giddyBut since my supervisor training is evidently done (I feel confident about my ability to run jobs, though I'll still want someone looking over my shoulder on the paperwork) I've been hitting the phones again.
Yesterday was brilliant. Figment came in late, so the Cute Geek Super (who was check-in yesterday) shoved him in the booth next to mine. I'd been absolutely dead on the phones until he came in, but after he came in, I got cheerful all of a sudden, and wound up getting six surveys on a job where you're lucky to get one or two (though planned production is more like 3 or 4).
Today, I was back on the phones on that same job. (If I were to give it a Vorkosoverse name, I'd call the client the Dendarii Brewing Company, and the business the client is in is obvious, though it's actually pretty hard to figure out the actual specific client from the survey if you don't know already.) I had no such luck to be sitting next to Figment, so when Cute Geek Super came by and told me, "I want six from you, just like yesterday!" I told him, "Well, you didn't put Figment next to me today, so who knows. I work better around him."
Turns out I only got one lousy survey. The respondent and I were having fun, though. It's always good when you've got enough good rapport with the respondent to be able to laugh at the way the survey is phrased and the way it repeats in a seemingly pointless fashion. (As a person who's taken a stats class or two, I see why the surveys are made the way they are, but it's bloody dull if you've just done the same thing all week.)
I got a handwritten page of dialogue between Beatrice and her mother over the Harriet issue, and Beatrice wound up delving into her angsty history of past relationships. I now need to sprinkle references to past ill-fated relationships throughout the story, with "the Jacob incident" being the worst of a bad lot, and tantalizing detail here and there so you actually do get a good picture of the thing without ever sitting down and outlining how it started out bad and got worse. You should know enough about it by the time they bring it up so that you'll know what they're talking about, even if some of the details they bring up are a surprise.
I got four pages of paper journal finished, which was a good thing. I like being able to do brain-dumps at work. That makes lots of brain-dump today, because I did get my morning pages in. I also got three pages into a paper letter to Darkside. What sucks about the communication between him and me is that the only reasonably private communication media we have are in person (rare), on the phone (narrow window of opportunity) and paper letters (slow). He shares an e-mail address with his parents, see. *facepalm* Is the man not a graduate of a reasonably infamous university with a bachelor's degree in CIS, living in the information age, with a job in his field? I am tempted to take away half his geek cred.
Figment and I had a very cryptic conversation over lunch today, with a very confused
othercat sitting there watching the evil twins at play. All computer viruses and computers referenced were actually very metaphorical, so the kind offer of the parental unit's computer was sadly useless, sorry... othercat wants a Rosetta Stone to understanding my particular brand of Utterly Cryptic. The problem with that, however, is that the definitions keep changing. The only common factor seems to be that if the cryptic is supposed to be aimed at you understanding it, you should already have the inside knowledge being referred to so that you can unlock the reference. (And if you still don't get it, ask me. Because I will explain. Eventually.) For example, I mentioned "The Clue Stick", and made cryptic reference to something Figment knew so that he'd know what the item was. Then I deciphered to
othercat: "You know that LJ icon that I have, the one that's purple and moves? Something like that." This nearly caused a sodaspew, because that icon of mine is particularly infamous and not exactly entirely work-safe, but if one had never seen the icon in question, one would still be in the dark. And one of the things that a well-respected, polite, friendly, popular, and very work-appropriate supervisor does not want to do is shout out in the break room, "It's a dildo, okay?!" Figment stopped by after work, with the general idea of taking me out to dinner, but that was not to be, as I'd already showed, changed into pajamas, fixed myself soup, and needed to get sleep in order to pry myself out of bed in the morning to get to work at 8:30. He wound up hanging around for a little to describe old movies to me. What is it with me and bondmates describing TV shows and movies to me? I've got two of them now. Clearly, the geekboys need to meet and have some Male Bonding Time (probably paintball and tabletop gaming) before they grow to resent each other and wind up destroying the universe.
