(no subject)

My counterpart from the company we merged with is off on PTO today, so I'm once again taking all incoming calls through eleven o' clock this morning. I will probably be fairly busy with this, especiallly trying to figure out what to do with all the tickets from $othercompany. I really just keep hoping to close enough tickets to look good enough to not worry about my job. I'd really like to work somewhere that I care enough about to enjoy the work and feel accomplished and proud of what I'm doing, but this place isn't it.

I finished Ursula Le Guin's short story collection The Birthday of the World on the way in to work this morning; another excellent recommendation from cranberrynomiko. I loved the exploration of alternate forms and ideas of marriage, gender roles, and gender itself. The society wherein marriages are composed of four people, and the society of strict separation and rigid rules for conduct of each sex that's just beginning to see those roles start to unravel were interesting. Even more engrossing was the idea of a race of genderless sentients who take temporary gender as part of the process of procreation, and can go through the process many times as either male or female.

But the story that most moved me was the final one, set during the middle generations of a long-term slower-than-light colony ship. Though it touches on social constructs surrounding pairing and reproduction, it's primarily about the evolution of thought and belief in a society that no longer has any first-hand references to understand what it is to stand under a sky and feel the earth beneath your feet. Some even doubt that such a place could exist, or can't comprehend why anyone would want to live somewhere other than the comfort of the ship that provides for every need. The ending left me with such feelings of hope and sorrow and loss that I'm not quite sure what to do with them apart from go back from time to time and turn them over in my mind as I digest the story. It makes me think that something like that could never work in real life, at least, not the way we planet-bound majority who are left behind hope and wish for it to, without a way to establish latency free communication from Earth to ship. Out of sight is easily out of mind.

I love the construction of the societies in these stories. More and more, as I travel, as I see new sights, as I meet new people, I wish for the opportunity to see life from more viewpoints. To see, as an American-born, white, male, technical worker, how arbitrary all the societal assumptions that I have really are. Though I can't live everywhere and be everyone here on Earth, I love the chance to be so many other people via the magic of story telling.

Meh. I'm so buried at work today....

(no subject)

For months now, when I assign tickets to other people, they sometimes get inexplicably assigned back to me, with my name in the history of the ticket as the one who made the assignment. And most times if I try to assign those same tickets again, it does the same thing. That on top of the entirely asinine way ticket assignment is done is the addition of insult to injury.

The people who run the ticket tracking system (from it's physical location in India) don't know why this happens, and I'm not holding my breath for them to figure it out. I'm actively working at not being very frustrated with it right now.

Coworker G has offered to take me out for lunch. I'm not sure why he does that so often; he seems to just like having someone with him enough to be willing to buy people (or at least me?) food. I won't complain, certainly. I feel a little guilty about it, but I made a small effort to decline a couple times and he seems to be more than happy to pay my way. It'll be nice to get out of here for a little while. Maybe it's good karma?

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