The Bungalow

That vid bunny from yesterday? Totally now in official pre-planning stages. The lyrics are in a Word doc for plotting, I am downloading all the Blaine episodes from Amazon so I don't have to use clips with the network logo crap all over them. I may need to wait a few eps to see if there's more footage I can possibly work with. We'll see, I guess. By the way, can anyone recall any eps where we see Kurt & Blaine walking together? Besides the slo-mo hallway after their first meeting that is. ;-)

In general, today has been an exercise in patience. Martouf is getting like four new molars at once, so he is very, very crabby. Work exploded on us this morning. And, ugh, it's something I should have caught. I really, really should have. I did catch half of it, not that it ended up making any difference as we never reached a decision on how to fix what was going to go wrong before it did. Even if I had caught everything, it probably would have still exploded. Perhaps not to the extent it did, but it still would have been bad. We have a temporary solution in place. It's a pain in the ass, but it's the best we can do for now. The permanent fix won't be in place until May as it involves some fairly heavy IT changes. Grr....

On the upside, I did get to go to ballet today. My parents came down to watch Martouf since he has not been doing well with the babysitting there. And today would have been just awful with the teething. So, that was good. It was a good class, too. I feel sore, for sure, but the good sore. Hopefully, I'll be able to walk tomorrow. The shins are achin' a bit as we speak. Took some ibuprofen, may need to ice later. *fingers crossed*

Oh! And that haircut I was contemplating the other day? I found a pic of it not styled like that and it's pretty much your basic chin length bob. So, I don't know. I'm so waffly on these things. LOL

And I think that's it. How's y'all's Friday going?

Hope everyone (who celebrates) had a good Thanksgiving yesterday. If not, then I hope you at least had a pleasant Thursday. :-)

My first (hosted) Thanksgiving went pretty well. Had some timing issues with some of the food - the mashed potatoes were done about an hour early. Also managed to make waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much of most things. But that's OK, cos they were all yummy and will make delicious leftovers. :-)

Sadly, right now, I am actually working. Yes, I have to work today. From home, but still. Meh. Sadly, it is not going well, as nothing that was supposed to be ready from the work that was done on Wednesday is ready and neither of the IT guys are supposed to be working, so I don't know if I'll actually be able to do anything that I need to today. The one guy does have his Blackberry and I was able to let him know and he might see if he can get on the network somewhere and push stuff through. Waiting to hear back on that. So, we'll see....

Hubby is sick. Awesome. Started coming down with a cold Wednesday and it was full blown Thursday morning. :-P So, that was fun. He's feeling better today, which is good as he has to watch Martouf while I work.

What else....

I'm working on that Fight Club/SPN crossover I begged someone else to write. LOL I've got a pretty decent start on it, I think. I just can't figure out if I want to keep it gen or put some good ol' slash in there (Dean/Tyler or Dean/Angel Face). What do you guys think?

I'm going to update the music meme post with all the answers later today at some point. Y'all are pitiful really. Only 50% answered? Boo. LOL

Oh! If you're into this kind of thing, someone wrote me awesome JDM/Jensen fic from the JDM/John Winchester comment fic meme! It's awesome! You can find it here.

And I think that's it. :-)

I need to write this all down somewhere to organize myself.

( Back here cos no one else cares )

In other news....
Today went just fine. Work was good. Pretty much the same stuff I was doing before with some minor changes as everyone in the mortgage industry has gone batshit crazy. :-)

And new layout. It is now June. Season 3 of Leverage premieres in 19 days. So, we are Leverage-ified. :-)

So, I got some interesting work gossip on my way out the door today. And, let me just say, if it proves true, I am so out the door.

The company I'm with now, I was first with several years ago. There was a slight debacle a couple years back where they were bought out by another company and a lot of people were let go (me included). While I was there the first time, there was this one girl who worked in the same department as me. But we had completely different jobs and she somehow like to think that she was "in charge" of me and had seniority even though she was hired a week before me and I did not do the same thing she did. I only helped them with what they did when they got overwhelmed. She was so freaking annoying, always calling in sick. She looked like she never showered. Her hair was always greasy looking. Dressed horribly, completely unprofessionally. Let me put it this way - when I was let go, everyone was shocked and horrified. When she was let go...not so much.

So, anyway, since then, supposedly she got a really great job at Primerica!! Which, well, one she's so stupid, I would never trust her with anything having to do with money and two, Primerica is a horrible company. But, anyway. Apparently, she's come by and trying to get a job with the accounting department. If she does come back, I am so gone. Seriously. One thing about this company, that whole freaking family works there. It's completely insane. Can you say "Nepotism"? Even the one daughter, who's only 22 or so with two kids by different guys (maybe?), the baby daddy works there. It's completely insane.

God help us all if she gets hired.

A big part of my job involves submitting invoices from all our offices into the various online 3rd party billing systems so we can get paid by our clients. Since we literally have thousands of invoices every day, we do this at night electronically and upload our invoices into the systems so no one has to manually enter all these invoices.

One of the systems, utilizes what they call batches. Each night (well, morning really with this system), we upload our invoices and they wait in a batch queue for us to review for any errors. These errors range from missing information to incorrect information, and the most popular, needing documentation to show the client that, yes, it did cost is $XX to do blah.

It is my job to go through this system and correct what I can to get the invoices into the system. This system was recently upgraded and we can now submit partial batches. Meaning, if some invoices are fine and dandy and others we need more information on, we can check a little box on those that aren't fine and dandy and those will not be submitted but stay waiting in that little queue in their batch.

With me so far? If you are, I'm impressed. :-D

Now, these batches also have various statuses attached to them so we can identify which ones still have unsubmitted invoices and which ones have been completely submitted. It is important to know that I cannot change the status of a batch. The help desk at that company has to do it. It's not difficult to do, but it's kind of a pain and is sometimes unnecessary work. Like the example I'm about to get to. (Damn, this is a really long intro into a random work rant).

So, yesterday, I had one invoice that needed documentation. When this happens, I e-mail the office with what I need, they usually send it later that day or the next day, I attach it and submit their invoice. Fine and dandy, right? So, with this one, I submitted the rest of the batch and had this one invoice waiting. I e-mail the office requesting the information and do some other work while I'm waiting. A few hours later, the office replies back that they manually submitted the invoice themselves.....

WHY?!?! Did I ask you to do that? No! Doing what you did is going to turn out to waste a lot of people's time, including you because you just did a lot of unnecessary work! I now have to get on the phone and call the company and have them change the status of the batch. Like I said, it's not a big deal, but it's wasting time that doesn't need to be wasted. Your invoice was in the system. I just had to attach the documentation you did yourself! You didn't have to go through and hand enter all 10 line items by yourself. YOU ARE NOT SAVING ME TIME! Just do what I ask!! Why is that so hard? But, my manager did OK a kind e-mail back to the office politely asking them to stop doing that! It's a pain in my ass!!

OK. Thanks. Back to lunch now. Later!

OK. This week officially fucking sucks and it's only Wednesday. zs;lkdfjjpaw984eutr'lakdsxn vlzisurfh

I HATE WORK this week. It's so fucking frustrating and is annoying me to no end. I work with invoices and seeing about getting them input into various third party billing systems. We have programs that are supposed to upload our invoices automatically. However, there are errors and invoices don't always make it in for various reasons. We are supposed to have these reports that catch all the errors that I sort through and e-mail to the office for them to manually enter. So the accounting department has now begun a quarterly reconciliation of all invoices unpaid through the end of November. I'm going through these reports (and there are many, one for every client, OMFG) and finding that there are MANY MANY invoices that never appeared on any sort of error report. WTF?!?! What the hell is happening with these invoices? Where are they going? And the IT guy (who happens to be on vacation this week and I want to kick in the head on an almost daily basis) cannot give a straight answer and it is driving me INSANE!!!! And the thing is, the one accounting guy is like pointing the finger at us saying we're not doing our job blah blah blah. Excuse me? WOuld you like to come sit at my desk and watch me sort through a report of a thousand invoices ONE AT A TIME and tell me you can do it any better? God! I just want to scream or something.

And to top it off, I'm still trying to work through this week's error report which seems to have suddenly exploded overnight and has like 3000 invoices (NOT exaggerating) on it. I'm barely a quarter of the way through. I just don't know what to do at this point. I feel like nothing is getting done. And everyone is blaming me. Excuse me. I took over a job that SIX PEOPLE were doing. That's right. SIX. And now just me. I'm gonna miss a few things here and there. Especially when our reporting sucks ass. But the kicker is, overall, there's not that much outstanding. Considering the THOUSANDS of invoices that did make it in, there's like, I think 30 at the most missing for any one client. Yeah, that's not bad. SO shut the fuck up about the $20,000 that's missing and let me do my job. OK? OK. Thanks. Asshat. (<-- that, BTW, is my new favorite swear word. Asshat. It's just so versatile!)

Does anyone wanna make me something to make me feel better? I would so love a Jack/Daniel header OTP thing. Maybe with those cool promo shots with the blue background from the TV Guide shoot. :-) That would be really nice.

OK. I'll stop grovelling now and go back to work. That's right. After working for 8 hours today, I still had work to bring home. Yippee. Sucks to be me.

They must have implemented some new security measures at work last night. Cos like EVERY website is blocked now. All the sites I visit on my lunch break and stuff. Gone. No more. Totally sucks ass. WTF?

Yesterday, I decided to start making my first attempt at a music video. It's a Queer as Folk Brian ansgt kinda thing set to "Sympathy" by The Goo Goo Dolls. The song is right around 3 minutes. After about 6 hours of work, I'm about 2/3 of the way through. Dang, man! I suppose it's taking me so long cos I didn't have it completely set out what I wanted so I had to look through all the clips I had for a few parts. Plus, some of the clips, the program didn't like so it crashed on me a couple times. The first time, I hadn't saved it yet. Luckily, I was just at the very beginning. But still, that kinda sucked. I probably won't be able to get back to it until Wednesday since I have Nutcracker and ballet tonight and tomorrow. I might be able to squeeze in a little before I have to go tonight, but we'll see.

Oh! Get this - I knew something a computer programmer didn't know!! I started working with this girl on the error reports to let her know what they're like now, what I would like to see, etc. I was showing her this one report that I had exported to Excel. The one billing program that some of our clients used just switched over the being an internet based program. But they are slowly moving clients over a chunk at a time instead of in one large chunk. So, the one thing this report doesn't tell me, that I would like it to, is which version the particular invoice would be in. Are you following me? So, each system actually has its own report, but I combine them so I'm just working one report and I then lose what system I got the report out of. Which I didn't realize the last time and had to waste a large part of my day going back to look each of these up again. Today, when I ran the report with her, I inserted a column where I could input the billing program version. I put it in the top line and then did Ctrl+D (fill down) to fill in the rest of the sheet. She didn't know about! I was really surprised and kind of proud of myself. Hehe. :-)

OK. That's my ramble. Later!!