Well sweet fuck, what?
Jan. 30th, 2013 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handsliveYeah, like I ever post here, or, in fact, anywhere. Hi.
I joked to my former boss today that sometime last year the top of my head came off and now the weather gets in. In response, I suppose I should say, to a question of how I was doing. I worked for him for a few years, and was walking around looking a tad poleaxed today, so there was no point lying about it. He was also mostly responsible for laying down a half-day meeting in the middle my week with three days notice making me quadruple booked in at least one spot and prompting cries of "where are you?!" in my IM window a couple of times. I had spent my morning shovelling coal like mad to make my day productive and was staring down the prospect of missing lunch. I mean, oh sure, the meeting invite had said lunch would be provided, but since he'd gone downstairs to buy a sandwich and the woman joining us was eating a salad of her own devising, I couldn't help feeling left out. (Yes, I went downstairs and bought lunch. I'm not a complete idiot. My status bar only reads 90% or something.)
Today prompted me to thinking that meeting invites at work have inertia, which you can calculate by assigning a mass to the participants. Higher mass based on status or number of participants means the meeting will be harder to move. It's not a perfect metaphor, but it was working for me since one of the "where are you?!" folks seemed to think I should move things to accommodate him. Not a VP? Aw, too bad. Your meeting has 8 participants? Gee, mine has 19. There are additional factors in play, but I don't know how to solve for them. Like that one guy with almost no open spots or availability. He's not a VP and he's only one of the 19, but this 30 minute slot is the only opening he has for the next 6 weeks and goddamn but you will not succeed if he doesn't make that 30 minute slot. He now has an equivalent mass to a CEO. Or someone with a C in their title anyway.
So, yeah. Hi.
Do you know, I sometimes forget a little that I'm left handed? I'm not as left handed as my sisters, which is to say they're left handed like many of you are right handed. If I handed you a tool and told you to use it in your left hand, you'd be basically brainlocked and ready to give up. Don't lie. I've seen you. I'm not that left handed. I do a lot of things right handed because a lot of things are setup in this world to be done right handed. Because you just don't think about it, do you? Why would you? But every now and then. There are small screws inside my computer case that I am basically incapable of removing or putting back in with my right hand. I'll drop them, cross thread them, ricochet them around the enclosed space. No issue if I'm using my left hand, though. I bumped into another example on the weekend. I was cutting up pills for my cat (she can't hold her metaclopramide or her cyproheptadine, so I have to cut them up into quarters -- what, she's like 5 pounds). I have a little pill cutter and it's great for cutting things in half. Cutting a 5mg dose into 4 is trickier. Or maybe it's just my OCD insisting that I get them roughly even in size. Anyway, this is a teethgrindingly awful task if I'm placing the half pills in the cutter with my right hand. It's only frustrating if I'm doing it with my left. I've probably cut 100+ pills into quarters and I only realized I was using the wrong hand on the most recent bottle of 20. I blame scissors. And a fair number of building doors. And hockey sticks. And baseball bats. And my desk in school. Er, hmm.
Well. What was that, then.
I joked to my former boss today that sometime last year the top of my head came off and now the weather gets in. In response, I suppose I should say, to a question of how I was doing. I worked for him for a few years, and was walking around looking a tad poleaxed today, so there was no point lying about it. He was also mostly responsible for laying down a half-day meeting in the middle my week with three days notice making me quadruple booked in at least one spot and prompting cries of "where are you?!" in my IM window a couple of times. I had spent my morning shovelling coal like mad to make my day productive and was staring down the prospect of missing lunch. I mean, oh sure, the meeting invite had said lunch would be provided, but since he'd gone downstairs to buy a sandwich and the woman joining us was eating a salad of her own devising, I couldn't help feeling left out. (Yes, I went downstairs and bought lunch. I'm not a complete idiot. My status bar only reads 90% or something.)
Today prompted me to thinking that meeting invites at work have inertia, which you can calculate by assigning a mass to the participants. Higher mass based on status or number of participants means the meeting will be harder to move. It's not a perfect metaphor, but it was working for me since one of the "where are you?!" folks seemed to think I should move things to accommodate him. Not a VP? Aw, too bad. Your meeting has 8 participants? Gee, mine has 19. There are additional factors in play, but I don't know how to solve for them. Like that one guy with almost no open spots or availability. He's not a VP and he's only one of the 19, but this 30 minute slot is the only opening he has for the next 6 weeks and goddamn but you will not succeed if he doesn't make that 30 minute slot. He now has an equivalent mass to a CEO. Or someone with a C in their title anyway.
So, yeah. Hi.
Do you know, I sometimes forget a little that I'm left handed? I'm not as left handed as my sisters, which is to say they're left handed like many of you are right handed. If I handed you a tool and told you to use it in your left hand, you'd be basically brainlocked and ready to give up. Don't lie. I've seen you. I'm not that left handed. I do a lot of things right handed because a lot of things are setup in this world to be done right handed. Because you just don't think about it, do you? Why would you? But every now and then. There are small screws inside my computer case that I am basically incapable of removing or putting back in with my right hand. I'll drop them, cross thread them, ricochet them around the enclosed space. No issue if I'm using my left hand, though. I bumped into another example on the weekend. I was cutting up pills for my cat (she can't hold her metaclopramide or her cyproheptadine, so I have to cut them up into quarters -- what, she's like 5 pounds). I have a little pill cutter and it's great for cutting things in half. Cutting a 5mg dose into 4 is trickier. Or maybe it's just my OCD insisting that I get them roughly even in size. Anyway, this is a teethgrindingly awful task if I'm placing the half pills in the cutter with my right hand. It's only frustrating if I'm doing it with my left. I've probably cut 100+ pills into quarters and I only realized I was using the wrong hand on the most recent bottle of 20. I blame scissors. And a fair number of building doors. And hockey sticks. And baseball bats. And my desk in school. Er, hmm.
Well. What was that, then.
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no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 04:53 am (UTC)Hugs and scritches, or at least something that would be appreciated, to poor Smudges.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 06:38 am (UTC)I don't think I knew that you were left handed. Me too. And yeah, sometimes I just notice that I've been doing something right-handedly because it's clumsy but not so clumsy that I noticed right away.
The one weird thing, though, is that I noticed a few years ago that I always eat apples with my right hand and it feels weird to hold the apple with my left hand. I think that's because of many many years of apple in one hand, book or pen in the other.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 06:23 pm (UTC)As a child, if I had had the vocabulary and concepts for it I would have identified being left-handed as a significant disability restricting my life and limiting my success in school. Nowadays, I rarely think about it. Some of that is because life isn't so right-centric nowadays (I rarely need to use dull scissors belonging to other people, I mostly type instead of write), but I also got better at things that used to bring me to tears (a right-handed can-opener, a right-hand-only potato peeler, for example). And how can I say whether I got better because my small muscle control just improved as I grew up, or whether it was because of the 6 weeks I spent with my left arm in a cast.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 06:43 pm (UTC)Still, I was 6 when that happened and already in the habit of eating right handed, which neither of my sisters do. Training definitely helps. My feeling is that, especially for children, a really strong tendency to one hand can't simply be overridden or its strength reduced. So, if you have some facility and the process of gaining it didn't bring you to tears, it wasn't the training. It's a scale, not a switch, that's influenced by other factors, so naturally I'm not dealing with the underlying complexity here. My primary claim is that a more "handed" person would have clued into using their primary hand sooner than I did. It wouldn't have come up for my sisters, for example.
R
Date: 2013-02-02 09:39 pm (UTC)Sometimes you are the key or the gate master without being a manager or above it. I like to call this position indispensable and not likely to progress further in your current co.
Have you looked at the new proposed layout for the LRT?
I am guessing 2050 or later, maybe 2112.