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So: like yesterday, today it is murderously hot outside. Like "noon in the tropics" hot.
This morning I got up to get ready for work, and as I was heading towards the basement for some clean clothes left in the dryer I saw that the windows by the front door--the only single-pane windows this house has--were fogged up on the outside. Because the windows were slightly cooler than the air against them, which was full of moisture. I've lived here for 43 out of my 49 years and do not recall seeing that before.
Anyway, so it was murderously hot--I get in the Jeep and head to work, and with the AC on it was a reasonable temperature in the truck. Get to the gas station, go to gas up--glasses fog up. From being in AC for ten minutes. I didn't even have it on that high, nor was the air really blowing at my face.
Get gassed up, hit the road, get to work, glasses fog up again...and when I stepped into the building it was like walking into a meat locker. Blissful.
...I can sit at my desk at work, in this heat, without needing a fan. The fan makes me more comfortable, but I am reasonably comfortable without it...and sometimes I am too chilly and must turn it off.
That rules. It's the one excellent thing about this job: the thermostat is set for endotherms.
On the way home I--knowing that the house won't be that cool--prefer to drive with the windows open. Besides, it's firkin' summer and I'd like to enjoy the warm weather at least a little bit, since I am out of the house 55 hours a week for work and have little time for fun when I'm not working. Mrs. Fungus and I were talking about that last night: we both work overtime, we're both out of the house 11+ hours at a time, and on our days off that's when we get to do everything else that needs tending to. We can't do it before or after work; there's no time. And we don't have the luxury of taking long lunches whenever we have errands to run. So she'll be doing laundry and vacuuming while I'm cutting the grass and doing vehicle maintenance, and then we'll go off and run half a dozen other errands--and we don't have any time to relax and rest. I mean, we don't have any time for it. Even on our days off.
But I digress. Point is, to get some limited enjoyment of summer, I drive home with the windows open, and then when I get home, walk into the house...and it is blissfully cool.
In fact, I'm sitting here with no fans on, enjoying the quiet and cool. There's a storm brewing outside--it followed me home--and the sky is mighty dark to the northwest.
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Well, there's absolutely no indication of what could have induced a man with dual German and Iranian citizenship to go nuts and shoot a bunch of people. His motive was completely unclear. No idea what could possibly have led this "tanned German" of Iranian descent to commit such violence.
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Despite the good air conditioning, the graphic at the beginning of this post neatly sums up what I'd like to do tomorrow. We started mandatory overtime on April 16, to be ended sometime in May or June...and here we are at July 23 and it's still going strong and "It'll end when the next training class gets out of t-bay!" Which they've said every month since April. And then a class graduates from training bay and half of them quit, right out of the box.
Thursday there were never more than 50 people logged on to the system, and call volume was light; I was worried that there'd been some kind of massive quit-off or something. Normal staffing for a weekday is north of 70, and for most of the day it was below 40. Did half the reps call off or something?
Anyway, yesterday and today we were much closer to normal, so that's okay. At least the traffic-shaping algorithm worked on Thursday so we weren't inundated with calls.
Still no sign of training. Tomorrow begins the last week of July and I counted about four units of training which I haven't done yet, and won't do without being told to. But I've wised up: the last time there was a huge wad of training for me to do--which, ironically, was the last time I was on a team with no supervisor but for bungee bosses--it was four hours' worth, and I marked it all "done" before doing it...and then we went AHOD a half-hour later and I had to stop my training. Employer got paid by $Major_Telecom for the training time, but I never got the training.
So now I don't mark a unit completed until I've completed it.
But tomorrow is Sunday, and after that is Monday; and on Tuesday maybe I can get some work done on the vehicles. Both the Jeep and the Toyota need oil changes. Argh etc.