Top Ten Reason Why I Love My Job:

1) My boss/es are awesome. Seriously, if I ever need to negotiate anything, I'm just going to let them do it.

2) Some of my coworkers are canines.

3) The non-canine coworkers are not insane, rude, snotty or otherwise and can dance really well :)

4) I get to do my job in a place where 40  degrees is considered earth-shatteringly cold.

5) I get to tell people "Yeah, I smelted that."

6) I get to look at crazy/cool/gorgeous and/or historic tableware/jewelry.

7) I get to eat off of crazy, cool, gorgeous and extremely historic silverware, cause we haven't melted it yet. They have spoons like on Ever After.

8) I'm the only person not on Lent in the office, so I get to eat everything that someone gives us that has meat/milk/eggs in it.

9) I know what good jewelry is now.

10) I'm good at it--which is probably a first for me and a profession you can make money at.

Apparently

Apparently, my breasts know more about gold than I do. At least, I assume so, since my last customer spoke exclusively to them.

Not always right

Is it just me, or are people getting stupider and stupider these days?

I work at a precious metals refinery. Like it sounds, we buy precious metals. So yesterday I got a phone call from a customer who asked me what we would pay for a triple band ring. That being rather vague, I had to ask some follow up questions:

Me: "What karat of ring is it?"

Him: "It's, uh...I don't know what karat it is."

Me: "Okay, well we can't give you a quote without that information, but just as an estimate if it was 14 kt it would be--"

Him: "No, it's not 14 kt. How much for a triple band ring?"

Me: "Again, I can't give you a quote without knowing what type of metal it is, but if you brought it in, we'd be able to give you an accurate estimate."

Him: "Okay, thanks anyway."

Ten minutes later he calls back.

H: "How much for a .11 karat ring?"

M: "I'm afraid there's no such thing as .11 karat."

H: "But I need to know how much it would be."

M: "And I'm still going to need to know what gold karat it is."

H: "It's not gold."

M: "So it's...silver?"

H: "Yeeaaahhh."

M: "Okay, well, an average silver band would weigh about 5 grams, which would give you about $4.00."

H: "That doesn't sound right. It's not that small. It's point 11 karats."

M: "Wait, you mean weight? As in, .11 carats?"

H: "Yeah."

M: "Okay, well, give me a minute."

At this point I assume that he has a small jeweler's scale and has weighed it in diamond weights--carats--because he couldn't figure out how to change the scale to grams or pennyweights. Not being all that familiar with carats since we don't do gemstones, I Googled the conversion factor. I was sure that something had gone wrong, however, when I saw the results of my search.

M: "Uh, sir, .11 carats turns out to be less than a thousandth of a gram."

H: "Okay."

M: "You can't have a ring that weighs less than a thousandth of a gram. It's physically impossible."

H: "That's what he said."

M: "That would mean your ring weighed less than 1/2,000th of a penny."

H: "I called the jeweler I bought it from and that's what he said."

M: "Oh, the stone in your ring weighs .11 carats! Unfortunately, we don't buy stones of any type, we'd only be able to buy the metal, and I'd need a weight on that to give you an accurate quote."

H: "It's point 11 carats!"

M: "Again, that is for your stone. We cannot buy the stone from you. The metal itself has an entirely different weight. Did the jeweler tell you a weight for the metal?"

H: [getting really angry] "No. Look, don't you have any point 11 carat rings around the shop that you could weigh up for me to see how much it would be?"

I had absolutely no words for this. Apparently this man believes that every ring in the world with a certain stone size has the same weight. And even if that were true, and assuming that we carried anything (being a refinery jewelry doesn't last long around here) why would we carry such a crappy ring? At this point, I decided to stop arguing with him.

M: "No. We don't. You'll just have to come in to get a quote on it."

H: "Fine. Goodbye."

20 minutes later, I'm working on another order, so my boss answers the phone. A few minutes later I hear my boss say "Sir, .11 is not a karat."

House Living

I don't believe in reincarnation, but if I had been reincarnated, I could tell you this much about my former self: She had a staff! And no, not a "the staff of Ra" type staff, but a "tell Cook we'll be dining out tonight" type of staff.  A hairdresser, personal shopper, maid, cook, gardener and possibly driver. This became all too clear to me this weekend. I finally cleaned the whole house at once for the first time and all I could think was "Couldn't we send somebody?" Life is too ridiculously busy when you've got to do everything for yourself. So I've decided I need to get a staff. But how? I'm concavely broke, and live in a  place that wouldn't fit all these people anyway. To go for the real deal I'd either need to (a) Marry rich or (b) invent/steal something. Therefore in the foreseeable future, looks like I'm going to have to settle for the lite version. How do you even advertise for that? "Single woman seeks maid, must have excellent hair care experience, as woman is inept and will leave it looking like it does upon waking. Light cooking included."And when I say "light" I mean the Hungry Girl Cookbook "400 calories or less". I'm thinking my best bet is an immigrant who wants to be legal, and who will take a lower salary in return for sponsorship. And non-abusive management, but I think that's a given. Honestly, hats off to single mothers right now. I'm having a hard time doing all this with just me, but those of you with kids, all we can say is "Wow".

Maybe I wouldn't be feeling the pressure quite as badly if I didn't have to go to a laundromat. I haven't done that since college, and I remember it being a lot easier than it is. A lot cheaper, too. It cost at least $10 a trip to do my laundry, and that's with leaving my clothes damp. And it takes hours. And a bunch of trips back and forth since I broke the handle on my laundry basket by trying to do it all in one. I don't think I properly appreciated the beauty of sitting around the house playing video games while waiting for the laundry to finish. Or going someplace while it was running. Or not loosing socks in between the car and the building. It would also help if my cat didn't feel the need to christen newly cleaned blankets by vomiting on them.

Having a townhouse is a little daunting to me. Before, I always just had to decorate my room, because I didn't have a living room, or the one time I did, my roommate did all of that. And the kitchen too, come to think of it. Besides, decorating can get really expensive. When it comes to decorating I've always been comfort above decor, so it's probably not going to look really great no matter what I do with the walls, but the plain white look is starting to wear on me. For now, I finally unpacked the last suitcase (that had been sitting in the living room with all my books in it) so we're going to call it good.

Well, happy days until I actually write again.

Sunday in the Park with Lisa

Today was a completely gorgeous day, so I figured I'd get out and run to the Park. I was just contemplating on how guys are most likely to hit on me when I'm really nasty looking (which, trust me, I was--if anybody else lived here I'd have to take a shower, but the cat can just hold his nose), and boom. Right then a guy walked up to me, offered me a fruity Mentos, and quoted Louisa May Alcott.

Sadly, if he had been a little quicker with the quote, I'd probably have taken the Mentos.




(And for those of you that I know are peeing your pants out there, it was technically LMA misquoting Hamlet "Sweets for the sweet".)


Also, my new favorite website is couchtuner.com. Whoever runs that site is on my Christmas Card list--assuming that this year I do Christmas Cards. Maybe I'll take a really sad pic of Nigel dressed up in a reindeer suit and while I sit there looking like the shy and retiring old maid I am :)

What people think.

So we're going to play True/False about me. Guess which statement is true:

1) I can still ride horses.

2) I am a 17 year old's idol.

3) My family believes that I've moved to North Carolina because I'm in the CIA (at least they don't know it's to cover up that out-of-wedlock child!).

4) I write letters to a 75 year old Scottish man.

5) The only Jane Austen spinoff I've ever liked is one where Jane's a 285 year old vampire.

6) I love my job.

8) I finally found a guide at an historical site who gave me permission to snoop in the out-of-bounds areas.

Yes, all of these things are true. Well, everything not in a parenthesis is true.

And so as not to create confusion: I talk to the Scottish guy about traveling and photography, I am not pulling an Anna Nicole; I've heard that there are good JA spinoffs out there, just haven't found em yet; I love going off-site for my job, it's the best; and yes, Janelle, he did actually give me permission: "I don't think anybody's going to cry if you go upstairs in the smaller cabin." It's total carte blanche.

Monday Night

I officially, for the record, un-dis Chuck.