rainy wednesdays cause flooding and traffic delays.

but nothing on the scale of yesterday, so i'm not worried.
i had dave drive me because of the flooding. i'm not so into that. also, i have a sore throat and i sound like hell. i think i'd rather get a warm, dry, safe ride in a car until the sore throat clears up, or the rain, or both.
so i have his computer today. i like using the laptop. i like os x. but i don't have time to use the laptop, really; it's not mine, so i have to let dave use it (he can't do his work otherwise...) but i don't want to go sit at my own computer, so i end up going and watching him work wherever he is instead of going to my computer and working.

we've had several constructive conversations about the inscrutable toaster project. (Hm. I'd link to it, but Hemulen seems to be down.) Not much actual work has been done, but planning has been done that gives me a very good feeling about it all.
Dave's done a lot of work, both in structuring the database, in planning out its tables, and in actually figuring out how to do the coding. it's not very well-documented, it seems.
I really like working with him because it gives us something concrete to talk about, and gives us both the opportunity to use our brains. We're both good at various aspects of this crap, and actually our skillsets overlap most conveniently, in that our strengths lie in different areas. So it's a very good way to do a project. Which is why we were joking earlier while i was unemployed that we should just start a company because we have all the elements needed to form one. But no product, so...
A business planner would be helpful, I guess. But, I'd rather just work for someone else and let them worry about all the stupid details, for now. There's a lot involved in running a business and I have yet to hear from anyone who works for one that's well-run. So nope, no way; I'm going to be a chump and work for other people. And reserve independent projects for my spare time.
I don't have quite enough of it, is part of the problem. I come home from work too frazzled to do much, even if I spend the late afternoon (like yesterday) staring blankly. I have been working at varying intensities, and the fact remains that no matter how hard or light my actual daily workload is, it's hard for me to focus at night.
But it's always been hard for me to focus, so...
Sigh. This project will get done. And it will be awesome. And once it's done, we'll have tons of awesome things to do all the time-- but they'll be easy and immediately rewarding.
Yep.

I hope that's a little more coherent than my entry of last night. Last night's entry is a graphic illustration of my problems with focus at night. It made no sense, right? It was rambling and stupid.
So, I'm thinking perhaps I should get in the habit of going to sleep early, and should wake up early and do my work then instead. So that I can use whichever computer I want, and can do my thing while I'm focused and capable, and then at work they can get the pieces of my consciousness. The tasks there are more mindless anyhow.
So, it's definitely a thought. Maybe just an hour or two in the mornings...
I dunno. We'll see.

my company is like the dysfunctional, abusive family i never had.

It just is.
I'm eating a cookie to ease the feeling of trauma. My throat doesn't hurt but it's moved to my chest. I don't have enough chocolate.
[Unknown site tag]The boss is a fanatic for putting updates on his employees' computers, and cleaning out their registries and such. With the result that, often as not, he breaks the computers and his employees can't do their work.
He has done this to our sales lady several times. In the past, she has found out in time to get the computer fixed.
Not today. Today she was on a demo and the programs wouldn't load, the data was missing, the versions were wrong, the database connections were mis-pointed. The people she was demoing for cut the demo short and said they'd wasted enough time looking at software that didn't work, and they had work to do. She was furious with the boss for having done this to her-- she honestly had no idea that her computer had been tampered with, and had no way of compensating for the broken things.
The boss yelled at her, and actually insulted her to the point that she broke down in tears.
A little background: The sales lady is in her late fifties, a grandmother several times over, and had a 20-year career as an R.N. She also had the guts to pack her five tiny children into her car with all her worldly possessions she could fit and drive them to her grandmother's house to escape her abusive alcoholic husband when she was a young woman. She is no sweet young thing. She is an experienced woman of the world, with brains and knowledge and qualifications.
She said nobody had yelled at her like the boss did since she'd left her husband.
I became aware of the situation when I went to the bathroom and walked past the boss' office to hear him screaming like a woman at the general manager about how nobody does things his way and how all the little details, they go their own way, they never do things his way.
The man needs medication, and badly.
The director of programming, a little Russian woman, cornered the boss and ripped him a new one when she heard about it. She told him exactly where he had to go and what he had to put where. The sales lady's computer is now locked and inaccessible to anyone but the sales lady herself, or the programming director herself. Nobody else can touch it. They can't even look at it. And the boss is not allowed to speak to the sales lady again until the programming director says so.

...

See, when I was a kid, in my house, we used to argue like that. We used to touch each other's stuff and yell at each other and scream, and our Mom would separate us until further notice. But we stopped doing that. We stopped. I think I was 10 the last time I had a hissy fit like that. I mean... I've flipped out, probably as recently as yesterday, but I haven't screamed at anyone until they cried since... Well, since I stopped having crybaby friends. I mean... OK. I'm not the most emotionally stable person on the planet. You all know that. I'm liable to tantrums, sure.
But not in a professional setting.
I've even cried here at work. I've been pissed off and obnoxious and the rest.

But it just frightens me to overhear screaming like that. And just... I mean, the poor woman! She had nothing to show this whole room full of people, busy people who were taking time to look at something, something that we want to sell for half a million dollars or something like that. To have nothing to show them... I can't even imagine.

If I had a history of dysfunction, I would probably be unable to function at this point. I'd be under the goddamn desk pretending not to be here. As it is I watched every single person in the office sneak quietly out precisely at noon, pretending they weren't here, being quiet, carefully packing themselves silently and quickly into the elevator together just to get out of here.
Me too.

I here reiterate that my company sells good products and actually is full of hardworking and professional people.
They just sort of get shouted down.

can't *hack* breathe... *gack*

I fuckin' hate chest congestion. *HACK HACK COUGH*
this is up really high. Higher even than my tonsils, which aren't swollen. I feel like, just at the top of my throat, it's clamped partially shut. If I open my mouth like a twit and extend my head upward a tad, I can breathe ok. It's not like I'm really lacking oxygen, but I'm definitely gasping like a fish every now and then, and my heart rate is elevated.
The thing is, other than that I don't feel that ill. I keep coughing to try and clear my throat but it's not working. *HURK HACK HACK*
I've had about two gallons of water today. (Exaggeration. I've had three Tahou's mugs, however. That _is_ a lot, and I'm not sure how much a Tahou's mug is except maybe it's around 40 oz.) *COUGH*
I even tried Buckley's cough syrup, which is billed as pretty much the vilest substance on the planet, but highly effective at treating coughs. It actually felt like my throat was burning when i swallowed it. And yes, the pain disappeared entirely. However, my throat is still mostly closed.
Blechh. *HACK*
I hate being ill, because it's all I can focus on. I don't feel ill, though. Dave's working on something important-- he accidentally deleted a very important file at work, that he hadn't backed up. So he's working on it now. So, I made him a number of small appetizers, and then dinner, and put them down in dribs and drabs on the plate next to him so that he could just pick them up and eat them without interrupting his work. ("You're the best," he said. Yay! I get to be the best!) Now I wanted to organize my 10-GB mp3 collection. But I just can't get comfortable. I feel like I'm strangling. It's very distracting.
HACK HACK COUGH ughh. It's a dry cough, too, so I can't even feel like I'm getting anywhere. Coughing doesn't relieve it. Bleck. Ugh. Yeck. Augh.
Right, enough.

OK. Now I REALLY feel sick.

I had a brilliant idea. I thought, while dave's hard at work, I'll organize my mp3 files. I have a lot of them. They're all over. Many, I haven't even listened to. I should go through them.
Hmm, I thought. I should get myself some better mp3-listening software. What's out there? Winamp is buggy and crashes a lot. Hmm...
So I thought, OK, I can't get iTunes, but there are iPods for Windows. What do they use?
MusicMatch. Hmm...
So I dialed them up, and downloaded the free version. Hm. Can't hurt. It's kinda ugly, wants a lot of personal info, but I skipped most of those things and got it fired up. Restarted, and there it was.
OK. Pretty ugly, counterintuitive, hard to use, kept clicking on random things that ended up bringing me to their website to buy the Pro version for $20. No thanks, I'm trying to see if the free version works.

So I'm adding files. Not so bad. Here we go. Can't resize the window so I can't tell which of my 80 Tom Lehrer songs I'm adding. (I forgot I had all these. Pretty cool. Wow. I have a lot of good music. Yeah.) Well, that's OK. I'll look at them later. Just getting something in there for now.
It hangs while adding a particular mp3. Hangs hard. No ctrl+alt+del. Nothing works. Crap.
Cold boot. I hold the power key down for a while. It reboots.
I try again. Stuff. Yay. It's all started up. There it is. I continue.
It hangs again. Whoops. Dammit.
This time I wait and after I hit ctrl+alt+del a bunch of times, I manage to just quit the program.
So, I tried it again.

Things seemed to be going well when abruptly my computer restarted. I mean, i hadn't hit anything in particular, and it just went 'click' and was restarting.

...
It can't find me. My user profile doesn't exist.

Let me clarify. No files are missing, but when I start up Windows, it says that my user profile could not be found, and it starts me up with the blue Windows background, and pops up the Welcome to Windows thing, and the little click me thing starts going on the Start bar...
Nothing's there. It doesn't recognize me.


HOW FUCKING ANNOYING IS THAT????

So, don't, under ANY circumstances, EVER download MusicMatch. I don't even know HOW it did that, but I've never had anything like this happen before. For fuck's sake.