The Syndicate

So here's the saga of everything going wrong with this past weekend's birthday party for the kids:

On Saturday the 15th, my wife was at a women's retreat with church. I took the kids to Party City to look at decorations because Chloe wanted a Tinker Bell party. I also looked at the 1st birthday decorations for Lilah's side of the shindig. I snapped pictures of a few decorations so I could show to and discuss with my wife before making any purchases. We settle on a which Tinker Bell items to get and carry on with life.

On Friday the 21st, both my wife and I are running late at work, so we get home and eat later than we wanted. Lots of prep work for the next day, so I go back to Party City to buy the Tinker Bell and 1st Birthday stuff. I grab the 1st Birthday stuff and head over to the theme aisle. I feel like I'm walking further back the aisle than I ought to, having left Disney stuff far behind.

A clerk asks me what I'm looking for, so I tell him Tinker Bell. He says, "Oh, that pattern was discontinued this week."



Fine, I think. I'll run over to Target and get Tinker Bell stuff there. They always have Tink in the party supply aisle. I get there and there is no more Tinker Bell stuff.



Onward to Toys R Us, where they always, always, always have Tinker Bell stuff because Disney tells them to keep that crap on their shelves. At least, they used to.



Walmart! Walmart will have it! They're big and have a whole party section. Kids still love Tinker Bell, right? Right? RIGHT?!? Wrong.



I get home at 10:00 pm with just a Mylar Tinker Bell balloon for Chloe's side of the party. Now I have to go shopping for the groceries so we can spend the next morning cleaning up the house. After 10:00 pm, our grocery store shuts down all the manned checkouts, so I had to run a cart full of groceries through the cramped self-checkout. My spacial intelligence scored big but it was a moral victory only.

Home at 10:45 pm and I start cleaning. I clean and clean until 1:30 am. The next morning, my wife shuts her alarm off before I'm fully awake, so we sleep in way too late. We bake, we clean, we tend to the kids. When guests start to arrive, they end up helping us set up the party.

Yeah, I'm not letting Chloe change her party theme three weeks out again next year. It's going to be a Star Wars party, so I can plan well in advance. Here's my week so far as a follow-up:

The water jug at the office is acting up and there are pieces of something floating in the water. Chloe didn't take a nap yesterday and was a grouch off-and-on the rest of the night before bed. Lilah peed on the bathroom rug before bath. Lilah wakes up screaming at 3:00 a.m. for a diaper change and a teething ring. Chloe wakes up at 4:00 a.m. and tells me she peed the bed. I can't find my big cup to take my own water to the office today, so I'll have to drink soda to hydrate (tap water at the office isn't safe) and I have all but cut soda out of my diet. And my shirt got caught on my office door handle, tearing it 4-5" straight up the back.

All first world problems, but all in a row? Sheesh.

I got a super-sized dose of 'be careful what you wish for' today. Our office manager came in and informed me that our administrative assistant handed in her two weeks notice about an hour earlier. This is an individual who has been caught reading and shopping at work when there are more pressing tasks at hand. Now, I recognize that I am a hypocrite because I play mafia at work but I still get my work done on the day it needs to be done. Our administrative assistant would let invoices that needed to be sent sit on her desk for days before putting them in the mail. Her job duties shifted in a big way this past January when neither the office manager nor myself could supervise her due to our own accounting and bid work duties being off the charts. As a result, she let her work fill the time instead of asking for additional tasks. Sometimes it was like pulling teeth to get her to take on a new task.

Overall, this is actually a good thing, because the duties among the office staff have really shifted over the last four years. They've settled for the most part but could use some tweaking. Our office manager and myself can now train a new person to do the work the way we'd like it to be done and provide the new person with a more structured work week (the outgoing AA all but refused to break down her weekly tasks in an organized way- she never got used to not doing tasks in fits and spurts like her previous and much more variable schedule). Our office manager and I can work to make the office staff function as a true team now that we have a vision of what we'd like it to be and a new person that will be receptive to that vision.

The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad part of all this is that our current administrative assistant is leaving smack in the middle of my busiest time of the year. I run the books. Right now I'm on a mission to reduce our net income as much as possible so our owners don't show as underpaying their quarterly estimates when taxes are filed. Come January 1, I'll be elbows deep in closing out our calendar and fiscal year. I won't have time to interview and train a new person but I'm going to have to. This means overtime, extra work, extra stress, and less sleep until it is all said and done.

Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it at the worst possible time.

I don't believe in superstitions but if Friday the 13th really is bad luck, then it must have struck me early this time around.

Since it's the new year, I need 2017 payroll formulas to run payroll this week. To obtain 2017 payroll formulas I have to install an software update on my office computer. Before I can install a software update on my office computer I have to download and install and update on our server computer.

Last Friday I attempted to install the update on our server computer but got caught in an endless cycle of being prompted to restart the server. I called the software company's tech support around 5:00 pm and was told that they couldn't stay on the line long because they were in Georgia and were being sent home early due to the winter storm heading for them. The guy said all I had to do was uninstall the software and install it again.

Not being an IT savvy fellow, uninstalling the most important piece of software for my job without any technical support sounded like a bad idea, so I waited until today. Unfortunately that meant my office manager wasn't going to be able to do anything in the software until I was done updating the server and all our work stations. I was trying to avoid this by doing it last Friday but it seems no good deed goes unpunished.

I call tech support at 9:02 am (they open at 9:00) and I'm told that 'due to high call volumes, no one is available to take your call.' Awesome. I have a bank report deadline on Tuesday and a payroll deadline on Wednesday. Fortunately, I was able to leave a message. Three minutes later I get a call from a tech support guy based out of Oregon. In under 30 minutes he resolves the issue with the server and we end the call. I've updated our work stations through the server several times before with no hang ups. Until now.

My work station rejected the update because I was missing a data file. At 9:35, I call back in to tech support and leave another request for callback. An hour later, a woman from Georgia calls me back. She tries repairing the software on my computer and the server but can't make progress. She tells me that she needs to transfer me to tier 2 support. Upon being transferred, I am greeted by the auto-response 'due to high call volumes, no one is available to take your call.' Instead of having me leave another message for callback, it hangs up on me. It's now 11:20 am.

I call back the number that called me and get the tech center operator. She asks for the name or extension of the person I need to reach but all I have is a case number. She puts me into the tier 2 support line where I sit on hold for the next 90 minutes.

Around 12:50 pm I give in and start eating lunch. Three bites later, tier 2 tech support picks up. We spend the next hour bouncing between the three office computers that use the accounting software and the server. We install updates and double check to make sure everything works right. Finally, the process is finished.

At 2:00 pm I go back to eating lunch and curse my luck. The last two weeks were four-day weeks due to the holidays and crunching five days of work into four was mentally draining. Thanks to my train wreck of a day, I now had just over four days once again to get all my week's work completed.

The only silver lining to all this is that we made an offer to someone for our administrative assistant position and she accepted. She could start later this week if her current employer doesn't want her around to fulfill her two weeks notice.

My oldest child threw up tonight. The smell seeped into the foam cushions, not to mention all but two rooms on the main floor. How can a four-foot-tall person contain that much vomit? How??!?

Yep. That's about what it looked like.

My car is sick. After 11 years and 124,000 miles, it might be time to put her down. Not looking forward to that so soon after replacing my wife's car.

It wasn't deleted. It was extradited to North Korea.

Nothing says "Happy Saturday!" quite like over 100 ants (I counted as I killed) in the kitchen before breakfast.

How did you hurt your hand?

I used to do that quite often. I would shove my whole arm up and be laying on my elbow/upper arm. My broad shoulders require more neck support than my sorry little pillow could provide. Then I got a super-firm pillow. Very thick. I'm still getting used to it. Scary thought though, nerve damage.

TFW you're trying to purchase Trans-Siberian Orchestra as a surprise birthday gift for your wife only for Ticketmaster to either offer garbage seats on the side of the arena or say "Sorry, there was an error with search. Please try again later."

You know how you can tell when a kid is really sick? When she throws up in her crib overnight and, rather than crying out for mommy or daddy, she just lays down in it and goes back to sleep. It took three baths Sunday morning just to make the smell go away.

Then came the 103.7 degree fever Sunday afternoon and all the crying, loss-of-appetite, and clinginess that comes with it. Children's Motrin, fluids, and time helped the fever go down.

This morning greeted us with bright red, splotchy marks all over her little body. Thankfully, they didn't itch, so all she had to focus on was the rebound 103.5 degree fever.

According to the pediatrician we saw today, it's Erythema multiforme minor, likely a result of her body fighting off fifth disease. The rash and fever come at the final week of infection. It'll get worse by mid-week, when she'll likely have swollen hands and feet, but hopefully all will be back to normal by the weekend.

Ah, parenthood.

Nope, it's actually called fifth disease. They don't even capitalize the name. It's literally the fifth disease in a list of six families of viruses and bacteria that cause childhood rashes but apparently nobody decided to give it a fancy name:

1. Measles
2. Scarlet Fever
3. Rubella
4. Duke's Disease
5. fifth disease
6. Roseola

Epignosis wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2017 11:14 am

G-Man wrote: ↑Tue Dec 05, 2017 5:05 pm Nope, it's actually called fifth disease. They don't even capitalize the name. It's literally the fifth disease in a list of six families of viruses and bacteria that cause childhood rashes but apparently nobody decided to give it a fancy name:

1. Measles
2. Scarlet Fever
3. Rubella
4. Duke's Disease
5. erythema infectiosum
6. Roseola

Fixed.

Yep, I came across that technical name as well. Makes it sound like a cute Harry Potter spell.

As if working late and feeling stressed out over switching accounting platforms, credit card processors, and payroll servicers all at the same time, now this:

Three of our employees got to talking about how many long weeks they've worked this year and got curious. They asked me which of them had worked more hours this year so far. I told them we have three ways to track it- by hours paid for, hours worked, and billable hours. I told them where they all stood in relation to each other in each category. They said they were just curious and wanted to know between the three of them.

Ten minutes ago I got a call from one of our owners. Apparently one or more of those employees didn't keep it between the three of them. I don't know the full extent of what all they told others about or whom they told, but it's become a mess for the bosses to handle. I realize now why I shouldn't have shared even the round-about answers that I gave them. It's a performance metric and should remain internal.

I've officially been told that if I do that again I will be fired. The boss said "I'm not saying that I'm going to do it this time." But he also didn't say he wasn't going to fire me this time. I can't imagine they would fire me given all the responsibilities I juggle and the current transitions we're undergoing but this is the owner who is a hot-head. I've never been chewed out in five and a half years at my job. Looks like that streak will end this afternoon.

Our new neighbors moved in a month ago, though I have yet to meet them. The husband occasionally brings home a large work pickup truck. Our mailbox is a straight shot out the middle of their driveway.

In 10 and a half years, our mailbox has never been hit by anyone. The door sits flush with the curb. It’s a tall curb. The only way to hit our mailbox is to have a tall vehicle that can hang over the curb enough to smack the box or the post. Like a large pickup truck.

Since our new neighbors moved in, our mailbox has been hit twice and is now on life support. It’s the middle of winter and there is a polar freaking vortex descending on us this week. There’s no chance of digging a new post hole, let alone cement setting right until probably March.

I have no proof that our new neighbors are responsible but the circumstances sure make me go ‘hmm.’

I've spent time over the last few weeks researching new refrigerators so we can replace ours before it dies. We've narrowed down the style we want and have weeded out some inferior brands/models. We're pretty close to making a decision on a refrigerator.

Our dryer died this afternoon.

At what point do I begin to assume that a contractor made off with my money? I’m a nice guy, but I’m starting to feel foolish. This contractor did good work for my parents, my grandmother, and my sister. They all recommended him to me for re-doing our deck. Last August, we signed a contract, got a date range scheduled, and paid him for the materials up front like most contractors require around here.

Two weeks before our build window hits, he breaks a rib and asks for a few weeks to heal because his doctor said he had to scale back on the hard physical labor until his rib is better again. That drifts into November and we agree to shelve to project until the spring because the ground is getting too hard to dig and we don’t need to use a deck in the cold PA winter.

Come spring I play email tag with the guy every couple of weeks. Each time, he apologizes and says he’s still catching up on all the work he had to postpone while recovering. He says he’s been doing work in the mountains, so he doesn’t have good cell reception and his voicemails and emails don’t come through until days after the fact.

It’s now been 11 months since we wrote him a check and he’s still hard to get ahold of. I told my wife that I’m almost ready to show up at his front door (his home address is on contract). Out of curiosity, I checked Zillow this afternoon. He sold his house in April. His phone number doesn’t even have a recorded message on it anymore. The last email I got from him was two weeks ago.

Is the fact that he has continued to email me a good sign and perhaps I should just cool it on the paranoia? Or am I, for some reason, the guy this contractor has chosen to play for a sucker?

Thankfully, my paranoia was just that. I currently have a large dirt patch where our old deck used to be.

G-Man wrote: ↑Tue Aug 06, 2019 9:09 pm Thankfully, my paranoia was just that. I currently have a large dirt patch where our old deck used to be.

Three and a half weeks later and I still have a large dirt patch where our old deck used to be.

Epignosis wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2019 6:38 pm Hope it doesn't become a grave site.

Nah, I want the guy to build the new deck before I kill him for taking so long.

Hello vomit, my old friend
You’ve come to haunt me once again
And now my daughter who was sleeping
Freshly bathed but she’s still weeping
And the foul stench that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Two extra loads of laundry

Epignosis wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2019 11:56 pm That's gross. I hope your girls are okay. I do want to hear about your deck though. Any news?

The good news: the deck is 90% complete.

The bad news: it’s been 90% complete for three weeks.

Here’s what I texted the contractor at sundown:

Over the last year, and particularly these past five months, we have been exceedingly patient. But like all good things, our patience has come to an end. After yet another broken promise (you said you would finish the deck by today) in a long line of setbacks, delays, and missed deadlines, I have no choice left but to assume that our project is not a priority for you. Please prove me wrong.

I am now unemployed. I'll provide more details over the weekend.

In the long run, this is a good thing. In the short term, it is a major blow to my pride and self-worth.

I received a very generous severance package, though, so don't you worry about little ole G.

As someone who couldn’t muster the nerve to quit a frustrating job, good for you. Best of luck finding something that is a better fit for you.

I actually wrote a paper while working on my second degree about employer-employee fit. I chose the topic to help me figure out why I couldn’t be content with other jobs I had worked before going back to school, and it changed my perspective a lot.

My cousin is under self-quarantine for Coronavirus. Her roommate’s girlfriend was in contact with it a week ago at a convention in New Orleans. She’s young and healthy though, so hopefully she’s going to have a mild case of it if at all.

My wife tested positive for COVID today. She started feeling tightness in her chest yesterday, and had had a runny nose for a little over a week. No cough, no fever, no loss of her sense of taste.

She got freaked out by the tightness in her chest and went to an urgent care facility this morning. They gave her one of the rapid tests, so she found out within an hour.

Fortunately she and I can work from home. Her kindergarten class all has to quarantine, so they will be doing virtual school (a live morning lesson and then they will do asynchronous content in the afternoon).

Working from home on such short notice is tricky for me, but it’s manageable and my co-workers are all very flexible and awesome. We’ll get through it.

During this whole pandemic, I have been the only one going pretty much anywhere. Chloe has gone to school, and my wife has gone to work. Otherwise, I have been doing all the out-of-home errands.

Neither of the girls have any symptoms, and I feel fine myself. What a mess.

Thanks Epi. The doctors gave her an inhaler for her chest. Other than that, she just has a runny nose.

For now, it’s more of an inconvenience than a concern.

Epignosis wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 5:15 pm October: Spend a fortune installing a brand new top-of-the-line, high efficiency HVAC system.
November: Install new insulation.
December: Odd little increase in the electric bill, but whatever.
January: You would think I got Jay Gatsby's electric bill by mistake. Son of a bitch is twice what it was this time last year.

That doesn’t add up. What did the HVAC seller have to say about that?

Epignosis wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 9:14 pm

G-Man wrote: ↑Sun Jan 24, 2021 1:37 pm

Epignosis wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 5:15 pm October: Spend a fortune installing a brand new top-of-the-line, high efficiency HVAC system.
November: Install new insulation.
December: Odd little increase in the electric bill, but whatever.
January: You would think I got Jay Gatsby's electric bill by mistake. Son of a bitch is twice what it was this time last year.

That doesn’t add up. What did the HVAC seller have to say about that?

They'll be here bright and early tomorrow morning.

What was the verdict?

Well hopefully the power company does the right thing. I don’t know how utilities are set up in NC, but here in PA they would probably fight you on it for three months before cutting you a break.

Four school days into the new school year and my wife has Covid again. This is the third time she's caught it.