Cimorene

Background to this post is an incident that occurred in my second week on the job. I work as the secretary and sole employee to the local chapter of a volunteer organization, and the first two weeks I was shadowing the outgoing secretary to learn the job, so the most important point here is that it was his expertise that we were depending on and he okayed all the stuff we, or I, did. I made this locked post called My First Time Enduring a Long Complaining Lecture from Supervisors for Something Not My Fault about it, but in short, I emailed (with my predecessor's advice) a colleague to ask him to clarify a tip he'd given me in person at a meeting and the next day at a SURPRISE! meeting with the volunteer president and volunteer treasurer I got lectured at elevated volume for 10-15 min for "involving outsiders in our business" (I had been encouraged repeatedly to, besides relying on my predecessor, ask any of my colleagues at the district office anything at any time because they're here to help - by the volunteers who are my bosses as well as by the colleagues themselves). This was because the treasurer had come to the office outside my work hours and read the email - not an invasion of privacy; it's the chapter's official email, but it's my job, so for the most part it is my email - and opened my colleague's response which was, to paraphrase, 'Oh, in that case no worries, sounds like X is all ready for Event'. In spite of this encouraging response, the subject line & my message underneath the response flung her into a panic because the equipment WAS already all ready, and she knew that, because it was her job to get it ready and she had already done so. (Like, in terms of management and employer skills, this is terrible on both her part and the volunteer president's: this is absolutely not how to manage employees, communicate with people, etc. But at least the psychological explanation for the bad behavior kinda made sense.)

People I talked to agreed that I had sensitive micromanagers on my hands, and specfically a territorial response from a touchy self-important volunteer. But I still kept remembering the way she bellowed at one point (even after having been told exactly what happened) that 'If there's a question about Events, you ask the person in charge of events, which is ME, not any OUTSIDERS, not anybody at the DISTRICT OFFICE, and ABSOLUTELY not Bob!' (Not his actual name.) That 'absolutely' seemed... odd, so I was left with a niggling suspicion that she had something against Bob.

Well, last week she and I ordered some Christmas cards through the district office, and these fall in Bob's purview, so the online order form is one he's made and he's then the one processing the orders. We especially needed blank Christmas cards, which are a special order item from the printers: they have an array of cards that can be ordered with custom text, and these are also available blank; the order form has a little notice that these cards take longer to ship because of the custom printing, while the other cards are in stock. We ordered a small quantity of postcards as well, and they arrived hand-delivered a couple of days later because they were in stock, so I texted the treasurer 'The postcards are here, but the other ones aren't here yet, I guess because they have to be printed.' This was a careless mistake on my part - I should've realized they aren't completely POD, just the inside bits. Anyway, she called me instantly, all upset, to tell me that they absolutely don't have to be printed because we want them blank.

'Oh, you're right,' I said, 'I knew that. Yeah, the blank ones won't need to be printed. I guess the longer delivery time is just because they come from the card company instead of being in stock.'

'But they can't be printed,' she insisted, 'they wouldn't be printed because we don't want anything in them... they can't be printed... it's very important that they have NO TEXT. They have to be blank!' All this dialogue is paraphrased, but she did explain that they have to be blank and that they don't have to be printed about five times in a row, while I agreed and said that they will not be printed and that she is right, that we ordered them blank and not printed, that that means they will arrive blank and not printed, that it is indeed important to us that they be blank, that the confirmation email already definitely confirmed that they will be blank and not printed, etc.

"But this 'printed'," she said finally, "Where is this coming from? DID BOB SAY IT?"

Dun dun dun

I said no and that I hadn't talked to anybody. 'That was just my mistake,' I said. 'I just misspoke. I DID know that they are going to be blank, I just said "printed" when I was thinking about the slower shipping time.'

'But they can't be printed,' she persevered as if I had said nothing, 'I need you to contact Bob and make sure he knows. It's important that they are blank. He needs to know that they have to be blank.'

I had to agree three times in a row in order to get her to hang up. (I then had to email Bob the next day, because she's my boss, and tied myself in knots trying to make the email sound less stupid than 'I know the order confirmation email says we ordered blank cards, but it's very important that you understand that the blank cards should be blank').

My sister points out that part of this might be because she's old (she's in her 70s, but you wouldn't know it to look at her. She's more energetic and socially and physically active than I am, and she appears to be in her 50s), and she's right, this is something our parents (in their 60s) and my sister's boss (also in her 60s) are also prone to, seizing on one detail like a dog with a bone and becoming so obsessed with it that they're apparently impervious to explanation and reassurance.

However, I'm now pretty convinced that she hates Bob for some reason, and I'm dying to know why.

Her daughter is maybe 10 years older than me and works at the district office with Bob - a small collegial office with only 6 employees - so it's possible the reason comes from there somehow, although I haven't seen any signs of friction at their meetings. Her daughter is a loud, cheerful, friendly, laughter-prone, helpful, sporty type who gives the impression she might be about to run a mile at any moment and can capably arrange anything. Bob, on the other hand, is a quiet and soft-spoken but friendly and helpful type (a bit Dilberty, only permanently smiling, with a bass voice and a slow, careful way of speaking) and the sole native Finnish speaker on the staff. His Swedish is more fluent than mine, but he has an audible accent and makes the occasional small error, just like me.

Her daughter is so easy to talk to that my first impulse was to ask her, but obviously I can't risk doing that. Tragically, I can't think of any way I could find out more that wouldn't risk causing kerfluffle. I briefly fantasized about writing Ask a Manager, but I know she would tell me I can't ask my coworkers if my boss who is the mother of one of them hates Bob. I can't think of a way to ask HER if she hates Bob, but that is probably the only way I might possibly learn more in the future, if the subject comes up naturally and she is moved to expound.

A little while ago, my desktop computer at work was still running Windows 10, in Finnish, but the greeting screen before you sign in was a new photo from Bing every day and in the top left it said "Like what you see?" and you could click to help its algorithm tune to your preferences over time.

I installed all the available updates, upgraded to Windows 11, and installed all the available updates again. Then I changed the system language to Swedish.

When the computer restarted it said in the top right corner "Som bilden du ser?" (This is 'Like what you see?' word for word, using - incorrectly - the word that means like/as.) I took a photo of it to show Wax and make fun of.

Two days later when I got to work and signed in, it had corrected itself and said "Gillar du bilden du ser?" instead, which was what it meant to say all along.

A couple of possible explanations for this series of events occur to me:

• The Swedish regionalization of the program was new, and they pushed an update using a machine translation because they hadn't had time for a human translator yet. Then they fixed it when their translator came back from vacation.



• It's been incorrect for... however long, but some Swedish speakers who are more used to Windows than I am actually managed to find the feedback button and report the incorrect translation as a bug. I did glance around for it, but I didn't go as far as googling.



• One of our phones, even though they are both Android, was background eavesdropping when we walked the dog and I told Wax about the problem and the AI managed to parse it out and report it to Microsoft and they fixed it. Okay, so this is maybe less likely, but we are living in the future...

I don't drink coffee, but I still broke the carafe from the coffeemaker at work yesterday because I bumped it off the counter with my elbow, and I reached for the broken one out of the trash to examine it side by side with the new one this afternoon and cut my knuckle on the glass.

It was ten minutes to closing when I noticed my knuckle bleeding freely but painlessly and getting on the other fingers of my right hand. And there I was, right in the middle of the Red Cross office, and realized I didn't know where a first aid kit was! (I've been working here over a month, which is surely the longest I've ever gone uninjured at a place of work! However, I guess office work is a lot safer than kitchens and daycares and opening corrugated cardboard boxes and caring for plants.)

I looked around. I checked the bathroom shelves, the desk drawers, the kitchen and even the office shelves. We have a whole room called the "First Aid Room" that's packed full of materials for first aid and CPR courses, first aid stations, and the volunteer search and rescue brigade. I went in there and looked around in dismay, but there weren't any immediately obvious ordinary first aid kits. There are big double-fanny pack kits - stuffed to the gills - but the one I gingerly peeked in was also full of cloth bandages and power bars and single-use disinfectant wipes. My hand was bleeding enthusiastically and starting to drip and I still had to finish making an online order before I went home, so I locked up the first aid room and Scotch taped a piece of paper towel around my knuckle.

We've got to have a first aid kit, right? It's probably somewhere obvious and I've forgotten it and it's become invisible to my brain because I look at it all the time, or something.

I applied for a kind of weird (because not any of the tasks I've done before) job Thursday, because the social worker in charge of jobs in our town encouraged me to (she's been trying to get hold of the person who would have to okay the work practice I actually wanted to do for a couple of weeks with no luck). I used to think I might want to do office work, I suppose, but it's still odd. (The local Red Cross office, so it's kind of a bit of everything - including selling some things in their shop and keeping up the public... area? Finnish Red Cross is a good organization though - no history of corruption like some of the international ones -, and the local chapters, as with any charity org, are the most important to support.) However, it's better than waiting indefinitely for the coordinator of classroom assistants for the local schools that speak Swedish to contact the social worker back.

And I really would like to have a paycheck again. At the best of times, we don't necessarily exceed Wax's paycheck in monthly expenses, but fixing a car or anything like that, or taking cats to the vet, will push the budget over the edge. For a few months after my previous work practice ended I still wasn't out of leftover money, but we've been spending more than we earned the last couple of months, and that's really not fun.

Stuff that we're not going to do until I have a paycheck again now includes but is not limited to:

• buying the rest of the murderbot books


• buying Greta Morgan (previously of The Hush Sound)'s new music


• buying a new keyboard - this keyboard is starting to waver a bit at times, and I really want a mechanical keyboard


• buying a new mouse, because mine died suddenly and I'm now using the emergency backup mouse, which is miniature and corded and plugged in with a usb extension cable, and bunnies have gnawed the scroll wheel, and double-clicking is slow and weird


• buying a new power source for my computer because the fan in the current one buzzes like it's full of angry bees for a good minute and a half every time you start it up and thereafter intermittently


• buying new noise-canceling headphones for Wax


• writing to TWSBI customer service to order a replacement wrench for my Diamond 580, which has been unusable since I broke the previous one late last year


• taking Snookums to the vet to have his teeth cleaned, which has now been put off for financial reasons twice


• traveling to Helsinki again to visit an international friend who has recently moved there


• buying the lumber to make toekicks under the kitchen cabinets and replace some missing trim from various doors and windows and baseboards around the house

Went to Turku for my meeting with my career counselor yesterday. Because of the pandemic, I hadn't been there in a couple of years. The downtown area is still impassible because they've been constructing the underground parking garage that nobody wanted or needed under the market square (which was also the bus hub) for like three years. Bribery still rules the day in Turku city planning, and the businesses that owned the land under the market square wanted the city to buy the land from them and build an underground parking garage literally across the street from an extant underground parking garage that is NEVER full, so it happened even after years of protests from basically everyone and even after the initial excavations found archeological remains. Walking through downtown is a huge hassle now, and the market square is a huge eyesore. 🙃

My career counselor and I talked over the surprise outcome of our last meeting with the manager of the store I'd been at from May through February - after such a long work practice, and with no inkling of anything wrong, we both thought I would probably be hired there, at least temporarily, at least in some respect, and we were both caught flat-footed by the refusal (not even with 50% salary repayment from the government). Because while in retrospect I'm feeling positive about both the break and the possibility of finding something better, the fact that the counselor and I were both completely surprised by the development seemed... bad? I wanted to understand the reasoning and what the manager was actually saying, for one, but I left last week's meeting mostly confused. ( Read more... )

On an abrupt tangent, I had the weirdest minestrone ever at Turku's ancient and iconic downtown bar-brewery-restaurant, Koulu (social security, whenever they require you to do more than 3 hours of meetings or whatever in one place, also pays for your lunch, and they do this by giving you a voucher for a nearby restaurant; Koulu is the one closest to my career counselor's office). I like minestrone. I even like Olive Garden minestrone. I even like minestrone thrown together from canned and dried pantry ingredients! I make it often, okay. But this minestrone had only one type of beans, the pasta in it was literal spaghetti, the soup base was obviously canned tomato puree - no other texture - and aside from a VERY basic Italian flavor profile, it tasted overwhelmingly of pepper. It wasn't Indian-food hot, but it was about as hot as a jar of mild salsa from the store. But the heat was JUST pepper. The vegetables were skinny slices of carrot and bell pepper. I picked all of those and the beans out and then gave up and ate French fries. I actually like mild salsa! Just like...not as a soup! Also, this is FINLAND! Who pours a whole jar of black pepper into their soup pot? Ugh. Now I am annoyed that I didn't get minestrone.

Last day tomorrow. I'm not feeling sad about it at all even though I liked the place, just a bit regretful. I guess that's the difference between a place that's just pleasant and comfortable like this, and a place that's warmly friendly like the Red Cross store was. I didn't form any connections to miss here, although I had good working relationships with almost everyone. And then there's Exhaustion. Seasonal Depression. Anxiety. You know... Mental Health. I still haven't stopped being tired most of the time yet from the winter/darkness - in fact I'm just starting to get a little bit more energy (but still making up the negatives, not reaching equilibrium yet)! So even though it means I have to do more work of applying soon, and also then venturing to and accustoming myself to new places, which are both awful for me... right now I'm just relieved that I definitely get some time off.

How much better I'm feeling: making food and doing the dishes sort of, not running out of laundry, spot-sweeping every few days. Today the sunbeam hit the cabinet fronts and the stove for the first time this year and I was moved to scrub them a little bit, even.

And then I took the time to oil my cuticles carefully for the first time since before Christmas! I have to moisturize constantly always of course, even depressed, but I've just been doing it as needed to keep from getting more hangnails, or to trim my fingernails. This time I actually used the cuticle pusher as intended, even though it is fiddly and time consuming. I have a whole nailpolish collection! And I haven't painted my nails since before Christmas! So today I tried one of the new shades I bought back then and hadn't tried yet - ILNP Sundance, which I finally ordered from Hypnotic Polish in the Netherlands after searching for YEARS for a duplicate of a shimmer lime/kiwi L'Oreal polish I bought at the grocery store as a teenager. And I think it's still a little too yellow. But this type of green has been un-trendy in nailpolish for quite some time. The big polish brands like Essie and OPI haven't put out a similar shade in years - there's a gap between chartreuse and kelly/grass green in everybody's lineups. I love holographic glitter polishes. So mesmerising to watch the sparkles move.

Speaking of that color, the day before yesterday I spent mostly making this icon. The idea of pixel art of my favorite antique radio, the adorable Australian bakelite AWA Radiolette "Fret & Foot" from 1937, hit me quite suddenly last week and I couldn't avoid the impulse. It's such a perfectly delightful object, even much cuter than standard art deco bakelite radios! I've only found photos online of two individual examples of it, probably because bakelite survival isn't the best and light colors are more prone to discoloration, while the fretwork is probably quite fragile. So when I say I want one, I don't really want one for close to 10 thousand AUD, but I do think there are so many box-shaped things in the world that COULD look more like this and don't and it's very disappointing that they don't. Like my computer case. Bakelite radios are a MUCH better model for a desktop computer case than the black and gray shoeboxes (with and without plexiglass/colored lights for ~gaming~) currently in use.

My work practice period is ending soon and I DO intend to apply to work at the store for real after that, but a week in which I have worked at the store is not a week where I have enough energy left over to tackle an application. I guess I should express this directly to my career counselor.

I'm also hanging on week by week right now, because even though I DO feel better than a coupla weeks ago (spoons-wise, energy-wise, general level of cheer-wise, ability to keep up with the dishes although the kitchen still needs desperately to be washed and not just tidied...), I'm still too tired to squeeze extra cleaning in on a work day and there's a huge cleaning debt in the house right now, and the dust bunnies and untidiness are oppressing me. Working three days in a row at this point in the year creates like a sleep-and-spoons debt where I need to sleep 18 hours and then lie motionless for 18 hours thinking about nothing in order to recover before I can handle doing anything. I am looking forward to the work practice ending when I will have at least a few weeks off to recover and do some spring cleaning.

I think the last day is somewhere in early March, but I've got a meeting with the manager and my career counselor at the store next week.

We are still walking miserably to the store and back and can't run any errands because of the car having died (NEARLY A MONTH AGO). Wax says she doesn't WANT to have it fixed yet, because if the car is fixed we'll have to walk to the garage to pick it up and she doesn't want to walk to the garage right now in the Icy Times. There are four-foot piles of snow on the corners and the main downtown paths are graveled, but there's a good six inches of ice in the trampled desire paths and they haven't all been graveled, and as the ice starts to melt on the days above freezing, the gravel sinks into it. Maybe I could convince her that we can manage it by taking the bus most of the way.

Since last summer I have been working (well, work-practicing) 3 days a week and 6 hours a day. At the end of the year meeting with my career counselor and the manager of the store, I broached the subject of getting some cash register training (I won't say I really WANT to do it, but I do want to be trained so I can do it in a pinch), but the manager thought it wasn't really worth putting me through register training (to the company) if I couldn't do at least four, in principle, because of the amount of time the other employees have to spend on the training. We had talked before about how I was handling that amount of work, and whether I wanted to increase it to 4 days a week. I didn't really WANT to work more, but I thought I was getting along fine with 3 at the end of the year; so I said I didn't see why I couldn't try out 4 days a week and we agreed I would do that this year, when I came back after New Year's.

At least, I thought we did. When I talked to my counselor the first week back he said he thought I hadn't made up my mind yet, and I told him in response that I had decided to do four. And I did the first week! But then the second week I felt kind of extremely dead on Tuesday morning and just did not go, betting that the manager was on the same page as my couselor (and also he wouldn't get mad even if he wasn't), and he was. But I was so prepared when I arrived last Wednesday in CASE he was surprised and I had to explain my absence that even though he was not surprised, I just kind of blurted out "I am planning to work four days after this week. I did it last week, and it was fine! I think I can do it no trouble!"

Of course this was completely incorrect? I mean, it's what I decided at the end of November, and I thought it was true then, and I had mentally rehearsed it and all that. But it's not true anymore. Since the new year I've had approximately zero energy, mental, physical, or emotional. When people talk to me in the afternoon the last couple of weeks I actually struggle to dredge up words and assemble them into a sentence. I've been so low-energy that I give up on forcing myself to eat something at dinnertime because I feel too tired to make a decision about it!

So that was last Wednesday. I need to tell the counselor this and, I guess, amend my decision back to three. It seems clear that working four days a week in the month of January, at least, is not in the cards, and I remember being so tired I felt dead in last... February and March at least? Before I kind of thought it was the other store being less copacetic and more physically demanding. But January might have been affecting me too.

Since then I haven't really had the mental energy to put the explanation into Finnish, although I obviously knew right away that it was silly to tell them both that. In fact, I was supposed to arrange a meeting with the manager last week and then call my counselor about it, but I just felt too tired to deal with it. I didn't forget in the sense of like, not remembering it at all, but I did sort of ... intermittently forget and remember and every time I remembered, say to myself, "I've definitely got to deal with that the next time I come back by the office... I'm not up to it right now, and besides, I'm doing something." Sigh.

One thing that I've started being fascinated and amused by specifically since I started working at the Finnish equivalent of Target (or a 1980s-90s Kmart) is the use of English by and for non-native speakers. As a lingua franca, really, but a written one specifically. Because the store is Finnish-owned and -run, but we sell a lot of products imported from other parts of Europe and a lot of stuff that's straight from China, with whatever packaging the companies came up with. Sometimes it's just complete nonsense, like this rather terrifying powder pink pocket mirror that says "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth" - sentence case but no punctuation.



(The towering hubris of just being like "Does that look good and make sense? Yes. I don't think we need to check with anyone who uses English competently.") Perhaps not quite as inexplicable, but definitely not susceptible to casual deciphering, is a giant freestanding cardboard display of catfood with a photo of a cat on the side: "JUST YOU, ME, AND ANY OF THE BELOW" (there is nothing else below except the floor; the catfood itself is next to or behind, but even if you parse this far, you're like - so I'm being... propositioned... by this Russian blue??).

But this kind of baffling is a rare event. Most of the time it's easy enough to understand what is meant (or at least it is once you know what the product is) and the clunky phrasing, accidental innuendo, or misdirected modifier error is the sort of thing you would pass over without much notice in the course of a conversation if it were out loud. I've started collecting examples of this:

• cookie name: "Choco Whoopies"


• product description: "assortment filled trolley" (toy wheelie suitcases filled with drawing supplies)


• product description: "fat balls" (seed-and-suet birdfood balls)


• product description: "High energy giant fat stick" (seed-and-suet birdfood with its own hanger)


• On a package of flavor-infused honeys: "Honey delicates from Finland!"


• On a package of boiled peanuts: "IMPORTANT FOR DAILY MEAL AND SNACK"


• product description: "Natur Premium pet fish cat" My beloved pet fish cat!


• On a package of catfood: "Family plate chunks" yum, that delicious family plate! Stoneware or silver?


• On a display box of snacks: "Do the natural!"

I haven't forgotten you, yvannairie and princessofgeeks. Today I have to hunt down bits and pieces necessary to assemble packages to take to the post office perhaps on Monday, if I can find the right boxes.

I'm making a second hat for my Dad and Wax is making a third to stick in my parents' holiday package. I've still only made it to book 4 in Foreigner, thanks to all the time not reading that this knitting has required.

At work this week I spent quite a bit of time constructing and revising the various Christmas displays, including a good 45 minutes yesterday trying to problem solve how to set up four more boxes of wrapping paper rolls and another box of cards in a place with negative floor space (you literally can't push a shopping cart through it anymore without either bumping things or moving them out of your way). I ended up with most of them stacked on top of the ones already there, vertically and somewhat precariously.

We've got Luci the puppy for the day again while her family goes to Helsinki. Tristana seems to have gotten over her alarm and they were playing together earlier! Super adorable.