What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Instead of sending me an email saying my statement is available, how about you just email me the effing statement and save me half a dozen clicks, a password entry, and hunting around your site looking for my statement. I know you’re trying to drive traffic to your craptastic site so you can generate more ad revenue, but you’re using a really douchy and inconvenient method of making that happen… and that virtually guarantees that I won’t even consider buying whatever your marketing geniuses are trying to sell. Sure, the email notice is better than paper, but just barely.

2. The Cloud. About a year ago, we suffered through a veritable avalanche of reminders “Make Sure to back up your C: drive to the cloud.” This week we’re suffering from a flood of equal and opposite reminders to go clean up the files we’ve stored in the cloud, it’s taking up too much space on the server. Sigh. Yes, networked storage costs money, but its not that much money. And really, being able to revive a document you worked on three years ago that’s suddenly relevant again is pretty much priceless.

3. Dogs. Most of the time, dogs are perfectly happy leading their lives of sleeping, eating, going outside, and repeating ad infinitum until the end of days. Every now and then, though, they decide to change things up… for absolutely no apparent reason. Or maybe it’s just me who can’t figure out why a dog would come into the kitchen after spending half an hour outside, grin at you (and yes, I’m quite sure she grinned), and drop an enormous deuce on the floor. I love these dogs like most people love their kids… but sometimes I’m amazed that anyone puts up with having the little heathens living in their home.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Sequestration. Some are hailing the alleged reduction in furlough days from 22 to 14 as “great” news for Defense employees. While I agree that it is news, that’s pretty much where I’m going to have to stop. It sounds a bit to me like the Pentagon is set to announce the good news that its civilian employees still have a sucking chest wound, but it was delivered form a .40 round instead of from a .45. Neither one of those events would be welcomed as a “good news” story by most people. I guess when it comes to getting screwed with your pants on, I can’t differentiate by degrees of badness.

2. Tortoise Poop. George has been part of the menagerie for about three months now. He’s been a great, non-obtrusive addition who seems to enjoy spending most days alternately sleeping in his flower pot, sitting under his sunlamp, or grazing on mixed greens. The only problem I’ve encountered so far is that tortoise poo reeks – and I don’t mean it’s a little smelly. Think more like condensed cow manure being deposited in your living room. It’s not awful if you are home and can get to it right away, but if you happen to be at work and it festers under the heat lamp all day, well, then God help you. Yankee Candle doesn’t have enough wax to cover that shit up.

3. What is Dead May Never Die. With apologies to House Greyjoy, they ain’t got nothing on the bureaucracy. Surely one of the most agitating features of work is seeing the project that was supposed to be dead and gone three months ago, that you buried, purified by fire, and hoped to never see again, rising from the ashes to again steal time and attention away from other things you’re trying to get finished. No matter how thoroughly an idea has been debunked, disproved, and derided, just wait a while and it’s sure to come back to you. Like the murderer in a horror movie, just when you think it’s long gone, it will rise again to claim at least one more victim.

Eww… Ewwww… EWWWWWW…

There are some things that you’re never really prepared to handle. It never really occurred to me that dogs eat poo, but based on a quick Google search of the topic, it’s very apparent that they do. I’m sure that’s a behavior that can be adjusted with some serious training. If Maggie were just eating off the ground, it would be bad enough but she has taken to following poor Winston around like he was a warm, furry, four legged soft serve machine. And yes, that’s exactly the mental image I was trying to get across. I’ve been disturbed by it all day so you might as well be too!

Awe… shit….

I was thrilled this afternoon when I got to the house and found no poo in the breakfast nook where I have been keeping Maggie since she got here. Definitely some pee, but I can totally live with that on the linoleum for a few weeks right? All was right with the world and I put my little angles out and headed back to the bedroom to change before cleaning up the kitchen. That’s when I saw it… the giant pile of poo in the middle of the living room floor. So not only did she get over the gate once, but she climbed back over it and was sitting happily back in the kitchen when I got to the house. Knowing that Maggie is an escape artist, I suppose it was inevitable that she would find her way over the larger gate in the kitchen just as she had found her way over the last one. I had hoped it would take her more than two days, though. I know shit happens, but I would really rather it happen on tile or linoleum. So for tomorrow, we go to Plan B. Now I just need to figure out what that actually is…