[172/365] longest day of the year? sure felt like it!

[cosmolinguist]

Gary woke me up at 4:30 this morning. He got me out of bed, acting like he needed to go out for a wee. And then he just...didn't. He didn't even go down the stairs. Just had a wander and a little wiggle on the carpet while I stood there, dragged out of a deep sleep with a splitting headache.

The headache didn't go away, or even get any better, for hours. By a quarter to eight it had eased just enough that I hoped to get an hour or so more sleep before my first big meeting (with all the people I went to the away day with, the other week).

A few minutes later, I heard a gentle knock at my bedroom door. I was so shocked I couldn't speak to tell her to come in, I had to get up and open the door myself.

If anyone else besides mother_bones had been in the house I would've been certain it was them. This is just way too early for her. She can't even take any of her meds that early, and they need time to help her be able to function at all.

I was thinking a, like, medical emergency level of situation must be happening for her to even want to speak to me at this time of the day. And, well, it wasn't that!

"The cleaners are on their way," she said, looking extremely pale and exhausted. I was a whole different kind of shocked now. We have cleaners every other week and just yesterday she'd happened to mention that they'd been good about always sending people in the afternoon as she'd requested. But this isn't their usual day; the people scheduled for last Friday couldn't come because, if I remember, one of their partners had had a medical emergency. So the company said they could fit us in today.

Apparently the empty slot they had for us was the first one of the day.

I couldn't even offer to make tea or breakfast for mother_bones, because of her medication regime. I did deal with the cleaners (new people, so they needed the Little Dog Talk and needed to be told which rooms they were doing and etc.), and then the dog who is a handful when cleaners are here.

I asked them if they could clean mother_bones's room first so she could go back to bed, and they did and she did. Which left me with the distressed dog and about 20 minutes until my big meeting. Luckily Gary wanted to spend most of that 20 minutes outside, not on a regular walk but clearly unhappy enough about the strangers and their Hoovermonster that he preferred to be outside. And it was a lovely day (sunny, on its way to a high in the low 70s [I can't do celsius temps so my phone app is still in F]) so I was happy to be outside too.

I was able to request a downstairs room to be cleaned first too, the one I work in, and as soon as they told me it was done I carried Gary in there with me (literally, you know it's bad when he demands to be picked up because usually he hates that) just in time to faff around with Teams and start my meeting.

This meant he was stuck in one room with only one inattentive human for far longer than he is during the usual cleaners-in-the-house routine. And he made every second count; he might have growled and frantically barked at the door some times more than others (like, especially when he could hear the Hoovermonster right outside the door!) but he never really stopped. I had to be quick on the mute button (literally, I spent 45 minutes with my thumb on the controls for my headset) to try to keep everyone from having to listen to him barking.

I hoped I could stay quiet during this meeting, since of course I don't have anything to contribute yet, but then naturally one of the first things the chair said was "Welcome Erik, do you want to introduce yourself?" Hi I'm Erik and I have a demon dog. Heh.

The meeting went fine though. I think that most of his noise didn't make it into my headset mic...but it all made it into my ears! I could not hear half of what people were saying. Luckily halfway through the meeting the cleaners told me they were leaving, so a minute later I could let Gary out, snarling and barking as he zoomed away into the empty house.

Work was fine though otherwise. I had a good meeting with my manager who's brand-new to managing the team he used to just be on, and I think he's good at it. He's very conscientious and reassuring. He answered a couple of questions, ordered me some more kit (a docking station which is a thing I just learned about and I'm very excited, and a keyboard to go with it), and made sure I knew it's important to take holidays (at some point, I literally can't get into the holiday-booking system yet).

I remembered diffrentcolours saying this about his reports, when working from home was new and there were lockdowns, people just weren't doing it and were burning out. So I felt well educated on the importance of taking holiday time and honestly I tried not to sound too excited about it as a thing that's almost wholly new to me (a full-time job's worth of holiday, and bank holidays, absolutely is new to me).

After the meetings I spent a lot of time sitting outside, enjoying the nice weather as I trawled through a report and some more mandatory training. The equality/diversity/inclusion one took me an hour and taught me absolutely nothing but it was nice to see how it's being presented to my co-workers. Felt good to see some decent trans stuff there though I'd hope for more examples; yes you shouldn't ask people about their genitals but also there's a lot of common microaggressions. None of which I have had at all so far though, I must say.

And HR have been so awesome at dealing with "I have one name on this and a different name on that" that I explicitly thanked the person who explained what they'd done and checked it was okay with me, I said fewer trans people are out at work now than previously and it means a lot that I can be. Which is true!

I fought with my computer settings a lot more (including yet another call to tech support about something that I'd just checked was still a problem but fixed itself before they got back to me!), I can't seem to change the font (I miss my Atkinson Hyperlegible so much!) but I've finally been allowed to change some colors. Everything is a compromise though; even the "light" theme in Teams is all dark during calls so I couldn't read the menu at all. The high-contrast Windows theme is half good for me and half bad; it takes away too much information that's encoded in color. And then, having tried it, I couldn't change it back for mysterious reasons. I need to read up on the screenreader controls too because... I don't want it to talk to me all the time but if I switch it to "speech on demand" I can't figure out how to "demand" it, so I've been doing too much reading with my eyes today.

And all that reading, and messing around with computer settings, and the sleep-deprivation headache, should maybe have been enough to keep me from going for a bike ride after work. Cycling is also a thing that I keep for the "good" eye days, but I couldn't resist today. I stayed off the roads for the most part but on such a nice day, at a time when a lot of people finish work, it was fairly crowded and with people who weren't always very interested in sharing. But it wasn't too stressful and it felt good to feel the air rushing by me.

I came back home, heated up pizza for dinner (oh yeah I also had to interrupt work but thankfully not a meeting to deal with the grocery delivery myself) and watched a few episodes of a really great Netflix cartoon called Dead End; it seems to be about teenagers, with anxiety, who like ghosts, are queer, need jobs, and/or have difficult parents -- so nothing there for me to relate to obviously! Highly recommended.

Comments

[barakta]

Argh, stress re cleaners, well done for being responsible human and thinking of ways to make it as painless for Mother Bones and Gary. Managing meeting with distressed doggo sounds super stressful but also "WFH life where people accept that home-work has annoying interruptions that aren't always avoidable".

Teams and Windows are diabolical. I find Teams REALLY hard to read, and yes the in-Teams-Calls is dark mode even if you choose light mode. I find most of the dark mode too uncontrasty to read properly and most of the light mode too blindingly bright. You can zoom a bit, but you can't change fonts and it WASTES SO MUCH SPACE ON BOLLOCKS THAT I DON'T NEED TO SEE. (I must not rant about Microshite or I won't stop, it's SO much worse than Win 7, I hate it).

Glad it is progressing well and they are being good with your names and stuff.

[cosmolinguist]

also "WFH life where people accept that home-work has annoying interruptions that aren't always avoidable".

Yeah, people seemed fine about it, they were very sympathetic when I explained about my elderly and intense doggo. I just felt bad that I could hardly hear a work for the first half of the meeting! Oh well. There's one of those every week, I'll get the hang of it. :)

yes the in-Teams-Calls is dark mode even if you choose light mode

Argh, whyyy?! I was really hoping someone would tell me "oh silly Erik, you just overlooked this setting you have to change!" I can't do anything calls at all, I have to use the mute button on my headset because I can't see the options on the screen quickly/reliably enough to mute and unmute myself.

you can't change fonts

I was very sad to learn this too! It's so enraging.

it WASTES SO MUCH SPACE ON BOLLOCKS THAT I DON'T NEED TO SEE

I know right! I'm forever trying to turn things off or get rid of them and so often I can't. The high-contrast mode does get rid of a lot of bollocks, but it also like I say gets rid of useful stuff that I need in order to be able to understand/follow/use things! I think they don't appreciate that if you have a significantly reduced color palette, for any reason, you should change some of the text. Because the color isn't giving you information, so more of the text has to and much of the repetitive or unhelpful text gets in the way of that.

[barakta]

I had a student with what sounded like an anxious doggo barking a bit in her background today, I said "Don't stress, it's WFH life now and children, dogs and cats make it all more interesting".

I can suggest the MS teams shortcuts page at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/keyboard-shortcuts-for-microsoft-teams-2e8e2a70-e8d8-4a19-949b-4c36dd5292d2

You can:
1) temporarily mute with CTRL + SPACE or
2) toggle mute with CTRL + SHIFT + M

But all involves you doing the memorising of a millionty keyboard shortcuts!

The thing that drives me potty is that despite telling Teams to start with headphones, if my computer doesn't have my deaf gadget turned on and plugged in while booting up (which I don't do cos why would I), Teams decides there is no headphones and set to speaker. If I'm connected via hearing aid to the gadget I can't hear the speaker sound and I have to fanny around setting teams sound again manually for each call... And that's on top of my gadget taking 3-10 seconds to properly transmit sound after switching mode and the mode-switching being really hard to get right cos it's 1 button and if I press it too short or long it goes wrong...

Piece of awful shit...

I'd also like to be able to have presentation screensharing AND see the speaker's face. Zoom lets me control the relative views with a slider... Teams is all thumbnail or ALL the screen of the speaker OR the shared screen. Useless for a lipreader... I must see if our HR contact who wrangles Microsoft Access is willing to pass on a bunch of feedback for me cos it does piss me off and makes meetings much less accessible for me.

[otter]

Oh, maybe I can get W hooked on that one. He watches a lot of things I don't like. Big Mouth had some promising bits, but Human Resources (the next season/spin off) is just gross.

[cosmolinguist]

I hope you can! I only saw like one or two episodes of Big Mouth and I did not like it.

[sfred]

Ugh, I hope today has been easier.

[cosmolinguist]

It was, it was much more straightforward. :)