Lake Lewisia #522

To say the pots were made while she slept would be a mistake, eliding over the active verbs, the conjunction of hands with clay, allowing the implied subject to transform into something mysterious. She did not remember making them when she woke, not even as shards of dreams, but she was still the only one who woke with pale clay caked in the folds of her knuckles, terracotta moons beneath the nails. She made pots in her sleep, she fired them when she woke, and she claimed both halves as her own, the dreamtime things and the daylight ones.

---

LL#522

plague journaling

*squints* I...feel like I'm being tested. Not by the universe--I'm not going to blame it for this. Especially considering it gave me another lovely day at work, spent with another of my preferred coworkers in the quieter room, where we told each other about amusing adventures we've had.

No, I feel like management is testing me to see just what sort of emailed policy update will actually make my head explode. Because of course there's been another update, and of course it is seemingly deliberately obtuse and foolish.

Because many states have begun to lift restrictions, we've updated our policies. ...Here are all the restrictions we're not, in fact, updating but just renewing for even longer as is.

I mean, yeah, sure, there's a logical series of sentences...

Oh, and you know how we said we encouraged mask-wearing and staying distant while working together? You know how we said we would make barriers to put between people who have to work side-by-side? Yeah, those are now required if you can't work six feet apart.

Spoiler alert: there were no barriers available today, despite every job running with multiple people. There were masks, though! They were shitty, hardware store paint department type ones. None of us can figure out a) how those were approved for use in the cleanroom or b) why it took so long to get/approve masks for us if that was the common garbage they were trying to source.

One of us pointed out the masks were so fuzzy that they couldn't be used on the job she and another were partnered on, because it would absolutely cause problems in the material from shed fuzz. For her trouble, she had to spend the rest of the day doing her half of the work from the next workstation over, a wildly inconvenient setup.

It took a month for management to even mention trying to get masks approved. Now it's taken another couple weeks for them to find some plain painters masks to chuck in a bag and fling at us? Still no barriers in evidence? It's just...

There's a point at which the excuse of "none of us were prepared for this, and we're doing the best we can to find solutions" wears out. I'll admit, I've probably been particularly impatient and insensitive to the difficulties management has had in responding to the pandemic and lockdown both. But I think even the most reasonable of standards would, at this point, ding them for being hopelessly slow to act and shockingly inadequate when they do.

There's one specific HR person who is sending these emails--who also hosted the involuntary meeting last week--for whom I have developed a stunning contempt. The emails alone would be reason to resent this person. They're poorly written--for someone whose job is professional communication--and manage to convey exactly the wrong tone for the circumstance every single time. And while I probably can't lay all these policies at the feet of this one person, I'm still inclined to, if not shoot the messenger, then at least to chuck rotten produce at them. If I'm to be forced to be an audience to this sort of inanity, I ought to be allowed to heckle accordingly.