The Cheesecake is Rich

Remember a couple years ago when I wrote about the song I wrote that went (basically) “I don’t want to go to work today, I want to sit on my ass and play, I don’t want to go to work today, ’cause yesterday was pay day and it’s all downhill from there! Hey!”

(No, it’s OK if you don’t remember)

I would like to go back in time to LaineyD (September 2009 edition) and slap her. “Oh wahhh, yesterday was pay day, WAHHHHH”. Every day is (somebody’s) pay day now and I would be so frakking grateful for it to EVER be “all downhill from there!”. For fuck’s sake. Every day at work is like that one spot on the rollercoaster where, after going at a 90 degree angle for seemingly 74,000 feet you stop and just go across for a moment and you’re all “Ahh, relief!” but then it turns out now you have to go 74,000 feet back down instead and midway through THAT the Loch Ness Monster or a T-Rex leans over and swallows you whole. So you never get to actually get that feeling of “Whoo, caught up!” for more than an hour at a time.

(It’s also a lot like studying your ass off for a stupid test and not getting any extra pay for it).

(Grr).

So, I bought another fancy and cute WordPress theme today for the blog. Perhaps you noticed it in the last few hours? It’s OK if you didn’t as you would probably be confused because

1) It said my blog’s name is Your Blog Name Here

2) The directions from the people I purchased this theme from were: “Open file blogheader.png in Photoshop, Paint or etc and type in your blog’s name”

3) Because I’m using White Dog, I do not have MS Paint so I downloaded a free trial of Photoshop…

4) Which took about 45 minutes to download and install…

5) Only to find out I’m too stupid to figure out how to bust into the “Type layer” of this stinking document to change the blog name and then…

6) I get pissed and change the ‘theme’ back to Free WordPress blog theme #5. I get it…the best themes in life (at least in my experience) are free.

7) Dammit.

I may email these people and say “Whaaaat?” to their two sentence explanation.

9) All of the above doesn’t even touch on how much time I spent browsing themes, then buying theme, then remembering how the hell I upload said theme to my FTP site, then realizing that DreamHost’s Net2FTP interface has been removed, then reading about WHY it was removed (hackers, ahoy!), then debating about trying another interface, then deciding to try my luck.

10) Dammit (yes again, for good measure).

A few weeks ago, in the interest of saving money, Gene and I hit upon the idea of doing the grocery shopping at Super Target. It worked out really well, we saved a little money, and of course, as a red-blooded middle class American woman I am required to tithe weekly at Target anyway.

On a previous trip, we were asked if we wanted to sign up for the Target debit card so we would save 5%. Of course we wanted to sign up!! But we needed a voided check from our bank account.

But, we bank at an internet only bank that does not offer actual paper checks. We get around this with a ‘check’ printed from their website that includes our account number and routing number. So today we headed to Super Target armed with this ‘check’. We did all of our grocery shopping (we do a menu and grocery list every Friday night so we’re ready to go on Saturday morning) and hit the checkout.

I gave the clerk our ‘check’ and he looked at it like it was covered in bees. The clerk calls over another clerk, who decides that the ‘check’ needs to be cut out of the 8.5×11 piece of paper. A few minutes pass and she finally makes her way back with our ‘check’ in her hand. They run it through the check scanner thing and it gets crumpled. They decide that the regular piece of paper is too thin so they try to feed it through with another small piece of paper behind it…and it gets stuck.

We tell them that we will just pay with our regular (non-Target) debit card, so I swipe my card. The clerk’s register is still asking “How much is the check for?” More time passes as the brain trust at Target tries to figure this out. The ‘check’ is still jammed somewhere in the bowels of the register, BTW (it may well still be in there now – identity theft, ahoy!). They determine that the only answer is to start. all. over. (We easily had 50 separate items in our cart, all of which had been scanned and bagged).

Gene and I look at each other. “Do you want to go to Cheesecake City Grocery Store?” he asks.

“Yeah, I do,” I reply, expecting Target to snap to attention that they are now losing out on our business and immediately come up with a better solution than ringing up our order a second time. I thought that a manager might even chase after us as we walked out to the car.

Instead…well, Target, forget you and your debit card and your wide array of stuff. I’m out. I will no longer be tithing at your house of retail worship.

So, I passed my Incredibly Hard Payroll test (did I tell you? It was incredibly hard).

And now…ummm… I kinda don’t want to do payroll anymore. (Have I ever talked about how much I dislike that phrase, ‘do payroll’? It just sounds so ignorant, like there aren’t another 10,000 verbs that might be more descriptive…such as “got fucked by payroll”).

I actually was supposed to have a job interview yesterday but I had to cancel. (A teammate was to have the afternoon off for a doctors appointment, so that trumped my interview with a major corporation in their HR department). That sucked. It would have paid about 10% more than I make now, but the drive would have been easily 45 minutes to an hour each way. And we probably would have had to buy a second car, so goodbye 10% more than my current job.

Maybe I’ll feel better after my vacation, which is coming up in about a month. Still don’t have the official plans together but we’re easing towards them now.

So, that’s all that’s new here. I am fine, hope you are too.

Yes!

Yesterday I took my exam for the Super Hard Payroll Certification. I was given 4 hours to take the exam and about midway through, I thought, “Well, this isn’t going well…”. I was able to mark any question I wanted as “Review Later” and I marked at least a quarter of the questions. After I’d gone through all the questions once I went through the review questions and checked my math and thought about the answers I’d given to the non-calculation questions. There were at least a few that I had no clue on.

At the end, I thought to myself, “It’s OK if I failed and it’s great if I passed, it’s OK if I failed and it’s great if I passed.” I truly had no idea how I’d done. After you click on “finished test” (or whatever it’s called), they make you answer some demographic questions about methods you used to study. Strangely, “Signed up for study group that was cancelled, jerks! Had to study using help from coworkers and ghetto flashcards made from penguin notepaper*” was NOT an option.

Afterwards, my result came up on the screen. “Test result: Pass”. And I looked at it and thought, Hmm, now which one is “Pass” again? Then it clicked that the next word was “Congratulations…” and that they would probably not congratulate me for failing this freaking thing.

So, that’s the story of how I passed the exam using 3 markers, 8 pages of dry erase notebook, and my trusty $10 Staples calculator BUT had to use context clues to figure out that I had passed.

Ah.

* I couldn’t find any note cards at home the night I decided I wanted to make flashcards, but I did find a pad of penguin shaped note paper, so I had to improvise.

You know what’s rewarding (in a “crazy sociopath” way)? Finding the Wikipedia page for the girl who was annoying in elementary school, a ‘mean girl’ in junior high, and (a) practically perfect (gigantic bitch) and editing it to remove the really self congratulatory stuff.

• Took Scooby to the vet this morning. They think that him scratching himself so much (from his allergies) has given him a little infection, so I walked out of there with an antibiotic and prednisone. So yes, Scooby will be on Prednisone. I expect that by Monday he’ll be up all night vacuuming. It’s about time he earns his keep.
• Two companies came to the house yesterday re: quoting for furnace replacement. My favorite (from the company that Denise worked with for her HVAC) said that the furnace is fiiine, the heat exchanger thingy is NOT cracked, and that we probably won’t die of carbon monoxide poisoning (although we did buy a CO detector today at Target). He did say that we have a cracked coil in our AC and that replacing the coil will cost approximately 1.5 EP* or we could replace the entire A/C unit for approximately 4 EP.
• Since it is late September, and the other HVAC company gave us (well, sold us) a freeon fill up a few days ago, we may table the whole thing for awhile.

Short Answer: YES.

Long Answer: Here is why I haven’t blogged lately. It’s all just a loooong string of worry.

• Worried about the stupid test (a week and a half to go!), passing it, failing it.
• Worried about work (a lifetime to go!), getting it all done in 40 hours per week. Big boss had a meeting where one of his talking points was “(company) has a negligible amount of overtime!” and I wanted to jump up out of my chair and a) throttle him or b) say “That’s because you BANNED it, you asshat. It’s easy to crow about the lack of something when YOU BAN it! All that means is that some of us are working off the clock!”
• Funny story: Left Tuesday @ 2:50 PM (two hours early and I hadn’t had a lunch that day) and returned Wednesday to find a fat (not phat) stack of shit to do, assigned to me by the recently returned Belinda. OMFG, I’m pretty sure I was being punished for daring to leave early. I’m still working on that stack, BTW, and it’s going to fire off a giant shitstorm on Monday and OH GOD WHY WASN’T I SMART ENOUGH TO GET A REAL JOB???
• WHY?
• Work to-do list has 14 items to do. I’m currently on item #5, I believe. I miss the good old days where my to-do list was “1) Make To-Do list, 2) Read Yahoo! for an hour”. Gene and I watched the season premiere of The Office, and at the scene where Pam’s watching something weepy on YouTube, I said, “Oh, for nothing better to do than watch YouTube at work!”
• I need 4 hours at the office to finish the stack from Belinda, start up two new clients, take an online class in whatever (it was due on 9/2 so I am pretty behind!)*, and complete an exercise from another class that was due today at 7. I’m so embarrassed, but I had to ask for an extension for the exercise as I was too busy doing things that would actually make some money for My Fearless Employer. When the email from our trainer came in to approve the extension I almost cried.
• Ooh, right, been on the verge of tears @ office since Wednesday.
• Belinda said I should take half of today and barricade myself and study for the stupid test. Ha ha. Instead, I spent a little over an hour (half of it off the books) going over one troublesome test related thing w/ a coworker. Time well spent? Who. the. fuck. knows.
• (Seriously, if I’d spent 4 hours today studying, the crap from Belinda from Wednesday would be even further behind and I’d get yelled at for that. The stack is actually 8 smaller tasks, each of which takes at least 2 hours to complete so really, my wish for 4 hours to get all of that done is foolhardy at best. Can I have 8 hours instead?).
• And on the home front…
• Furnace is effed up so we need to replace it to avoid death by asphyxiation (carbon monoxide for the loss!)…
• Which will probably cancel Las Vegas, which is OK, since I’ve only had my motherfucking hopes pinned on it since APRIL. (Not that I planned to strike it rich there, just that no one at Mandalay was going to ask “Hey, Elaine, could you reset my password/answer my question/input pay data for the equivalent of 480 people?”)…
• And tomorrow I get to take Scooby to the vet because his coat (skin?) is looking really awful (and not in a “My dog’s coat is not SHINY” way, more of a “Why is my dog spotted?” way).

I don’t know if the tickers in the last post make sense to anyone but me, but they’re ticking off the days until I take my certification exam and then the days until vacation. (The latest on vacation: Still not booked, Gene does not appear to have been chosen to speak @ Geek Week ’11, haven’t decided between the week in Vegas and a 5 day cruise from MD to Bermuda, but I just saw the average temp in Bermuda in November is 70 degrees…gotta say I’m back on Team Vegas)

Anyway! One piece of good news: I just finished going through the handouts that my boss Belinda emailed a few weeks ago. The book (called the P.ayroll Sou.rce) is the size of an average college textbook but three inches thick, the handouts are 8.5×11 and about 50 pages. I am also the lucky recipient of a treasure trove of study materials from my coworker, Pattie. I’m supposed to share them with Broomhilda from work but I haven’t yet. I think I may drag the lot of it to Office Depot so I can have a copy for myself.

And there’s a practice exam in the gigantic Payroll book as well, and one on the A-freakingPA’s website too. I hope it all adds up to passing this test on the first try! It would be good to pass it now because…

1) Wouldn’t have to take it again in the winter/spring

2) Boss Belinda didn’t pass it the first time

But, I’m not certain of passing it this time due to not having the backup of the All Important Study Group, so I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t pass it this time. At least that’s my thought now, let’s see how I feel on October 4th!