The Marci Rating System

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???

Usually I do my grocery store trip on Sundays. This week I did the Sunday trip, and then -- on Tuesday -- discovered that I did not, in fact, have another box of tissues tucked away in the cupboard under the sink. Since this is a particularly sniffly time of year for me, tissues are kind of an important thing to have available. At the moment of this discovery, SEVERAL very logical and common-sense actions would have made sense:

*go to a store and buy tissues
*order tissues online and have them delivered
*ask starandrea if they had any tissues

I did NONE of these things!

NO, I thought to myself. I CAN DO THIS MY WAY. I often tuck tissues in my sweatshirt and coat pockets during the winter season, so I knew FOR SURE there were some around. (Luckily, this FOR SURE was more accurate than my prediction that I still had another box of tissues under the sink.) ALSO I was PRETTY SURE there were those little pocket packs of tissues stashed in multiple backpacks, travel kits, etc.

ANYWAY it is now Saturday and I have not yet run out of tissues (again). Just 24-ish more hours to go until my weekly shopping trip! HECK YEAH I GOT THIS.

(Note: there was absolutely NO REASON for me to do this, except that it's the sort of low-stakes challenge that can be fun and silly and why not do it, really?)

This week it suddenly struck me that in 2025, it will be the same number of years from 2000 as 1975 was. (Then I had to sit down for a while and do some deep breathing.)

I was born in the 1980s, and the 70s always seemed like ancient history to me. The idea that people born in the 2000s (who are in their 20s now, what?!?!?) feel that way about the 90s is absolutely wild. Knowing that we grew up without home computers, cell phones, or the internet is astonishing even to me, and I was there!

What amazements will the next 25 years bring???

*In happy news, I am well-stocked with coffee and chocolate, two things I am very much looking forward to consuming today.

*In less fantastic news, I'm battling with a sense of 'I'm falling apart and falling behind in every way.' That this feeling is objectively untrue does not seem to make it less unpleasant to experience.

*Current word count: help, I can't do math. the goal is 23,333 today, and I hit yesterday's goal of 21667, I think, so... somewhere between those two? idk there are now three files and that's so many numbers

*A sentence I wrote today: "Why are you up so early?"

*Sometimes my computer tries to offer helpful suggestions like 'this sentence would be more grammatically correct if you took out this word,' and I'm always like 'I think you fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of this exercise.' Sometimes I add more words instead.