“We’d be outraged if we weren’t so exhausted.”

The title quote is from Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, describing what he calls "the smoothest military coup."  Things in Egypt are terrible, but because I am totally irreverent, when I read that quote on CNN.com this afternoon I wanted to print it out and stick it to my desk.  I didn't though, since it kind of sounds like I have a bad attitude.  Taken out of context, it's awesome on so many levels.  I want to put it on bumper stickers and t-shirts.  It could become the new motto for apathetic people everywhere.*

Things at work are getting easier and I thought that I'd share two big differences between my new Triangle and BCFG

• My chair is really comfortable.  I think that we all have these really expensive Herman Miller Aeron chairs that I hear sponsoring various shows on NPR.  I just Googled them and they cost over $800 a piece.  (I'm sure there was some kind of volume discount.)   As you will remember, the chair in my former Triangle was the most uncomfortable chair on the planet.  (And I managed to destroy one chair simply by sitting on it, which is probably up there in my top ten most embarrassing moments ever.  Chairs should not collapse when you are sitting on them.)  This one may be the best desk chair there is.
• We have real Half and Half.  And real coffee.  And tea.  And hot chocolate.  And even purified water with crushed ice that is the perfect size.  It's like they thought of every one's beverage preferences.  The people at BCFG had serious coffee addictions--much worse than my previous addiction to Diet Coke.  You would think that if you drank that much coffee that it would be good coffee, however, that was not the case.  It was this horrible 50% caffeine, 50% decaf from the grocery store.  They also had powdered creamer.  Powdered cream should be against the law.  The Mothership has really good single-serve coffees and teas and, best of all, real half and half.  As my sister said "real half and half  says 'we appreciate you--now get back to work'."**

The one negative right now is that I'm not so sure about this one person who is marginally in charge of me.    I seem to get on her nerves.  Everyone else likes her, so maybe she has to grow on you, or maybe she just hates me for some unknown reason.  I'll keep you posted. 

I'm tired.  (But thankfully, not outraged.)

*Or for people like me who are just really tired.  Like really tired.  

**No idea where the period was supposed to go in that sentence. 

I am a Prairie Dog

I passed my Series 63 this morning.  Thanks to you all for putting up with me when that's all that I would talk about.  I will now triple guarantee that my registration is correct and I should be done taking exams for the rest of my career.  (I have no desire to go for the Supervisory Principal designation.) 

I am done with training at work and settling in to my new triangle, where we are all prairie dogs.  I work in a large, open plan room, where we all sit in pods with desks shaped like triangles.  (I wish I could take a picture for you--it's very hard to explain.)  We are like prairie dogs--poking our heads up over the walls when we need something.  Right now, I have my head poking up a lot.  This job is harder than I thought that it would be.  There's talking and listening and typing and reading all at the same time.  I have greater compassion and admiration for anyone who has worked in a call center before.  It's hard--I underestimated it.  Thankfully, I still enjoy it.  Each call is different and the novelty of talking to people from all over the world hasn't warn off yet.  I hope it never will.

In other news, I am feeling better.*  After the horrible PAM experience, I was too nervous to try another anti-anxiety medication, so I just had to stick it out, waiting to see if the mood stabilizers would work.  Thankfully they did.  I'm not 100% yet, but I'm really close. 

I promise to write more now.  I've sat down to write postings many times, but every time I started to write I would tell myself that I needed to study.  I'll start taking notes about cool things at work.  My manager, whom I like, is about my age and very cool.  He majored in Pop Culture.  Someday I'm hoping that I'm good enough friends with him to ask him what kind of a job he intended to get with that Pop Culture degree**.  He also wears Doc Martin boots to work almost every day, so it's like a little reminder of happy college days every time I see his feet. 

I don't have to go into work for another 3 hours, so I'm going to watch some bad TV.  I love bad TV. 

*I'm hopeful that now that my exam is over I will finally feel truly well. 

**I'm thinking that would be a bad way to start off our employee/manager relationship.  He does know more about "The Simpson's" than any other person I've met. 

Exam Eve

I was going to make him say "Agents, Issuers and Banks are exempt from registration as broker-dealers," but that was too many words.  Good luck will have to do. 

72!

I just completed my first practice exam with a score of 72%--the lowest passing exam score.  That is kind of amazing, since I thought that I was getting about 50% of the questions right as I was taking it.  Apparently Ryan Gosling, and my former client, are correct and I have lots of knowledge. 

For anyone wondering abut the PAMs, my doctor is reluctant to try anything else since the PAMs have made me feel so bad.  I've decided to stick it out and do the best I can with my current drugs.  I feel a little bit more stable already, so I think I'll be okay.

Time to iron...

Something I needed (other than more Diet Coke)*

I'm talking an end of chapter study break (and also getting more Diet Coke) and I decided to make myself something.

My absolute and all-time favorite client said that to me at our last meeting prior to her retirement.  It's one of those things that I've just tucked away for times that I've needed it.**  I used to want to say it to The Man.  Something would go wrong and I'd want to snap back "Oh yeah--well _______ _______ says I have so much knowledge, so what do you think about that?"  Anyway it makes me feel better.

By the way, you have so much knowledge too. 

*Do you think I could get Diet Coke to sponsor me?  Then maybe I wouldn't have to retake this exam. 

**She did not preface it with "Hey Girl," if you were wondering. 

Don't press the red button

I'm training in a live system.  There are no dummy accounts.  Since I will soon have the authority to place trades they went ahead and built my screen with this big red button that says "Submit Order."  Supposedly the red button isn't supposed to work, but...live system...we can't test that out.  I live in fear every day that I'm going to submit an order by accident and sell someones shares.  Whomever built the system didn't think things through because the "Model Transaction" button is right next to the "Submit Order" button.  We model transactions in training all the time to see what would happen if a trade was placed.  I'll also model transactions all the time when I'm actually working to give people different scenarios to execute their trades.*  If I'd built the system, I'd have put the "Model Transaction" button as far away from the "Submit Order" button as possible to try and prevent accidental pushings, but (as usual) no one asked me.  Bottom line--click carefully and enjoy the little panic attack that you have every time you model a trade thinking "did I just hit that red button by accident?"

Last night I discovered that my body does not tolerate the "Pam" family of drugs.  Lorazepam, Diazepam, and all their friends in the benzodiazepines family.  These drugs are supposed to reduce anxiety, but they make mine worse.  I think that I've said this before, but I feel like I'm living in a constant state of "fight or flight."  The Pam drugs are supposed to relax you, and for me they relax my body, but not enough to sleep, and they certainly don't quiet my mind.  I had an extremely bad experience last night--I would describe it as feeling like you  needed to run away from a lion, but then finding that your legs wouldn't work.  Thankfully the Pam that I took last night was a fast acting one, so it wore off quickly.  I ended up huddled on the couch, alone in the dark, eating Oreos** until it wore off.  This morning I called my doctor, whom I seem to have stumped.  He asked me if I could make it through the weekend, which I can.  He wants to think about it, and hopefully on Monday he'll have come up with a non-Pam anxiety drug.  Or, if I can stick it out for about two weeks, I'll know if the increased dosage on my mood stabilizer is working, and then maybe I won't need anything else.  Do you all get tired of reading about my pharmacology?  It helps me to write it down.  The Husband isn't a great listener when it comes to this stuff. 

For some good news--I don't think I broke my tooth.  I think that I just broke some bonding off my tooth.  According to the dentist, my teeth are too big for my mouth, so before I got braces they had to pull several teeth to make room for everything.  After I got my braces off, my teeth were bonded to make them the same size and shape of everyone else's teeth.  After careful examination, it looks like I just ground off some binding (which is why my tooth doesn't hurt).  It is kind of annoying, so I'll have to make a dentist appointment soon to get it fixed.  Since bonding is not as hard as teeth, grinding off my binding sounds less scary to me.

The Husband just finished my  Häagen-Dazs without asking.  That wasn't very nice.  It's probably because I was correcting him regarding Facebook.  (But there's a big difference between a shareholder and a venture capitalist and it was getting on my nerves...just like everything lately.)

*Whose still with me?  I'd have lost The Husband by now.  He's currently not talking to me because I kept correcting him when he was trying to talk about the Facebook IPO.  I probably shouldn't have done that, but I didn't really sleep last night and I'm grouchy. 

**Probably not the best choice, but it made me feel better

It's called grammar people.

I probably shouldn't criticize the grammar of others.  I would be very afraid if someone took a big red pen to this blog, however lately two things have been aggravating me like nails on a chalk board.   (Or when you accidentally knock your teeth together, which bothers me more than nails on a chalk board.) 

The first is people feeling the need to omit the verb "to be."  This seems to be regional, as I'd never heard it before I moved here and now everyone says it.  For example, I would say "the garage needs to be painted."  People here say "the garage needs painted."  Where's the verb?  (Okay, I just Googled to see what kind of verb "to be" is and now I'm wondering if I'm using it unnecessarily.)  Regardless*, it sounds weird to me.

My other irritant is the phrase "I seen."  I know this one is wrong.  I like what Urban Dictionary has to say about this one:

	I seen
	What uneducated people say in place of "I saw". Dumbass: Yo, I just seen that Lemony Snicket movie! I am hearing both of these daily... In other news, I went to the doctor today.  I had a hard day and I got to his couch and just started crying.**  He had a discussion (I watched) with himself about increasing my anti-psychotic medication or my mood stabilizers.  Since I'm at the top of the safe range for the anti-psychotics he went with the mood stabilizers.  I guess at the end of the day it's better to be unstable than psychotic.  So, I've got a drug adjustment... The doctor did have a good idea--he said that since I felt bad that I should get a do-over for both my birthday and Mother's Day.  (I encourage all of you whose husbands dropped the ball to do the same)  You can get me this.  (WARNING--THIS LINK IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR FOR PEOPLE UNDER 18.***)

*Not irregardless, another teeth clinker

**I feel like I need to justify my crying so here's what happened...today was May Crowning at Sweet Pea's school and as part of the service we all prayed a couple decades of the Rosary.  If you are unfamiliar with it, this is how the prayer goes:

 Hail Mary, full of grace.
Our Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.  
  

You pray the Hail Mary a lot when you pray The Rosary and all I could think about was the line "now and at the hour of our death" (yes, Catholics are a morbid people) which was playing on a loop in my head when I was in the hospital.  I think that I had something like a flashback.  To be overly dramatic, I think that I have something like mild PTSD from my time in the hospital, which (aside for the drugs) was not good for me.  


***I bet you're really curious now.  :  )