Gossip

It was a good thing I decided to take the day off from the NaNo yesterday, because just as we were finishing up our last drinks, we got a text message from the inestimable weaselbitch asking if we wanted to meet up for a quick drink or something. I hadn't seen her in ages beyond Mage sessions so we decided to stick around.

I got some of the 7th Sea news yesterday. I haven't been talking about how I feel about that whole mess one way or another, mostly out of respect for the wishes of others. This is despite at least one serious question that was posed awhile ago, namely: "How are you going to feel about seeing some of these people at Dragonmeet?" Well, I don't know. I got thrown out of game because I had disagreements with the GM and because another player gave an ultimatum -- I'm not entirely over that, but I'm doing the best I can. And now I'm going to see said GM while trying to sell the very game that was at the centre of the disagreements. That's a little bit of a mind-fuck, particularly when I'm dealing with first time trader nerves, and I won't lie and say it won't be a problem.

However. Honestly. What am I going to say? "No, don't attend a con you've been going to for years because it'll make me uncomfortable"? Um ... no. I don't see it as being much of a problem after the whole 'first real contact after acrimonious situation' thing is over and done with. And frankly, if it goes horrifically badly, I can excuse myself from the booth for a few minutes and lock myself into the Ladies' until I calm down. How I feel about this shit is my own problem, and I can deal with it as such without asking someone to rearrange their planned outings on my account. I suppose the same goes for cholten99, really.

All told, the entire situation sucks but ... you know, coping. At this point, I'm too busy to do much else. Speaking of which, must get dressed and go to work while lucky bugger dodgyhoodoo stays in bed. Another week of this. I want more time off.

Work Woes

I. Want. A holiday. Maybe it's just borderline exhaustion talking, but I am so fed up with this shit that it's not even funny.

Look, it's not hard. You send a paper in for publications. The guidelines clearly state that all submissions should be made via e-mail with a submitted hard copy to come in the post later. Do people do this? Usually. However, I've seen sheer idiocy when it comes to paper submissions, three counts of it just today. I had someone send in a floppy disc that had been paper-clipped to the fucking hard copy of the document and then crammed into an unpadded envelope and stuck through the post with no "WARNING: CONTENTS FRAGILE"-style notification whatsoever. By the time I got it, the paper clip had got wedged into the little metal slidey flap-thing that I assume protects the disc while still allowing access to the disc so the computer can read it, probably scratching the disc to fuck, and the metal thing was stuck with the disc exposed. Needless to say, it was no longer an adequate piece of data storage equipment. The best part is when I e-mailed the guy asking for a copy by return e-mail; he honestly seemed surprised that his disc had got so damaged when he put it through the Post Office with no protective padding and a bloody paper clip attached to it.

That was not today. Today was the singular CD (I am going to e-mail this person and get them to send it to me via e-mail anyway), one paper with no electronic media whatsoever, and one... Oh, the one from Japan is a doozy; this author sent in one original and not one but two hard copies but no soft copy at all. You pay that much for postage and you don't send an electronic version as required by our guidelines? And you pay that much when you could have just e-mailed the fucking thing? Oh gods people are so unbelievably stupid.

And then there's that awful woman with the total lack of comprehension problem with regards to how she sends her submissions in. She sent a document to us that she'd done in some programme called LaTex, which apparently is used by "all scientific publications; after all, your publishers use it". We are not Cambridge University Press. We are not a university. We aren't even strictly speaking a scientific publication, and we don't have such a need for statistics that LaTex is going to be even remotely useful to us. So we don't have it. Instead, we have Word, which a vast quantity of people use. By using Word and sending us a Word document instead of LaTex and then sending us a PDF file of the document, you are guaranteeing that we can send it to referees and not have to worry about fucktard doctors who only use Hotmail or Yahoo. (Neither of those two internet mail clients can actually support PDFs, at least how we do them here. I don't know why; I just know that every time I send PDFs to a web-based mail address, it borks.) And who in their right mind thinks that you can embed a document in PDF format into another document? Because this woman obviously thinks you can. Grah. Hate.

But of course, if I take a holiday, everything goes to hell. Nobody touches my workload, except in tiny dribs and drabs in case of anything urgent going on, so when I come back it's hell on earth. I would dearly love to take the week after next off so that I can sit back, relax, prepare for Dragonmeet and generally have a holiday. But no. That's not going to happen. Because if I take time off, I'll go from Dragonmeet to Mage day to Uber-Workload-Hell with no breather in between. At least if I stay at work, everything will get done and I'll have at least somewhat less reason to stress.

Generally, my job is great, but sometimes these little annoyances will really stick in my craw.