Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

Tired Professional Editor Girl

Day Two: many words have fallen to my pink highlighting bar of doom. If only I was permitted to edit to the extent to which I wish to edit! Then I would be in heaven. But there are rights issues.

We did a beautiful full moon ritual tonight. I have missed group ritual.

In other news, I have a new (secondhand) cell phone. Of course, since the provider website won’t recognise my credit card because it claims I’m not typing in the correct address registered to the card, I can’t do more than activate it until I go out and buy a top-up card. Sigh. At least now I’ll know what time it is when I’m on public transport. (I lost my Eeyore watch! I cannot find it anywhere! I am very sad indeed.)

Very tired. Going to bed now.

Day One, On-Site Professional Editor Girl

So! Here I am, at home after my first day of the bright shiny on-site contract. I am working on the floor with the team as opposed to working somewhere else, which is both good and bad. The sound and movement around me is mildly distracting, even when I have my headphones on, but time moves quickly and people are right there when I have a question.

Things I have learned:

French keyboards and I do not get along. (This is, alas, also true of my new-to-me laptop.)

Public transport is a temporal black hole.

The heads of the team do not actually know the specifics of what they want me to do, other than to integrate two databases, and to make things better. Fortunately I too want to make things better. Most of today was spent feeling my way through the material to get a really good handle on what needs to be done.

Everyone — and I mean everyone — takes lunch. I am unused to this, as the last time I had an on-site job it was in retail where we usually worked through lunch, or only took as long as necessary to bolt food before going back to handle the pile of tasks that needed to be done.

I need a snack at around three-thirty or four, or I get wonky around the time I leave.

Things I accomplished today:

Around mid-afternoon I discovered that 25% of what I was going to classify and correct was already in the main file. I am very, very glad I figured this out before I worked for a few days and discovered that everyone’s time had been wasted. Also, it reassured me that the way I was editing things was good, because my corrections ended up matching what was in the main file most of the time. The designer whipped up a formula thingy to compare/sort (I’m the word girl, not the tech girl) and I now have an annotated list that clearly identifies what in the new file is (a) already in the main dictionary, and (b) what isn’t. Yay me for locating and identifying that particular potential disaster for everyone. Tomorrow is a new day with that pitfall out of the way, and first thing I shall be sitting down with one of the heads and making a very detailed list of what they want me to do, in the order it ought to be done. This seems a very free-flow sort of project and work environment, and very flexible, but I have a limited time in which to do this for them and I need to pin down a less-vague system that will work for both parties, to be used as a reliable checklist but that will still be organic for everyone.

I have a desk, and a computer, and internal e-mail, and passwords, and all sorts of official things. And all this was operational about an hour after I arrived. Impressive. I only got my keycard mid-afternoon, though, so it’s a good thing I had friends who could use theirs to swipe me back into my top-secret room after lunch.

I ate lunch. (This is a big thing for me. Everyone leaving the floor at noon is an excellent reminder.) Meallanmouse will keep me on the lunch-track, hurrah!

Memorable things:

Baronscartop: “Those guys are totally checking you out.” Heard not once but twice while on the casual ‘this is where you work’ tour first thing in the morning, one on each floor. I am so oblivious to these sort of things. Nice to have friends who can point it out to me.

Not having butterflies in my stomach at any time. Yes, I know what I’m doing, and yes, I have confidence in my abilities and my adaptability. It’s just odd to be put in an alien environment and realise this, as opposed to working in one’s home office and letting the awareness sift to far below the conscious surface for long periods of time.

Also: The smaller contract that I worked on at the end of last week and this Sunday appears to be satisfactory to the client. Yay me, again. Much with the yayness, in fact.

Music, Consultants, and Colds

The sun, the sun! I’ve been greedily soaking it up for the past couple of days.

We had our final regular rehearsal before the spring concert last night, actually in the church where we’ll be playing. (Due to scheduling issues our dress rehearsal will be elsewhere.) It took almost half the rehearsal to accustom ourselves to the very different sound of the room. It’s hard to hear the other sections when everyone is playing, and the sound is somewhat muffled and oddly amplified. Not in a bad way; there were times where we sounded like we were an ensemble twice as big as we truly are, for example. As usual, it took me a whole movement to sort through the different sound to actually hear what I was playing. It’s going to be a lovely concert. (Concert! This Saturday night at 7:30! Cedar Park United Church in Pointe-Claire! Here are all the details!)

Yesterday I had my first face-to-face interview in over ten years. (Most of my jobs have been as a result of networking and being familiar with the employers beforehand, and my freelance work is based in telecommuting.) It went well; so well, in fact, that I am now an official consultant working on-site at one of the local megacorps. (For those familiar with HRH, it is, ironically enough, one of the places at which he’s been trying to land a job for a couple of years now. Taste that irony!) An inside referral secured me the interview, and the two-week contract (with possibility of renewal) seems tailor-made for me and my abilities and qualifications. The heads on the project are people who care deeply about the work, and for whom I developed quick respect during our interview. So naturally, now that I have the contract I am wibbling deep inside and worrying that I will let them down, as well as making the individual who referred me look bad. It would be really, really nice to not have to field my own inner critic every time I get a job. It sounds like I would have to actively work at not making the situation better, however, and I am nowhere near as wibbly as I was last night. This morning, I am Professional Editor Girl again.

The project sounds engaging and moderately challenging for me as well as interesting on a I’m-doing-a-good-thing level. Nothing like promoting reading comprehension while sorting words and — ahem — editing a dictionary. Seriously — how cool is that? I get to edit a dictionary. It’s like a dream come true, if I’d ever presumed to have this particular daydream. (Granted, the work will also be frustrating due to its nature, but still! Editing a dictionary!)

One of the curiosities of this contract is that I will be travelling elsewhere to work, instead of working in my home office with cats and tea and other comforts. I haven’t done this in five years. Public transport is now my friend again. It’s an hour of travel, broken into three twenty-minute chunks so I can actually settle down and read without worrying that I’ll miss my stop. I’m told they will provide everything I need, but really, I will have to burn a few data CDs’ worth of music, bring tea and a mug, a dictionary (because I have learned never to assume that any office has a reliable dictionary, if a dictionary at all, and sure I could use an online dictionary but I always suspect them of being Not Quite Real), my good headphones, notebooks, and so forth.

Eep. I will have keycards and such. And, I’m told, an office in which to work, which probably means a small unused conference room with a computer brought in. My lower back already hurts at the thought of office chairs.

Also, another small freelance contract landed in my in-box last night. It will have to be done in the evenings, now that I am an official nine-to-fiver for the next two weeks.

Liam and I have both developed colds. I thought it was the general spring allergy thing, but it is not.

That is all.

Morning — The “Good” Is Debatable

I have been awake since 3:55 AM, when the volume of the radio belonging to the crazy lady downstairs suddenly leapt to the level of Intrusively Loud (Even Had It Been Daytime). I am Not Pleased.

Since then, I have read/examined a new tarot set and drafted a point-form review of it for the next issue of WynterGreene, handled some correspondence, surfed the internet, and thought up many scenarios in which I confront the crazy lady and tell her exactly what living in an apartment means (i.e., regular living noise during the day is not “a lot of noise”, and loud noises between ten-ish and seven-ish are Not Allowed and Very Inconsiderate). In all of these scenarios she sees the error of her ways, apologises in tears for her behaviour, and moves immediately.

Sigh. I am going to be one very cranky girl later today, what with the truncated sleep and annoyance with the cause. This is bad, as Liam is home today and there is a ritual here tonight (yay, Spring!). (The aforementioned ritual is thankfully not led by me, which is a good thing because I will be in no state to do something like that by tonight.)

Naturally

HRH: Home in bed. The gastro has struck back with a vengeance.

Liam: Home. There is unpleasant roommate upheaval at the caregiver’s.

Me: Oh look, a rush editing job just landed in my inbox.

*headdesk*

Thank goodness we had a nice visit with the ADZO crew yesterday to have provided me with some sort of break. Liam discovered sledding and loves it with a violence heretofore reserved only for Mermy and Thomas.

Also: BSG? Well done, destabilising the viewers.

Turning In

I’ve just finished my second article for the next issue of the local journal and sent it off. Yay me. Yet again I am amazed at how much I know about a topic, and how superficial an examination must be in the space of 900 words.

Despite my cheerful optimism regarding orchestra last night, I had a really rough evening when I got there. It was a strings-only rehearsal, and we practiced every sequence that gave us trouble in the Haydn symphony for two hours. This means that we did a lot of work on the frustrating passages that are (naturally) challenging, and didn’t get the rewarding boost of playing the easier stuff in between. On top of that my fingers and my brain were not talking to one another last night and I just couldn’t get warm or count correctly, all of which conspired to make me play even worse than usual. I was so out of it by the end of the night that I missed every single entrance in the Handel bouree and couldn’t find a place to jump in before it was over. ADZO had shared an insightful chat earlier in the day with me regarding applying professional standards to everything one does, however, and that really went a long way towards me not feeling as despondent about rehearsal as I otherwise might have felt.

The boy had two shots this morning and got a bandage on each of them that the doctor then added little stickers to, a fire engine and a train to be precise. It was an excellent way to grab his attention and get him to stop the indignant crying. He also got a train sticker for his hand because he kept craning his head around to try to look at his upper arms, and he showed it to the five-month-old baby waiting his turn to see the doctor. He very helpfully took his medicare card from me and carried it into the office on his own for the nurse to check at the beginning of the appointment, too. He’s a good kid.

Tomorrow, the Friday plans which have been postponed twice will happen! But now, I have to try to get myself into a sleep-like headspace.