By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (22)

October 27, 2020

If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?

Current total: Lakota, $1,905.47; Rural libraries, $346.69.

Week 32 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Week 32, Day 220: Mondays keep on Mondaying. I had to walk away from my desk to make dinner leaving 70 emails and three hours worth of other time sensitive work and I was in a real mood about it.

I was in a mood most of the day though, from having to reel through a dozen management decisions to finding out that our Joybird order wasn’t just delayed in transit. They hadn’t even started making production until this week. It was slated for delivery starting tomorrow through the end of the week. I was livid, in fact, because they were a month behind and wouldn’t you think that warranted some kind of proactive notice? Not only did they not bother to give us a single update until I started contacting them, they took a week to answer my email and ignored all subsequent contacts. Couldn’t get them to reply to an email, texts, or even answer their phone. I can handle delays if I know about them. But delays like this and a refusal to make sure we’re updated honestly says to me that this is a shady company that isn’t going to come through and can’t be relied on to honor their refund policy if the product is shoddy. Especially when I see the absolute bonanza of complaints from other people trying to get them to answer emails and phone calls for months.

I’m preparing myself to have to dispute the charges if and when they fail to deliver what they promised.

I did catch myself on the verge of blaming myself for not doing deeper investigation into the company, an unhealthy go-to reaction when I’m mad at someone’s shortcomings but feel helpless to change it. I turn the anger back on myself for not seeing it coming.

But I did due diligence, I did do research, and I did check with people who’d used them before. It’s not like I just jumped in feet first eyes closed, and it’s not my fault they stink. I’m getting mad all over again typing this up because we moved our old sofa out already to make space, timing was an issue, and I need a sofa. I need to find a back up sofa option because I have my doubts that Joybird will ever come through. Highly do not recommend.

Worked super late this evening. Did not love that either but I find that even if it’s exhausting, the reduced stress when I do the extra hours and see an actual reduction in my workload for the next day, it matters. Plus during the day sometimes I have to deal with administrative nonsense and at night I can focus solely on my work.

Week 32, Day 221: Seamus’s puff pastry looking ear is worse but the vet isn’t very concerned yet. He’s thinking it needs another few weeks to start to reduce in size. I hope so. He doesn’t seem to be bothered by it but I don’t want it to progress to the point where it does bother him. We’re crossing our fingers that he’s beat his multiple infections, we should find out later this week.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Joybird is a terrible company and after being given a chance to rectify their error they chose to obfuscate and basically use 1209 words to say the product was going to be a month late, too bad so sad. PiC and I were disturbed by the sheer volume of negative experience being reported this month so after a proper fume and grumble, I did some research and talked extensively with the AmEx rep to confirm the best course of action. I decided to take one last shot at getting them to cancel the order on their own.

Tuesday was no less a terrible day than Monday but with second late night at my desk, I might have done enough for tomorrow to be less terrible.

Week 32, Day 222: APPARENTLY I wasn’t clear enough when I told Joybird their second chance was squandered yesterday and to cancel my order. Their response was to blame the shipping company when they haven’t made the product yet, and ignore my cancellation of the order.

I documented everything and popped it into a dispute through AmEx. Not playing around, y’all. You don’t get to force your “high quality product” down my throat when you completely blew the whole production timeline and failed to tell us there was any delay until it well past time to fix it. Time was a critical factor in our buying from them, I would not have purchased from them if they were honest about their real delivery timeline.

My morning alternated between quietly fuming as I settled the Joybird stuff and loudly fuming as I tried to deal with stinking Seesaw on the craptastic Chromebook and the infuriating blocked ports problem with Comcast. Of course Comcast chat support doesn’t know what to do, of course. Half an hour of wasted time trying to get that Seesaw connection back and another half an hour trying to get Comcast to fix the port problem and exactly nothing got done. I just emailed the teacher and explained we had wasted the morning trying to get it to work but it’s not happening. They just use Seesaw for attendance anyway.

In good news, I finally caved and went to the dentist today, and it wasn’t a terrible experience. Everyone was masked, they enforced distancing, they had masks and face shields on during treatment and they even had an extra doodad that hovered nearby to hoover any aerosolized anything. Smol Acrobat wasn’t a fan of the reclining position but they survived it just fine. It’s nice knowing the tartar has been removed, for now.

A third late night at my desk… There’s still a lot left over but I am starting to see a bit of light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve been pushing really aggressively to get a LOT of work cleared and processes improved. Though there is always more work flowing in, the improvements are good to have done going into the holidays. I figure it’s going to be late nights for a while so that I can attend to non work things in the daytime. If I plan to put in extra hours most days for a set period, it’s less stressful than trying to fit an impossible amount of work into 8 hours.

Week 32, Day 223: So many meetings today. So much troubleshooting. So much frustrating.

But I did remember to eat small snacks throughout the day for the first time in a few weeks and that helped the belly-based discomfort.

PiC did the Costco run, bless him, as always. He picked up both Seamus’s medication refill and a bunch of staples. I really like their cauliflower pizza and JB got to try their ravioli on sale. It was on their mind because when we considered getting seafood takeout, I read “lobster ravioli” off the menu and they were very disappointed that I said they couldn’t have it. I’m not paying $30 for an entree for a five year old, we do not play at that level!

Smol Acrobat continues to confound as to his position at any given time. There’s no way he should have this much room to move this much, I feel like I’m about to burst and yet he just keeps bouncing around.

Highlight of the day: commiserating with a dear friend about how we’re sick of people right now. We work remotely and we’re isolated during a pandemic and somehow people still get on our nerves. 😂

Just before dinner, I whipped up an almost sugar free low carb banana pumpkin bread using this paleo pumpkin bread recipe as the base (I added allspice, walnuts and a tiny sprinkling of chocolate chips). I had to double the recipe midday through when I realized I already had 3/4 cup of pumpkin puree and I’d added an overripe banana to the wet ingredients. Luckily that occurred to me in time to fix it. But we have a large loaf pan anyway so double the recipe actually fits better. Pretty excited to try it tomorrow.

Week 32, Day 224: It struck me this morning. I doubled the recipe for the bread yesterday midstream, when I realized I had too much pumpkin and banana. I forgot that I’d reserved 3/4 cup pumpkin puree, and adding a banana doubled the volume of the wet ingredients. I very carefully measured out all the dry ingredients again. Annnnd I didn’t double the eggs. Weirdly, it didn’t seem to affect the bread. The loaf was still a little too wet after a longer bake but that was the problem I had with the first loaf too. Huh.

We’re nearing the end of the month and I had originally planned to wrap up the Giving Project on November 1st. So, last call for donations!

• I will be sending the donations to the libraries in the first week of November.
• We have $250.97 in the till for the Lakota families. I’m trying to decide when I will have the time and energy to deploy that. I’ve really been struggling to keep head above water this month and this week in particular has been an unbroken streak of 10-13 hour days.

Contemplating my publishing schedule. I might start publishing Tuesdays, Thursday and Friday starting in November. I’m also contemplating discontinuing link loves or Friday posts for a while to give myself a bit more of a break as life continues to be intense. Or maybe they get combined into a Friday post for a while.

What do you think:

A) Weekly COVID posts: keep or ditch?

B) Links: keep or ditch?

C) Fridays: keep or ditch?

:: How was your week? Are you struggling with feeling like you’re doing “enough”?

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