Weekend Plans Post: Before Your Bosses Come Back
I have about seven different bosses. Now, this isn’t an “Office Space” joke, really. I mean, I’m including “boss’s boss” and “boss’s boss’s boss” in there as well as any given person who can officially tell me to deprioritize my current task and give myself a new action item. Out of all seven, each has done that at least once in the last year but, really, there’s about three that call me up in any given week and tell me to start doing something else. So it’s not *BAD*.
For one thing, I *LIKE* all of them. When they call, I don’t pick up the phone dreading that I’m about to get yelled at. I imagine that something has gone wrong and I need to fix it or something has gone right and I need to hear about it or there are donuts.
Well, over the last two weeks, two of my bosses have been out of town. One got called up for his National Guard duty at the same time that my other one got sent to Singapore to fix something or other. So, for the last two weeks, I have just been working on the pile of jira tickets they dropped in my queue right before they got on the plane and I’ve turned that moderately-sized pile into a dinky pile that will be a nonexistent pile come noon tomorrow.
And then, come Monday, I can get a new pile dumped on me. It’s all good, though. It’s better to have them back where I can talk to them about stuff throughout the day and help nudge the clock along. Because, seriously, it has been a desert around here with only the other five bosses.
We’ve reached something close to equilibrium with the kitties. They know our routines and we know theirs. We have to carefully figure out how to leave the house because the second they hear the jingle of keys being picked up, they make a beeline for the front door and we have to figure out how to keep them from running out. If only one of us is leaving, the other can pick up the cats. If both of us are, well… we’ve got to pick between chasing them back inside with a broom or locking them up in the kitten room for the duration of our outing.
When you have two elderly cats, you can do stuff like leave the front door wide open when you’re getting groceries out of the car of taking out the recycling or getting the mail. With kttens? You can’t answer the door to get an amazon package.
Their energy levels alternate between “ZZZZZZZZ” and “OFF THE CHARTS”. For example, here is a brief vampire story:
It’s positively wonderful, though. I had forgotten.
This weekend will be spent capturing more of the little kitten interactions and otherwise preparing for a change in tempo at work come Monday. Maybe a trip to Costco in there.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Wait, I’m not done.” Photo taken by Maribou.)
Your bosses actually call you? Like with a telephone?Report
Yes.
I’ll grant that that has dropped off.in favor of Teams and Google Chat, but I still get about two phone calls a week.Report
My boss and I are on the phone constantly. It may sound counter intuitive, but lawyers, like druids, actually instinctively prefer not to put anything in writing. We only do it because otherwise no one would pay us.Report
“Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail.”
— Eliot SpitzerReport
The highlight of this weekend I think will be putting in a big order for REAL sushi. I joined my wife in only getting the non-raw roll type stuff out of solidarity during her pregnancy and now that the baby is here it is time to indulge.
Other than that it will be the usual sports stuff with the oldest Saturday morning, and maybe I will take him to the pool in the afternoon. Sunday my mom is coming over to make us dinner and awkwardly jostle an infant as if she didn’t have 3 of her own once, which should be fun as well.Report
When I was just getting into high school, the “cool” band was Led Zeppelin. Primarily, I guess, because of Stairway but also because of (deep breath) Black Dog, Kashmir, Whole Lotta Love, Immigrant Song, and so on.
These songs gave them a status that transferred to the solo albums of both Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
Jimmy Page’s album wasn’t particularly notable outside of “Wasting my Time”.
And that album came out within throwing a snowball’s distance of Robert Plant’s “Now and Zen”.
Personally, I prefer “Now and Zen”, if only for “Ship of Fools”. He seemed to capture the zeitgeist of confusion more than Jimmy Page’s chords did.
While both of those songs were pretty awesome… neither of them made me feel “I HAVE BEEN LIED TO!” the way that Zeppelin did.
Alas.
Would that more bands could capture that.Report
I spent an absolutely lovely Friday in Milwaukee. If you ever get there, the art museum on the lake has a great collection, and the building itself is an architectural wonder. We also got to the bobblehead museum, which for a fiver is an absolute steal.Report