The Marci Rating System

I went to the dentist this week, which is always An Endeavor. There was a new dentist who looked at my teeth, which is Even More An Endeavor. BUT! It did also include some memorable moments.

1. Dentist asked if I'd ever had ortho. I had no idea what that meant. My utterly blank expression must have clued them in, because they clarified 'like braces.' "Oh," I said. "No." The dentist said, "okay." WHY DID THEY ASK? WHAT DOES 'OKAY' MEAN IN THIS CONTEXT?????????

2. Dentist asked if I used a night guard. I said no. They said I might want to consider it, to reduce clenching my jaw. Out loud, I agreed. Inwardly, all I could think was BOLD OF YOU TO ASSUME I AM CLENCHING MY JAW MOSTLY AT NIGHT, NEW DENTIST.

[Seriously, though, night time: I am sleeping. Calm. Relaxed. I love sleeping! Cozy blankets, no responsibilities. Compare to day time: I am awake. Having experiences like going to the dentist and attending work meetings. Which of these times seems more likely to cause me to clench my jaw?????????]

ANYWAY, the verdict from New Dentist was that my teeth look "pretty stable." Yay, thanks, that's really encouraging, stranger who's never interacted with me ever before, but just stuck their fingers in my mouth without asking for permission!

Yesterday a department director (not mine) sent me a message asking how many times a certain thing happened last year. And I was like: ...

Meanwhile, my brain was all:

*how would I know that?

*what is a tactful way to say 'that thing is managed by your team, so shouldn't they be the ones keeping records on it?'

*I might be able to search my way back through emails and give an estimate?

*but all the emails would have come from your team! you could ask them!

*what in the world do you even need that information for?

Finally I gave as careful an answer as I could, and offered up a [measurable, replicable] search filter for documents (my actual job, lol). I layered it with caveats of low accuracy and non-inclusiveness.

The director: That's exactly what I'm looking for, but only do it if it will take less than ten minutes.

[NOTE: It had already taken considerably more than ten minutes, which could not have been more obvious from the time stamps of the messages we were exchanging.]

In conclusion: I sent the data anyway.

I'm STILL sorting through my experience at the car dealership a couple weeks ago. It was fine? It was WEIRD. Like, you know those stories about people who are driving through the desert and they come across a town that's not on the map, and they stop for gas and coffee, but everything seems slightly off, and later they find out it was a secret military training facility?

Okay, the car dealership wasn't THAT weird, but it DEFINITELY had that same energy. I think part of it is that it's just a Weird Building -- it's a huge building that feels like it's mostly empty space, and you can see a lot of it (the showroom and waiting areas), but you can't see any of the parts where anything is happening (the actual sales offices and the service bays), really. So it feels a lot like nothing is happening, except you know that can't be right, so that means something is happening IN SECRET.

Also, I swear EVERY song that played was popular when I was in high school. So, to recap:

*secrets

*time warp

*Very Clean Bathrooms

I just don't know what to make of it.

Last November, I purchased a car. From a car dealership. Genuinely still boggled that I managed it, but it turns out that car dealerships are extremely motivated to make sales happen, so after five years of *thinking* about buying a new car, once I actually decided to do it, the dealership pushed me through the rest of the steps.

(PS: I was not unwilling to be pushed. It was fine. The salesperson had some cute dog pictures to share.)

But now I face my next DOING THINGS challenge: the maintenance visit. I mostly want to do it, because 1) I'm supposed to get two free visits a year for the first two years and I like free things; and 2) I guess maintenance is important. I know nothing about cars except that I have one, and that for some reason, you're allowed to just drive these massive safety hazards around with barely any training and very little supervision.

Which is to say, cars make me nervous. Doing new things ALSO makes me nervous. But this will be a NEW EXPERIENCE, and once it's done, I'll have had it, and then I'll know if I ever want to do it again!

Last year at some point, I picked up a small set of shelves from the side of the road. (As one does, in this town -- people just put stuff out for free, usually with a sign that says 'free' and sometimes not, which, yes, does occasionally lead to issues.)

ANYWAY the point is that I put this lil' unit in a corner where I didn't see the whole thing at once -- it was next to the bed and also a storage bench, and I could usually only see the top half. Never noticed anything odd about it. Very sturdy. Excellent shelves. Can hold the weight of the cat easily, which was pretty much the reason I picked them up.

And this weekend I did the bi-annual 'let's move the furniture around' party, which 1) entertains me; and 2) gives me a chance to move the bed either under the windows (summer) or against the wall away from the windows (winter). Mostly the entertainment, honestly. The lil' shelves moved to a different wall.

This morning I woke up, looked across the room at the shelves, and immediately thought 'oh, they're crooked.' They've got a pretty serious lean going on! As far as I can tell (lol with my 10,000% lack of structural engineering abilities) they are indeed very sturdy, just kind of, uh, angled.

Since I'm pretty sure I can figure out how to access the level app on my phone, I'm going to check if the shelves are level. They LOOK level to me. Anyway, love the things that suddenly seem SO obvious in the morning light!

One of the 'new and improved' performance review metrics that was rolled out this year was 're-grading' every employee.

(IDK, I guess they put all of us in grades (aka tiers, aka they're absolutely just re-inventing the top-down hierarchy) before, but then it was a SECRET. Now they've changed how many grades there are, and it's NOT SECRET.)

Not EXACTLY secret, anyway. I was told my grade during my annual review, and after some pushing (I tried to be tactful? I am not good at it, though), I was provided a 'general overview' of the tiers. Then my boss asked if I had any questions about it.

(I did, obviously. My job title was LITERALLY listed in the grade above the one I was given. But the company had already put out a video that was VERY CLEAR in saying 'if you think you've been graded wrong, you weren't' in almost those exact words, so I definitely wasn't going to ask about THAT.)

So instead I asked, as delicately and tactfully as I could (still not very, unfortunately), if my boss was allowed to tell me if everyone on the team was the same grade. (There are only three of us.) Cue the loooooooooooooooong pause. The answer was immediately obvious. To my boss' credit, they did eventually say yes, they could tell me, and no, the rest of the team was graded differently.

IN CONCLUSION: I no longer need to feel guilty any time I feel like my coworkers have been asked to do things I haven't! (I mean, I often do still feel guilty, but at least now I can tell myself to chill out about it.) Obviously I still feel salty about this entire situation, but I'm trying very hard to see the upsides, which even I can admit are numerous.

Tooth: repaired!

Audiobook: provided more than adequate distraction!

Dentist office employees: super friendly, but absolutely ZERO idea of what non-dentist-office people know about teeth!

MY TWO FAVORITE EXAMPLES FROM YESTERDAY:

*Early in the visit, one of the employees was attempting to clarify which tooth had lost the filling. Them: "Is it the number 30?" Me: "...???" I DON'T KNOW MY TEETH BY NUMBERS, OKAY? (We both had a laugh about this afterwards; the employee confirmed it had indeed been a very long Monday at the office.)

*On the opposite end of the spectrum, the person who injected the anesthetic shots took great care to explain that I "might experience some soreness or tightness in my jaw," and that's "totally normal." I nodded along, but I was definitely thinking 'yes, I've been to the dentist before. I've been to THIS dentist before. I've literally had THIS TOOTH filled before. JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO. I'm ABSOLUTELY aware of the jaw soreness issue.'

I'm genuinely not sure which one was more funny, but they were both great. And a perfect time to recall the xkcd 'Average Familiarity' comic!

In a day filled with far too many awkward moments, perhaps the MOST AWKWARD (that I'm willing to share on the internet, lol) was when I said I'd been listening to an audiobook on the drive to the office, and this led to a brief exchange about books, and then my boss asked: "Do you like Harry Potter?"

CUE THE AWKWARD PAUSE

My brain had about a dozen thoughts at once, including 'yikes' and 'oh no this conversational minefield just became MUCH MORE DANGEROUS' and also 'is this a test?' because I am highly suspicious of any questions I'm asked at work.

I made an attempt to equivocate my way around the question until I could land on the relatively safe sub-topic of, 'I thought it was great how the books encouraged so many kids to get into reading.' And then we had a meeting to start and the conversation didn't continue. PHEW.

Fantastic out of context gem from a work meeting with my boss yesterday:

"You won't have any goals for this year."

DAMN, TRUER WORDS!

(The context is that the company is changing the system used for annual performance evaluations, and in the new system, only managers will have goals "in the system," because those goals will be linked to their bonus. Somehow. Corporate math is a mystery to me. The rest of us minions will only have goals "outside the system," in one of the other half-dozen "systems" the company uses for such things.)

(This is loosely related to the new "performance matrix," which is a hilarious version of a x-y axis graph, in which -- I wish I was joking -- the aim/expectation for minions is to be at zero. This is because our jobs -- according to the matrix -- don't have much potential to add measurable value to the company's bottom line [the y axis], nor are we able to significantly influence the company's culture [the x axis]. I genuinely could not decide whether to laugh or cry during the presentation of this novel new measurement system. WHAT. EVEN.)

(I mean, it's definitely so that they can classify nearly every employee as mediocre, thus justifying the avoidance of any pay raises. It's also hilarious.)

There's a weekly meeting on Thursdays from 9:30 am to 10 am -- a VERY REASONABLE amount of time for a meeting to run. Yesterday afternoon, I was suddenly scheduled into a SECOND morning meeting that's scheduled from 10 to 11 am. UNACCEPTABLE.

Do they not realize that the 10-11 am hour is when I make my coffee??? When I check the drought monitor for the Thursday update? These are ESSENTIAL parts of my Thursday experience!

Mostly I'm cranky because the meeting has the word "training" in the title, and there are only two other attendees. One of them started on Monday, so presumably they're not the one leading the training. Which means it's either being led by the third attendee (who has a very important title but has almost nothing to do with the process), or it's supposed to be being led by me, and no one told me. WHY IS WORK LIKE THIS???