The first was a printer not printing right, thanks to a) going idle, and b) not having enough toner. So I wound up printing to the alternate printer, which was going fine until the Rules Lawyer monitor told me to, um, quit that, because it was causing excessive need to sort things. I was just happy that the big printer was back up. Yay back up.
The second was the obscure sort of geek-thing that can happen to anyone, and pretty much all a non-geek is going to see is "the browser ate my monitoring session!" The geek saw that it was IE vs. the goddamn backspace key (again) and documented it as such. I think I'm going to write up brief specs for a little scripty that will Make That Not Happen and send it off to the Monitor Boss with the request to please forward that on to the Head Geek. (You can do a scripty that says, "Um, if you surf away from this page, you lose the monitor report. Continue, N/Y?" with N as the default, so if you hit backspace, enter, or backspace, space, you're still safe and you won't have surfed away, right?)
Between those two issues, I lost 13 minutes. I still came out with 5+ monitor reports an hour, which is decent for .25 downtime.
I finished off monitoring at nearly noon, and wound up on the phones for the remaining seven-ish hours. Fun for the whole family.
I had one dreadful respondent screech that there were no teenagers there, and they were dreadful creatures that should be put down. This got my brain thinking about some of the more horribly militant CF people out there, not the sane and reasonable ones who have realized their own utter lack of interest in children of their own and lack of interest in anyone else's children, the ones who would be content with them living in their own world away from children and childrearing, and new people coming into their world once they're adult enough to get along, nor the ones who have no problem with well-reared children but have a major beef with Bad Parenting, but the ones who honestly think that most or all children are actively evil and should die. Not "children are selfish little buggers and are inherently evil and must be taught how to be good, and keep them away from me," but "all children are evil and must die."
Those people, I think, are likely to have some bloody bad unresolved issues with their own childhoods to be reacting like that. At an uneducated guess, not having had time to query the person about the root of their issues or even if they were just playin' with the phone goon. I suppose, though, in a world where we have science fiction where the main theme of the book is "The human destiny is to HAVE BABIES, and stopping humans from their destiny is WRONG, and THESE PEOPLE WILL FIGHT FOR THEIR DESTINY NO MATTER WHAT THE PENALTY IS EVEN THOUGH A THIRD CHILD COULD MEAN DEATH!" we've got to have the polar opposite. Did I mention that I've stopped reading Orson Scott Card?
Your ordinary person forms Issues with the stuff that happens to and around them in their assorted formative years; those of us who are still having life-changing events well into adulthood never stop getting new Issues, in all likelihood. But it takes a certain kind of special to form Issues with the life stage itself. Once you're through with it, at least. When Adulthood is looming up, and then Middle Age, those do get kind of spooky.
I need to create a certain scorchingly bad punny recipe. Google currently returns no hits for "chili con quasar". I'm thinking beans, cheese, spices, maybe meat (for the non-kosher version) and habañero peppers. Or hotter. As hot as the audience can stand, and then a little. The dish being able to put off a decent amount of light and some radio waves would be a distinct plus.
