Bring your kid to work….Never June 24, 2010

I was just in the ladies room and in popped a little girl, around 10 years old.   Where did she come from?  Well probably she was a guest at the retirement party for C that everyone but my department was invited to (outcasts!). 

Kids in the workplace is a pet peeve of mine.  This is something that I had never experienced until I came to work here.  People bring their kids in all the time.  And I don’t mean the occasional spouse showing up with the kids for lunch.  I mean they just show up and hang out.  For hours.  I can’t count how many times a screaming 3 year old has come running by my office.  How many times I’ve listened to someone’s infant cry during work hours.  A couple of weeks ago, someone couldn’t get a babysitter, so she just brought her child to work all day.  No, we don’t have on-site day care.  No, we don’t work at a toy company or anything related to children.  Why do kids even want to come here?  I don’t even want to come here and they are paying me.

My mom and I were discussing kids the other day.  Specifically, how people who are parents now seem to never want to leave their kids.  On this day we were at a charity walk with literally 70,000 other people.  It was 95 degrees and very humid.  Basically your normal summer day in the midwest.  But in the midst of this, many small children and babies.  I’m not a parent or a doctor, but I can’t imagine this is the proper weather or conditions to bring your infants outside for hours.  I don’t even make Sadie take walks outside in this weather.  Plus, you’d think people would be worried that they would lose their kids in a crowd this size. 

So, why not just leave them at home?  Are babysitters that hard to come by?  It seems like when we were little, our moms would leave us with the grandparents for these kinds of occasions.  Or you know, our dads.  I was just talking to a co-worker about this.  She was trying to plan a girls weekend with some friends, but one refuses to leave her daughter, with her own husband.  Seriously?  This leads me to another pet peeve, which is when I hear women say that the father of their children is “babysitting.”  I don’t think it is babysitting if it is your own kids.  I’m pretty sure that’s just parenting.

Of course, I’m no expert.

In completely unrelated news….yesterday I got my sandals from GoJane.  The photos on their website did not do them justice.  They are so incredibly adorable and I have gotten many compliments on my silver sandals today.

I’ll be gone the next few days on a girls weekend to Music City, aka Nashville.  Flood waters do not scare us!  Happy weekend, everyone.

Toaster Wars June 18, 2010

Put this in the category of ‘Behaviors I don’t understand’ – There is this lady that I work with, I’ll call her Jill.  Jill is nice enough, I guess.  Jill is in her sixties and has been here for like 30 years.  That alone is something I can’t understand.  Anyway, every morning I go to toast my blueberry bagel and almost every morning, Jill is there at the same time as me.  Not beating Jill to the toaster sucks and here is why and what I don’t understand.  Jill toasts her bagel every morning on the low setting on the toaster…2 on a scale of 1 to 8.  Then when it pops up, Jill complains about how untoasted her bagel is, and puts it back in the toaster.  This repeats 2 – 3 times.  Every morning.  Someone once asked her why she didn’t just set the toaster at a 3 or 4, and she said that was too high.  Someone please explain this.

I can’t understand this logic.  Then again, this is the same lady who still smokes even after her husband died of cancer, and still goes to tanning beds even after two bouts of skin cancer.  So clearly her logic is skewed.  And by the way, how about adding something in health care reform that prohibits insurance companies from having to pay out to people who get skin cancer twice and continue to go to tanning beds.  I mean, that just seems rather obvious to me.  Also, this is a lady who has something like five weeks of vacation a year, and does not use it.  On purpose.  She chooses to go to work more than she has to in a year.  Unbelievable.

I hate having to use the kitchen facilities in the morning.  I am not a morning person and I hate how everyone else seems to be in such a great mood before they have had their coffee.  They feel the need to make small talk.  What I really dislike are the Decaf People.  These are the people who voluntarily go without caffeine and are quite smug about it.  They are so much healthier and don’t need caffeine to wake them up.  Or, caffeine just makes them jittery!  Yes, that’s why you should drink it daily to let your body get used to it.  I mean honestly.

Also, there is another lady who makes herself like a five course breakfast.  She comes over and puts an egg in the microwave, toast in the toaster, cuts up some fruit, and then leaves it all to cook while she goes back to her desk.  Inevitably, I am the next person who happens to walk up to toast my bagel.  So, I have to wait for her to come back to retrieve her multi-course breakfast.  People tend to act like the kitchen at work is their kitchen at home.  They leave their food in the microwave, or leave their dirty dishes in the sink.  It’s weird.

In other news, I am finishing Week 4 of ’8 Weeks to Train for Your First 5K’ today.  I will be running 15 minutes/walk 1 minute, twice.  Yay me!