The only thing on my plate right now is a site for some folks who make child caskets. Very quiet office and pictures of mini coffins in front of me. Mini coffins in *pastel colors*. So what am I focusing on? Finding a nice lace image for the backgrounds, 'cause imagining these suckers actually being used is going to drive me into nuttyville.

I want to be cremated and tossed somewhere nice - no creepy box for me, thanks.

Today may be the day I brain a random co-worker. And on that note, the quote of the day...

When I'm old, I don't want them to say of me, "She's so charming." I want them to say, "Be careful, I think she's armed."
-G. Stoddart

I just got the order to turn one of our client's sites off. I don't know why I enjoy it so much when I have to do things like this - maybe I have a latent god complex. Or maybe it's 'cause they rank as one of our most annoying clients *ever*.

Wow - I've been sitting at this damn desk for too long working on one damn site revamp, and my brain and backside are numb. Even the lovely walk (Spring is *so* here - half the trees don't have all their leaves, but it's hitting 80 degrees.) I took on my lunch break has faded into oblivion. I have this urge to shoot rubber bands at the head of marketing and bb's at the daughter of one of our photographers. (Yeah, bring your kids to work all you want people, but keep them *away* from me! I have too many distractions as it is.) I've never longed for an office before, but if I had an office, I would have a door. That I could close. Today, that is a very nice thought.

It occurs to me that I'm rhyming way too much - this may be another sign of my impending mental collapse.

Something I've noticed about people lately.... they come to me with something that needs to be done (turn a site on/off, fix an item that's "wrong", make minor copy changes, etc....) but don't have all the info I'll need in order to effect the change. Examples: What is the actual document name of the page with the error producing product, what *specific* domain am I supposed to be screwing with (when one client has multiple domains, telling me to turn off/on "two of them" is not very helpful)

When the specific information I need is not provided, and I cannot immediately call to mind the details of the account (we've got over 100 clients and I do not have an eidetic memory - you do the math) I will ask questions. These questions serve two purposes. 1.) Maybe the person with the request really does know what I need, and just doesn't understand that they have to tell me. 2.) Failing number one, maybe the answerers they do provide will jog *my* memory enough that I can complete the request. Both of these things have, at different points, happened.

However, sometimes people just do not like being questioned. The want me to snap my fingers and produce their desired results out of the ether through the magic of technology. After all, don't I work on this stuff every day? What do you mean you can't remember all the domains registered to a client you haven't worked on for three months?

Hey, I'll admit - tact and diplomacy are not my best things. I'll make a stab at being nice and understanding, but if you aren't going to work with me, if you do not at least try to help me do what you want me to do, then I have no use for you, and you can bugger off. I'll attempt to complete your request anyway, and if it's not perfect, then use your brain and give me the correct info to work with. No one is paying me money to think for you.

We have a cheap client (CC). Everybody has had one of these - the kind who disputes every charge and tries to find the cheapest way of doing anything, regardless of quality. CC was out of the country for several months and let his domain and shopping cart account lapse. When he gets home he finds that he can't get to his website, so he calls me asking why it's broken. (Of course, he doesn't mention that he hasn't paid any of his net bills)

Insert half an hour of me checking the server (running fine), his ip address (working), and pinging his domain (working fine). So, unable to figure why the domain itself won't work, I check NSI's Whois database. And lo and behold, the damn domain expired.

Over the course of the next day, CC gets in touch with NSI and gets everything turned back on. (He's got a pretty unique domain name, so no one had snapped it up in the interim.) Then he calls and wants to know if he can avoid dealing with the shopping cart people entirely and just take orders via email.

Hmmm.... you want people to send you their address and credit card info over unsecure email?! His response - "but I've heard that nothing on the net is really secure anyway". Of course, he doesn't even know what a privacy policy is or why he might need/want one. As my brain threatened to explode, I tried to explain that customer trust was very important when dealing with ecommerce. No, nothing is 100% secure, but one still needed to take, erm, basic precautions. But I did give him the price breakdown for a new page with a mail form 'cause, hey - there's only so far you can go to save someone from their own ignorance, and billable work is still billable work.

CC said he'd think about it.

Well, I thought friday was going fine. Work all day, cash paycheck, buy groceries, and relax at the bookstore for an hour. Cool, huh? Then I get home, and there's a message from my boss on the machine. Turns out a quickie addition to a client's main page did not meet with approval, and had to be removed. So at 9:00, I find myself *back* at work, fixing the page. Yeesh.

Die Hard is playing in the background, and I'm thinking that if you put all the snarling bad guys from all the old action movies together in the same room, it still wouldn't be as scary as the world is right now.

Getting a wicked eyestrain headache from too many silos. I should go to the optometrist.

It's 6:00 and I'm still at work. Yeerg. Very much looking foward to the B5 tape waiting for me. Not looking foward to the pile of dishes also waiting for me.

It's snowing again - which I find is damn hypnotic. Must not look at windows..... must work and look productive. Grrr....