I have work dreams on a fairly regular, if infrequent, basis - mostly when things are especially stressful, or when I'm learning something new that I'm afraid of doing wrong. All of a very similar type, where I am setting up an order that gets massively complicated and messy, or where I need to do important follow-up that I can't get done, or I am editing something that goes horribly wrong (one particularly memorable one, I got all the way to the end of something, sent it out, thought it was fine, and then colourofsaying saw it on the internet and texted me frantically to let me know it was about child molesting). I keep waking up and falling back into it, convinced that if I don't finish it I will be in horrible trouble, and eventually have to talk myself down and convince myself that I cannot affect our workflow with my brain.

Last night I watched Hannibal (which is awesome and I love it and it gives me lots of feelings, the most predominant of which is eeeeeeew) just before I went to bed.

These two things are related. In that I had a work dream/nightmare in which I was setting up an order for an urgent police bulletin about someone eating people.

...I don't think I like that kind of mental crossover.

Bad: Working 2+ hours of overtime doing awful, awful financial tables.

Worse: Doing it twice in one week, because we are short-handed (especially on people senior enough to do tables), and I am a sucker.

Better: It's paid overtime? If I survive this month, my bank balance will appreciate me.

Best: I've got a review and editorial exam next week, and if I pass (which is hopefully likely), I'll be receiving a promotion, with attendant raise. Fingers crossed!

AND THEN THINKGEEK TRIED TO RECRUIT ME.

Like, not even slightly kidding. See, we have them as a client at my office. And I'm used to the kind of coy, oh ho, you're so good at this, you should come work for me instead thing from corporate communications people after I catch them on a particularly good mistake, which is flattering, but, you know, silly and obviously not serious, but this was not that. This was ThinkGeek's PR rep getting my personal company email so he could get in touch and say, hey, I was really impressed with the work you did last week, you caught a mistake very few people would have noticed but that our fanbase would have ripped us a new one over, here's a link to a job opening in our media department if you're interested.

Honestly, if it weren't in Virginia, I would seriously consider putting in my application - it would take some studying to get my html skills up to snuff, but if I'm going to stay in marketing and PR I can't imagine many more awesome places to ply my trade than ThinkGeek. Although if I had an employee discount there I don't think I'd ever see any of my paycheck.

Anyway, the best part of this (aside from the fact that ThinkGeek tried to recruit me omg) is the mistake I caught that actually led to this whole thing. Which was: in a release about their launch of several new Star Wars related products, they misspelled womp rat. And Grand Moff. Which I noticed because a) I am a good and diligent editor and b) I was double-checking all the Star Wars spellings against Wookiepedia, because I know that Star Wars fans are insane. Of course I only knew to bother to do that because c) I am an enormous nerd.

So basically, this is the story of how my obsessive geekiness and kind of embarrassing infatuation with Star Wars got me scouted for a PR job.

So, this happened today:

(context: after we proof-read a press release in my office, we often email a proof to a client, so they can make sure it's set up right, there isn't anything missing, there aren't any changes they need to make, etc. If we do that, we are not allowed, under pain of death and Janine being very scary, to send that release to the media until the client has approved it, either verbally or in writing.)

Client: You didn't send my release out on time! I am very angry!

Me: *checks notes* Your release was on hold because you hadn't approved it. We sent you your proof yesterday, and then we sent you a reminder email last night.

Client: I never got those emails! You are awful!

Me: I can verify the email address we sent them to, the time stamps, and the people who sent them. It should have been an email from *company address* that said in the subject *Your release is ready for approval*

Client:...oh, that? I deleted that, I didn't think it was important.

Me:...well there you go then.

Client: Well why did you send me the email reminder (that I also deleted) so late? You should have called me back immediately when you didn't get my approval! I hate you!

Me:...we process and send out 150-300 releases a day. It is not possible for us to baby-sit every single proof for potential client error. Especially when many of our clients have long approval processes if they have to make changes to a release after it is processed, and don't want us bothering them while they are conferencing with their IR/PR people.

Client: That's stupid! You're stupid! I'm going to tell my account manager this is a stupid company.

Me: FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUU

And then I made the bitchiest, most passive-aggressive trouble note ever on her order, because I do not have time for this kind of bullshit.

Fact #1: I am good at many parts of my job, but I am complete rubbish at sales, something my supervisor has been working with me on for awhile to try to bring my stats up.

Fact #2: Today I made a sales pitch to a client almost exclusively because the press release I was setting up for them was about Cesc Fabregas, and I was hoping I could convince them to send me a picture. For, you know. Improving their media pick-up and ROI. Of course.

It is very hard to imagine a more Monday-ish sort of Monday could exist. It is never a good start to the week when you you convince yourself, in that split-minute between your alarm going off and your brain going on that it is still Sunday and you can go back to sleep.

I didn't overslept, actually, but it was a jarring way to start the day. I barely made my bus, but on the way to work I had a minor obsessive freak-out because I couldn't remember if I'd left the stove on or not, and finally ended up texting my dad and asking him to drop by my apartment and check for me (not an incredible hardship, since his office is two blocks from my complex, but I still felt guilty). We were short-handed and utterly slammed at work, which is usual for a Monday but seemed much worse today, especially since I stayed up too late reading Thor fic and got distracted by immediate copy and only drank half my tea. I stayed ten minutes later than I meant to because I had to completely reformat a document and call a client, and I still felt like a horrible slacker for not staying late since we had so much left in pending (I wouldn't have been much use though, my brain was about to start bleeding through my eyes). While I was putting my bike on the rack on the bus, I got my handlebars stuck on my helmet.

Tomorrow I have to go to the housing office and tell them I've been seeing cockroaches in my apartment (NOT MY DAMN FAULT. I'm a little untidy, but that means I have a few boxes of books still sitting in my room and I sometimes wait two hours before doing the dinner dishes, I'm not that gross! I suspect my upstairs neighbors, or possibly just the horrendously dry weather. Whatever, it's slightly appalling either way). And I have to call the DMV and see if it's even possible for me to get a learner's permit since I'm over 21, or if the idea of a 23-year-old who doesn't know how to drive is so foreign to them that they expect me to just quietly muddle on until I'm ready to take my exam.

But in the meantime, I am at least done with work for the day. I have tofu and delicious homemade ciabatta in my kitchen. I shall eat and watch Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes and plot out the ridiculous Avengers High School!AU that I am never going to write, because it is ridiculous (this is the one where they are all still superheroes, but teenagers, with Feelings, and Issues, and barely controlled super powers, and Black Widow is the scary but insanely hot goth girl and Steve is the star of the baseball team but still a dorky art class kid at heart and Thor has funny feelings about his freaky drama club step-brother Loki and Coulson, much to his chagrin, is the Feeney and sometimes they save the day from supervillains and sometimes they freak out about prom and finals and their fucked up families and sometimes they just punch each other and fail at talking about things. See? RIDICULOUS). And all will be well. Until I am eaten by cockroaches, anyway.

Three Things (The Fucking Chelsea! Edition)

1. Work continues to be work-like. For every vaguely exciting/important release, like Squeenix's new game and Facebook's IPO (I geek out so much over our Squeenix, EA, and Blizzard releases, it is kind of embarrassing), there is the afternoon where I set up ten dividends and a release from a company that makes penis extender devices. The first quarter earnings period officially ended this week, and we've just hired on a load of new editors, so hopefully things will soon be back to normal insane, rather than tear-our-hair-out-and-sob-over-excel-tables insane. On the bright side, I had my 90-day eval on Tuesday, and it was all positive - my stats are all solid, my manager said I'm good at most things and steadily improving on the things I'm not, and I am most definitely certainly not going to be fired in the near future. Also, our operations VP got us all ice cream yesterday.

2. I had my first driving lesson today! It went fairly well, in that I'm not dead and the car's still in one piece. I took a lot of time practicing stopping and starting, and eventually graduated to driving in circles around the parking lot of the Mormon church down the street from my dad's. I even did a few figure-eights, and a bunch of laps weaving in and out of the parking divider. Not terrible progress, considering that the main point of the first lesson was just to get me a little less panicky at the whole idea. I'm currently aiming to have my license and enough saved up for a down payment on a used car by the end of September. It's going to stretch my budget a bit, but if I'm careful (and with the extra money from the raise I'm getting this month), I think it will be okay.

In the meantime, I talked to my manager this week about taking a few minutes off my lunch and leaving a little early at the end of the day so I can make the 7.12 bus instead of having to wait for the 7.50, and he said that was fine. So I've been getting home a lot earlier with a lot less standing around on street corners. I'm also probably going to be buying a bike in the next few days - I'm not going to bike the whole way, because I'd have to go under a kind of sketchy overpass in a heavily traffic-ed area, but being able to bike just from my bus stop would make things a lot more convenient. Helpfully enough, we have a bike shed in the back parking lot of our office, and my HR guy said he could get me the forms I need to be reimbursed the cost of bike commuting (which will just about cover the cost of the new bike). This is all working out much smoother than last week's freak-out would suggest.

3. Seriously, guys, FUCKING CHELSEA. Who the fuck did John Terry have to sell his soul to (assuming he had a soul in the first place, which seems doubtful...) to get that result? I am so bitter and heart-broken right now, I barely have words to describe it. EXCEPT THAT BASTI'S SADFACE IS THE SADDEST FACE THERE IS.

In the last two days, I've edited press releases for Aon (Manchester United's shirt sponsor), Universal Studios, and a company that does tech R&D based on psychic remote viewing. The remote viewing people had pictures of the secret alien Mayan sea lab they discovered in the Baltic sea. I had to call my boss over so I could ask her, look, I know this is [our cheap no-touch internet product] and they are all crazy, but do we have an actual bar of Too Crazy For The Internet?

As it turns out, we don't. As long as the Mayan alien psychics aren't engaging in pornography or online gambling or threatening litigation, there is no such thing as too crazy for the internet. Such is my job, folks.

Hope everyone is having a nice Easter/Passover weekend. Not my holidays, and family doesn't really do easter, so we don't have any big plans. I intend to spend it dealing with apartment stuff (getting electric and cable set up, and possibly buying a coffee table), playing the SWTOR free trial, and waiting to get our running water back. I may even watch some football. I might have heard about Arsenal playing a game this weekend, some team from Manchester, I don't know, doesn't sound like that big a deal.

Today I was officially ordered by my boss to work less hard. My whole team was - apparently we are like ten times more efficient at processing copy than anyone else on the floor? Which is a good thing, but Manager J doesn't want us to take on too much and get overwhelmed, so this afternoon she instituted a team-wide policy that we reduce our workload a bit and start taking a couple of minutes to breathe between releases. And opened a private chat with me and the other new hire so she could remind us that seriously, we are still trainees, we shouldn't feel like we have to do ALL THE WORK just because there are releases sitting in the queue. Also, I get two 15 minutes breaks a day? NO ONE TOLD ME THAT WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THAT.

So, I shall now feel totally guilt-free in taking a mid-morning snack break and pausing to check football scores during my shift, because I am just doing as I was told.

Fun, fun, weekend this week. My grandma was in California visiting my aunt and uncle for her birthday a couple of weeks ago, so we had a belated birthday party for her with my aunt and our roommate and my dad's girlfriend. Roommate and girlfriend's slightly appalling racism in our after-dinner discussion aside, it was a pleasant dinner, and it was nice to spend time with my grandma, since I haven't had the chance to see her much lately. And after dinner I got to go to a show! hanjuuluver was home for spring break, and I had a couple of tickets for a show my grandma had gotten and then realized she couldn't go to, so the two of us drove into town for ice cream and Russian dancing and folk music. It was pretty awesome, there was acrobatics with swords and heartfelt love songs that somehow still sounded like rousing drinking songs and one extremely homoerotic dance-off between two groups of sailors on rival ships.

With that to start the week off, and my gaming group breaking into an art museum to look forward to, even stupid daylight savings time can't make this week quite suck.

Three Things (The OMG Is It Seriously Wednesday? Edition)

1. I am settling into the new job all right so far. I am drowning in training materials. I've lost track of how many webinars I have to watch, along with training videos, quizzes, handouts, wiki articles, conferences with HR - and it will be days yet before I start actually working with the editorial/CS software. People keep reassuring me that everyone is totally overwhelmed at first, and I'm sure I must be walking around all day with that startled-rabbit new-hire look on my face. But it helps that everyone in the office has been super nice and supportive so far. I like my supervisor a lot (and I see her all the time, since we are in pods of shoulder-height cubicles), people have been patient in explaining things when I'm shadowing in editorial, and I'm getting used to the culture on the intra-office chat program. And there are some nice small perks, like the snack desk and the free sodas and TV in the break room (I'm easy to please, apparently). Also, there is a cute butch lesbian with a mohawk in the cubicle block next to me. :)

2. I got my first alumni call from Stanford tonight! Which, you know, is probably not something that warrants excitement, but it was interesting to see what it's like from the other side (much more fun and much less stressful, unsurprisingly). I had planned for a long time to mess with my student caller a little - nothing mean or unreasonable, just making them work for their gift a little and making sure they were following procedure (since I know how the call script is supposed to go). But I couldn't bring myself to do it, I just chatted with my student a little and told her she was really lucky, because I wouldn't have been able to give if I hadn't started work this week. And then at the end she put me on the phone with Awesome Boss R (who was my boss when I was working there last year, and is, as you can guess, pretty awesome) and I got to thank him for acting as a reference and saying nice things about me, and let him know I got the job. All in all, a very happy-making phone call.

3. I have been reading a book on the trial of the Templars this week - an academic text on the actual history, not anything about the wacky conspiracy theories. It is pretty interesting in itself (I am a massive medievalist nerd, and really fascinated by monastic orders), and giving me a lot of ideas for stories I'd like to write. Some of them are more serious/original, like the one about the knight who survived the trials and got sent off to another order with massive PTSD, and is constantly being pestered by people who think the Templars survived (to which his response is an emphatic OMG FUCK YOU NO). But those ideas keep getting replaced by far far sillier ones. Like the Barcelona RPF historical AU where the Nou Camp is a Templar castle and all the boys are knights. (Sensible in that the order was big in Catalonia, not so sensible in that how do you explain the existence of Leo Messi, Dani Alves, and the rest of the SA players?). Or the Dragon Age story that introduces the Cathar heresy into the Maker/Andraste/Chant cosmology, possibly combining it with elements of elven liberation ideology, because why not? Hey, we've already got elven-centric apocrypha and existence of apostates and heretic sects, I think I could find a way to make it work.