Janet’s Webpage

Once in a while you’ll hear these kind of statistics: blah-percent of people enjoy/dislike their work. Regardless of the percentage, I’m always amazed. My thoughts are either “Wow! So many people love their jobs?” or “How can that many people hate what they do?”
Since the US censor has not ask me that question yet, I assume that these surveys are probably informal ones with a small group of people. That would explain how widely the ‘blah’ number varies.
For me, the feeling changes from day to day but it’s starting to become more unanimous lately. Picture this: You’re in a room with 4 persecuters, 3 cringers, and 1 moron; all of them hate their jobs. How much would you enjoy working with this bunch?
Today during turnover, I handed Pete my comments on an ICP he had co-signed. He took it and, in one movement, tossed it into the garbage. I knew he would do something like that. He had already found a new reviewer and got everything signed, therefore my additional comments are more of a nuisance than anything else. He then went through and discredited every one of my comments. I knew I could win this fight if I wanted to, since he has several procedure violations in his ICP. But it was late and I was tired, so I plainly told him that if the roles were reversed he would never had let me off the hook so easily.

  

For weeks I have been looking at light weight tents, durable boots, and recipes for campfire cooking.
This camping fever started when I was using Pauli’s office. Pauli… tall, slim, balding, and the only guy at the plant who can run a mile without feeling overwhelmed. He was on night shift during the outage and I took the liberty of using his private office when I got kicked out of the WIN team (real estate is always limited for maintenance departments). Paul has maps of routes taped all over his office walls, one of which is the long map of the Appalachian Trail.
The Appalachian Trail map on Paul’s office wall is about 3 feet tall, detailing the 2,000+ miles and 14 states trail as well as Paul’s dream of one day through-hiking the whole thing. While I was in Paul’s office, I think I stared at the map more often than I did work.
I am mesmerized by Bill Bryson’s narrative of his adventures on the Appalachian Trail, and I’ve been wanting to try out the trail myself ever since reading his book. This is typical Janet, by the way. It’s like the time I went to Paris after reading Sadaris’ essays. This is also very unrealistic since I welt under sun, rain, high wind, high temperature, low temperature, high humidity, or any combination of natural environment.
Still, I feel no shame in broadcasting my dream to anyone who would listen. This just goes to show how nice people are since no one has laughed out loud in my face yet. Neal, one of the WIN team guys, even gave me a couple of Michigan state park maps for me to try out. One is Warren Dunes and the other is Grand Mere.
Grand Mere really is the biggest secret of the southwest Michiganders. It’s free, it’s dog friendly, and if you spend a few minutes to walk pass the dunes, you are rewarded with a mile of beach front all to yourself.

Took some pictures of the park, but it was a cloudy day and the park really is prettier than the photos.

  

I was suppose to have today off but Jay told me yesterday to cover for Kim, who called saying that he will be sick on Sunday.
The company gives its workers 4 months of paid sick leave per year, something that is widely abused by the employees. We’re suppose to have a doctor’s note if we are taking more than one sick day, but supervisors rarely ask for the note when you come back to work.
While I was in the WIN team, the maintenance people were talking about this guy who had never taken a sick day for years. Then he found out that his performance review was the exact same as his co-worker, who religiously takes 3 sick days per year for the past several years. The maintenance guy with the good track record promptly called in sick the next day.
Everyone has a sick day story prepared for emergencies. Usually it has to do with stomach ailment; the sickness that can strike any time in any season under any circumstances. Even if you were healthy and chipper the day before, you could have violent diarrhea the next day. It’s perfectly reasonable.
I used to be well practiced at giving sick day excuses. It’s a bad habit from elementary school, when I forget my homework and my parents refuse to drop it off at school for me since they both work. This carried on till high school, where the school nurse is ever accommodating for excusing me from an afternoon class. In the beginning, I always felt I had to do an act. Cringe my face and speak in a dying voice. This all stopped one day when I was in the nurses office and this other girl walked in, as bubbly as ever, and received a sick note as well. I realized that I had never fooled anybody.
The faking sickness died off during college, when you need nobody’s permission to skip a class. During the working years, the ethical and moral implication deepened for this kind of risky practice.
I can’t say that I’ve never thought about calling Jay and telling him that I can’t work the next day under good health. These thoughts are extremely common on Sunday nights when I’m stranded at the Detroit or Chicago airport, having missed my connecting flight to South Bend. However, I happen to live with the patron saint and protector of corporate policies. Every time I call to complain about my flights, SO always guilt me into spending $200 to rent a car and drive back. In the end, I would walk into the office the next morning with only about 3 hours of sleep.

  

  

To quote someone near and dear: “I haven’t had a day off for xxx.” (Fill in xxx with random number of days, months, or years.)
Yeah, it sure feels like it.
SO and I worked in the garden today. We burned most of the leaves, branches, dead trees, left over annuals and cleared the strawberry patch. I washed my car today
Now I don’t want to go to bed… I wish I can take tomorrow off too.

  

So so so so so so tired…
I’m starting a weird sleep pattern; one day I’ll go to bed at 7PM, the next day I’ll go to bed around 1AM. Therefore I’m always tired every other day… But, tomorrow is my day off, so that should be good. I’m going to Laurie’s to finish my stain glass piece.
I had a dream about Pete the other day (WIN team supervisor). It’s so weird, once in a while I dream of totally random people. In my dream I was at a dinner party, and I was telling everyone how tall Pete was… like, really really really tall! Then I woke up and thought: wait a second, Pete’s not THAT tall…

  

One of the small pleasures in life is blissful sleep. The kind that starts out with the thought “oh, I’ll just lie down on the bed for a minute” and falling into a deep zombie like state within 30 seconds. Just before falling asleep, in half consciousness, you realize that you’re falling asleep and that it is good. This kind of joy comes with long hard outages.
Today, we solved the TSI problem (the one which I created by bogging down the system with “400 pids”, and no I don’t know UNIX, otherwise I wouldn’t have broken the TSI to begin with).
I have a building mass of frustration and I don’t know where it comes from or how to get rid of it. For example, there was a long line around quitting time for the rad monitors and I waited for over 10 minutes just to have someone cut in front of me right before I leave. I felt like screaming. Screaming at him to get back in line and ask him if he cuts in front of me because I was the only girl standing in line. It’s ridiculous because I probably had over a dozen people opening doors for me today, yet I get angry because one guy wanted to go home more badly than I did.
Anyway, just random thoughts for today.

  

Long hours nightmare.
I actually came in for the 7X 7Y job on purpose, even though I was scheduled to have yesterday off. I was at work for almost 15 hours, most of them spent fixing the damn software.
Now that I’m actually thinking clearly, I want to try it out again on the simulator. Once everything is up and running, of course.

  

The great joy and pain of this hobby is when you acquire a large collection all at once. The scanning, labeling, sorting, and storing take so much time. Then you look at it and it’s all worth while (but only after everything is done).

  

It really takes a crisis to realize how many friends you truly have.
On the first day of outage, I remember thinking to myself: This is going to be a long and painful one…
I just didn’t have the energy to go through another outage. Then I remembered that, assuming that I retire at the age of 55, I will probably have to go through another 39 refueling outages in my career.
As the days go by, I found that this really isn’t as bad as I thought. So many people stop and asked how I was doing, then stood and listened as I vented out frustration. Nobody ever told me that they were too busy, even though I can see the paper pilled up on their desks or that they are on their way to a meeting/walkdown/surveillance.
Thank you.