Tag: office

Couldn’t write this morning because as soon as I got up, I had to go to work.

Lunch at the office was Chick-Fil-A, but nobody asked me (possibly nobody was asked, I heard the lunch service just asks how many people and brings whatever they feel like)  and I couldn’t unspend the money, so I ate it. It wasn’t even good, although the fries might been better if they weren’t cold.

Read: Bianca Torre is Afraid of Everything (Justine Pucella Winans): Her list of fears is actually only 60 items long, but on the other hand it  covers most forms of human interaction, which is why she lurks in her room with a telescope and sees a murder. Traumatic hijinx and a side of gender euphoria ensue.

Written: FAIL.

More office. Not very many people mask, even in conference rooms, and I don’t think free burgers makes up for that.

Did some more mining in Minecraft, and finally broke into the giant cave from the side. It is only slightly less monster-guarded that way, though. Did find another abandoned mine, and also a lot of copper ore which should be useful but mostly isn’t. I guess I could compress it into copper blocks or cut copper and build a new house out of it or something.

Reread: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Work For a Supervillain (Richard Roberts): I liked this better on reread, maybe because when I first read it, I was hoping it would be more like the Penny books. I’m surprised we haven’t seen the new character who was introduced at the end in subsequent books, though.

Read: Fluff vol 2 (RavensDagger): More silly superheroics, this time LitRPG. The main character gets more externalized superpowers and is definitely growing into her supervillain role. It’s also increasingly clear that the Hero and Villain tags are completely spurious.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the office, although at least there aren’t constant customer meetings this week. I got my new laptop with working keyboard, and will try to remember to not eat over it. The automatic transfer app doesn’t work (probably because of the security software, which always screws up everything) so I get to have two laptops until I’m sure I have everything I need transferred over.

Read: A House With Good Bones (T Kingfisher): Not as creepy as The Hollow Places, but even more Kingfishery. I felt pretty bad for the monsters, though.

Read: What Moves The Dead (T Kingfisher): A Kingfishery retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, which I have never read. I felt even sorrier for the monsters in this one, though. I did not expect to read two Kingfisher books in a row in which merely being horrific and inimical to humanity is treated so unsympathetically!

Written: FAIL.

Went to the office again, did a work, ate a Korean drumstick, came home, died in a pit again.

Read: Lilith’s Shadow Omnibus vol 2 (Benjamin Medrano): Three more books of superheroic adventures and drama, including more possible girlfriends for the main character and also one or more attempts at planetary subjugation/destruction. Still emotionally a little flat, but full of genre.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the office. Customers, why?

Today’s Minecraft accomplishments: added an emergency bath next to the lava-powered garbage disposal, mined some obsidian and crying obsidian (neither of which is super-useful, but they’re shiny).

Read: Lilith’s Shadow Omnibus vol 1 (Benjamin Medrano): Bioroid creation of a supervillain becomes a superhero, gets hot girlfriends, fights aliens and evil wizards and suspicious superheroes, etc. The romance seems pretty flat, though.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the office. I need better shirts and/or collar points. And an iron and ironing board, probably. Ugh. Clothes, why?

Instead of doing anything useful when I got home, I played more Minecraft. Not sure what this fire and lava and weird purple dirt is doing in the middle of my island, but I guess I’ll mine some of it.

Read: Beyond the Burn Line (Paul McAuley): The sophonts after the sophonts after the sophonts that succeed an extinct humanity might be better at society, but they have UFO weirdos too.

Written: FAIL.

This is the week we have to start being in the office two days a week, so I got up much earlier than I wanted to (although to be fair, I never want to get up) and trundled up to Mountain View.

The customer meetings will never end, possibly because the customer will never accept that they have to fix their problems instead of us waving a magic wand.

Read: Without Mercy (Eric Thompson): More human-on-human violence in space.

Written: FAIL.

Nobody likes going into the office in 2022, but Ken very kindly gave me a lift to Mountain View, so I did not have to get up so early, and I hid in a small conference room most of the day so I did not have to breathe with people. I did come out and unmask to eat holiday lunch (salad, roast veg, mashed spud, roll+horseradish+roast beast, so not sure what holiday tradition that is, maybe British? Tasty, though.), which hopefully did not fill me with plague. I also got grilled a lot in the training meeting, because I was sitting right across from the instructor, but fortunately I knew many answers.

Read: Magister’s Bane (Yvette Bostic): The main character starts off ugly to the point of deformity but then is revealed to be actually super-hot as soon as she is brought into the magical world. I am not sure what think about that plot twist. At least she still has severe self-esteem issues from spending her entire life with people avoiding looking at her face.

Read: “Haley and the Miraculous Potion” (MCA Hogarth): Christmas episode, so of course it’s even more overtly Christian that usual. (IMHO, it’s super-weird how Christians take Jewish scripture telling ancient monoloatrous Jews not to worship the gods of other tribes and try to make it relevant to their monotheism, but this sentence could have ended after the word “scripture”.)

Read: Yakuza Reincarnation vol 3 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Old-school yakuza reincarnated into a fantasy princess continues to beat the snot out of people doing crime wrong.

Written: 385 words, no kittens.

Had to get up early and go into the office today so we could have a team lunch with boss3 S. The office was just as hot and inconveniently located as usual, but I was able to hide in a conference most of the time and mostly avoid humans and their virus-spewing face-holes. I also drank canned coffee milkshake stuff that was probably very bad for me.

Apparently boss3 is persona non grata in Switzerland after running afoul of their draconian anti-speeding regime, which I would not have known if I hadn’t come into the office today.

I cleverly (not really) got pizza on the way home and watched TV with Marith, which was definitely better than being in an office.

Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.1-2: Uh oh, Mob is thinking about his future. That can’t be good for Reigen’s business!

Read: Fluff (RavensDagger): LitRPG but superhero instead of D&D. An extremely anxious and repressed college freshman gets superpowers, gets randomly assigned to be a straight-up villain, and discovers that her power is summon little sisters who have actual powers. It’s all sideways from there.

Written: 214 kitten words.

Commuted into the office, spent most of the day hiding in a conference room so I could unmask, but then I didn’t have an external monitor so bleah. After getting home, Coworker K (who was in office yesterday but not today) announced she’s testing positive, so that’s 2/7 in our team so far. At least coming in to the office for the rest of the week is cancelled.

Read: Liching Hour (HK Tolson): Despite actions that could be construed as heroic, our protagonist is still pretty terrible. Just not as terrible as other monsters.

Written: 441 kitten words, total 921 for the week so far.

Last day of the superspreader event! Only one session for us today, so we didn’t have to be there until mid-morning, but then we hung around for free lunch and team bonding (mostly admiring coworker UK-T’s vacation photos). Aside from the ever-present risk of viral doom, it was pretty nice. I had to log in again when I got home, but the customers were mostly quiescent.

Rapid Test: Negative.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Still trying to manipulate Chi’s sister into abandoning nanoterrorism as a viable tactic for liberating the oppressed peoples of Mars, still not getting very far because in addition to being crazy, she’s also psychic. GML, who knows nanotech stuff, nerded out with Nadine’s pet mad scientist and made some discoveries, but I’m not sure I understood them. I’m not smart enough to play this game.

Written: FAIL. But I expected that.

More stuff relevant to my job, although it was hard to stay awake for it. Boss3 S is growing on me. She is also unimpressed with the sales bros, and works well with Boss2 B, who I generally admire. Nobody on our team is testing positive yet, but I think most of us skipped the dinner anyway.

Rapid Test: Negative.

Written: FAIL. I technically had hours, just not neurons to do anything with them.

Today started the Customer Success-specific parts of the event, which I also missed a bunch of in favor of hiding in the Support cave to do work. Also somebody who my teammates rode on a bus with last night tested positive today, so that was great to hear. They are all testing negative, but of course it’s been less than a day. Regardless, we seem to have given up on not eating together, although at least we’re outside for breakfast and lunch and it’s only our team (so the company will be doomed if we all get sick at the same time). Skipped the indoors group dinner at Macarthur Park in favor of going home after I finished working.

Rapid Test: Negative.

Read: Liches Get Stitches (HJ Tolson): A simple hedge witch accidentally steals a necromancer’s lichdom and revels in it. She’s a complete sociopathic monster (preexisting condition? unclear) so she’s not exactly sympathetic, but hash tag relatable. I mean, whomst among us hasn’t wanted to rip out of the soul of someone who’s being uncooperative and raise them as an undead slave so they can finally get something done? And she only uses bodies that are already dead for crafting new and exotic shapes of zombies.

Read: I Think I Turned My Childhood Friend Into A Girl vol 1 (Azusa Banjo): The childhood friend seems to actually be a legitimate trans girl, but realized it after the ML used her to practice his makeup skillz. Also ML has the hots for her, but then so do a lot of people because she’s really cute in her flawless makeup.

Written: 246 kitten words, 621/3000 so far for the week. Well, I knew it was going to be a terrible week.

Had to get up early so I could commute and wear a mask all day and watch people booze it up and not be able to properly collaborate with my teammates. If I were still a useless post-college git, maybe I’d be impressed by free food, but apparently I’m a grownup now.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. I did not contribute much, but at least a Navy Puke got fragged.

Read: Rare Swords Are Only Good Until You Lose Them (August): Third in the series, MC is still OP, although he’s burning through his reserves. Also, we finally find out what Elsa’s deal is.

Read: Stars and Steam (Anthea Sharp): Five short stories, not much more than vignettes, in a universe where aliens give humans advanced technology on the condition they can make their society stable, by which they mean Queen Victoria always rules (and apparently mores never change).

Read: The Field Guide To The North American Teenager (Ben Phillipe): A black French Canadian teenager moves to Austin, where he hates everything at first, which understandably makes him kind of a jerk. Sadly, he both stays kind of a jerk even after making friends, and leaves written evidence, so then he gets a comeuppance.

Read: Catch These Hands vol 1 (murata): Years after they were high-school delinquent rivals, two women meet again, and it turns out the one that had a crush on the other still does, so they start dating. It seems very Japanese in that dating is purely a social status, almost no visible affection. Also hardly anything happens.

Words: FAIL.

Had to go into the office today, which was definitely less good than working from home, except that apparently it made my boss’s boss’s boss happy to have us all there. Since we had to unmask to eat lunch together, presumably the entire team has Covid now.

I did make it home at a reasonable time, but then was completely useless.

Read: The Babysitters Coven (Kate Williams): A high-school girl discovers she has magic powers, which does not thrill her, especially when she finds out they come with obligations and sketchy new friends and doom. The magic system/cosmology is as incoherent as you’d find on TV, alas.

Read: “The Terracotta Bride” (Zen Cho): Reread, because somehow I didn’t record it the first time. A robot girl comes to the household of a rich man in an Asian afterlife, and chaos ensues.

Read: KNiP #1-220 (Sarah Simon-Blum): Cute comic about a small saucer alien who has to study humans and do jobs, but really just wants to wear pretty dresses and avoid anxiety-inducing things like human politics and retail work.

Words: 508 kitten words, I guess.

I got up two hours early (which is actually three hours early because it’s still Spring Forward Week) to go to the office, and it was worse in every way than working from home. I’m sure there are some jobs where being together in one place isn’t worse, but mine is not one of them. Home is more comfortable, has better food, has fewer interruptions, and doesn’t pointlessly waste four hours of my day on commuting. If I want to communicate with my coworkers, I will ping them on Slack like someone who lives in the 21st century.

My boss, who is from India, asked what St Patrick’s is about. I told her it was just white people nonsense, which is not an answer I’m sure she was happy enough, but “beer” was enough of an explanation.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. More of Nom’s ghosts (she will never live that down, ever), more shooting of zombies, and now the people we left safe at the base camp are freaking out. Yet, somehow, all the Marines are still alive and nominally sane.

Read: “The Backbone of the World” (Stephen Graham Jones): Mysterious prairie dog issues, uncanny strangers, impending doom on various levels, a clever plan.

Read: The Kaiju Preservation Society (John Scalzi): Just what it says on the tin. There are kaiju, somewhere, and they need preserving. It’s a little implausible that the secret is kept so well, but that’s fine. It’s a good romp and terrible people get their comeuppance.

Read: Ogres (Adrian Tchaikovsky): Sadly, the setting twist was obvious from the very beginning, although there is also a plot twist that I did not see coming.

Read: I Can’t Belive I Slept With You vol 1 (Miyako Miahara): A (hot, young) out-of-work game developer gets offered forgiveness of her back rent if she’ll sleep with her (pretty, even younger) landlady, and free rent if she lets her move in and rent out her old apartment. Super-problematic, obviously, but the leads get along and honestly seem to like each other. The twist I thought was going to be there seems to not be, but maybe it’s just unreliable narrator?

Words: FAIL.