meetings, meetings, meetings
Jesus Christ, people! Eric has added two new Zoom meetings to my week, putting my total planned for the week now at seven. Three of those are today alone, so whe it comes to virtual work meetings, I think I'm making both one-day and one-week records. And yes, I know, some people are in these meetings practically all day every day. But I'm not!
Okay, to be fair, one of the three today, while with people who work at the office, is strictly social: the weekly Office Lunch Meetup—which, incidentally, as of next week is moving to Wednesdays for 2021. And at least one of today's two truly work-related meetings has already happened; the Category Management meeting this morning. And realistically, the "Grocery Check-in" Scott scheduled for him and Noah and myself later this afternoon will probably comprise largely of informal catching up as well. So it's not like these things are any kind of true burden for me . . . although they do still cut into time I otherwise could be getting real work done.
Tomorrow is the "All Team Merchandising Meeting," meaning those of us who usually don't have to attend, are wanted on the first of those weekly meetings each month. And then in the afternoon, Eric wants me to walk through Marie in IT one of my regular processes, so she can research how it may get tied in to some new program coming down the pike. It's the same deal for the second meeting with the two of them scheduled for Friday morning, just a different regular process.
And on Thursday we have our next All-Staff Town Hall, this one presumably including any store staff who are able to attend, so we can all officually meet Suzy, our new CEO. I keep wondering if the Board, who hired her, had any idea she'd be sending out these wild emails to all office and store staff with varying font sizes and colors, making it feel like I'm getting emails from Auntie Rose from beyond the grave. (How does Auntie Rose have posthumous information on PCC sales, anyway?) Her style and demeanor—quite informal on all fronts, so far—are a pretty dramatic shift from Cate before her. I rather doubt I'll have developed my own sense of how well she fits at PCC until we're all working at the office again.
God damn, do I hope that happens before the end of this year. In spite of infections worldwide vastly outpacing vaccinations at the moment, I remain hopeful that we'll manage that. How much hopeful I remain over time will probably depend first, before anything else, on what kind of shifts in organization we see, and how quickly, once Biden is finally inaugurated. This country almost certainly won't move on from President Fuckwit in any substantive way until he drops dead, and unfortunately that's not likely for a long time, even if he is in his seventies. (His parents both lived to be in their nineties.)
Anyway! There's not much to tell about last night. Well, except that I thought I was going to be buying a new computer, and when I called Apple's sales department I discovered my computer actually does have the 64-bit processing that people had told me was missing and was the reason Microsoft Office for Mac apps were not working and constantly crashing. That was also two operating systems ago, though, and so I went ahead and downloaded the apps again, and . . . so far so good, actually. I guess I'm just going to need to keep fewer applications open at one time. I just hate having to close and re-open Mac apps so often; they all take ages to close, or especially to open. I should actually time it sometime. But, I have to admit, any given app performs better when others are not also open at the same time. We got off the phone and Shobhit was like, "Is it time for me to gloat?" because he's been harping on my using multiple apps all at once for ages. Oh, shut up!
Incidentally, I keep countless apps open all at once on my work computer and have for ages. It's never caused me any problem. I still don't understand why it's worse on my iMac.
After that call I drove to the office to swap out paperwork, and . . . those fuckers did not have my next stack ready. God damn it, now I have to go back today. If I wait longer, the stack will become too thick for me to get done in one sitting and that screws up my overall workload.
Then we finished out season six of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. One season left! I thought to pull out my Entertainment Weekly book The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time, even though I've had it since it was first published in 1998. I was curious where they ranked this show, which surely was on it, and . . . they ranked it #1! Holy shit.
Then I remembered I still had my 2016 copy of Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest TV Shows. They ranked it at #46.
And now, I've just finished with the aforementioned Office Lunch Meetup on Zoom. By the way? I only just today realized I could pin the app to my taskbar. Duh! I did the same with Microsoft Teams after using that for the Category Management meeting this morning. I had been chatting with Tracy P over Skype for Business and mentioned it to her, and she told me she had been Zooming all this time in a web browser! It was only my mentioning it that made her discover her computer had the app already installed. "This is changing my life!" she said. That cracked me up.
As for today's Zoom Lunch Meetup itself, it was quite fun, and unusually intellectually stimulating conversation. We had six on the call today: Rebecca, Noah, Adreienne, Andrew, Katherine and myself. We talked about all sorts of stuff, but virtually every topic was a deep thing to discuss: gratitude in the time of COVID; what we might do with ourselves after the pandemic; minimalism, materialism, perspectives on comparative wealth, optimism, mental health, and a bunch more. I had a great time and it was the highlight of my day. Hooray!
[posted 1:06 pm]