(no subject)

One of my co-workers commented again about the food I was eating today. "It's the same stuff you had yesterday, isn't it?" I pointed out that yesterday was shells with alfredo and blue-cheese sauce, whereas today I was having tortellini with regular alfredo.

After gushing about Andrea's food (which is entirely worth gushing over, believe me) and the fact that she cooks for me, I offered recipes. 'No,' she said, 'I have recipes. I just don't cook. What I need is a wife.' That made me giggle.

I rather like that co-worker. She seems pretty cool. She takes her cat to work with her in her car every day of the year, with an iced waterbed in the summer and a heating pad in the winter. She is into geology as a hobby and talked to me with great interest about southwest Wisconsin's driftless area when the subject happened to come up. She is in a road-racing club and talks about her time trials in her Miyata. There are just all unusual and pretty neat things for a mild-mannered, more than a little geeky, woman in (I think) her late thirties or early forties to be interested in.

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Staffing at work promises to be interesting in the future. We have so many new hires coming in that we had to order nearly sixty thousand dollars worth of equipment more than we had budgeted for. Therefore, since we have a lot more system builds to do than we had expected, we are going to reduce our staff. Yeah, it doesn't make any more sense to me either. But we apparently don't have the budget to keep our two-day a week person at all, and serinthia has been moved from full-time to two days a week.

I'm pretty sure that means that we won't have enough people to get everything done that we need to get done. While that stresses me out a bit since I know that we're going to be going crazy trying to get all these systems built on top of everything else we're going to be doing, but at the same time I'm a little bit less stressed about the eventual outcome. Once the end of quarter comes and I haven't finished everything I was supposed to finish because I don't have enough hours in the day, I can say "I told you so."

I don't want it to sound like I'm complaining about my manager. She's in complete agreement. They just won't give her the funding we need. This is not a very proactive company in that regard. Every department, especially non revenue generating ones like the help desk, do what they can with what they have until things break down. Then the might get more resources. *shrugs* So it goes. I just hope my promotion to pseudo-unofficial second level support becomes official sometime soon. I could use the extra money. And I know that when we add another forty people or so to our other Illinois office, we're going to need another full-time person there at least, and possibly another in our Vermont office where we have about a hundred people and no dedicated support personnel. Our VP of IT is pushing for more people there. I'm hoping that eventually turns into justification for me to move to official second-level status and for hiring another person full-time in LVL with benefits. Only time will tell I suppose.

I have more to write yet, as always, but that will have to wait 'till I can get to it. 'Till then!