Friday, May 27, 2011

Of Ants and toilets...

Work is crazy, and it seems to get crazier on friday's, especially when its a long weekend.

Recently, my office has been under attack by an invading army of ants.  Today they sent their largest wave of troops, but I easily squashed the 8 intruders under my index finger.  I'm sure they are just marching towards the big bag of sugar that a coworker happily stuck on my desk.  Some days I feel like putting a piece of tape on the floor around my desk and putting up a note to tell everyone to quit putting things on my desk!  I swear some people can't have a clean surface without putting something on it and it drives me nuts!  

I've been taking off early from work a lot the last week for doctor's appointments, being sick, needing a little off time and whatever else.  Each time I do that I have to ask my supervisor for permission, which he doesn't really care about, but at one point I email him and asked if it was okay if I worked a full eight hours.  He called me minutes later and asked me, "don't you normally work 8 hours."  I laughed and decided my joke wasn't so funny if I had to explain it too him. But once I explained it, he actually did laugh.

Then after training a guy to be my back up for the summer and finishing up my other duties I was checking email and my other coworker walked into the bathroom.  There is a direct line of view from my desk to the throne and after walking into the bathroom he started looking at the floor and walking funny.  At first I thought he had spotted more ant, keen on taking the throne from us and some of glorious power.  But no, there was water all over the floor.  The toilet's float thingy had malfunctioned and the overflow in the upper tank was too tall, so water was pouring out of the hole where the handle protrudes from.  

He started going nuts.  Grabbed a mop and started fiddling with things, and I think he made it worse.  It reminded me of the first time the toilet got stopped up on DaNae after we got married.  She freaked out and started wiggling the handle and doing something in the upper tank while screaming for my help.  I was asleep in bed and got up long enough to turn off the water to the toilet and then went back to bed, my husbandly duties done for the morning.  

Well, I wasn't asleep, but I hate doing things with toilets, especially public ones.  The valve on this one was funny and I didn't know how to turn off the water, so I just rigged the float on the toilet to shut off the water flow and told him to not use it until maintenance could fix it.  Well maintenance sent a student over to fix it and he just stared at it and said it seemed to work fine.  That wasn't good enough to me.  If the float malfunctioned once it would do it again.  I finally convinced him to talk to his supervisor who swore he would buy us a new tank rig.  

With ants slaughtered, and a promised fix for the toilet, and my eight hours of work completed, I went home and eagerly await the arrival of my sister and her family...I'm looking forward to the weekend despite having to work it.

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