ugh

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so i used to complain all the time about how my office job was made up of a number of tasks for which my ADHD and inability to differentiate between numbers and such all make me ideally ill-suited. I blamed most of it on our terrible, antiquted, cash register system that i had to operate via trans-state VPN (yes really, a VPN to Pennsylvania, I’m not even making that up), and it was the Worst.

Well.

After literally a decade, the company upgraded that system, and we now have a new cash register system. 

Which means that all the painstaking workarounds we’d adopted in the intervening ohhh probably eight years I’ve been doing this job?

None of them work anymore.

it turns out I’m still uniquely poorly-suited to this job, which still involves a lot of, hm, looking at small numbers on bits of paper, and entering them into a glitchy and slow-responding system (it’s way better than it was, response times are like one second instead of literally 72 seconds, but it’s still long enough for my ADHD to check the fuck out of the conversation), and having to know which of a long list of tasks you’ve done, which must be done in the proper order. Since the system actually works, all of this matters. I hadn’t realized how used I’d grown to just not having the system work at all, so everything had to be kludged into approximately the right shape and then if it didn’t line up we’d just sort of shrug.

No… now it actually is meant to be correct down to the penny, and every inventory item needs to be accounted for, and people are now relying on the numbers in the computer to be correct. The numbers in the computer have been meaningless for my entire tenure at this job, and it is, let me tell you, a daunting undertaking to try and actually make those numbers be the right things!

This kind of sucks, honestly… 

I get that I’m just whining, but I felt like I should record my sheer baffled indignant incredulousness at actually having to do my actual job again, after having had to annoyingly and meaninglessly screw around for literally a decade… 

Oh also my coworker was supposed to be back in town tomorrow and so when he suddenly turned up this morning I about fell out of my seat. Er, his seat, I was actually at his computer doing a bit of his job that I have to fill in for when he’s not there. It was faintly embarrassing. I’m really glad I got so much done over the weekend or I’d’ve looked an absolute idiot.

As it was, I was like, “oh good you’re here! Now I can ask you about Thing I Didn’t Understand,” whereupon he instantly got on the phone with the Philadelphia office and didn’t ever hang up, so I had to muddle through on my own anyway, whereupon I fucked it up almost inextricably, which would not have happened if I’d just been able to ask him but he literally spent four solid hours on the phone, so. I’d have better luck texting him on his day off, in terms of getting a question answered.

sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post

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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “reading as autobiography”

I used to do a lot of those episode fill-ins and flesh-outs as well. My memory of the shows always fades but I still like to read that type of thing. And this is a particularly good reminder that authors are people and stories often come from specific headspaces, so no one should ever have to justify why a story or series went a certain way or ended. And the things we write in less than sunny times can be really helpful to others.

This reminds me that I’m about due for an SGA nostalgia trip, so I shall go re-read some stuff as well and we’ll see whether or not I have kudosed them while logged in yet!

LOL thanks!

I think that is an excellent point, though– sometimes I think a lot of art is important because of what the artist was going through, and sometimes art is important regardless of what the artist was going through. 

Anyway, it was making me think of two of the most recent comments on my old SG:A stuff– I got one, at the end of the one series, that was so lovely I’ve literally had it open in a tab since I got the notif months ago, trying to think of what to say in response, and it was in essence “I get that you didn’t mean to stop here and this wasn’t finished but leaving it on this note was such a lovely wrap-up anyway”, basically, only like, better-said and deeper. It was so lovely, I literally cried.

And then the more recent one, on the other series which got recced somewhere so it’s enduringly popular and I Regret That a lot honestly, which was “IIIIII don’t get it, IIIIII’m confUUUsed, you set up all this shit and then never resolved it?? What’s all that supposed to mEEEEan?? How dare u”

Which, ironically, because I’m not a good person, I did reply to right away (it is not the first comment I’ve gotten like that on that series, hence the Regretting the mild popularity of it; if I’d been able to finish I’d be delighted but I set it up to be way too ambitious and also I was pretty fucking mentally ill, so), and i said “oh I get what’s confusing you! see, when you’re on AO3 there’s a little ticky box that says whether a work is completed or not and this one’s still set to Not, also I wrote this shit for free in 2012 so you get what you fucking get and being a snippy little shit isn’t the way to get it finished!” only I hope I said it nicer. Not much, though. Because fuck you, whoever the fuck you are; you’re looking at something marked WIP that hasn’t been touched in numerous years and you’re pretending that confuses you?? 

So I wrote right the fuck back and they haven’t answered, which, good, and then I stewed about it for a couple of days. The fucking nerve.