June 3, 2011
Dear Everyone:
When I woke up yesterday morning, I knew that I had an appointment that
afternoon with the
Physical Therapist in
Rossmoor; but there was
something else. Something I
was supposed to do in the morning.
Something relatively important.
What was it? It kept nagging
at me: Something important I
was supposed to do in the morning.
Then it dawned on me:
Get up and go to work!
Yes, I’m back at work, since Wednesday, that being the first day of the
current month. This is going
to take some getting used to.
I’m sort of out of practice.
Luckily, the month began in the middle of the week, so I have a
few days to figure out what I’m doing.
Still working out the “routine”.
The Manager must have been listening for the elevator Wednesday morning
because he was in my office before I could put my purse down.
“Welcome back!” Etc.
“Good to see you!”
And did I get that email from HR (Human Resources) that said my
“transition” job had already ended?
Well, no. But that’s
“OK” because I have until July 11th before I have to vacate
the premises. Plenty of time
considering I have “nothing” to do.
So I’ve been mostly dealing with email.
I had over 2000 entries in my Inbox.
Some are easy: I
don’t really need to know that some airline had a “special” two months
ago. Ditto the hotel I
stayed at on business three years back.
They can be deleted.
Only “delete” doesn’t necessarily mean “gone”.
The email system we use at work has a “Delete” folder.
When you mark a message “delete”, the system moves it into this
folder. Unless you
specifically tell the system to abandon the contents of that folder when
you shut down, they just sit there.
This, of course, is an attempt to “idiot-proof” the system.
Lots of people hit “delete”, then go “Oops!”
So the programmers put in a “safe wastebasket” that allowed
people to get rid of messages without really getting rid of them.
Out of sight, out of mind.
But not out of reach.
So you have to either tell the system to actually eliminate the contents
or set it up to automatically dump them when you shut down.
Guess what happens when you try to shut down a system that has
hundreds, even thousands, of contents to eliminate.
That’s right: The
system jams and gets stuck.
One thing I have learned: Moderation.
Don’t try to do too much at one time.
This is true of two-hole punches,
staplers and
computers.
So I only delete a few at a time, shut down, then start up again.
May seem time-consuming, but so what?
Company’s going to pay me no matter what I do, at least for a
little while. Might as well
do it right the first time.
And there are hundreds of email messages that don’t need to be deleted.
There are even messages that have arrived in the last week that I
can respond to. I just got
one from a person who accidentally signed up for a Learning Course that
I am still the “official contact” for.
Of course, all those will need to be changed over to someone else
(plenty of time to do that); but in the meantime, it only took minutes
to fix.
It’s all coming back to me.
Love, as always,
Pete
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