Pinkabrinka

Posts tagged work

Dear Self-Important Twat,

When stop what I’m working on to create a rush document for you, do not respond to my email by requesting that I re-send the document I just sent but this time send it to your new staff member and copy you. Get off your ass, hit “forward”, and take care of it yourself.

Kisses!

When did “webinar” come to mean “someone reading PowerPoint slides out loud”? And if that’s what we’re going to do, can we get actors to read them, please? This webinar might be slightly less painful if it was being read aloud by Sam Eliot or Alan Rickman or George Clooney.

I may be a little burnt out on doing the Employee Appreciation stuff at work. I put together a survey today to determine what activities people liked or disliked, and what we should do in the coming year. Instead of the standard “Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree” scale I went with a scale from “I would rather listen to the Chipmunks singing that ‘Christmas Don’t Be Late’ song on repeat for three hours while standing in line at Wal-Mart behind screaming babies.” to “This was totally like fluffy unicorns dancing in glittery go-go boots on rainbows of awesome while it rains Skittles!”

See also: I may be spending too much time on the internet. Evidence: Fluffy unicorns on rainbows of awesome.

As of today, I have a new job. Well, an expanded job—adding grant-based contracts development and oversight to the grant writing and management I’m doing now. New title, new division, new boss, new cubicle. New salary is still being finalized.

This first came up on Friday afternoon. I didn’t think it would move quite do fast, but…surprise!
My phone line is being moved, so I guess that makes it official. :)

This can count as my SST, right? I mean, promotions are totally sexy.

People who say that real life isn’t like high school clearly never worked in this office.

I write and submit grants, mainly federal grants, for my agency. We have a grant due today. I received the last of the project materials this morning. So, submit it and move on to the next one, right?

Wrong. First I have to wrestle with the stupid computer network, which has decided to block me from accessing the federal government’s grant application system because it may be unsafe. You know those suits and their racy government websites. Sigh.

…
Dear Computer,

Decide which of the two following things is more dangerous to your continued existence:
• the website that I need to access for a $400k grant due today
• a blowtorch

Take a moment to think it over carefully. I’ll just be over here watching *that scene* from Office Space.

XOXO,

me

I’m the grants coordinator for my agency. That means I locate, write, submit, provide final project oversight, and report on upwards of twelve million in grant funds at any given time. Today, I received an e-mail concerning recently submitted grant reports, questioning the submission of identical responses to questions on three separate reports. One of the performance measures in question—“For the reporting period (July-September 2011), how many counties were in your state? “

Really?

This was not a computer generated e-mail; someone actually sat down and wrote an e-mail requesting that I explain why we’ve reported having an identical number of counties in the state on multiple reports.

I stalled on answering, certain that they’d realize what they’d just asked and retract the question. I debated a response of either “headdesk” or “facepalm” until I saw the next part of the e-mail.

They invited me to explain how we were interpreting the performance measure, in order to clarify the data.

Ummm….“We are defining the number of counties in the state as the number which fall inside the boundary commonly known as the state line. We are excluding all those counties which, while located close to the state line, fail to meet the above qualification. Currently, these are divided into four groups, which we refer to individually as Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Michigan, or, for research purposes, the OKIM counties. Our analysts have verified this data through extensive field testing: at every truck stop we visited, both the magnets and the collectible spoons marked “Indiana” failed to include the OKIM counties. However, given that our state legislature once tried to officially round off Pi, we have not excluded the possibility of an attempt to annex either Louisville or Cincinnati. Should that occur, we will revise our operational definitions and county number data.”

I was good.
I didn’t send it.
But I REALLY wanted to.