Suzy Says

Hello from Absurd World, where the Wi-Fi at work hasn’t worked for over a month (wish I could say the same), despite the original estimate from the IT folks of two days. They finally got it sort of working this week, but its tenuous grasp fails a few feet from my office (and the CEO’s). There is no estimate for if or when it will work in the wilds of our work stations. Even though it used to, when my technophobe Old Boss had that office. I imagine New Boss will be less than impressed when she moves into it, especially since she lives on her iPhone.

I spent about a billion hours printing postcards last week for an upcoming fundraising event. In keeping with our technologically challenged theme, you can’t just load up the printer with postcards, enter the number you need, and say Go. It jams almost immediately, so you have to feed it a page at a time, like a particularly querulous baby. Bite-sized pieces. It makes it hard to do anything else, especially when you need to print 400 of them. And that was after I ordered 400 blank postcards from the facilities guy and got 1,000 index cards instead.

Things are still in flux at work. The Old Boss has not finished emptying out her office of more than two decades’ worth of things and stuff to make way for the New Boss to move her two decades of things and stuff into it. The Old Boss has been coming by on the weekends to excavate, and her method seems to be shoveling paperwork from her office to mine. My desk is FEMA worthy on a Monday morning.

New Boss is still doing her old job in addition to her new job, so I am assisting with both and working on the transition, notifying the countless people who need to be notified and filling out seemingly endless forms and gracefully leaping through hoops of bureaucracy. On the bright side, I have not typed up a handwritten document all month. New Boss shares her Outlook calendar with me, so I know where she is and what she’s doing, and we even have a standing meeting on Monday morning to talk about what needs to be done that week. Hopefully she will find someone to replace her and we can get back on an even keel. It would be nice to have a year which is not so full of constant change.

I ended a long day at work by meeting my former co-worker and current friend Richard at a charming oceanside inn’s bar, right in Hooterville. It’s a cozy place for a glass of wine on a rainy winter evening:

We had a great time catching up, and I’m lucky I caught him when I did, because he is off to Mexico and France on business. He’s always going somewhere fabulous or just coming back from somewhere fabulous. Being with him is so fun and inspiring. We should do it more often.

A YEAR AGO: A family dinner.