It's been coming down steadily for a few hours now but nothing is sticking. The kids totally could have gone to school - probably didn't even need an early dismissal.

In promising news, S. is home from the hospital

That's great to hear!

Do most of you actually care about the ratings? I always say to myself that "everything is made up and the points don't matter." I know whether I'm doing a good job or not. (But I've also never had a hostile boss situation, so.)

Yes, because if they are as artificial as they are in stack ranking, you can still be doing a good job, be told you are doing a good job, be assured that you are just taking one for the team, and have it used against you later.

Welcome to tech.

It's sticking here for sure. It's accumulating sort of alarmingly quickly. Oh, also, I'm making those Ham and Cheese Biscuits you tweeted about, Jessica, because I actually have all the ingredients on hand and they look fantastic and pretty easy.

Do most of you actually care about the ratings?

My new job, for all it's family-owned, is very corporate in structure. We get "calibrated" once a month, which means a supervisor goes through and listens to an assortment of your calls at random and scores them. They partly define promotions and raises, I guess, but they seem both sort of fair and also weirdly subjective based on which supervisor is listening. The nice thing is that every supervisor was once a call specialist, so they do know what a weird job it can be.

I'm making those Ham and Cheese Biscuits you tweeted about, Jessica, because I actually have all the ingredients on hand and they look fantastic and pretty easy.

They are both of these things! If it's not too late, I'd recommend making them smaller than the original recipe - I wound up with 8 biscuits and I think they're still a little too big for how rich they are. 10 would probably have been better.

Welcome to tech.

Not just tech.

Glad to hear that, Amy. What a weird thing. (ETA S, not, ratings)

I'm currently on two conference calls at the same time. Because both of them are required, and they were scheduled at the same time.

Very efficient!

My contribution to meeting #1 was "I have nothing this week."

My contribution to meeting #2 is not remote-strangling the coordinator, who keeps making jokes and going off on tangents (now he's talking about selling GS cookies). He's trying real hard to make this "fun" but everyone is confused and we've lost the plot completely.

"Where's the questionnaire?" "Did we spell questionnaire right?" (No.) "Wait, which survey are we talking about?" "OUR survey. The one we wrote." "You mean the questionnaire?"

We are the Keystone Kops of editors.

Now he's giving us an update of weather conditions on the highway. Why? Oh, a semi trailer slid off the road. His wife saw it happen. Further bulletins as events unfold!

Damn it, I just volunteered for something. I had to, otherwise I would've done nothing on this stupid project.

FFS, wrap it up. Nobody's gonna fill out this stupid survey, nobody cares. What's wrong with day-drinking, anyway, someone remind me.

It doesn't pay well?

It's not all about the money, Matt. You can't put a price on the joy of not giving a shit.