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Tag Archives: work

Cleanliness is next to forever fresh rolls of toilet paper

I have recently been working out of THEM’s Irvine office.  Which is really in Santa Ana.  But not that far from Google’s Irvine campus. Anyway, working out of Irvine isn’t too bad.  It’s physically closer to my house, even if it generally takes longer to get there.  I am kind of lucky that I can take the back way in via surface streets, but it’s still a 30-45min drive on a good day.  It’s much worse on a bad day or if I decide to take the freeway.

I still prefer to work from the Cerritos office though.  Not just because of traffic issues, but because the actual building management is so much better than the one in Irvine.  I may be slightly biased because the building management office is right across from ours in Cerritos and that their staff has been exceedingly nice to me.  But I really do think they do a better job of managing the building.  It’s clean, it’s patrolled, their maintenance crew is on top of things (and friendly, maybe overly so), and they do nice little flourishes, like vacuum a very even V pattern into the carpet just to let you know that the carpets were freshly vacuumed.

In Irvine…not so much.  My first experience here was my very first day ever.  And you know how that went.  I was kind of distracted by first day stuff, but I did notice this nigh overwhelming stench in the bathroom.  And it’s persisted to this time.  Now, I don’t actually think that this is the fault of building management.  I think this is more an issue with the builders and/or plumbers.  I think there’s an issue with their plumbing.  Like they forgot to install a trap on one of the toilet lines or something.  Which would totally be against code.  Other things I’ve experienced in this office were the AC cooling the room down to 50degF only to turn on the heater and heat the room to 80degF.  It…was the most inefficient way of maintaining the air temp in a space ever.  Also, it didn’t work very well.  Currently, there’s a light that’s flickering over the cube adjacent to the one I’ve appropriated.  My colleague is probably going to start having seizures soon.

I know this post is all whiny and complainy, but it’s just to provide contrast to the two things I like the most about the Irvine office/building management.  1) They provide baby poop green colored soap.  Seriously.  It’s baby poop green.  One of the most entertaining (and descriptive) colors known on earth.  2) Maintenance thinks that proper cleaning of the bathroom involves new toilet paper.  Always.  ALWAYS.

I’m one of the only girls working on this floor.  There are very few people who use that bathroom.  I always use the same stall.  And I don’t really make a dent in the toilet paper in a day.  But the next day, and sometimes the next time I use the bathroom, it’s a brand new roll.  How do I know?  Because the edges are glued down.  Again.  Now I had briefly thought maybe they just glued the edges down every time they came in, but who does that?  Also, I’ve been keeping track of the depth of paper on the roll.  It’s not changing.  They’re switching out the roll every time they check up on the bathroom.  Which begs the question, what happens to the slightly used rolls that they’re taking out?  I am very amused by this situation.

Ok, I don’t know how contrast was provided.  I just wanted to complain.

Weird things happen in threes

Not too long ago, I had a weird and oddly specific dream about work.  I don’t normally dream about work unless I’m overworked.  I haven’t really felt overworked recently, but maybe I am?  Perhaps I’m so overworked that I don’t even realize it anymore?  Maybe I’ve broken through to the other side or something.  Or maybe not.  Anyway…about this dream.

At work, I’m in a situation where I need to borrow some equipment from a vendor because it would not be cost effective to buy it.  We only need it temporarily for testing.  We are on good terms with this vendor, I think, but we did just recently borrow a bunch of other stuff from them and JUST NOW returned it.  Granted, I wasn’t the one asking for it originally, but still.  I don’t want them to feel like they’re being used or anything.  Well, they aren’t since we bought 10 very expensive units of another component from them.  And I digress…again.

So, I’m in the position to borrow more stuff from them, and I sent out a carefully worded email to see if they’d be open to such an idea.  I emailed them late on a Friday and they are on the east coast, so I didn’t expect to hear from them until the next week.  Sure enough, they sent and email early Monday (for me) when I was still in bed and groggy.  I remember half-waking up and checking my email and then…my brain confabulated some weird stuff for me.  In that the person I had emailed said that I wouldn’t be able to borrow the equipment I was requesting because their “cosmetics division has it checked out until 2032.”

There are several things wrong about this.  First of all…cosmetics division?  This is an industrial automation and electrical component supplier.  They don’t have a “cosmetics division.”  And if they did, why is one of their own departments checking things out from sales?  And until 2032?  The component I was requesting is pretty much already obsolete.  The notice hasn’t been given yet, but the manufacturer is pretty much trying to price the component out from buying range.

I woke up kind of bemused at why the vendor would have told me such a thing until I got to the office and decided to “reread” the email.  I say “reread” because I have serious doubts that I ever read the email at all.  I probably just checked to see who sent me email and fell back asleep.

Ok, so that was the first weird thing.  The second is, on the way to work that same morning, I was hit with this overwhelming urge to eat junk food.  I rarely crave junk food in the morning.  If I want junk food, it’s more of a lunch kind of thing.  But no, I really wanted junk food in the morning.  So…that took me to McDonald’s.  I rarely ever have a craving for McD’s.  Mostly because I think it’s gross.  But I do have a certain fondness for sausage biscuits and McD’s was more on the way to work than Chick-fil-A (yes, they also have sausage biscuits, but if I went there I probably would have gotten a chicken biscuit).

Anyway, that’s when I saw that McD’s tells there workers how to pack the bags.  I had never noticed that before.  It was terribly amusing to me.  It’s ILLUSTRATED.  Because posting a sign on the wall or writing down instructions would be overkill?  Ok yes, I realize that the simple depiction of how to pack the bag is actually a really effective way to show workers how much food they can stick into the bag without writing a huge paragraph that they wouldn’t have time to read anyway.

And…I lied.  I didn’t have a third thing.  Oh!  How about this?  Cabbages and roses look pretty similar if you look at them on a small scale.  This actually plays in to a later post.  Yup.