Been having a heck of a couple weeks lately, nothing overly detrimental (except for one) but a lot of frustrations.
Most of it revolves around things not working like they should. This may get a little long...
It started with me dropping my phone in a pan that was soaking in my kitchen sink while talking to my boss. Ever since then my phone hasn’t been working completely right, sound would be a little off and occasionally people couldn’t hear me but it was mostly functional. Then, after dropping it and getting it soaked I had the case off so the artwork my daughter made me could dry out from the dip.
The next morning, still caseless, I’m doing my stinker tinker time in the bathroom and drop the phone right on the tile floor. I picked the phone up and watched a crack slowly spiderweb across the screen over the next 20 seconds. This happened the day before I was leaving to California and not knowing how much longer my phone would survive in its form and not wanting to risk being stuck somewhere in the Mojave desert with a broken phone I gave in and picked up a new iPhone 11 Pro Max air pod loofa S or whatever it’s called these days. I knew set up would take a while so I started it, got to the point where it just needed to restart with the Apple on the screen so let it sit. Well, it sat, for around 28 hours and never came back to life. Just an Apple.
So I drive to California with my broken phone, thankfully no issues, and end up exchanging the faulty new phone for another new one out in California. New phone works great and silver lining is my photos and video quality should get a bit of an upgrade with this phone.
Ever since my 13 year old lexus broke down coming back from California last year, I’ve been renting cars for the road trip. I get to enterprise to pick up a Camry, but since the location I reserved with just reopened their inventory was low and they didn’t have a Camry or anything remotely similar. I ended up being given a “discounted” Nissan Armada which gets a lovely 16mpg on the highway. So my gas costs for the trip doubled but whatever, time to go see the kiddo.
We get to the hotel around 4pm but they apparently didn’t have any pet rooms ready so we had to sit around the lobby for a while. We were told 10-15 minutes but it ended up being an hour. This was frustrating because if they told me it would have been an hour up front and set expectations accordingly I wouldn’t have been wondering when the room would be ready every 15 minutes and could have gone to do something. Oh well, we get to the room and it’s nice and clean. Another win.
We have a great weekend out in California, not too many other headaches other than a couple food orders going wrong and me having to put my Karen hat on to get it rectified (not that srs, just getting money back for items we didn’t receive, honest mistake). But overall a nice trip.
This morning we head out to the armada and try to go get breakfast and the dang thing won’t start. Battery shows it has juice but it doesn’t even try. A couple phone calls and hours later we get a replacement rental car, which is a Hyundai Elantra, it was a whole lot smaller but also better on gas so I’ll take the trade off for the long drive back after dropping my daughter off.
Finally get back home, and start thinking about how it’s back to work tomorrow, this is where the real rub kicks in. Our line of business is centered around due diligence on mortgage trades in the secondary market. Since the shut downs spread the market as screeched to a halt with us performing maybe 20% of the work we were doing last year. Because of this, the company needs to save money. So they are demoting nearly everyone company wide and doling out large pay cuts (20% - 25%). From what I’m told we should be getting that news for our business unit tomorrow, and effective this coming Monday.
Everything that happened on the trip and with the phone was small potatoes and no sweat at the end of the day. But this work one, that’s going to hurt. Building will probably slow down for me for a while (after the Sherpa expert bday build) but I’m hoping to get lots of wheeling in with the rigs I’ve been wrenching on all year.