Well, dammit

My head hurts. I think it might be because I brushed my teeth with beer this morning. About ninety times. What? You don't brush your teeth with beer? You probably don't live in a swamp, then. That's why. You probably live in some kind of fancy ass house where water, glorious municipality-provided chlorinated fluid of the gods, flows out of the taps. See, it's freezing here in the swamp. The pipes in the well house froze up WHILE I was in the shower this morning. I had barely gotten last night's beer rinsed off and had just soaked my head and squeezed some shampoo into my hand when the pounding hot liquid fruits of my swamp-well slowed to a trickle, then stopped completely. I twisted the knob this way and that, and looked disbelievingly at the sticky clump of Neutrogena in my hand for at least thirty seconds before I figured it out. Guess how you solve this problem? After you brush your teeth with beer for a long time, I mean- yep, you hike out into the arctic morning with a soaking wet head toting some sort of warming device FOR THE WELL HOUSE. I felt like freaking Ma Kettle, or Ma Ingalls, or Ma Joad, or whichever Ma had the most agonizing collection of suffering combined with a demoralizing lack of sufficient beer and bad hair.

Then I had to go to work like that. Luckily I have been using this awesome deodorant made out of approximately equal parts coconut oil and baking soda mixed with a few drops of tea tree oil so I didn't stink too bad. My armpits, anyway. I'm not so sure about the rest of me, but that worked out well for our late afternoon staff meeting to develop performance goals and metrics. We don't have any right now so some people peak out with making it to work on time a couple of times a week.  Well, that's not quite true. We HAVE some metrics but they are (U) unsatisfactory, (S) satisfactory and (E) exceptional and everyone just gets S's because if you get a U or E someone has to do extra administrative work and no one is on board for that. So now, we get to write our own, and there needs to be two levels, 'meets expectations' and 'exceeds expectations', or something like that. I wasn't really paying attention. So, for example, 'meets expectations' could be 'responds to customer inquiry' and 'exceeds expectations' could be 'gives customer correct answer 90% of the time'.  These are not actual examples from today's meeting (these are totally actual examples from today's meeting).  Properly executed, this could work out well for me. The bar should be low enough that I can handily outperform the special snowflakes that are tardy all the time. I'm thinking of a 'meets expectations' goal of 'comes to work sufficiently hygienic when temperatures are above freezing'. Brilliant, right? Well, gotta go- I'm off to lay out tomorrow morning's beer!