not sure about this weekend, but I cleaned out my closet today.

All of DOD and therefore we too are forced to use MS Office, and that includes Teams. One of the things I hate about it is that when someone IMs you, there is no easy way to identify who it is -- and often it's someone asking a question from a meeting you didn't attend! It's quite poorly designed from a UX perspective.

And they took away our landlines so now we're supposed to just use Teams to call people, but it pretty regularly crashes, so that's embarrassing to be still talking while the other person's line has gone dead. I do like the option for joining a meeting by making Teams call my cell phone, and then I can use my bluetooth headphones and wander the house.

I am at my wits end with IT problems. I seem to spend all my time wrestling bureaucracy and bitching about our admin staff, who are either incompetent or overburdened, and both of them are kind of abusive. Anytime you ask for any help, they berate you for your temerity to put something else on their plate. But if you ask to be allowed to do the thing yourself, they also berate you. It's really pretty awful, and I have 3 new staff members who are forced to deal with them (I spend a lot of time apologizing).

Anyway, my laptop crashed at 4pm, so I took the dog for a walk and now I'm going to watch ST:LD and then go to the climbing gym.

The company I'm at uses Slack for messaging, Linphone for calls, and Google Meet for, well, meetings. It's actually pretty stable, except everytime Slack updates it makes the window busier. Simplify!

Nilly, Shir, good to hear you're holding on. Shir, I've added your story(is there any more to it?) to my Oh No Parrots file

Why does the smoke detector's "low battery" chirp wait until 12:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning to activate?

It is definitely too loud and annoying to ignore. I suppose that means it is working as designed?

However, me (still half-asleep) wobbling as I stand on a kitchen chair to reach the cursed thing and fumble at trying to replace the battery...that was a risk to life and limb that I really didn't need. Now it could be hours before I manage to fall asleep again.

Oh no, dcp. May you br able to sleep soon.

Shir, I've added your story(is there any more to it?) to my Oh No Parrots file

There is a Oh No Parrots file? I'm listening. There's not much more to it - it's a nuisance when you try to be alert to sirens and turns out that it's a bloody parrot. Speeding motorcycles right now is something that all of us curse. There is a darker story related to parrot mimicking noises: if you're a parent of a soldier or a spouse of one, the worst fear is the knock on the door by the army's casualties unit announcing that they have died in action. One day, one parrot decided to mimic these knocks on the door at 6:30 am next to a family with a son fighting in Gaza.

If this war will last for a long while there might be a mass murder of parrots here.

If not murdered at least the parrot would be released to the wild. We have wild parrots in Fort Lauderdale and they are ridiculously loud. I can't imagine having one as a pet, although I have friends who have birds.

Dog is in the car, now I have to trick the cat into the carrier, and get myself something like breakfast. Slept like crap, but I should be able to nap during a charging stop.

We use Teams in a fairly limited way in my office--mostly as a sort of running chat/virtual water cooler for intra-team Q&A, announcements, and just the kind of griping and joking around that used to take place out loud when we were all in the office 40+ hours/week pre-covid. It works fine for that, but when people try to use the other features it's not a great tool.

But everything pales beside the evil that is Workday. It's not every day that one's workplace challenges draw a major write-up in the Seattle Times: [link]

Y’all are definitely making me not miss office life.

I am puttering around the apartment, not very focused but still productive. Made room in my closet for R’s clothes, did some laundry stuff, purged some knickknacks and organized others. Taking a lunch break, then I have to make my bed and pack the car. Living between two places an hour apart is kind of a bitch, even while it is a privilege.

Shir, that is so awful. There’s just so many horrific details during horrific happenings. Things you wouldn’t ever think of, like parrots imitating sirens and door knocks.

I agree that there's so much awfulness and terrible, heartbreaking deatails all around. The parrots thing I actually find amusing.

If you'd like to see something more hopeful - though it does include some details - one of the stories is of four Bedouins who came to rescue their cousin. But first they rescued 30-40 other people. [link] it's sad, and incredible, and there are literally thousands of other stories like this. I try to focus on them.

Another wonderful story is a story of a nursery in one of the Kibutzes. The survivors thought the plants were all gone. Few people came back to get some stuff back to the families in the places they were evacuated to, to a living nursery with a sign, "we're sorry we had to break in. We wanted to water the plants", left by some other soldiers.

I still can't believe so many people can't return to their homes or rebuilt them (those who want to). They survived unfathomable things. I want them to be able to come back home (if it's not burned down/destroyed). They won't be able to do so for a very long time.