|
|
|
two dogs, one office
Tuesday, October 16 2018
Originally the plan was to work remotely today; I'd had it all arranged with my immediate boss and everything. But last night during that unexpected span of after-hours migration work, my boss seemed to have completely forgotten about it, and even spoke of me coming in early (in a casual, almost Office-Spacian way) today to do the part of the job that required office-quality internet bandwidth. I'd reminded him of my needs today, but then said I probably could come in, but that I'd have to get out early for the thing. [REDACTED] Now that I did have to go into work today, but not stay there long, Gretchen had convinced me to bring both dogs. That seemed like the sort of logistical complexity I usually do my best to avoid, but this morning when I climbed out of bed, I gamely went about doing the additional things I needed to do to bring the dogs (rousting them from bed, feeding them early, taking them on a brief poop walk, and loading a dog bed into the car) on top of my usual morning tasks (feeding the cats, visiting the brownhouse, eating something like a bowl of cereal, putting on some clothes, and brushing my teeth).
It might've seemed a little crazy for me to show up in the office with two dogs, but the only ones there when I showed up were Morning Dave and Jason, the latter of whom has just spent three weeks of vacation in eastern Europe. The dogs had all settled down on the dog bed by the time the head honcho showed up, and all he wanted me for was to pull the trigger on me working fulltime. So he led me and the dogs upstairs to the closet-office where Cindy works. Cindy was a hitherto-unknown employee who comes in just to do the books and handle things like the paperwork wherein I demonstrate that I am an American citizen. Most of the actual work of my becoming a fulltime employee actually consisted of me filling out some forms on an HR automation website called JustWorks.com.
I stayed in the office a couple hours as I waited for large files to both upload and download. And then it turned out that the files I was dealing with needed to be supplanted by other, more recent files. Still, it was clear that something had to be live to make a client happy, even if that something was somewhat out-of-date.
The two times I took the dogs out for walks, they made things about as difficult for me as two dogs can. On one occasion they decided to go snuffling under some semi-abandoned tractor-trailer trailers, ignoring my pleas for them to come back. Another time, back in the field behind that patch of woods behind all the buildings, Neville just took off, and I wondered for an instant if I was going to be spending the rest of the day tracking him across unfamiliar ground. But I managed to catch him and leash him and get him and Ramona back into the office. Things are so much easier when it's just one dog, one creature with free will, to deal with.
In the office, the dogs were a little better, though they did tend to amplify each others' bad tendencies. I didn't have to worry about Ramona getting into garbage when it was just her. But today, I found myself putting the garbage can up on a table.
A little after 11:00am, I loaded up the dogs and drove home. I don't think I'll be taking both dogs to the office again any time soon.
[REDACTED]
After some further errands in Kingston, Gretchen and I returned home, and I resumed working remotely. Much of this time was spent making it so my main computer Woodchuck could be a viable alternative development environment. This was easier than expected, facilitated by the VPN and git (connecting, in this case, to BitBucket, not GitHub).
This evening I came along with Gretchen to a postcard writing event Gretchen had organized for Pat Strong (the Democratic candidate for New York's State Senate) at Rough Draft (the bookstore/bar/coffee-shop in Uptown Kingston). On the way there, we picked up Nancy in Old Hurley. For the bulk of the event, I was the only man at the table (the other nine people there were all women, among them Sarah the Vegan). I'm the kind of person who, when given a task that I know how to do, will do it to exclusion of all else. So I was more productive than anyone else at the table. While the others (particularly Sarah the Vegan) yacked away, I'd fill out a post card, cross it off the list, take a sip of my double IPA, and repeat, the same as we'd done back in the spring a couple weeks before I was fired from Mercy For Animals. It's hard for me to do something so repetitive without injecting a little style or whimsy into my work, so I'd do things like write the characters extra thin and tall, extra wide and short, or as big as possible (with as few words as possible). At some point Gretchen (who was on stamp application duty) offered a course correction, saying we didn't want people receiving these postcards to think they'd been written by a crazy person.
All along I'd thought this writing out postcards by hand was being done to give a personal feel to the voter outreach effort. It is, after all, a lot harder to ignore something that has clearly been created by human hands. But according to Sarah the Vegan, this writing things out by hand actually stems from a technical difficulty: Pat Strong hadn't been able to figure out how to automate the merger of postcards and mailing labels (especially when the latter have been printed on regular printer paper).
It wasn't long before we'd written postcards for every address we had and it was time to disband. Gretchen handed out yard signs she'd gotten from Pat's Midtown office and I ordered a vegetable pot pie. As things were winding down, Ray showed up, so Nancy ended up going home with him.
[REDACTED]
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181016 feedback
previous | next |
