connecting my computer to the DSL that my boss has on his computer kind of tricky. Hopefully this is the year that he replaces the phone system and puts me into the electronic age. I've been hinting about it for two years now and about six months ago the phones gave me an advantage. I'd answer line 1, have a call come in on line 2 and when I'd put them on hold lines 1 and 2 would then have a conversation. The whole thing is screwed up. Thank Heavens.

I have to do lots of things online at work and it's really annoying for my computer to tie up one of the lines. Did I mention that it takes forever to download software updates for our accounting program, or to send a document to a client - which I don't do often but could if I had a DSL connection. My boss and I share files on CD's and we use different programs to write the files so we can't both write to the same disk. I don't know why we're so out of sync on this but we are. One day I'll be able to just shoot him the document in an email and make corrections easily. Yea! And maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to have a business email account so I don't have to use my personal account for work!

Sorry about the rant - I guess it's been coming for some time. The rest of the week should be mellow and I'm looking forward to that.