The Russians are Coming & other gems from my week

First off two posts within a couple of days of each other -- you guys should be proud. LOL.

Typically my weeks are pretty cookie-cutter. I'm the type of person who needs structure to accomplish some of the life changes I'm trying to make and this week there have been some interesting deviations to my normal day. Some bad, some funny, and others that I'm pretty excited about.

First off I have finally added in some exercise to my life. I hate exercising, with the exception of swimming, which I love but I haven't had access to a pool in years. So I bought an old Tao Bao VHS tape for 2 bucks on Amazon because I know me and I didn't want to buy a 15.00 DVD just to have it become another dust collector. So I finally did it for the first time on Sunday and it was a litte rough, but then when I did it again on Tuesday I actually felt pretty good. So hopefully I can commit to doing the tape every other day to start out with and hopefully work up to everyday. I have to take change in little increments and I've discovered that if I do that it's easier for me to work it into my regular routine.

I guess it helped too, because I pushed passed the 15 lbs. mark this week which I was pretty excited about. So I'm still trucking along and have a long way to go, but I'm trying to be proud of what I've done so far. I'm not very good at taking compliments from other people or feeling proud about something I've done because I feel like it's just what I need or am supposed to do so it doesn't really deserve recognition, but my Weight Watchers leader is trying to encourage me to be proud.

Work has been...colorful this week. First off, I'm the returns supervisor in our market and summer is a really heavy time for returns. We have 18 stores spread across the state and all of them ship their defective product back here to me -- I am the returns departments -- and my little cubicle is drowning in product right now. So it's been a little stressful trying to get done my other responsibilities (because in a small office you never just have one job) while trying to stay on top of the defectives.

To make matters worse and my progress even slower our system is antiquated to say the least and when the home office is doing maintenance it can take up to 15 minutes for a page to load -- really not good when a customer calls with an issue that needs to be researched, which inevitably happens when the system is down. Figures, right?

Monday was particularly odd, because it seemed to be the "customers calling with weird issues day" and the sales reps were slammed up front, so we in the back had to answer the phones. One of the handicaps of answering the phone and it being a customer, is the fact that we back here have very minimum knowledge of all the different services so we can't help them as well as they want to be and it just leaves everyone frustrated.

Then on top of all of us answering phones all day, we all started getting these security warnings of a trojan horse in our system and apparently a hacker in Russia was trying to get in. Why a hacker would choose our rinky-dink little system to hack -- I don't know. One would think if he was really good, he'd go after a bigger company or at the very least corporate Verizon and not us. But oh well, our systems guru got it fixed.

Of course a week at work would not be complete with back room drama. One of the inventory guys picked up one of my other co-worker's keys, which she had left by the kitchen sink. So he thought it would be funny to hide them from her as a joke. I don't know why he thought this since she can't stand him and he knows this, but he did. Well he left the office before her and never gave her her keys. So her keys were locked in his office and anyone else that would have a key was gone. She was livid and I'm pretty sure is plotting her revenge.

But he always does crap like that. He's a 27 year old man with the maturity level of a thirteen year old boy and a laugh that makes you wonder whether or not he owns a white panel van. He also does the minimal amount of work possible, so any prank he pulls on any of us is not going to go over well because we all know he has better things to do.

But hey the weeks almost over and I have fun things to do this weekend. I'm going to see one of my favorite bands, Hoots and Hellmouth Friday with my friend Emaleigh. I'm her "plus one." The guys in the band got her on the guest list, so she's giving her extra slot to me. If I can figure out how to, I'll post a couple YouTube videos of their shows -- they're amazing.

Then Saturday I'm visiting with my mom's family for our July b-day gathering (my mom being one of them) and hopefully they will have good ground turkey this time because I'm sick of chicken. They're a burgers and hot dogs sort of family, but me being the obtuse black sheep that I am, I choose a couple of years ago to stop eating beef and pork.

I'm mainly looking forward to seeing my paw-paw. I guess since the death of my dad's dad I realized I really need to put forth the effort more to see my maternal grandfather, who was as much like a "daddy" to me as he was a grandfather. I love the man dearly.

Hopefully, work-wise, next week will be a little less weird, but of course we're getting close to commission time again which means a whole new set of issues pre-packaged for us.