Goodbye, Uncle Fred

Fred C. Starke
1952 - 2009

To a good man and fabulous father... rest in peace.

Thanks for the happy wishes

Thank you to everyone who sent me cards, emails, phone messages, and texts to wish me a happy birthday on Friday.

It was a very stressful week. Between missing Alex's field trip - which really bummed me - and working some crazy hours that further messed up my sleep schedule, and plans for my birthday not working out quite at all as expected, and having trouble with the laptop again, and the lawnmower acting up again, and... I am near my wit's end.

So today, I'm spending time with my son. I'm sorry if I'm not talking to you, please do not feel slighted, I'll be happy to call people back later. I just really, seriously, need some down time.

Happy Mother's Day to my mother, my husband's mother, and every other mother out there. You are special!

And they're off!

Why does it seem habitually acceptable for school field trips to be scheduled at a certain time, only to find the buses do not arrive promptly to pick up the students?

The kids are going on a trip today to Orlando. They have a behind-the-scenes tour at Universal Studios today, and one at Magic Kingdom tomorrow. They'll get to have fun in the parks as well, but they are also getting information about the technologies behind the park, etc. It ties in with the program's IT emphasis. It sounds like a lot of fun, and I'm beyond disappointed that I don't get to go. It's the first field trip he's ever had that I have not attended. Boo hoo for me...

But anyway, they were supposed to be there at 4am. Yes, four o'clock in the morning. Crazy, isn't it? That gave them time to review basic rules, take attendance, load the bus, and be ready to leave at 5am. I dutifully dragged my sleepy self out of bed at 3am so that I could wake him up, get him into the shower (I suggested numerous times that a shower the night before might be more prudent, but so much for that idea), feed him breakfast, make sure he didn't forget anything direly urgent, and get him to school on time. Although we constantly fight the 5-minutes-late-syndrome, we were actually there at the school right at 4am on the dot. Yippee for us.

We were the fourth vehicle.

We found the parking lot still gated closed.

The first teacher didn't arrive until 4:30, and that irritated me. One parent didn't show up with her child until 4:45, and commented that she could have slept in a little more since the buses were late. I confess, my thoughts were less than charitable about her loss of sleep. I'm sure those there before 4am weren't too sympathetic, either.

At 4:56am, the first bus pulled into the lot. At this point, the teachers went ahead and pulled everyone in to start their speeches, etc. Once the teachers actually started doing something, I left.

Seriously, can someone explain why this seems to happen a good 80% of the time? I have a hard time convincing myself that it really matters if I'm there at the designated time when I know good and well that everyone is just going to hang out in the parking lot for an hour anyway. That time of morning, I could have used another 45 minutes of sleep.

Now, please excuse me. I'm going to see if my friend Mr. Sandman is still in the vicinity and can return to spend a little more time with me this morning.

Yep, I'm still alive

To my many friends and family members that have been woefully ignored over the past 6 weeks, I offer my utmost apologies. This job has ended up being substantially more time consuming than expected. I do manage to read my email every couple of days, but I'm so tired and mentally worn out that I haven't the energy to respond most of the time. Here's hoping that subsides a little bit soon!

Once we completed training, we were assigned to various districts, and had crews assigned to us. By "us", I mean those that completed crew leader (CL) training that our boss thought would actually make good crew leaders, and that meant not everyone in the class actually ended up with the job they thought they were going to have. To some extent, that even included me...

My boss designated me as the floating crew leader. This means that I don't actually have my own crew of people to manage. When the other crew leaders have employees that need a little hands-on assistance in the field to shore up areas that they may not have fully grasped in the original training class, they call me. If other CLs need help doing employee observations - everyone gets observed whether they need additional training or not - they call me. When enough people either quit or are terminated, the office will schedule new training classes, and I teach them. Those new employees are then assigned out to join existing crews. Should another CL need time off for some reason (got sick, taking vacation, etc) then I am the 'substitute' leader for their crew until they can return. And my phone number has been passed out to everyone's crews so that if they run into a problem while they are working and need help, they can call me if their CL is not able to answer their own phone for whatever reason.

At first, I was a little disappointed that I would not have a crew myself. My boss told me that he gave me this job because he thought I had such a good grasp of the material and thus would be a good fit for it, but I was still a little bummed. I've quickly come to realize, however, that I think I have one of the best jobs.

• I get to bounce all over the place, meeting lots of people instead of dealing with the same people over and over.
  
• I like to help people, so being a "help desk" for hundreds of people makes me feel good.
  
• I enjoy coaching people who are struggling so they can do their jobs better. Many times, they just need some reassurance that what they are doing is correct, and then they are off and running.
  
• Anyone who knows me should understand that teaching new hires is a rewarding job for me. Meeting people that have been out of work for a while and are almost in tears at the opportunity to be gainfully employed is special too, even if I didn't have anything to do with the hiring process.
• I don't have to deal with personnel issues like finding out why so-and-so didn't report any work this week, or verifying timesheets to make sure they were entered properly and sound reasonable, or terminating people for whatever reason.
  
• Not having direct reports means my trip to France this summer for my parents' 40th wedding anniversary will not cause any problems for my boss. The office just won't schedule a training class during that time, and other CLs will have to deal on their own for a bit.
  

The downsides?

• I am fairly attached to my phone from 7:30am-9pm because I never know when it might ring. If it's a call from someone in the field who is unsure of a situation, you can't really make them leave a message for a time that is more convenient for you. If they are stuck, then they need an answer or they'll have to stop working and go home. That's bad. (Think how many calls the regular CLs get since their people generally call them before they try me!)
  
• "Don't work more than 40 hours per week except for the rare occasions when overtime is approved." That was drilled into our heads during my training class. BUT... there's only been one week so far that I've been able to keep it under 40 hours. Every other week has been in the 50 range. (Some CLs have closer to 60, depending on the size of their crews and how many problems they've had to handle.) That's not only tiring, but it's killing my desire to do my own cooking and to eat only healthy foods. After I've been working for 11 straight hours, "picking up something on the way home" sounds much more appealing than the prospect of getting home and cooking. Thankfully I have a number of meals frozen from when I was prolifically cooking during my period of unemployment, but it's still a challenge. Which is not to say that the extra money is not welcomed and being pushed into savings for when this job is over and I don't know if/where I'll work!
  
• The lack of ability to plan times to take care of personal business is a little frustrating. Even on days where I think nothing is planned so I should be able to do my own thing, I never know if I'll get a call that a computer in Panama City has died and the office needs me to come pick up a new one to drive down there to exchange so that person can keep working. It's a 2-hour drive each way... Depending on the situation, I can sometimes tell the people that they'll have to wait, but sometimes I have to drop everything and go handle the problem, which means any plans are thereby rescheduled. It's disconcerting to have your whole life in a constant state of flux.
  

So, I hope this catches up everyone who asks how my job is going. It's time consuming, it's sometimes challenging to figure out how to work around all the quirks in this software, but I'm working with some great people and having a lot of fun with it. I'm getting a distinctive farmer's tan going, too, so I'm trying to find some shorter-sleeved shirts to combat that!

Hope all is well in your assorted areas of the world!

Life was boring

As he walked into his backyard, he watched his neighbor in surprise. Whatever was she doing in her backyard, fully dressed, washing her hair with the garden hose?

Actually, I don't think any of the neighbors saw me. But I'm sure they would have been perplexed if they had. Sometimes, though, drastic measures are necessary.

I mentioned that I was exhausted by Friday, so I skipped washing my hair. I wasn't going anywhere, I was just cleaning up the house, etc., so I didn't think it really necessary. In the afternoon, I started washing some laundry. I glanced out the window and saw the water that was draining out of the washer running down the hill of my driveway, rather than disappearing down the sewage pipes like it should.

Uh oh.

We've twice had problems with the enormous tree in my yard growing into the pipes and blocking the passage of the dirty water. Both times, the problem thankfully ended up on the city's part of the yard. They brought out the machinery, dug up the yard, cut out the roots, and replaced the pipes. Since then, I've tried to put root-killer stuff down the drains every so often, just to make sure they don't grow back. It's a real pain, because it takes them about two days to do everything, and I meanwhile have no drainage. Think of how often the drain is used, even just for flushing a potty... and what would you do if said drainage was not available? Those are not fun times.

Seeing the water running down the driveway - times like this, I'm very happy about the enormous incline of my yard, since the flat yard I would like would have let the water come back up to the house - gave me a slight panic attack. I don't recall the last time I put the tree stuff in the drain, and I knew all the pipes in the house were working just fine. It was definitely a problem with the outside pipes. So I went out to check them. Sure enough, the water was completely backed up. I started to realize that a couple of times I've seen the driveway wet when I didn't think it had been raining, but I hadn't consciously thought about it. My only consolation: when the problem was the trees, it was a gradual problem, and this seemed to have popped up pretty quickly.

Off to Home Depot to look for a drain cleaner. I bought some of the root killer, but that needs running water to work. What I had was definitely NOT running water. The only running part was the overflow that ran down the hill... The one I found said to dump it in and give it 7-8 hours to work in slow or standing water, preferably without using any additional water during that time. Normally, I would have poured it in at bedtime, but since we couldn't use any water anyway, what was the point of waiting? Glug glug glug.

8 hours later, we took a flashlight outside to check it. Nope, still looked just the same. Bummer. Maybe it needs a little longer. Checked it Saturday morning when we got up. Nope. 18 hours after application, and it still looked the same. This was not good news. I now had places to go, and needed to look decent. If the water was just dirty water, maybe it wouldn't matter if it overflowed, but I'd seen some... other waste... bobbing along in the pipe opening and was not keen on having that floating down my driveway! So what to do?

Thus I took my shampoo and a towel out to the backyard to wash my hair with the hose. The water was surprisingly warm from the sun, which was nice as I'd been expecting it to be freezing. I felt rather like I was camping or something, except it was in my yard. In an odd kind of way, it was sort of fun. To do once.

While I was at the meeting, I kept praying about the drainage problem. I truly did not want to call a plumber on the weekend. They are expensive enough during regular hours, I didn't want to pay the emergency call fee. I was trying to figure out if we could survive until Monday. I was also claiming God's promise to be a father to the fatherless and a husband to widows. France is a little far for my dad to just to stop over to help out, so I was effectively fatherless. Didn't that count?

When I got home, it was about 22 hours after we first poured the cleaner into the pipes. At 18 hours, the stuff had not moved even an inch. At 22, however, the whole thing was cleaned out and operating properly. No more blockage! We flushed the toilet to make sure the water was not still stopped up just out of sight. Nope, washed out like it was supposed to do. I did a load of laundry, no problem. Ran the dishwasher, no problem. All better! PRAISE THE LORD!

Life can be interesting sometimes, no? I guess I'd been on a streak of humdrum activities, so I got a little surprise to spice it up for a bit.

And yes, I've applied the root killer now, too, just in case. I'll be fine with boredom again for a little while, thankyouverymuch.