In which… I don’t know. Something about work, something about how while I’m really really grateful to have a job at all, I’m bored and underpaid. And then some crap about the band.

I spent some time today reading manuals and trolling the boards at Postini; I’ve volunteered to administer the new spam filter here at work. It’s a bit of a pain because I don’t have access to the DNS or mail servers, but as this is the only technical thing I get to do I cherish it.

The rest of the time I’m a bookkeeper, which isn’t going to keep my interest much longer, and I’m still part-time at an introductory wage. I’m going to go register with a new temp agency later this week and see if I can’t pick up some incidental temp work here and there.

Right now I’m on hold with India. I’m trying to RMA a Netgear 8-port switch. You’d think I was trying to become pope or something; it’s already taken forever and I haven’t even gotten to the part where I have to pack and ship the thing (and hold onto the power supply WITHOUT LOSING IT until the new unit arrives). I’ve now spoken to three agents and the most recent informs me I’ve landed into the wrong queue and is transferring me back to a department I’ve already talked to.

Also, I hate my Polycom IP phone. Either it’s buggy or it’s just too different from the five hundred other phones I’ve used in business settings in the past 20 years for me to be able to intuit it. I’m always hanging up on people, losing calls, and swearing at it when its redial/incoming calls features don’t appear to work. And sometimes, for no apparent reason, touchtones don’t work, so that makes trying to get my voicemail or navigate menus impossible.

It’s overcast here today and I’m grateful, because yesterday it hurt whenever sunlight touched my sunburned forehead.

I have band practice scheduled tonight, but my enthusiasm is pretty low after going last week and learning that the band sounds worse than it did five months ago. The drummer was new then, and there were some mild tempo issues I figured would go away. But last week the tempo issues weren’t gone, they were worse. I’ve learned to trust my sense of rhythm over the years, and even though I’m “just as singer” when I realized the band hadn’t spent even a single chorus in the pocket after five or six songs, I had to say something. I mean, they were all acting like they weren’t noticing, like it was fine, so perhaps they’d rehearsed themselves into it so much they could no longer hear it?

The drummer was defensive, the guitar player was in denial, and the bass player seemed embarrassed but relieved. They didn’t seem to agree with my assessment, didn’t seem to want to talk about solutions, and ended up nodding vaguely and avoiding eye contact. I thought, You can nod all you like, but there’s no way you can go into the studio sounding like this and end up with a product you’d be willing to use as a demo.

As much as I love those folks socially, I don’t think I can be in a band that doesn’t groove – it’s all rock shuffle now, and even that would be okay if it were in the pocket, but it’s not. (Covering ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is bad enough, but if you’re having tempo issues and the rhythm section can’t groove together, it’s just not worth it no matter how much you drink.) So now I’m feeling tense and nervous, because if I go and it still sucks I either have to say something and be the bitch or I have to not say something which will make me hate them. Gah! If only there was such a thing as an ego-free band, where one person could say, ‘There’s a problem with this,’ and the other would say, ‘Oh, okay. Do you have any suggestions to help me fix it?’