I frequently say things about work that are less than wonderful, so let me pay credit where credit is due.

There was a raffle at work this week. They passed out tickets, one to each person, though I have to admit I wasn't overly excited, especially considering that in the past the prizes have been things like $10 Sheetz gift card or a $5 Wal-Mart gift card. Not that I'm complaining about that. Ten dollars for Sheetz is nice. I always put it straight into my gas tank, which gets me about two and a third gallons these days. So it's appreciated, but nothing much to get excited about.

Naturally my approach of generally disinterested apathy resulted in me winning the top prize in the raffle, which I was surprised–nay, shocked–to discover was a digital camera. I was quite grateful, and as you can imagine I was very popular the rest of the day at work, as any fool with a new camera tends to be. So a big plus there for work.

On a slightly more backhanded note, they've been doing some construction at work, completely redoing a large section of the building. On Thursday they put down some sort of lacquer floor and did painting, both in a poorly ventilated area. Try to imagine how the place smelled this morning.

I wasn't feeling great, but didn't get worried until I realized that I was coasting through my work in many places doing it totally wrong without even realizing. I had a case I had to link to an old one as a follow-up, and I ended up linking it to three cases before I finally hit the right one. Once I realize my thought processes are getting scrambled, I start to get worried.

At 12:30 I decided to leave. Everyone else was filling out incident reports for the problems they were having, so I filled one out, and I filled out a number of items on the wrong line so I had to take a second form and start over. It took about ten minutes, and I agreed to check on something else, some work that was done by someone who had gone home already because the situation at work with the fumes was really bad and she's pregnant, and clearly wasn't about to take chances. So I made sure that was done, and by then it was 12:45 and management had decided to send everyone out for an hour, open the place up as much as possible, and see if it helped at all.

I took advantage of the hour to cash my paycheck. I got back in almost exactly an hour–traffic is much heavier at 1PM than 7 PM, if you can believe that–and was told the place was closed for the weekend. Apparently the fumes were even worse. Actually, I can attest to that personally. I actually recoiled ten feet from the open door when I got my first whiff. It was that bad.

So a second thank you to work for giving me an early start on my weekend.

Since I mentioned the camera...

Jillian made a horrific face at me when she saw I had the camera, so I took a picture. She told me several times to delete it. I'm not going to do that, but based on the picture itself and the fact that Jillian is a supervisor and therefore could potentially cause me serious troubles if she was so inclined, not to mention my basic sense of decency, I'm not going to post it here.

On the other hand, I have no problem with posting this picture of Stacey demonstrating great confidence in her photogenic qualities:

That's how most people at work on Wednesday afternoon reacted to me.

I also want to mention that in general management frowns on people wandering around, being out of their seats, or otherwise visiting people in other cubicles. The following picture is of a section where three people should be working, along with one computer that no one sits at anymore. That stated, guess how many of these people are management.

For the record, that horrific white thing in the background is something I've written about elsewhere on the site.

Finally, I took this picture out the side window while driving in traffic near 50 MPH, which probably isn't the smartest thing I've ever done. There are Xes on the road because of a railroad crossing which I'd just passed, with is my excuse for why the picture is slightly crooked. If not for the red flare in the center, it would be pretty much exactly the picture I was trying to get.

I'm a total amateur, but I'll get better.