oh dear

Mar. 4th, 2020 03:36 pm
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
via https://ift.tt/3crof4N

My coworker is absolutely terrified about Coronavirus.

He’s a big dude, robust and healthy, strong. Maybe 43? Built like a bear. Really pretty sturdy. Lifts heavy stuff, gets the door, that kind of guy.

But he had whooping cough as a kid, somehow– he doesn’t know either, must’ve missed the vaccine or something? Don’t know; his mom wasn’t an antivaxxer or anything. But he had whooping cough, sometime in the early 80s. It happens sometimes.

Ever since, every time he gets a cold, it settles in his lungs, turns to bronchitis. He’s had pneumonia four or five times now in his life. Every ten years or so it knocks him flat, just a cold he can’t shake that settles in and builds itself a palace in his lungs until he’s weak and feverish and flat-out exhausted.

He is terrified of coronavirus. He’s not immunosuppressed, exactly, not chronically ill, generally in fantastic health– great blood pressure, good cholesterol, etcetera. But those scars in his lungs, from the whooping cough– he knows pneumonia will be the thing that kills him someday, we’ve discussed it before. I’m sure he’s not wrong. 

So I’m humoring him, as he goes nuts with the handwashing and sanitizing everything in our office. It’s a little annoying because he talks about it all the time, reads me the latest statistics from the WHO, asks me what i think’s gonna happen, etc. I’m like, I don’t actually want to dwell on this, but. He still keeps bringing it up.

Yesterday he finally admitted that his wife suffers from severe anxiety, and he can’t even breathe a syllable of this at home. At the moment, so far she’s oblivious and carefree about it, and he’s like, I can’t let on that I’m freaking out because she’ll freak out and I can’t do that. He admitted he went panic-grocery-shopping and stocked up on everything without telling her; she doesn’t know that he’s upgraded all the soap in their house, doesn’t know the freezer’s crammed full and the basement’s full of toilet paper and canned goods. She doesn’t know. He can’t tell her. Because she’ll worry.

So I’m trying to be kind, and let him worry at me, because I understand. But it’s a lot. 
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
via https://ift.tt/3apRH9u

So we sell film developing on Etsy.

My job is to run the whole Etsy site, and sometimes i develop film, but I’m not up on the lab procedures here and so mostly I just run film down and sometimes I’ll twincheck it (every roll of film gets its tongue extracted from the canister, and we have these great really substantial metal-foil stickers that are two identical ones in a row with a number, and you stick one half to the negs and the other half to the bag, so you know which film goes with which order) and get it ready but the extractor tongue here is semi-broken and I’m not up on its quirky points so I don’t often even do that, unless I’ve got a complicated order. And I was developing the black and white film myself, by hand, but the store manager is trying to convince the company owner we need our own BW machine so I’ve had to pack the BW up and mail it to the main store instead, and that’s fine, whatever.

Anyhow. (I also do all the online order entry and some of the price changes and all of the product photography and editing of those photos and some of the listings, and I still don’t work a quarter as hard as the fulltime guy who runs the online store. It’s all more work than you’d think.)

I came in this morning to a message from a customer that she’d gotten back someone else’s negatives instead of her own, and when I was like “oh she probably forgot what was on the roll” and asked her to check the twincheck stickers– and sure enough, her bag said 2595 and 2596, and the rolls she’d got back were 2596 and 2597.

Fuuuuuuuck. I went to my Completed Orders page and meditated for a moment. How do I figure out whose other orders went out at the same time? She’d ordered in December, and took forever to mail hers in; that day I’d gotten no less than fifteen envelopes, and some of them had been new orders and some a little older, and some of them were done and some have BW film so they’re still sitting here. And there was film in the store that day too, local customers– one of them could have her negatives, and since so many people nowadays are developing old rolls they cleaned out of a drawer, they may not know what’s on their film and so if they got the wrong thing they may just shrug and say who knows what Grandma took photos of, y’know? Fucky fuck fuck.

The twin-check is such a basic, ingrained thing, that never fails (I’ve literally never made a mistake with it and I’ve worked here since ‘07) that we have zero backup error-checking of any kind. Why would we need to?

So I’m tearing my hair out– at best, I’m going to have to email a bunch of recent customers and say ‘Hi, I’m a really unprofessional jerk with no concern for your privacy! Can you rummage through your recent order from me and see if someone else’s precious property is in there?’ And at worst, I’lll get no affirmative responses.

And then another message arrives. From another recent customer, a regular even. 

“Hey I think… I got somebody else’s photos? I don’t recognize one of these rolls?” And in response to my desperate follow-up, “Yeah! My bag says 2597 but the roll says 2595!”

Oh thank fucking christ. 

The guy who fucked this up for me, by the way, has been working here since 1983, so. I don’t know what procedure I could really change to prevent this, and I know if I make a big deal of always checking the twinchecks on my orders he’ll get offended, but fuck, that could have been so bad. (I guess I’ll have to quietly double-check all twinchecks when he’s not looking. I mean, fine. Listen I work really hard to keep on his good side because he’s a sour old fuck* but he’s never going to leave and is an institution in this institution of institutions so the cost of being nice to him is worth the benefits of him not hating me. He hates everybody and I Do Not Want That.)

[*I say that but he just baked a really elaborate cake for the other old-timer whose birthday it was, and actually I do rather like him, he’s just mean to everybody when he’s not being weirdly sweet]

hilarious

Jan. 15th, 2020 02:31 pm
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
via https://ift.tt/36YW61Q

So the wifi at work is like, punishingly slow. Has been all week. I’ve tried restarting it, nothing helps, it just is what it is.

The wired-in Internet is fine, so we can mostly do our jobs without noticing, and since my coworker browses Facebook on his computer not his phone, he doesn’t particularly notice. 

I have my personal laptop and while waiting for things I look at Tumblr on it. It’s all blank spaces where images should be, and since none of you savages use any kind of image descriptions, it’s just wide open whitespace with occasional completely out of context commentary, which is sort of Dadaist but mostly not worth looking at.

Instagram on my phone is also mostly blurry things that don’t load. I’ve realized I follow too many people; the vast majority of them I’m like oh good this lets me skip Stories faster. Hm, I should re-evaluate. Except I do sometimes get something I value out of those things… I’m not good at unfollowing. 

But what’s really hilarious is that our printer works over wifi, and so everything seems to be working just fine except when we need to print something, and since my coworker so rarely uses the wifi he has forgotten every time, and every time starts theorizing about what could be wrong.

“Our wifi is choked,” I remind him. He doesn’t believe me, and tries to give me troubleshooting advice until he gets distracted, and then literally twenty minutes later the printer finally spits something out and he’s all astonished because he’s forgotten about it.

It helps that he just mostly doesn’t pay attention to me, LOL. Fortunately I’m the one who’s printing stuff, so I don’t do something silly like try several times to print the thing. I just wait, now.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
via https://ift.tt/2OKPr4I

of offering film development online. i added in a mandatory personalization field wherein i insist that the customer type “yes” to certify that they actually read the listing and understand what they ordered. I also said they could use it to specify the surface finish of their prints, if they ordered prints.

got about seven orders. two of them were for “develop only” and had “matte” written in the personalization field. I wrote to both and said, “matte what? you did not order any prints.” Both were like, “no I want prints”. 

The text of the listing explains fully what “develop only” means. One of the customers was like “no I want prints only.” I’m like bitch, how the fuck you think film works? you think I can just print it without developing it? what the fuck do you think this is? is it even film that you have? Jesus.

I am now struggling with how to fit into 256 characters in which I’m only allowed to capitalize one word “READ THE FUCKING LISTING AND IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND IT DON’T BUY THIS AND IF YOU DON’T BUY PRINTS I’M NOT GIVING YOU ANY THIS IS HOW THIS WORKS PLEASE JUST FUCKING READ THE FUCKING LISTING”

I really don’t know. Two out of seven people just completely failed every single check.

I was inspired to go through all the orders and pre-emptively message those people because I received a message from a customer who ordered and was taken care of while I was gone, who’d done exactly that, ordered develop only and CD and then didn’t understand where her prints were. (”Are they shipping separately?” “Yes bitch when you BUY them.” Like, WTF??)

I genuinely don’t know how to explain it clearer. 

what a drag

Nov. 7th, 2019 02:13 pm
dragonlady7: Comic book panel featuring Poe Dameron saying "You know what, man? You're sort of a drag." (drag)
I wrote a whole second whiny post this morning but it didn't help me work through anything, so I filtered it to private. Just feeling crummy, though I should be grateful I suppose that there's no physical component to it. Just emotionally, I feel crummy, for no reason, so that's an annoying bummer.

At work, we're supposed to have our outgoing mail picked up by the postal service. We have a scheduled UPS pickup daily, and the USPS is supposed to do the same. They have to come here every day to drop stuff off, as it is, but the carrier refuses to pick up the bin. The folks downstairs have started asking him whenever they see him. (I send most of the outgoing stuff, but of course as I'm up here, I don't ever see the mail guy come and go; down there, they don't send much mail, but they see him, and now they know about the problem that I've got stuff, some expedited, that's going by USPS and if the guy doesn't take it, it doesn't go, the shipment goes late and we get dinged on Amazon and eBay by their algorithms.)
Today the store manager saw the carrier come in and said, "So are you going to pick up yesterday's mail yet?" and the carrier answered, verbatim, "I'll try," and left without taking it. I suppose indicating that he'd come back for it? Which is fine except that he has literally never done so. The only times the shipment goes at all is if he takes it the first time he stops by.

So anyway. We've called the USPS several times, and have now gone in person to the post office three times to discuss this; today will make four. But the store manager's annoyed, personally, so I know he's on this and isn't going to rest about it now.
I don't want to hassle the mail carrier, I know it's a hard job, but we spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on postage in a month, let alone a year, and I've started choosing UPS for shipments I'd normally send USPS, because UPS has never missed a pickup. And I don't want to do that. And I especially don't want to it because USPS has a lot more cheaper options, in many cases, so it costs us money to make choices like that, and our margins are pretty fucking thin as it is. So like. I get it but also, shape the fuck up, mail guy: it is literally your job, and I am sorry if your job is hard but mine is literally under threat from this.

At least UPS is union too, is how I console myself-- I've started thinking about this more lately, and. Anyway. I miss our old UPS guy, who was a union activist and all-around hilarious but unfuckwith-able guy; I'm sure he's still doing the route out there, and I'm sure he's fine, but he was awesome and a little punctuation to every day when he'd stick his head around to the back room and ask if that was really all we were sending. (Funnier if it was piled high, as it often was.)


In other matters, I had a bunch of old family movies transferred from 8mm film reels. They were my mother's childhood movies, mostly taken between 1959 and 1964 by her father-- the vast majority are 1961 and 62, which seems to be when he was most enamored of the camera, but there are a couple of outliers. And it is fun, both to see what dorks my mom's family were, and to see the weird eerie resemblances that pop up a lot. I now have photo documentation of four generations of my mother's people using their tongues to think with-- Grandma, Mom, my sisters, and my sister's daughters all have the same habit of sticking their tongue out of the corner of their mouth when they're concentrating on some physical activity, and it's quite cute. I probably did too but I surely beat it out of myself the same time I stopped smiling with my upper teeth hooked over my lower lip. (Which was probably cute when I was little but really is not an expression an adult can get away with making.)
And that's kind of the thing-- it's tricky, and weird, but for some reason, all I can see in these movies is my resemblance to my mother and grandmother, and it should be beautiful and reassuring, but it's just weirdly painful for some reason. My mom was in the chubby awkward phase of a girl just beginning puberty for most of the movies, and it's weirdly painful because all i can see is how hard that age was for me-- when I first became aware that my body wasn't Acceptable, and that I wasn't going to fit in as an adult no matter what I did. So that's weird and unwelcome, but fortunately I have time to get over it before the rest of the family sits down to watch these, because that won't happen until Thanksgiving.

Oh dear, this turned out weirdly boringly navel-gazey too. Oh well.

I did have a funny bit. Well, IDK how funny it is. but. The light in the work bathroom burned out. We figured out it's a weird fixture but takes a regular light bulb. So I went and got a light bulb. But I forgot to note what wattage was needed-- to be fair, my coworker forgot to tell me, he was the one up the ladder and I wasn't going to muscle past him to look.
So I bought a 100-watt bulb. They're LED now, it's not like they're going to set a fire.

The old one was 40W, and yellowish. The new one is 100W and Daylight White. It's like a fucking operating theater in there, and you can now see every speck of filth in the place. SO I guess I'm gonna clean that bathroom later today!!! Holy shit.
I turned the light on and started laughing so hard my coworker thought I had hurt myself. It's so funny. I never thought about what a difference it would make.

OK, it's not that funny, but it was the only thing today that was remotely amusing, so I'm leaving it in.
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
First thing I did this morning was pull 33 separate sheets of printed-only-on-one-side paper out of the garbage, because no matter how much I ask him not to throw that shit away, my coworker refuses to put it into the recycle bin. (I print internal lists and memos and such on the back of the sheet, and once it's printed on both sides, I take it home and recycle it, because it seems really stupid to me to throw paper away since it's like. Stupid.)
Some of it had food garbage on it so I had to throw it back away, but. I kept count because I couldn't believe how much it was-- I was only gone five work days.

Now I'm set to re-doing a task I did weeks ago, that got left to languish so long that eBay's servers glitched and lost most of my work, so now I have to track down where the files are and re-do the whole thing.
My job is so fucking pointless, I love it!

Sigh. It's fine. It's not like I'm doing anything else with my life.

I'm also making a list of the shit that definitely got burned up in the yurt, for the first time-- figured I'd make a list of what kind of replacement shit I need, and it's. Well, depressing. I forgot, I brought my travel first aid kit, meaning to go through it and shuffle stuff I didn't need anymore into the first aid kit in the barn, but I didn't, and now that's gone plus the nice bag, and I'm traveling again in December and have to replace it.
Nail clippers, I lost my nail clippers. Headphones, lost those too. Some nail polish, I found the bottle, it was kind of funny because it had clearly exploded. Cosmetics-- lost some nice eyeshadow, my only concealer, my sole tube of perfect red lipstick.
I want to just re-order everything on Amazon, but I won't-- they use delivery contractors in Buffalo now, I've seen the vans, and they force them to pick up their loaded trucks in Rochester, 60 miles away, and then drive to Buffalo, and only then clock in, and it's so unethical I won't have anything to do with it and only order stuff if I'm going to have it delivered at the farm, where I've confirmed they still use the US Postal Service.
I know, it's a dumb line to draw in the sand, and I should just stop using Amazon altogether, but god damn, I don't even know where to buy this kind of shit anymore and I don't want to drive to seventeen local stores to find it not in stock anyway, which is the whole reason I started using Amazon in the first place. (And let's be real here, it's not like Target is pumping so much money into my local community.) There is no ethical consumption under capitalism-- but I also am not going to make those poor exploited delivery guys drive unpaid from fucking Rochester to get lost in my neighborhood. Ugh.

ell oh ell

Oct. 25th, 2019 12:08 pm
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
So I sell film developing on Etsy, and I keep getting super annoyed because the site collapses my item descriptions under a Read More, and then customers don't read it, so they don't know things they need to know to buy the thing, and they buy the thing and then ask me questions the listing answers like right there for them, this is not rocket science, whatever.
anyway.
i wrote up a thing, like, here's the problem, here's what i've tried-- and one of the things I tried that had the most success is that I put the really crucial information into a little text block that I Photoshopped over the default listing image. That's been the most helpful thing, but I need to tell them more than will fit onto a single image.

The problem is that people don't read stuff, I get it, so I asked for other advice-- like, I got it, you can send an email with their order confirmation, I put the relevant info into that, but that's not customizable. I need like, a conditional thing, if they order X it asks them Y, if they order Z it reminds them it doesn't come with X included, that kind of thing. Because otherwise it's just too much information and people won't read that much.

I got a few helpful responses, a lot of commiseration (some of it quite funny), and

an astonishing number of people who didn't read the whole thing and told me I ought to try overlaying the text over the default listing photo.

Which MAKES MY POINT and is HILARIOUS but it would be really rude to tell a person who's gone out of their way to try and be helpful that they were absolutely proving my point: people just won't read shit.

Profile

dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
dragonlady7

January 2024

S M T W T F S
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 2627
28293031   

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 17th, 2025 12:40 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios