I have been slammed with work today. I was slammed with work for the past few days, actually, and will be again tomorrow. There was even some Sunday work to be had.

I’ll be up for air soon.

Okay, so now I’ve checked around some more, after someone asked me, “Have you tried Greyhound?” and I said, “Duh! No!”

$43 round trip, takes me to the Springfield-Franconia mall, four-tenths of a mile from the Metro station, which saves me the trouble of taking the train into Union Station and having to reverse course. Also, Amtrak is $57 plus parking. But hm, Greyhound is in one of the crappiest sections of town… parking there would be a problem. Taxis are pretty much out of the question in Richmond.

Damn.

American mass transit sucks, outside of New York, New Jersey, and Chicago.

And they wonder why Americans won’t use it.

The following is one of the reasons that a friend of mine goes crazy at work on a daily basis. And by “goes crazy at work” I mean, “Is driven utterly bananas by many of the people she has to deal with.” The situation is changed to protect our privacy, but the gist of it is true.

Friend: I’d like an apple, please.
Vendor: No problem. Here’s a gardener who can plant apple trees, prune them, and grow them.
Friend: Sorry, I’m only budgeted for an apple. Please sell me an apple.
Vendor: Okay, how about this one? He sets up apple farms, educates your people on how to set up and cultivate apple farms and keep them green and growing for a long, long time.
Friend: NO! I need an apple! ONE apple!
Vendor: How about this guy? He ate an apple once.

This week a series of annoyances managed to all roll out one after another, forcing me to bring out my inner Hulk—albeit, the kinder, gentler Hulk.

About two weeks ago, I got new neighbors: A young couple with two young children, an infant and a four-year-old. They also have a cat with three kittens, and they’re trying to push the orange one on me. (Not gonna happen. Tig and Gracie hate other cats, and at the age of ten, I think it’s unfair to them to bring a stranger in the house.) But here’s the thing: Their four-year-old has been bothering me incessantly. She knocks on my patio door to tell me Tig wants to come in. Meantime, he was sound asleep on the patio until she came by to bother him, whereupon he woke up and frantically tried to get inside to get away from her. She knocks on my patio door to tell me she’s wearing a new shirt. She waves at me through the kitchen window while I’m preparing dinner, because my window looks out on my patio and she is in my backyard area, because she is not, apparently, being watched very carefully by her mother. And to top it all off, her mother knocks on my front door to tell me Tig wants to come in, and I have to explain to her that no, he doesn’t, he wants to sit on my porch and not be bothered, and that he knows how to let me know when he wants in. If he can’t get me to hear him scratching on the door, he will either yowl until I hear him, or come around to the patio door and get my attention that way. Really. I’ve been living here for five years, and my cats are thoroughly adapted to their environment.

Then, for the past week or so, we have the added annoyance of my cats misbehaving. Tig kept waking me up at 5 a.m. by yowling at me to get up and pay attention to him. This happened night after night until I finally woke up enough to start throwing shoes at him. I never hit him. I throw them in his general direction, and he gets the message. So it took two nights of throwing my slippers—no, three nights. He finally stopped waking me up. Now it’s Gracie’s turn. She’s discovered that I work from home now, so that means I can pay attention to her 24/7. Well, uh, no. She’s been yowling at me to come pet her upstairs. She’s been doing this every couple of hours. Two days ago, I got fed up with all of her noise and went to the foot of the stairs and had words with her. She sat on landing at the top of the stairs, eyes growing wide, and listened. She also got the message. I heard a yowl just now as I was writing this post, and yelled, “Gracie!” in super-stern voice, and she stopped.

Finally, yesterday, neighbor child knocks on my patio door—the blinds are closed—in midafternoon. Tig is asleep in the corner, ignoring her. She grabs her shirt and tells me that she’s wearing her new teddy bear shirt.

“What did I tell you about bothering me while I’m working?” I asked.
“But I’m wearing my new teddy bear shirt!”
“Briana, GO!” I said. I pointed. I never point. But she was really pissing me off.
She took off running.

I have not been bothered since.

Ahhhh. That sound you hear is the sound of me getting my privacy and control back.

This time next year, I hope to be working from my own townhouse. I’m going to install a fence.

A big one.

Update: She crossed the line. She squirted Tig with a water bottle. And in order to do this, she had to sneak onto my patio—all the way onto my patio—and get him while he slept in the corner near the door. She did. But I saw the tail end of it. I went next door and told her mother to keep that child away from me, my patio, and my cat. I was not nice. I was not patient. And I wasn’t accepting excuses.

I do not want that brat anywhere near me or mine again.

Conversation in my office this morning:

“What’s ‘nillable’?”
“It means the variable can be null.”
“Then why doesn’t it say ‘nullable’?”
“Because a programmer wrote it.”

I’d forgotten that programmers are on my “Die for what you’ve done to the English language” list, right up there with business-speak creators. (”Bulletize”? “Bulletize”? Stop verbing my nouns!)

Yeah, I know. It’s a living language. But it’s ridiculous to use “nillable” to define a variable that can be null when, gee, I dunno, “nullable” would be so much plainer. More intuitive. “Nil” and “null” have two very different meanings.

/language rant.

Last night, a few minutes before quitting time, I asked my manager if the November 30th date was firm. I told him that I’m looking for other jobs and need to give them a starting date. He told me that he really didn’t know.

Apparently, the situation is this: My manager isn’t the one trying to hire on the cheap. The company has decided on budget cuts company-wide and is looking very carefully at all new hires. They don’t know if they’re going to keep my current job as a contractor-only basis, hire someone for it, change the job description yet again and try for something different, or, well, whatever.

Meantime, my manager says, his supervisor and very few others really get the web, so the big guns don’t think that my job is all that critical or necessary, and, in fact, don’t understand how valuable my manager is, or what he is trying to do. In a nutshell, he is trying to bring the entire company intranet into one look-and-feel, one style, and one set way of doing things. It’s what you need to have on an intranet. One of my jobs was to survey individual intranet sites. I went through 174 sites and saw for myself what lack of standards and practices has done. Just because you can get someone in your department to learn Microsoft Front Page and put up internet pages doesn’t mean you should be doing it. There’s one site that would have been a great candidate for the old “Worst Site of the Day” internet site. I have signed confidentiality agreements, so I can’t really say much about it, but suffice to say that it has scrolling messages, horrid wallpaper, and an animated email gif.

If the higher-ups can’t grasp that uniformity is necessary in a company intranet, someone ought to slap them upside the head. An intranet is a marvelous tool. When I first started contracting, I studied the company history and benefits while keeping an eye on the job postings site. My favorite hit off the home page: The cafeteria menu. It lets me know whether or not to bring my lunch on certain days.

Something as minor as a week’s cafeteria menu is incredibly useful. A well-run company intranet can make it so that members of a department could work from anywhere in the world. I can’t believe that the higher-ups don’t get that.

In any case. The good news is, I don’t think I’m going to lose my contracting job any time soon, after all. And since it’s a really tough thing to get hired at the end of the fiscal year, it will be nice to keep getting my paycheck while job hunting. After I explained to my manager that the reason I was coming in so late these days was because I’m doing job-related work at home in the morning, he said he didn’t mind if I also searched from work. He’s a good guy, but I wish he’d been a little more communicative with me a month ago. It would have saved me a lot of anguish.

In the meantime, yes, I’m still looking for work. Here are my bonafides. Email is meryl - at - yourish dot com.

Y’know, I look at the post that lists my job skills and I think, “Wow, how could anyone not hire someone with those qualificaitons?” Then I go to the various online job sites, and I think, “Wow, how can they find anyone with all of those qualifications?”

I don’t suppose a job is going to drop from the sky into my lap, though, so I’ll just remind you that yes, I’m still looking, and no, Large Financial Company in Richmond isn’t smart enough to hire me. So keep those cards and letters coming, folks. I’ve got a 30-day reprieve, but I still need a permanent position, and I still can’t afford to be unemployed.

I really would like to give my nieces and nephews nice presents in the upcoming holiday season. A permanent position will help me do that.

I may have time to catch up on blogging next week, if they don’t bring me back. I couldn’t say.

In any case, I can’t thank Scott enough for what he has done. He made a Blogad for me, too.

It’s a tough time for me right now, and it’s great to know that so many of you are pulling for me.

One resume is winging its way to another Large Company in Richmond as we speak. It’s working.

Thank you, everyone.

Update December 2006: Yes, I am still looking for permanent work. I’ve seen two jobs disappear out from under me at Large Company in Richmond, and my contract is up the end of the month. And I’m really tired of updating this post.

Update August 2006: I’ve finished a contracting tech writing position, and am still looking for permanent work.

The job that I’ve been temping in these past two months will not be going to me. I found out this week that the company is filling the position with someone who will work for far less money than I. That’s their decision, and though I think it’s not the best decision to make, I have no say in the matter. (Update: It isn’t going to anyone just yet.)

But I really need a job. I can’t afford to be unemployed. At all.

Here’s what I need you all to do for me, especially Richmond-area readers. Pass along this post, or link to it, or email the link to a friend (http://www.yourish.com/2005/10/27/235). (For bloggers, the trackback to this link is http://www.yourish.com/2005/10/27/235/trackback/ ). You can right-click and copy the link in most browsers. It worked for Scott. Maybe it’ll work for me.

To prospective employers:

I have spent the last year in web content management and technical writing (training documents, white papers, and programming guides). Clips are available on request.

I have an extensive background in publishing, both print and electronic. I have years of experience as a typesetter (Atex, AM Varityper) , a desktop publisher (Quark and Pagemaker), a web developer (HTML, Claris Homepage and Dreamweaver), and now I have experience on Vignette Portal and a proprietary content management system. I have experience with many of the major blogging tools (Moveable Type, WordPress, Blogger) and have been writing this weblog (until this year, in Dreamweaver) since April of 2001.

I also have experience editing, proofreading, and copy editing in the magazine and book industries. I am a superb proofreader and copy editor; you will have to look long and hard to find typos in my posts. I have written various pieces for company newsletters and intranets. I am a very fast writer–I once stunned a PR manager by giving her a 200-word story in 30 minutes after she gave me three articles about one of our corporate officers to condense and rewrite. (”You’re finished already?”) The article went into the newsletter without a single edit. Although I prefer the essay form (that’s why I blog), I have written dozens of news, sports, and feature articles if we count my college newspaper–which I also edited. I have done tech writing, including the sysops’ manual and help files for 2AM-BBS, a proprietary software system.

I was an entry-level programmer. My programming skills are rusty, but I never forget the basics of what I am taught. The following are skills that I am light in, but that can be brought up to speed if need be: C++, SQL, Java, JavaScript, ASP, VB, DB2, Oracle, and Access. I’m not really looking for a programming position, but I do have more than a passing grasp of what programming entails. I have a much deeper knowledge of HTML and CSS, and a smattering of XML.

There is a saying that someone’s knowledge of a subject is a mile wide and an inch deep. My knowledge of many subjects is a mile wide and a foot deep. In some places, it is several feet deep.

In most interviews, your candidate tells you that she is a quick study. It’s a cliché. Well, it’s not a cliché with me. I taught myself Adobe Pagemaker in three days for a job interview with the New Yorker. (The job went to a relative of the production manager; go figure.) I took the Microsoft Office skills tests when I registered with Kelly Services last year, and managed to pull out decent scores even on the programs I hadn’t used in five years. I have shaken the rust off my Powerpoint and Outlook capabilities since working for my current temporary assignment.

I built and maintained intranet sites for Lucent. I manage intranet content for my current employer, as well as deliver new HTML/CSS pages for the intranet. I am not an official proofreader, but I do bring discrepancies, bad grammar, and errors to the managers’ attention. I create graphics and adjust images for the intranet articles. In short, anything that needs doing, I will do.

I am a teacher and a trainer. I teach fourth-grade religious school, and I have trained people in the Atex typesetting system—a painstaking, three-month process—and can sit down with a 73-year-old woman and teach her how to download her mail from AOL.

As I said above, my salary requirement and departmental budget constraints are what’s keeping my current company from hiring me. I can supply references from current and past managers, including my manager from Lucent, with whom I still keep in touch six years after being laid off (in the first wave of Lucent cutbacks).

I don’t want to relocate. I like the Richmond area. If you have a job for me outside my area, telecommuting would be a great thing, but I am also open to traveling onsite on a regular basis.

In any case, I am a devoted, loyal, hard-working employee. If you think you have a position that I can fill, or know someone who might, my email address is meryl - at - yourish -dot - com.

I need a job. Do you need an employee?

It’s been a really, really long time since I programmed anything, and I can’t seem to put the disparate elements together to form a whole Javascript. I’m hoping one of my readers can help me. Here’s what I need to do:

I have a group of photos in a table, each assigned a radio button. The user is going to choose the photo s/he likes best and then click the submit button, which will send an email. The subject of the email will be populated with the value of the radio button chosen. I’m naming all the photos and radio buttons the same, e.g., 0001, 0002.

Like I said, I have the elements down. I can’t seem to put a script together that passes the value of the radio button into the right place, mostly because, uh, it’s been four years since I last wrote a script. The syntax is what is giving me problems.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You know, gremlins seem to follow me no matter where I go. At work, at home, anything to do with computers and I just get the most annoying things happening.

My computer was not set up properly in my new department. From the get-go, I had network errors, script errors, and problems logging in. I finally got the Help Desk to send someone on Friday. The guy fixed everything except one password, which is apparently unchangeable, reset my network settings, and fixed it so I could add printers myself, which had somehow gotten screwed up.

Only now I can’t print at all. Because the printer is looking for a printer tray that does not exist.

Everyone on the floor prints to this giant Xerox printer. It has six paper trays: 1,2,3,4, High Speed, and Bypass. My computer is looking for Auto, Top, or Main. It can’t find them when I print. So it puts my job in the hold queue. If I try to release it, it prints my cover page, and then tells me that Auto (or Main, or Top) is empty, and to please fill it with paper. But I can’t. Because the trays do not exist. Doesn’t matter if all the trays are full, it’s still looking for the fictional trays. I tried to fill them with fictional paper, but it didn’t work.

So I called the help desk and went through the usual help desk rigamarole. Favorite part: “Can you find the reset button on the printer and hit it two or three times?” Oh, yeah, sure. It’s only a five-figure high-quality printer that everyone on the floor (and I’m on the executive floor) shares, sure, I’ll disrupt their print jobs. I can’t even find the reset button, if the printer even has one.

She gave me a ticket number and set it to “urgent.”

I’m emailing my documents to my coworkers when I need to print.

Anyone want to take a pool on when the IT guy manages to come out and fix my printing problems? I call Friday.