Waiting Game

I'm down to the dregs of the cold, which is to say a little bit of a sniffle and an occasional cough. Which is good, because we've got a busy few days ahead of us.

Fall Festival tonight, errands and Art Day tomorrow morning, visiting friends tomorrow afternoon, and of course all the excitement of Hallowe'en on Sunday.

Which I think I already talked about in my last post, so I apologize for the repetition.

I know my posting here has been kind of sporadic. I expect it will continue to be for a while.

I'm playing a waiting game right now at work. Two documents I'm working for next week need new screenshots. (One of them just needs two screenshots; the other needs about sixteen of them, because the author stole a chapter from another product's installation guide on how to install Windows Server 2008, which is fine -- except that this particular product doesn't use Server 2008, it uses Server 2005. So while the actual instructions don't vary much between the two, all the pictures are wrong.)

I did all my paperwork yesterday. Well, all of it that I could do. There's a few documents that I need to scan to PDF, but our copier/printer/scanner is broken, so that task is on hold until the repair guy can get out here. So now I'm just waiting on those screenshots, really.

I need to swing by the bank today and get my passport out of the safe deposit box. Not for any exciting reason, though, alas. My company is issuing everyone a new smartcard badge, only being the company that it is, it's doing it in the most ridiculously byzantine manner possible. So in order to get my new badge, I've got an appointment for next Wednesday to drive to a location about 45 minutes away (at least I don't have to go all the way up to one of the NoVA offices, I guess) and present not one, not two, but three forms of identification: my old badge, my driver's license, and either a passport or official birth certificate. (There are some other options, but those are the prime candidates.) Which, I have to say, is simply absurd. Turning in the old badge makes sense. Showing my driver's license even makes sense, if they want to make sure I'm me.

But seriously? Passport/birth certificate? WTF? Who do you think you're fooling, here? This badge is not going to gain me access to secure locations or classified data, here. It's a key to the building (where secure data is required to be kept under lock and key) and a login for my encrypted laptop. Oooo, a mis-issued badge could get the Bad Guys access to the company intranet, where they could be just as stymied as me by the completely labyrinthine corporate sites!

And seriously? You're making everyone in our office drive an hour and a half, round-trip, for what should be a 15-minute photo-and-printing job? We write software to issue smartcards for the military, stupid company, we know how it's done. We know how excessively complicated you're making it, and we know how stupid it is that one guy can't pack up the camera and a card printer and come up here to our office and get 90% of us in one day.

God, I hate bureaucracy.