Post by Toronto Maple Leafs on Feb 20, 2021 10:39:54 GMT -5
I put a Too Long, Didn't Read at the bottom, feel free to scroll lol
Since December, I have been essentially working 2 full-time jobs. My regular job (Industrial Recruitment) where I basically find, interview, train and track the certifications of people that can do skilled labour and confined space attending and rescuing on mine properties, as well as general labourers who help out companies with short-term construction work and things like that.
The second job is the one I do for my boss. This is scheduling the Skilled Labourers to work on mine properties. So, if you're not familiar with the mining sector, there is the work that happens in the mine itself (the literal mining for the property they are there to collect, processing, etc.) and then there's the work where people are there cleaning everything, shoveling, using industrial vacuum trucks with giant hoses to clean out the machines that process what is mined, and clear out acid tanks and shoveling materials back around giant conveyor belts, etc. etc. That isn't really a thing that the mine itself hires people to do when it's a large operation. They get a contractor to come in and do all that work so the mine can focus on the extraction and processing of the good they are collecting.
This is a 24/7 job where basically if the mine does a specific task, I sometimes get as much as 24-30 hours notice, and sometimes as little as 2 hours notice that a project is happening and how many people they need. I then call and schedule those people, so I basically live and work 24/7 on-call.
Then we hit another lockdown in Ontario. This had me doing some work from home, and this is where things shift on my productivity with the site, because it is the most annoying thing lol
Basically, for a reason I cannot quit figure out yet and likely will never figure out, when I am at work and I log into the program and create players and process lines and set captains and all that jazz, the UHS website flies. And I mean flies. You click, it opens, you save the lines, it saves immediately, all that stuff. The only thing that actually takes some time is when I queue the games up to actually sim. That usually takes between 3-5 minutes per "day" simmed, then I copy and paste all the data over and post it here.
That is not what it does when I'm at home. So my working from home routine was: in the office Tuesday to sometimes Thursday, and working from home Friday to Monday. This was sort of cool for my wife and kid, but also not because my phone explodes almost every 5-10 minutes, calls, texts, emails, etc. And not all of them are warranted which makes it a little bit more annoying than it already is, to a degree.
When I am at home, the system is insanely slow. For some reason, my internet here, despite being 150 down/10 up, is very, very slow for ONLY the UHS site program. I've troubleshooted it to death and given up. It doesn't matter if I access it on my desktop or my work laptop, no matter what it. is. painfully. slow. Everything I click is a 20-30 second wait.
Setting rosters and lines and searching players and editing and creating them at an almost instant opening rate is time consuming but quickly productive. Doing this and waiting 15-30 seconds a pop makes it almost impossible to do. So that limited my ability to do the site stuff in the system like create the new 50-70 players, assign them to their teams, assign the CHL players to their new NHL teams, edit each CHL player to change their draft year in their name to their rating, open each team's roster, set their lines, assign awards, etc. literally every single thing there is 1 click to get to the thing, 1 click to set the thing, 1 click to return to do another task. Just getting to the things I want to do for each individual thing is at least 1 minute to do when I do it at home.
This week at work was supposed to be quiet. It was supposed to be my regular stuff to deal with, plus a little extra stress that is always to be expected with any job, but it was not supposed to explode. It did. I was asked to help out another department with a sudden burst of recruiting a combined total of 52 people to help in different roles regarding data entry for the City in distributing the Covid vaccinations.
So my plan to have everything rolling for Season 10 for Wednesday and Thursday, turned into probably Monday. I got up and dealt with my regular morning issues I always deal with around 5:30AM on both those days, and I stayed at the office to help them with this project until 7PM on Wednesday and 8PM on Thursday.
The added kicker for Thursday, is that after I successfully recruited 28 people for a "team" target of 36, and scheduled them all in 4 separate 90 minute training sessions for the City for Friday, one of those candidates contacted me to inform me that the city emailed all 36 of those candidates to show up to the training "whenever they want." So at midnight Thursday, my phone started blowing up with calls and text messages from all of those people wondering what the hell was going on. I got that resolved by about 1:30AM on Friday morning.
Then a strange thing happens. While at work Thursday night, my colleague made me a mixed drink. I was wrapping up sending out the text messages of where and when to be for the Friday training and thought this was a kind gesture. The drink was terribly pulpy and sweet, and I debated drinking it, but basically talked myself into it because it was a nice gesture by an upper-management woman. So I finished that gritty, pulpy drink.
Friday at noon, that same colleague calls me and asks me how I am feeling. It turns out that every week, she gets a food box delivery to our office and she stores some of it in the work freezer. On Thursday night while I was wrapping up this spur of the moment recruitment drive for administrative workers, she was participating in a parent-drink-night zoom call thing fundraiser through the school. She made one of those drinks by using ice from the work fridge/freezer, didn't like the overwhelming pulp taste from the grapefruit, and gave it to me.
Then on Friday, she put water in her water bottle and added ice from the fridge/freezer and an hour later, after the ice melted a bit, she took a sip and spit it out. It had the same gritty, pulpy texture in her water. Turns out, she is a lunatic person that thought using the "ice" they send out in the food box is something you can do. I will never understand why she felt that way.
I assumed when you're late at the office, and a colleague makes you a drink, it's probably ok and trustworthy. Apparently, your 40 year old colleague can make insane decisions like feeding you a possibly toxic product.
Queue Mike frantically finding out what the fuck he consumed. Tried figuring out the product. Tried getting a hold of Poison Control. On hold for 20 minutes. First finding on google reveals "if ingested, seek medical emergency services immediately." I tried to stay calm and let my wife know I am on my way to the hospital. Stay on hold with poison control. Try and determine if I "feel" any weirder at all. The works.
Exhausted. Frustrated. And Possibly Poisoned.
I head out on the way to the hospital and poison control finally gets back to me to let me know that the chemical is called Sodium Polyacrylate. It is non-toxic, but shouldn't be ingested. This product has the ability of absorbing 100 to 1000x its own size in water. It is mixed in with water and frozen and packed and shipped with food products to keep them at the appropriate temperature longer. And my colleague thought this was "real ice."
Turns out, I am fine. My work now has not stopped making fun of me for taking precautionary measures for believing there was a chance I was legitimately poisoned. We've nicknamed the cocktail she gave me "Pulp Fiction" because it was pulpy, and my potential poison turned out to be fictitious.
I get home and learn from my wife that this chemical is the same ingredient they use in diapers to absorb urine. She shows me a video of how effective it is. Then she told me she made me a snack with my 20 month old baby as a surprise for a crazy day. Then she threw and hit me in the face with my snack. A diaper.
So needless to say, I am fine. I am laughing it all off, because in retrospect it's kind of funny, but it's also kind of not. I didn't think I would have to exercise caution over a drink at work. The whole thing is ridiculous, and is very fitting for basically my entire life. Mike does a thing - and here is how it goes wrong.
Anyways, all that to say, the lockdown is now over. Things are returning to normal, slowly, and Monday I should finally be able to get the time back that allows me to do my job, field resumes and text messages while I slowly assemble the lines and get the players all fixed up. And then we can start simming again.
I think this might be in line with one of our longest off-seasons ever. But I appreciate all of you being so incredibly patient with me and this process, so we can continue to enjoy this retro site and see where things take us as we wrap up our tenth season, and our first decade, and the close of the 20th century for the 1999-2000 season.
TL;DR - Mike's computer is slow at home and fast at work, his work is busy, he helped his colleagues and they unintentionally accidentally non-poisoned him/made him eat a diaper.
Cheers and can't wait to get the party started.
Since December, I have been essentially working 2 full-time jobs. My regular job (Industrial Recruitment) where I basically find, interview, train and track the certifications of people that can do skilled labour and confined space attending and rescuing on mine properties, as well as general labourers who help out companies with short-term construction work and things like that.
The second job is the one I do for my boss. This is scheduling the Skilled Labourers to work on mine properties. So, if you're not familiar with the mining sector, there is the work that happens in the mine itself (the literal mining for the property they are there to collect, processing, etc.) and then there's the work where people are there cleaning everything, shoveling, using industrial vacuum trucks with giant hoses to clean out the machines that process what is mined, and clear out acid tanks and shoveling materials back around giant conveyor belts, etc. etc. That isn't really a thing that the mine itself hires people to do when it's a large operation. They get a contractor to come in and do all that work so the mine can focus on the extraction and processing of the good they are collecting.
This is a 24/7 job where basically if the mine does a specific task, I sometimes get as much as 24-30 hours notice, and sometimes as little as 2 hours notice that a project is happening and how many people they need. I then call and schedule those people, so I basically live and work 24/7 on-call.
Then we hit another lockdown in Ontario. This had me doing some work from home, and this is where things shift on my productivity with the site, because it is the most annoying thing lol
Basically, for a reason I cannot quit figure out yet and likely will never figure out, when I am at work and I log into the program and create players and process lines and set captains and all that jazz, the UHS website flies. And I mean flies. You click, it opens, you save the lines, it saves immediately, all that stuff. The only thing that actually takes some time is when I queue the games up to actually sim. That usually takes between 3-5 minutes per "day" simmed, then I copy and paste all the data over and post it here.
That is not what it does when I'm at home. So my working from home routine was: in the office Tuesday to sometimes Thursday, and working from home Friday to Monday. This was sort of cool for my wife and kid, but also not because my phone explodes almost every 5-10 minutes, calls, texts, emails, etc. And not all of them are warranted which makes it a little bit more annoying than it already is, to a degree.
When I am at home, the system is insanely slow. For some reason, my internet here, despite being 150 down/10 up, is very, very slow for ONLY the UHS site program. I've troubleshooted it to death and given up. It doesn't matter if I access it on my desktop or my work laptop, no matter what it. is. painfully. slow. Everything I click is a 20-30 second wait.
Setting rosters and lines and searching players and editing and creating them at an almost instant opening rate is time consuming but quickly productive. Doing this and waiting 15-30 seconds a pop makes it almost impossible to do. So that limited my ability to do the site stuff in the system like create the new 50-70 players, assign them to their teams, assign the CHL players to their new NHL teams, edit each CHL player to change their draft year in their name to their rating, open each team's roster, set their lines, assign awards, etc. literally every single thing there is 1 click to get to the thing, 1 click to set the thing, 1 click to return to do another task. Just getting to the things I want to do for each individual thing is at least 1 minute to do when I do it at home.
This week at work was supposed to be quiet. It was supposed to be my regular stuff to deal with, plus a little extra stress that is always to be expected with any job, but it was not supposed to explode. It did. I was asked to help out another department with a sudden burst of recruiting a combined total of 52 people to help in different roles regarding data entry for the City in distributing the Covid vaccinations.
So my plan to have everything rolling for Season 10 for Wednesday and Thursday, turned into probably Monday. I got up and dealt with my regular morning issues I always deal with around 5:30AM on both those days, and I stayed at the office to help them with this project until 7PM on Wednesday and 8PM on Thursday.
The added kicker for Thursday, is that after I successfully recruited 28 people for a "team" target of 36, and scheduled them all in 4 separate 90 minute training sessions for the City for Friday, one of those candidates contacted me to inform me that the city emailed all 36 of those candidates to show up to the training "whenever they want." So at midnight Thursday, my phone started blowing up with calls and text messages from all of those people wondering what the hell was going on. I got that resolved by about 1:30AM on Friday morning.
Then a strange thing happens. While at work Thursday night, my colleague made me a mixed drink. I was wrapping up sending out the text messages of where and when to be for the Friday training and thought this was a kind gesture. The drink was terribly pulpy and sweet, and I debated drinking it, but basically talked myself into it because it was a nice gesture by an upper-management woman. So I finished that gritty, pulpy drink.
Friday at noon, that same colleague calls me and asks me how I am feeling. It turns out that every week, she gets a food box delivery to our office and she stores some of it in the work freezer. On Thursday night while I was wrapping up this spur of the moment recruitment drive for administrative workers, she was participating in a parent-drink-night zoom call thing fundraiser through the school. She made one of those drinks by using ice from the work fridge/freezer, didn't like the overwhelming pulp taste from the grapefruit, and gave it to me.
Then on Friday, she put water in her water bottle and added ice from the fridge/freezer and an hour later, after the ice melted a bit, she took a sip and spit it out. It had the same gritty, pulpy texture in her water. Turns out, she is a lunatic person that thought using the "ice" they send out in the food box is something you can do. I will never understand why she felt that way.
I assumed when you're late at the office, and a colleague makes you a drink, it's probably ok and trustworthy. Apparently, your 40 year old colleague can make insane decisions like feeding you a possibly toxic product.
Queue Mike frantically finding out what the fuck he consumed. Tried figuring out the product. Tried getting a hold of Poison Control. On hold for 20 minutes. First finding on google reveals "if ingested, seek medical emergency services immediately." I tried to stay calm and let my wife know I am on my way to the hospital. Stay on hold with poison control. Try and determine if I "feel" any weirder at all. The works.
Exhausted. Frustrated. And Possibly Poisoned.
I head out on the way to the hospital and poison control finally gets back to me to let me know that the chemical is called Sodium Polyacrylate. It is non-toxic, but shouldn't be ingested. This product has the ability of absorbing 100 to 1000x its own size in water. It is mixed in with water and frozen and packed and shipped with food products to keep them at the appropriate temperature longer. And my colleague thought this was "real ice."
Turns out, I am fine. My work now has not stopped making fun of me for taking precautionary measures for believing there was a chance I was legitimately poisoned. We've nicknamed the cocktail she gave me "Pulp Fiction" because it was pulpy, and my potential poison turned out to be fictitious.
I get home and learn from my wife that this chemical is the same ingredient they use in diapers to absorb urine. She shows me a video of how effective it is. Then she told me she made me a snack with my 20 month old baby as a surprise for a crazy day. Then she threw and hit me in the face with my snack. A diaper.
So needless to say, I am fine. I am laughing it all off, because in retrospect it's kind of funny, but it's also kind of not. I didn't think I would have to exercise caution over a drink at work. The whole thing is ridiculous, and is very fitting for basically my entire life. Mike does a thing - and here is how it goes wrong.
Anyways, all that to say, the lockdown is now over. Things are returning to normal, slowly, and Monday I should finally be able to get the time back that allows me to do my job, field resumes and text messages while I slowly assemble the lines and get the players all fixed up. And then we can start simming again.
I think this might be in line with one of our longest off-seasons ever. But I appreciate all of you being so incredibly patient with me and this process, so we can continue to enjoy this retro site and see where things take us as we wrap up our tenth season, and our first decade, and the close of the 20th century for the 1999-2000 season.
TL;DR - Mike's computer is slow at home and fast at work, his work is busy, he helped his colleagues and they unintentionally accidentally non-poisoned him/made him eat a diaper.
Cheers and can't wait to get the party started.
