How To Be A Stalker 101

I'm nosy.  I unabashedly admit it.  I am not a fan of drama in my own life, but I LOVE knowing all of the dirty details of someone else's soap opera-esque daily strife.  Maybe not the greatest quality to have, sure, but if you're reading this, I'm pretty sure you're in my boat-o-nosiness, so no finger pointing!

This being one of my qualities, I can hardly shame anyone else for wanting to know all of the juicy details of my existence.  I have left this blog as public for that reason - I've shared the link with my family and friends, and they are free to pass it along at their discretion.  I have readers from all over the world who I will never know, and I think there is something very cool about that.  If my silly little adventures can entertain someone halfway around the world, that's a good day in my book. 

Being the nosy little lady that I am, from time to time I like to check in on who is checking in on me. Blogger has a handy stats tab on the backend of the site that tells me how many readers I have, what country they are from, what post(s) they read, and from which referring site they used to find me.  Here are some highlights (forgive the horrible photo quality - my battery in my fancy phone with a flash camera died and the nearest T-Mobile store in this land of corn is a 2 hour drive, so I have ordered a replacement, but in the mean time I am stuck with my old 'in case of emergency' phone with a pretty crappy camera):

Top 10 Countries Visited From This Month:

Top 5 Posts Read This Month:

Operation Sugar Daddy

Dear Help Desk, You Suck

Who Hires These People??

The ABCs of Men

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?

Top Search Keywords Directing People To My Blog This Month:

Oh, that's VERY interesting.  Someone has searched some combination of my name and a long ago ex a total of 27 times in the last 20 days that has landed them at my blog.  There's another 5 in there that have been for 'Heidi Higdon Facebook' that I can only assume to be from the same person.  I'm feeling generous today, so I'm going to give you some tips about how to do this stalking more efficiently.  1.) BOOKMARK my blog so you don't have to search for it every time.  It's http://heidichris.blogspot.com/. 2.) If trying to find me on Facebook, why don't you try searching for me ON FACEBOOK rather than google? 

At first, these stats really freaked me out and I was thisclose to making my blog private so that people that I don't want to know how or where to find me can't have access to my life, but then I realized that 1.) I have nothing to hide, 2.) I probably am the most interesting thing to ever wander into that person's life, so can I blame them for wanting to live vicariously through me? and 3.) If you can't figure out how to anonymously stalk me or how to find me on the largest social networking site in the world, I probably have nothing to worry about in the way of super smart schemes to track me down. 

So with that, happy reading everyone.  And remember sweetie, stalking me won't make you attractive.

Who Hires These People?

So the IT saga continued as my work Blackberry would not connect to the internet, therefore hindering me from accessing my e-mail, therefore defeating the purpose of me having a Blackberry.  After 10 days of trying different things, most of which included taking the battery out and putting it back in (SERIOUSLY! Is that all they teach you at IT school??), Bill* gave up and told me I was on my own.  Apparently, this is acceptable behavior at my place of work.  Days earlier, I sent a grant application to my GRANTS MANAGER to complete and submit, and she e-mailed me back flatly saying,"I'm not doing this."  I was unaware that not doing our job was an option.  They should add that to the handbook.

Back to Bill from IT deciding that he didn't want to work on my IT problem anymore, he told me 'you'll have to go to Sprint and see if they can fix it.'  Fine.  I'll deal with it myself.  After getting to the Sprint store and waiting in line for twenty minutes, I'm told that the 'blackberry guy' is at another store across town, but is heading to the store I am at and will be here in about fifteen minutes.  I can go wait in the blackberry line behind 6 other customers.  If I were running a business that saw customers needing help with a specific product on a daily basis, I might think of hiring more than 1 person per city who knows how to fix said product, but that's just me. 

An hour and a half later, as it is finally my turn with the nice Sprint Blackberry technician, I explain the problem and hand him my phone.  He looks at the phone, then back to me, then back to the phone.  "Great", I think, another idiot for me to deal with today.  And then in a surprising turn of events, he said to me, "Ma'am, you don't have an account with Sprint.  Your service is through U.S. Cellular.  You'll have to ask them for help." 

Another hour at U.S. Cellular, it turns out that Bill never ACTIVATED MY ACCOUNT and that is why I have no service.  I drive back to work, login to my desktop, and find an e-mail from Bill saying "Actually our service is through U.S. Cellular, not Sprint.  My bad. Hope you get this in time."  Yeah Bill, I figured that out, and no I didn't get it in time.  Know why?  Because my Blackberry that you've been working on for a week and a half wasn't freaking activated!!!  Can we maybe move that to the top of our troubleshooting handbook??

So technology slowly working itself out, I headed home for a nice relaxing weekend at my sweet new apartment on the water.  As I started my day cleaning and doing some laundry, I noticed that it was getting very, very dark inside.  So I stepped onto my porch and saw this progression of weather:

10:05am - clouds rolling in

10:11am - wind starting to pick up

10:15am - house-shaking thunder and HUGE winds

10:18am - torrential downpour with bending trees and howling wind

10:32am - storm completely over, sunny skies, ducks back happily swimming in the lake

10:35am -

                          Good work, National Weather Service.  Thank God you and Bill are here. 

Dear Help Desk, You Suck.

I know that I shouldn't criticize something I don't understand, but I'm saying it - I think the IT department in every place that I have ever worked gets paid way too much for doing way too little.  When I call the help desk, no matter what the problem seems to be, I'm told to turn off my computer and turn it back on.  Flames could be shooting out the back of my monitor and I bet dollars to donuts that their solution would be to reboot.  I feel that this is the IT equivalent of a doctor telling me to 'rub some dirt on it and see if that fixes your broken arm.' Thanks, boys. 

Given the circumstances of the boxed answer I am so used to getting, I reserve all help desk calls to situations involving fatal errors or denied access.  Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending 6 of the 8 working hours of my day on phone with Bill*(names have been changed to protect me from getting the virtual finger from the help desk folks the next time I need their overpaid expertise.  But you know who you are!) from IT trying to gain access to the new system that we are supposed to be using.

I may not be a computer genius, but I know enough to know that this isn't a great start to the day when trying to login to a remote desktop:

Again, I had no idea what this meant, but I knew it needed fixed so I called Bill and explained that my parameters apparently needed corrected. Bill seemed nice enough, but it wasn't until after making me restart the computer 4 times in a row and reading him the same error message all 4 times that he decided I might not be an idiot and could have a valid problem.  I feel that this call could have been cut by 5 - 5.5 hours if we could all agree that if the problem persists after 2 reboots, maybe we should move on to the next troubleshooting idea, no?

After sufficiently reaching the apparent reboot quota before actual problem solving commences, Bill decided to shadow my screen. Having never met Bill in person, I didn't expect him to know that I am the cutie in the bottom right corner of the picture I use as my desktop background and the other cuties are my friends:

However, I also didn't expect his reaction to be, 'Oh you have 5 daughters?  I have 5 daughters too.'  Really Bill?  I sound old enough to have birthed 5 women ranging between the ages of 25 and 50???  This conversation is not off to a great start.

After taking control of my screen and going through the exact same process that resulted in the exact same error message I had been explaining, I sat silently while Bill talked his way aloud through a whole bunch of technical mumbo jumbo that I didn't understand.  Twenty minutes later, during which he repeatedly declined my offers for him to just call me back when it was fixed, he had an a-ha moment and proclaimed 'Oh my gosh - I forgot to give you paramaters to login to Citrix properly!  I can't believe I did that.  I'll fix it right now and you'll be set.'  So the problem was exactly what the error message that I had been reading to you for an hour at this point said?  Well who could have seen that one coming???

Another reboot, another screen sharing session, another login, and another error message:

So I'm in - I just have no resources. My internal reaction:  'No problem, Heidi.  Bill is a trained professional and will fix you right up.' Bill's vocal reaction: 'Ooooh.  That's not good.' Other than a medical specialist, a system administrator is the #2 person I don't want to hear that response from.

Fast forward TWO hours of listening to Bill ramble on some more about what it might or might not be, and yes, several --- 3? 7? 92? I seriously lost count --- more reboots to make sure that the computer fairy hadn't magically fixed it for us, Bill figured out that he had forgotten to give me (and only me out of the 23 new staff rolling over to this system) the permissions required to have resources.  Easy fix, he assured me.  Give him 10 minutes and then repeat the reboot, share, login process that I am a recently certified expert at, and I would be good to go.

................................Drumroll, please................................

Wah- Lah!  A real, remote desktop with access to my home desktop in the top left corner.  Fantastic!  I have access to e-mail, the intranet, timesheets, the database --- everything a fundraiser like myself would need! 

Bill being the concerned IT professional that he is asked me to login to the timecard.  This is what we found:

That's right.  3 Heathers and the wrong Heidi.  It has taken 4+ hours to get me into the desktop, and now I don't exist in the payroll system?  Bill said he would look into it as soon as we established that everything else worked.

Back to the desktop, I notice that not only do I not have a shortcut to the database, but of my 4 icons, the only 2 that work are the payroll system in which I don't exist, and this one:

This icon takes you to appointment scheduling and patient records.  The problem?  I am a fundraiser, not a clinician. 'Bill?  Why do I have access to clinic stuff, but not to anything pertinent to my job?'  Bill: 'Oooh.  Looks like I gave you the wrong desktop.  And uh, ummm..hang on.  JB!  JB!  Can I get a consult over here?' Next came muffled whispers between the two, and then Bill cleared his throat as if preparing to tell me that they had forgot to tell me I was fired and I don't actually work there anymore before he said, 'Yeah...I gave you the completely wrong accesses and we don't know how to fix it without deleting your profile and rebuilding it.  And that's going to take a while, so sit tight and I will try to get it fixed.  How about I call you the middle of next week to update you?'

No problem, Bill.  I'll just come to work with the inability to log my payroll, access donor records, enter donations, or do anything required in my job description, but never fear - I can color code my e-mails and if I get bored, I might schedule a few IUD removals for myself.  Give me some gloves and those tong-like things; I'm sure I can figure it out.

Bad news: I don't exist in the work system, have no access to anything important, and apparently sound like a 70 year old woman on the phone.  Good news: When this gig goes south, I'm pretty sure I can start a new career as an IT administrator.  Or a nurse practitioner.

Teachers DO need a degree, right????

As many of you know, a big part of my job is working with teachers to coordinate a coin drive in their schools. My beloved mother is a teacher, and I am certain that she had to first obtain a four year degree before she was allowed to shape the minds of today's youth. What concerns me is that I see no possible way that some of the lovely educators I work with actually completed such a degree.

My first complaint is inattention to detail. In order to sign up their school to participate in the coin drive, teachers are required to first complete and return a very simple, one page registration form. This is important because I need to know how many boxes and how many Dear Parent letters to order for each school. After school name, address, and contact information (which has proven to be much more difficult to correctly answer than one would think), there is a line that says, "Number of classrooms participating:" --- the answer I am looking for here is a NUMBER, hence the word NUMBER in the description. The answer that I get waaaaaay more often than I should is "all" or "entire school."

My second complaint is not double checking their work. The few Einsteins in the group who actually know to write a NUMBER when I ask for NUMBER of participating classrooms instantly earn my love and adoration, however, I'm learning that I may be too liberal with my praise. If a teacher tells me that they need 40 collection boxes, I order 40 collection boxes. Seems simple enough. Until they call me 3 hours into their campaign in a panic saying, "I need 48 boxes, but I only got 40!!!" to which I reply, "I'm sorry - your registration form said you only needed 40" and they say very matter-of-factly, "Well I was just guessing." And how did that guess work out for you? Just fine, because YOU don't have to lift a finger. It's me who has to shift my entire day around to drive 8 boxes out to your school that is inevitably 50 feet from the freaking Utah border!!!!!

My third complaint is skipping over the directions. I know that this service learning project is not a teacher's first priority, and they are helping out of the goodness of their hearts, so I try to make their life as easy as possible where it relates to this coin drive. I provide each and every teacher with a folder complete with creative ideas, a tally sheet, a frequently asked questions page, and instructions on how to use coin star, among other helpful resources. If I had a dollar for every time a teacher called me and asked me EVERY single question on the FAQ page, we wouldn't need a coin drive to meet budget! What irks me even more, though, is when they call to chew me out and say, "The coin star machine is broken. You should really have a note that tells teachers to make a test deposit first!" and I apologetically say, "I'm so sorry! You should have gotten a page of instructions on coin star, and in bold, red print it says 'we highly recommend doing a trial run to make sure the coin star machine is in order' --- was your packet missing that page?" to which I get, "I don't know, I didn't read it." Really?! What happens when your students don't follow the directions? I'm pretty sure they either get a paper with an 'F' on it sent home to be signed and returned, or they spend their recess inside writing paragraphs about FOLLOWING THE DIRECTIONS!

And my final complaint is the wasting of my time with incorrect answers. I had one teacher order 29 boxes for a student body of 32. Knowing that this couldn't possibly be right, I called her to get the correct numbers, but she insisted that they were right. Me: "Your registration form says you need 29 boxes and 32 letters, but that didn't seem right to me." Her: "Nope, you got it. 29 classrooms and 32 students." Me: "32 students in each classroom?" Her: "No - 32 students total." Me: "In your whole school there are only 32 students, but you have 29 classrooms?" Her: "Yep. We're small." --- I still didn't think this was possible, so I gave it a couple days and then I e-mailed her, "Just wanting to confirm - you have 29 classrooms and 32 students in your entire school, right?" and I received a resounding, "That's correct!" So against all of my gut feelings, I ordered her 29 boxes and 32 letters. Fast forward to delivery day - I showed up with the promised supplies and some extra gifts to thank her, and she looked at me like I was an idiot and said, "We don't have enough letters - there are about 200 kids in our school and you only gave me 32. I know I said there were only 32 students, but that was just in my leadership group. I really meant 200 for the whole student body. Sorry. Can you bring more?" It took everything I had not to inflict bodily harm on this woman.

I don't get paid nearly enough.

These are the teachers we have? Really? These are the people who are molding the leaders of tomorrow? No wonder the stock market is in trouble. Pray for us all, people...

Are rules really made to be broken?

RULE: –noun
1. a principle or regulation governing conduct, action, procedure, arrangement, etc.:

Rules. Nobody likes them, except for the people who make them in some sort of attempt to assert their dominance and remind the rest of us that we aren't in charge. That's fine. I can accept that ours is a society of rules. And yes, I agree that some rules are dumb. Idiotic, some might say. And that's also fine. Where I have the problem is when someone sets forth a set of rules in a plastic placard at a staff meeting, and then blatantly disregards them.

Case and point:

Rule #1: All meetings will start and stop on time.
Outcome: It ran an hour and a half over schedule. On her watch. AFTER I talked through lunch instead of breaking like she wanted. We work for 7 hours a day and we were meeting for 3.5 of them.

Rule #2: All cell phones are to be turned off.
Outcome: Phone rang twice at the decibel of a 747 taking off above your head, she left the room to answer it both times, and not a peep out of the rule-making boss lady.

Rule #3: No gossip. We are too small and whispering is unprofessional.
Outcome: Approximately 1 hour later, the creator of said rule is sitting in the office across from me WHISPERING to my new neighbor --- It's not gossip if it's factual, right?

Rule #4: Dress for success.
Outcome: Oh, if only I had a picture to show you of her baggy t-shirt and jeans.

Rule #5: Personal lives are to remain personal.
Outcome: Remember when you told 3 staff members and 2 board members that you and your husband did so many drugs in the 60s that you don't even remember that decade, but you're pretty sure you had fun? Which part of that, exactly, was about business?


Ummm, hello? Kettle? This is Pot. You're black.

For those of you who were in the meeting --- don't mind my frustration, it's just my lower left brain talking. It likes to color code things. You wouldn't know that about me unless you got the 25 minute explanation...

Really?!!

Dear person(s) who stole my identity,
If you're going to be a criminal, please be a smart one. Especially if a lot of prep work is involved.
So you're living life in the fast lane, you're too cool for the rules, and you make your money by being a scam artist. I get it. And if you were any good at it, I might even have to give in and applaud you for a job well done.
This is where I have the problem. You targeted me. And while, yes, it does suck for me, this isn't even the reason I'm irritated. What annoys me more than anything is that you chose ME - a single, 23 year old woman who works in NON-PROFIT, drives an economical albeit adorable Ford Focus that she doesn't even own yet, shops the sale racks, and who is paying off college debt. It's really a simple case of ROI - return on investment for those of you who were snoozing during that economics class you dropped out of, hence making a life of crime your only viable option - I mean, if you're going to do all the work to steal someone's identity, wouldn't you want to find someone who was WEALTHY?!!
This is Las Vegas we're talking about. Millions are made here every day. Probably every hour of every day. There are people who wouldn't notice that a thousand dollars was missing, or that a couple thousand were unaccounted for. They'd chalk it up to a new purse or a set of golf clubs, and would never think twice about it.
I, on the other hand, DO notice a thousand dollars. Quickly. And furthermore, your choice of purchases boggles me. You dropped a grand at Toys R Us? Really? This leads me to the conclusion that either A.) You're 9 - in which case, I retract my earlier statements and I admit that I am, in fact, completely impressed, or B.) You have the worst taste ever! If you're old enough to open a credit card, what could you possibly want at Toys R Us that amounts to $1,000? Are you sitting in your living room on inflatable furniture playing Donkey Kong??? If you're going to use my name and credit to buy things, at least make them things I'd not blame you for buying. Had you made your purchase at Christian Louboutin or on a plane ticket to Tahiti, I'd have commended you. I'd have said, 'good thinking, criminal person!' But Toys R Us? Why, I ask you. Why?
I even had a moment where I thought, well, maybe this was someone who couldn't afford presents for their kids, and they were just trying to give them a happy childhood. Desperate times call for desperate measures. But then I remembered, IT'S NOT CHRISTMAS! Children do not need a THOUSAND dollars worth of presents to celebrate the month of September starting! And the children who do get such lavish gifts have parents who don't need to steal someone's identity!!!
So now I leave you with these parting thoughts, just as I said to the people who stole my car stereo and then LOCKED MY CAR DOORS, without stealing the actual car --- think these things through. Get the most bang for your buck, or, in this case, the most bang for MY buck...