About Kristin

Recent transplant to the Northwest. I didn't escape the sadness.

You can now reach me at deathspiral@travelcompany.com

So, for those who don’t know/haven’t guess, I work in travel.  We’ll just call my company Travel Company but you could probably figure it out if you paid attention.  Travel Company is a privately owned, small tour operator that runs group tours to weird places.  Being a small company and being as how the nature of our business is strange anyway, I have become sort of used to doing a random assortment of things for the office.  Technically, my job function is internet marketing, but I spend a lot of my time doing data entry for hotel pricing, sending out visa kits for people going to Turkmenistan, calling our Moscow offices trying to get information out of them despite not speaking a word of Russian, looking up airfare, etc.  I’m your girl friday.


The problem is, of course, that I am both competent and quick (when I’m not skyving off to write in Sad Sigh), which means that my job load just keeps increasing.  And it seems like every time we have a staff changeup, I get a new email address (when the IT guy left I became techsupport@travelcompany.com; when the person who did our data entry got too busy to do it, I became database@travelcompany.com; when we decided to start a FAQ project, I became FAQ@travelcompany.com, etc.).  So when 3 people were laid off two weeks ago, it did not surprise me that I was given another email address to deal with some of the overflow workload left by them.

What did surprise me was that I finally counted up the number that I answer every day and I now have 6 email addresses at work.  6.  6!!!!  That essentially means I have 6 different job functions at a company where every job function is super varied since we are small and weird.

So, I guess feeling like a schizo is just part of the hazards of the job.  Write to me!  Really, pick any working email address @travelcompany.com (obviously, not our real domain) and it’s probably me!  There are only 13 employees now.  There’s like a 46% chance I’ll answer.

Another International Sad-Sigh

Went to Canada this weekend with my girlfriends.  The trip was really fun, until we attempted to cross back into the US.  We were “randomly” selected for a full car search at the border and “randomly” I (with my Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan visas) and my friend who has a student visa from Yemen, 4 stamps from Oman, and stamps from Qatar and Dubai were “randomly” interviewed by Homeland Security.  Pointed statements included “Did you go to Syria?  No?  Good” and some strange remarks about the “Islamists” in Norway.

But it was totally “random,” as they told us about 10 times.  And so that flag I heard them talk about that may or may not be on my passport now is totally “random” too, I bet.

Meta: Idle thoughts

I should be writing a Sad Sigh about how 3″ of snow has virtually killed Seattle, causing buses to attempt to fly and causing me to wait 40 minutes in 20F weather this morning as bus after packed bus passed me because King County Metro can’t get its fucking act together. I could also talk about how SAND and SALT are not the same things and how whiny Seattlites get when I point out that a little NaCL spread nice and thick on our roads would prevent buses from trying to fly. They say “But it’s baaaaad for the environnnnmenttttt.” It snows 3 days a year here at most and you know what else is bad for the environment? Cities. 3 days of laying down some damn salt isn’t going to kill all the trees in the Evergreen State.

Anyway, that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing because as I was one of the few people who could make it into work today, it was a pretty slow day and on slow days I mostly futz around with AdWords copy and surf around “learning” about CSS and javascript. And then it occurred to me as I mistyped a .com. Someone needs to create a new domain.

Then we could be sad-sigh.vom

Meta: Sad Sigh Makes You A Jerk

When Dennis posted that he had been robbed at the gym again on Facebook, I responded simply with this blog’s title.  “Sad.  Sigh,” I said, encouraging him to post about his misery so that we could all delight in it.

Dennis asked me to instead post about my schadenfreude over his lost wallet.  Well, it wasn’t exactly schadenfreude.  It was more like…recognizing a Sad Sigh opportunity.  Without having any sympathy.

I blame Grace for the death of my compassion and for me being a jerk.

I got mine though, as I woke up this morning with a terrible migraine.  Dennis, for this I blame you.  Oh, and sorry about you being robbed.