Eddie, Mom, and I trekked down to Newport yesterday to exchange her bag, get some lunch, and do some window shopping. We hit up a couple of shops on Belleview Ave and checked out the Tennis Hall of Fame. It was also the day that they were doing “Art on the Lawn”, so we checked out some of the artists and their wares. I was very amused to see someone selling a painting that was a direct copy of an image that I had saved from somewhere on the net (Deviant Art perhaps) and if I’d been ballsier I’d have gone up to the artist and called them on it. Window shopping was fun, as usual. We went into a lot of different shops, all sorts of things for sale, and I hovered like a bee around the outside flower boxes taking pictures. We walked along some of the shops in the Brick Marketplace section, and Eddie got himself a couple of duck/chicken kitchen gadgets while Mom found some more penguins to add to her collection.

Then came lunch. And lunch, while delicious, sucked ass.

We decided to go to The Landing, which had a great patio and upstairs deck, and also was the only place that didn’t look completely packed, wasn’t a take-out stand, and had both clamcakes and chowder. We waited for no less than 10 minutes before someone finally cleaned off the table on the patio that we were going to be seated at, because every time someone was free to clean it another member of the waitstaff came out and deposited their platter of dishes on it to serve one of the tables nearby, and the free waiter would take off to do something else. Eventually we did get seated and ordered drinks, only to be told a few minutes later that there was something wrong with the soda fountain and there was no fizz. We switched our drink order to noncarbonated things like juices and iced teas and got those instead, served in plastic cups. I’d like to think that the plastic cups were a safety precaution on the patio, but almost every other table had regular glasses. Perhaps only the tourists get the fancy glasses, to make a better impression?

We got our food in a normal amount of time, although your average restaurant wait time is never fast enough for Eddie when he’s hungry. Fish and chips and clamcakes and chowder, although they brought Mom’s chowder out before everything else (even though they asked if Eddie wanted his calamari out at the same time as the meal); the fish was as big as your head and breaded, not battered. Fantastic. Not once did we see our waiter after he dropped off the food and brought us our vinegar for our fries. And several times we saw other waiters coming through with soda, so I’m assuming that they got the fountain working properly eventually, but ours never came back and offered up the sodas we’d originally ordered. Eddie eventually had to stop someone who was passing by to ask for our check, and for the amount of money we paid for the dinner we expected better service, really.

Robin made a post on her site today - not even an entire post, just a bullet in one of her lists - saying how bored she was with Plurk. Eddie and I were talking about it this morning and he and Robin were commenting back and forth about it as well, and we’re also a little disenchanted with the site. It’s got a funky linear time line and threaded comments, which makes it easier for me to follow than Twitter, but it’s terribly cliquish over there and I’ll probably be using it less and less.

Like any sort of social networking site, Plurk’s also got a fair share of drama; I can think of at least 1 user who has a thing for stirring up the shit, deleting her account, and recreating a new profile and persona to do the same thing. There’s another person who is one of those people who just feels the need to turn every single thing into a sexual innuendo and flirting with anyone who has “male” in their profile. Someone else garnered a bunch of comments because she felt someone was “abusing” the ability to make posts private and didn’t feel that the items being made private warranted being private in the first place.

Unless Socialthing ends up doing more with Plurk, I’ll probably remove Plurk from my feed, simply because it does nothing but show me what I’ve posted. Completely pointless; I know what I posted, since I posted it to Twitter and Facebook in addition to Plurk, and both of those services actually show me more info on my stream. I can’t read replies on there, so if I want to actually keep track of things on both sites, I need two tabs open in Firefox. As Eddie can attest, I usually have about 8 tabs open all the time, between Google Reader, LiveJournal, links that blogs have pointed me towards, and whatever random thing I might be obsessing over this week. I don’t want to have anything open that I don’t have to, which is why I like Socialthing in the first place.

If you’re not part of the in crowd, you don’t get comments to anything that you post. You can post a lot and comment on other people’s plurks, but you may as well be doing nothing at all because these people aren’t going to bother giving you even the most cursory of glances. And if you make a post about how no one is commenting on your things, someone else will be all passive aggressive about it and make a post of their own complaining about people who complain about not getting comments. Let’s face it, most people who write things want to get some sort of comments, even if we’re just posting about stuff that goes on in our everyday life.

I’ll admit that I’m not the greatest when it comes to commenting, but I do try to post comments on things if I’ve got something to add, and this has gotten a lot better since I set up Google Reader to allow me to do it right from my feed screen. However, the blogs that I make comments on are better for actually having a “conversation” with other readers than Plurk is in my opinion, because it’s quality stuff and not just the “me too” mentality that Plurk seems to have a lot of. And I’ll take quality over quantity any day.

We arrived at work this week to be told that we had to take an employee survey about what we think about our workplace and the company as a whole. The survey was your typical bullshit about whether or not we strongly agree or disagree with a series of statements such as “My manager gives me the tools I need to succeed” and “I feel that there is room for me to advance within the company.” Because in a store that doesn’t have any sort of “lead tech” position (aside from the title of Supertech, but I’m sure she’ll tell you it doesn’t come with a pay raise) there’s oh so many promotions that I can get.

What makes this survey such completely and utterly insane is the fact that they’re hyping it as anonymous and voluntary. It’s so voluntary that there is a list of people’s names in the manager’s office that shows who has taken it so far, because the district manager is sending out messages along the lines of “Take the survey, it only takes 5 minutes” (or “minuets” as the note we got read) and it’s gone from a voluntary survey into that gray area between “mandatory survey” and “DO THE DAMNED SURVEY OR I’LL EAT YOUR SOUL.”

Plus, the automated survey system (or THE GIRL, as the old ladies refer to the automated system) must tell you about 15 different times how anonymous your responses are. “No information will be linked to you,” she says in that soothing voice. The recording then proceeds to ask you what your store number is, your job title, how long you have worked for the company, and whether or not you are a full time employee. Let’s see: a full time pharmacy tech who has worked for the company for between 2 and 3 years narrows the choices of employees to… just me.

Let’s hear it for anonymity!

The rain has finally stopped for a day and we’ve got a nice, bright, sunshiny day here in Coventry. Eddie is complaining about how I won’t kiss him because his mouth smells like tuna from his lunch. Chaucer is sleeping somewhere, and Pickle is in her cage, curled up into a little cinnamon-bun shaped ball of fur. Everything is unpacked, and I’ve been slowly going through my crafting pile to get rid of things that I don’t need or won’t ever use.

We’re getting used to living here; it’s a quiet neighborhood, and the only excitement we’ve had lately is a squirrel falling from the roof, hitting our A/C, and landing in our wind chimes. And I slept through that. Even the loud motorcycles across the street have left I’ve started crocheting a bit again, this time an afghan for us, mostly while Eddie and I make our way through the 1st season of X-Files on DVD.

Last week was busy at work. I was the beginning of the month, meaning that we were filling pretty much nothing but heart meds and birth control, with the occasional pain killers thrown in here and there. The company is running a promotion right now where people can get up to $120 in gift cards if they transfer their meds from another pharmacy to us, so we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place at times. On one hand, we’re getting it drilled into our heads that they lost a lot of business during the merge/takeover last year, so they want all the business that they can get. On the other hand, this type of promotion attracts more of the type of people that no pharmacy wants: the ones who go from store to store, filling things at several different places at a time depending on who will fall for whatever line of bullshit they’re trying to use this week and who has the better promotional offer for prescription transfers.

We were talking about how cynical the job makes you, and how little faith we have in humanity after working there. I mean, we’ve got to deal with the fact that we need to treat every patient as though they are either a complete imbecile or junky. We need to specify that suppositories are to be unwrapped and are to be shoved up their asses, not swallowed. Oral antibiotics are to be swallowed, not applied to the ear with the infection. When a person comes in with a prescription and says, “I’m paying cash,” we immediately jump to the conclusion that they are one of the sketchy variety and assume that they have insurance and do everything possible to bill things out properly, including calling to the nearby chains to check them out.

Naturally, this makes everyone hate us, except for the little old ladies who think we’re wonderful.

I had a terrible day, and I’m not entirely certain why it was so bad. I had a good sleep, I didn’t have any crazy nightmares involving people dying (or waiting for people to die), and it wasn’t insane at work. But lately I’ve been not-quite-right, and I know it, and I feel powerless to actually fix it right now. There’s too much going on, even if it may not seem like it, and I’ve been putting myself on the back burner trying to keep everything else from boiling over. I need my meds adjusted, and my MD isn’t in the network so it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg to go back to her and get a check up in addition to the wallet-rape it costs me to get the crap refilled every month.

So I sent Eddie a text message this afternoon telling him how I was feeling, and requested pizza because for the first time in a very long time I wanted to eat for comfort. And after dinner Eddie drew me a bath and tossed in two vanilla and buttercream bath bombs, lit some candles, and left me in there alone for 40 minutes. I laid down, covered my ears with the water and enjoyed some well deserved silence.

Well, almost silence. I had a cat who was attempting to steal my glasses from the edge of the tub, drink the water, and sit on my stomach while I was relaxing.