I think I mentioned a couple of times in the past that my coworkers are scared of me. I know some of them downright hate me and probably refer to me as a fucking bitch to like-minded coworkers, not that I give a flying fuck. I’m just not a people person. So sue me.

Anyway, some might wonder how I know  my coworkers are scared of me. I dunno. I get the impression they are. It’s this feeling, ya know?

My group, Unix system admin group, consists of 4 people. Database admins, programmers, QA testers, web admins, or simply put, basically everybody in IT needs us to do something for them daily, cause  we ARE the superusers after all (if you don’t know Unix, the meaning of  Unix superuser is lost, but it really doesn’t matter). So people come to us for help. I use the term “us” loosely because they go to one of the three other members in the group. All the time. Except when forced to do otherwise.

The boss man of my boss man wants at least one of us to be at work 8am to 6pm,  so two of us work 8am to 4pm, I work 10am to 6pm, and the other 9am to 5pm. Do you see the dilemma for those who have to seek our help between 5pm and 6pm? I’m the only one around! Muwahahahaha!

So I sit at my desk going about my business, everybody else in my group gone for the day, and a phone starts to ring merrily, the one belonging to the nicest push-over. The phone goes silent after several rings. A few seconds later, I hear a second phone ring, the one belonging to the second nicest, and an evil grin starts to spread on my face. Another few seconds later, the phone which belongs to the last of the nice guys in my group starts to ring somewhat desperately. My evil grin now emits chuckling sound. After that last phone ceases to ring, there is  silence of uncertainty for  at least a few minutes. I’m intrigued. I’m curious as to what will happen next. I gleefully anticipate and wait. Oh the delight!

Half the times, after that awkward silence, my phone, hesitantly and reluctantly, rings, which kinda disappoints me because the other half the times when they do NOT call me amuse me to no end. You see, the other half of the times except those few occasions when they decide to wait until the next day, two or more people sheepishly present themselves in person by my desk instead of drawing lots to choose who is to call me. Once, six people came by and stood around waiting for somebody to start talking. You can imagine the amount of energy I put into the effort to suppress myself from bursting out with laughter. Oh yeah, it still cracks me up every time I think about it.

Yeah, subtle clues, I know. But that’s where I pick up this vague sense that they are afraid of me.  What do you think?

I’m always puzzled as to why somebody brags about such thing when, for example, she is a struggling single mother, trying to make ends meet, working at a place she can’t stand anybody who works there. Oh yeah, you COULD argue that the meaning of “success” isn’t the same for everyone and how rich or how famous is not the only measure of success. Yeah, I’m sure most of those high school kids had that  in mind when they voted. Please.

I’m very relieved that I was never voted as such. As a matter of fact, there was no such thing when I was in high school in Korea. Otherwise, I would have been voted the most likely to win the hot dog eating contest or something. But if I had ever been voted “the person most likely to succeed,” I’d never speak a word of it to anybody. Because if I did, I’m afraid people would try their darnest to stop themselves from saying something like, “Oh congratulations! Now the only thing left for YOU to do is to actually BECOME successful!” or “What a shame, eh? that you turned out like this?” or “So were you voted the most unexpectedly not successful at your high school reunion?” or “Another reason why not everybody should be given a vote” or “Guess they should have voted you most likely to disappoint, eh?”, etc, etc.

Oh no, I don’t think I’m a failure. But I don’t particularly feel that I’ve achieved the level of “the most successful” out of hundreds of high  school classmates I graduated with, you know? Not to mention even remotely successful. I’m just a normal, average middle class single woman… OK, fine, scratch that normal, but you get my drift.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t share this bit of information about themselves. On the contrary, I like to know this kind of tidbits about people when getting to know them. Nor am I saying struggling single mothers are failures. God knows how many happy single mothers are there who struggle daily but whose lives are filled with love and joy and happiness, who lead much more fulfilling and meaningful life than I ever could. Honestly, I don’t know anybody I would label as a failure. Life IS very complicated and mysterious. Oh I know.

And do you know what else I know? I know when bragging is taking place as opposed to sharing information about oneself. I just don’t like brags. Some people don’t seem to understand that we can tell when they are bragging. We KNOW. So stop bragging you were voted most likely to succeed 20 years ago by a bunch of high school kids.  It makes your life seem pathetic to have THAT as the highlight of your life.

I don’t know if I’ve blogged about it before, but since IT moved from the headquarters to this building occupying just one floor, we don’t have cubicles. The desks are placed right next to each other, and there is no barrier between my space and the next guy’s space. Herein lies the problem.

There is this auditor who has been coming in and sitting at the empty desk next to mine for the last several weeks to audit our  SOX compliance. Ever since I came back to work from my staycation, I’ve noticed that this guy has been expanding his space, which means he’s been encroaching upon my space.

I come to work in the morning, and his laptop case, not a portion of it but the WHOLE of it, is comfortably standing on the floor casually leaning against MY file cabinet of MY desk. His files are arranged on his desk and on about a foot of my desk. I don’t really care about the desk space because it’s the space I don’t get much use of, except that I don’t like him nonchalantly just claiming the space.

I have been just pushing his laptop case over to HIS side so that it  leans on the file cabinet of HIS desk. Every single morning. And during the course of a day, it gradually crawls towards my side again. The thing is this. He doesn’t have to open his cabinet cause there is nothing in there! And I DO use my file cabinet. Why the fuck is he doing this?

Today, I came in and I just opened my cabinet without moving his laptop case because I knew he could see me. It fell over. He tried to catch it, but he couldn’t. It was lying on MY side right next to my chair. He turned back and kept on doing what he had been doing before WITHOUT picking it up and moving it. I guess he thought since I knocked it over, so I’d pick it up? Maybe?

Uh… like I give a fuck? So I went around doing my thing, pushing my chair out when I had to get up, which, incidentally, might have trampled on his laptop case  more than once, and I  “accidentally” kicked the laptop case numerous times, and strangely enough, I “somehow” had to get up and go away from my desk quite frequently this morning. Finally when I came back from the lunch, he had moved his laptop case completely under his desk, out of reach of my chair and my oh so pretty little feet.

Oh, I’m SOOOOO giddy with anticipation for tomorrow morning. I SOOOO wanna see where his laptop case would be when I come in. People in the office will have something to talk about for a few days if I see that case grace my cabinet again tomorrow morning.

Then why am I extremely busy, you might ask? Well, because people procrastinate and put off work as long as possible. For some reason, people in this company seem to only work at the end of each month. And then more people only work at the end of each year. But even so, I wouldn’t be busy if people would REMEMBER their passwords, which they need to their work! I’m busy because people request their passwords to be reset. The requests come in droves at the end of each month, quarter and year.

What I don’t understand is this. We are not talking about some password for some internet social networking site or private email or googles or yahoos or game or gambling site or any other PERSONAL sites. What we are talking about are the passwords they have to use TO DO THEIR WORK! How can you keep forgetting this password? I’m telling you, out of several thousand users on this particular system, and some people forget their passwords so often, I even remember their names. And what does it say about how much work they do throughout the month or quarter or year?

Another thing that cooks my grits? They all want it as soon as possible. It’s very urgent. It’s high priority. It’s an emergency even. YOU forgetting the password that you need for you to do your work that you get paid to do is NEVER an emergency or high priority or urgent. WE (we as in IT people at work) don’t really care if one person –YOU– doesn’t get high performance marks  because the said person –again YOU– has forgotten the password to do the work. A request for the password reset is automatically assigned the lowest priority by the system. There is no use crying or keep sending emails or calling or yelling because you haven’t received the new password in shockingly long 15 minutes of you requesting it – I might not even see the request within a few hours because if it’s some real emergency or high priority or an urgent matter, the ticketing system would have automatically paged us, and believe me, a password reset request never gets that privilege.

I don’t care how many passwords you have to remember because most people don’t have to remember more passwords than a system administrator of about 100 servers, the root passwords of which need to be changed every few months. The password is needed to do you job. Remembering it is part of your job. Please make an effort.

I had to go to the supermarket on my way home from work yesterday. I came home indignant. I have to say, whenever I go to the supermarket, I come home outraged, full of hatred for inconsiderate, selfish, lazy, uncaring, irresponsible, stupid and downright hostile people. It’s amazing how people can be so callous for no reason at all. Yesterday, these people I saw there were worse than ever! The following are 13 things I muttered to myself or wanted to scream at the people at the supermarket yesterday ALONE.

1. Why can’t you just close those damn doors so that the poor old couple can park next to your car instead of staring at them and making them back out and go to another spot, you inconsiderate selfish fuck?
2. It doesn’t occur to you that other people might want to pass while you examine the label of each can with your cart blocking the entire aisle?
3. When people say “Excuse me,” while you talk on the phone blocking other people from the items they want access to, you are supposed to move your fat ass swiftly out of that area, NOT glare at them moving just half a step.
4. We all want to get through this aisle. It would work much better if you ALSO moved your cart to your right while we pass each other instead of you standing firm in the middle of the aisle waiting for me to somehow let you pass cause I ain’t backing out of the aisle or climbing over the shelves. That’s right. See how that works?
5. If you don’t move your cart and unblock me and let me get out of here, you are never gonna get to the chicken legs AT ALL. I might get all the remaining chicken legs while I’m blocked in here.
6. Is it really necessary to make others wait while you two argue about which frozen food to get?
7. Sorry, I got here first. Glaring at me for taking the last carton of milk ain’t gonna make me give it up, bitch.
8. Didn’t you just see your kid run his hand through chicken and turkey section with sticky blood everywhere and put his fingers to his mouth?
9. I understand you could have missed the find prints on the circular that clearly states only regular Cheerios are on sale. I don’t understand you wasting everybody’s time fighting with the cashier and the manager about it even AFTER you found out.
10. I seriously think the time you wasted staring into space while waiting for the person in front of you could have been spent much better on looking for your purse AND your changes at the bottom of your humongous bag.
11. Standing so close to me trying to push me forward isn’t going to make the cashier scan my things any faster.
12. If you choose to idle your engine right at the curb despite the signs not to, at least get away from the fucking exit so that people with carts can get off the curb!
13. The parking spot for the handicapped is NOT where you return your cart, you lazy ass.