ups and downs (but pretty good all around)
My morning at work has been a little frustrating today. Too many emails coming in from stores with things I need to tend to and thus put off what I already have on my task list. Boo hoo, woe is me! At least I still have a job, and I work in one of the few industries impervious to economic downturn—I mean, until complete and total collapse of society, anyway. People always have to go grocery shopping. Granted, our stores are much more expensive than conventional groceries, so there's that. On the other hand, there are also always people willing to spend way too much for their food. (Side note: organic foods are not artificially inflated in price, contrary to popular belief. It's more like conventional food costs being deflated due to mass production of unhealthy preservatives and the use of pesticides, etc., etc.)
Anyway. Two things to report on today about my day yesterday. First, this time through nothing I did at all because I wasn't even trying to move tracks to my hard drive, my iTunes library just up and disappeared again and I could find no way to fix it; I wound up on Apple Support calls for about two and a half hours, speaking ultimately to about four different people, the fist couple being moved on from, as always, because the issue was too complicated for them, and/or I got transferred to the wrong fucking department. I even wound up getting the call disconnected at one point because they are obsessed with making sure all software is up to date. The woman I was speaking with instructed me to go to Settings on my phone and install the latest update, from 14.1 to 14.2, and then asked if I had any other device I could call her on (uh, no—the only other option would be Shobhit's phone and he was at work). And I am convinced it was because of the software update that the lady suddenly could not hear me, even though I could hear her fine, saying "Hello? Hello? Hello? I can see you are still on the line ... hello?" Then she said she was disconnecting "due to no response" (I was practically screaming trying to respond) and once that happened the phone automatically rebooted to install the update she fucking told me to install. I then even got an email saying Apple Support was trying to contact me and getting voice mail, and guess fucking why? Because my phone was busy installing the god damned software update!
So, once the phone was rebooted, I called Apple Support again, and at least this time I had a case number to point the new person to, even though the notes were not nearly thorough enough. But whatever, this last guy I spoke with was by far the most helpful, finally finding me an iTunes Library version from my files that restored my iTunes up to last Friday, so I actually had minimal changes in iTunes I had to re-do, particularly in terms of updating playlists. He was the only person who thought to do the sort of insurance move of copying the current iTunes Library to a different location before replacing the current location with a restored version. He actually got me far closer to where I really needed to be far faster than any of the three other people I spoke to. I told him that and he seemed to feel pretty good about it.
Furthermore, he sent me an email address I can contact if I run into issues again, so I can get back to him specifically since he had already been working with me on this. No one still has any idea why my attempt to sync to my phone yesterday afternoon suddenly made my entire library disappear out of iTunes (and, as a result, out of my phone as well), as it was as though iTunes tried to sync using the wrong library. What a pain in the ass. But, I'm back to basically where I want to be again now, so there's that.
The whole thing basically sucked up what little extra time I had yesterday evening, though. I had half an hour then to make myself dinner, so I had a bagel sandwich. And then I watched another digital SIFF advanced screening of a movie, this one kind of disappointing: Come Away, which I gave a B-. It wasn't terrible, and it had some truly subtle charms, but I was also glad I never paid money to watch it.
The viewing of the film took ninety minutes, Shobhit getting home from work right when it finished. I then wrote the review, which was unusually short, barely reaching 500 words as I recall. But, whatever; I had nothing more to say about it.
I think I forgot to mention Shobhit has some kind of ear infection going on. At his request I even accompanied him to the doctor appointment he made for Saturday morning—Dr. Auerbach was unavailable at short notice so we went to a Virginia Mason clinic at University Village which I didn't even know existed. That doctor, who was a very nice young lady, took one look and told him it was a good call to make the appointment. And here I had been all skeptical about his complaints about pain in his ear earlier in the week. In my defense, Shobhit is a hypochondriac like no other person I know, which makes it difficult to trust that something is really wrong when he's complaining about things like this. And the first two days, I could see nothing in his ear—but then by Thursday and Friday, I could see bloody redness, sort of like a midway point between a rash and a bruise, spreading in the skin from the hole in his ear. It was clear then that something was wrong.
The doctor figured it was a burst ear drum. She prescribed antibiotics at first, but at her suggestion Shobhit also made an ENT appointment for this morning, and he came home with ear drops instead. I had to drop four drops into his ear for him right before a work Zoom meeting at 9:30. Apparently it's not a ruptured ear drum after all, and just some kind of infection—hence the ear drops, I suppose?
Shobhit otherwise has both today and tomorrow off of work, so I'll have some quality time with him for a couple of days.
And finally, I just finished with our Tuesday work Zoom Office Lunch Meetup. We talked a lot about the election this week. And also about dogs.
As usual, when I got on the call promptly at noon, only Rebecca was on the call. I really thought Noah was too busy this morning—he missed the biweekly Category Management meeting—but he pleasantly surprised me by joining the lunch call. And then the other usual suspect, Brent, joined, although he had to leave again at 12:30.
So, for the next fifteen minutes or so, I really thought it would just be the four of us in the end. But, then at about 12:45 Adrienne hopped on the call, for the first time from home rather than the office, telling us she's finally starting to work two days a week from home. We got to hear a lot about the odd layout of her house, including the window behind her that only opens up to her daughter's bedroom, which a previous owner built as an add-on without bothering the take out the window. And then, at about 12:57, a new person! Chris P from IT joined the call, telling us he had "five minutes where I don't have to just stare at a screen" (I chose not to mention what he was looking at right then) and we were all pretty delighted to see him. I've exchanged a zillion emails with him since work-from-home started, but this was the first time since March that I actually saw his face.
It kind of put into new perspective how much I miss the whole office. I really look forward to when we can work in the office again.
[posted 1:10 pm]