*** Thanks to topsurf who gave me the idea for the post***
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?
Some mornings, Many mornings, Every morning, after I shut the alarm, half awake, half asleep, I ponder the state of my physical and mental faculties to get through the day looming over me. I am not “sick” per se, but I feel sluggish, and I feel like my body needs a little more rest from moving about. My eyes hurt when I try to separate the upper and the lower eyelids, which have been glued together overnight by whatever substance that’s produced by my eyes. And the only thought that comes to my foggy brain is I need to think of an excuse to take today off… And I try to think of an excuse, the effort making me a little more awake than before, which pisses me off.
But then I go, Wait a minute… Did I order lunch for today? That needs some explanation. There is a group of Japanese people at work who made arrangements with a Japanese restaurant and organized some system so you can put an order for lunch everyday for the next business day. The menu for each day is provided a week at a time, and you pick one out of four different kinds of food – a bento, a curry, a rice bowl, and a special, and put it in the spreadsheet provided on a network drive by 5 o’clock in the evening. By noon the next day, you get your food delivered, you pay a set price of $8. It’s pretty convenient not to mention that the food is good. I only order one or two days a week though because the menu doesn’t always contain what I want to eat.
And so after some intense effort to recollect if I ordered the food or not, being awaken a little more by the effort, I exert superhuman strength to get out of bed because usually I can’t, for the life of me, remember if I ordered my lunch. So I drag myself around to take the dogs out in order, and get ready for work. By the time I’m ready, I remember about lunch. But by that time, I have spent too much energy getting ready for work, I might as well go to work even when it turns out that I didn’t order my lunch. So I go to work.
How about that for motivation?
I dragged myself out of bed this morning and headed out to go to work through my usual route. But before reaching the highway, I was forced to make a left into some local road I’m familiar with, because of some police activity up ahead. Not knowing which way I should go, I followed the cars in front of me because they all seem to know where they were going, and no, why would the fact that they might not be headed towards the highway cross my mind? It didn’t. I was lost less than 10 minutes away from my house.
When I finally found my way back, I could tell I’d be 20 to 30 minutes late for work. Oh fuck, this is just fucking fabulous. The first day back to work this year. What a great fucking start already… I grumbled. I grumbled and got annoyed by people driving slow in the first lane. I was annoyed and aggravated by people who seemingly don’t know how to drive in between the lines. I was in a foul mood. Remembering my new year’s resolution but couldn’t see any positive at the time, I tried to calm myself and uplift my mood by reciting those eternal words of wisdom by Frank Costanza — Serenity now… Serenity now…
I changed the radio station to find some uplifting music and happened to come across the one where the DJ and some others were discussing the story of a woman who won 10 million dollar lotto jackpot her husband bought prior to his death a few days ago. And naturally, listening to the story that reminded me how I didn’t win the lotto, which would have enabled me to say, hey, I’ll just turn around and drive back home. Work? Pssh…, my mood became fouler. Is that a word? Fouler? More Foul? Anyways, serenity now…
I walked into the office and towards my desk looking at the clock which pointed out I was 23 minutes late. I frowned and heaved a sigh… Oh wait. What do I see? What? Is that desk next to mine a little too strangely clean? Yes, the one that belongs to the coworker who I despise with burning passion. Doesn’t that look a little too empty…? No monitor? No docking station? Could this be? COULD THIS BE? Holy crap that’s ever seen the light of this glorious day! I won’t have to waste my energy in trying to avoid and put as much distance as possible from him from now on! I won’t sprain my eyeballs anymore from glaring at him in meetings where he always has answers and comments and recommendations on anything and everything he has never worked with before! I don’t have to scream and yell at the him as to make the whole office eerily quiet for taking ridiculously long time to do a simple task and make all of us in our team look like fools because he would never admit he doesn’t know how to accomplish something! I can sit and eat at any table in the cafeteria! This is Merry Christmas all over again!
Serenity can bite my fat ass. The bitch is gone. This year is shaping up to be just fine, I say.
I thought there would be more than enough “Thirteen things I’m thankful for” Thursday Thirteen posts this week in blogosphere, so I’ve decided on a grumpier kind. This is the list of thirteen things I did yesterday that I really, truly, most definitely did NOT want to do, but for the good of everybody involved (or not) I decided I’d better do.
- I woked up in the morning. Well, if you’ve known me either IRL or virtually for a couple of weeks, you would know I hate mornings because the “waking up” aspect of it. So this is no small matter in that once I wake up in the morning, I consider I’m about half way through the day, except that I’m pessimistic in nature, I rather bemoan the fact that I have the entire half left in the day.
- I drove 50 minutes. I hate driving. I hate traffic. I hate idiot drivers. I hate slow drivers. Of course the destination being work doesn’t help the matter.
- I drove another 50 minutes. This time, heading home, so it is a little better than the aforementioned driving, but it doesn’t make me hate driving, traffic, idiot and slow drivers any less.
- I worked. Yeah, well, need I elaborate?
- I arrived at work early. I hate getting to work even a minute earlier than I need to because I don’t get paid for that amount of time while I have to stay at work at least 8 hours.
- I agreed to work for an hour from home on Thanksgiving although I’m not on call. I really couldn’t care less about scratch tapes running out or backup tapes not being sent out during the long Thanksgiving weekend, especially since the two employees in our team don’t even bat an eye even when they are on call. I agreed so that the only conscientious coworker, another consultant I might add, would do it both Thursday and Friday for an hour each if I didn’t agree. Behold my angelic countenance! >>>
- I bought my lunch at the cafeteria in the building. The first time I bought something from the cafeteria 3 weeks ago, I swore that I would never eat their food again because I got to spend $7 for lunch which didn’t make a dent in my mid-day hunger after finishing it. Of course I eat like a pig, but do they really expect me to be remotely satiated with a table spoon of tuna salad on a wrap? But having to start the work day at noon limited my options.
- I said hi to the coworker whom I despise, who in turn despises me. We have to work together and he had to assign SAN disks on the server I’m working on. So I had to be agreeable a smidgen.
- I said bye to the coworker whom I despise, who in turn despises me. He was on his way to the data center to run the cable. I was supposed to open a ticket for him to go into the data center, and I didn’t. So I decided to be a little more agreeable.
- I even wished the coworker, whom I despise, who in turn despises me, a happy Thanksgiving. I know, I know. But before you hastily decide I’m not such a bitch, let me give you the reason and protect my reputation as a bitch. He was going to the data center to run the new cable and hook them up without a ticket. He could easily pull another cable and cause an outage and be blameless because I didn’t create a ticket. I was walking on thin ice. OK?
- I said hi to the coworker who sits on my left, whom I despise with burning passion. I’m sure this guy despises me as well since my feelings toward him is well known around the office. But he’s too scared to show his real feelings and I think he keeps saying hi to me just to annoy me knowing that I don’t like saying hi to him.
- I said bye to the coworker who sits on my left, whom I despise with burning passion. I’m telling you, this guy is doing this to annoy the crap out of me!!!
- I resisted the urge to tell my boss and give him proof that the coworker – who sits on my left, whom I despise with burning passion – is not only an incompetent pretentious idiot, but also a liar. It was not easy. Not. At. All. But I did resist it. Because of him, the problem that could have been fixed on the server (which crashed after a power problem) in 30 minutes took 11 hours of restoring and recovering – the liability he denied and blamed the IBM support, but that’s why he’s stupid. Doesn’t he know we can prove he lied? In any case, I didn’t get him fired this time. Where is my reward?
I have been pondering the wisdom of writing a blog entry about people at work. I mean, there are a lot A LOT of things I want to say about some of them. But each time I start to type about a particular incident with a particular individual at work or just some rants about somebody in general, after a few paragraphs, I change my mind about it and poof, I delete the whole thing. I know I’ll never write about the company I work for or the company I work at, no matter what, since that obviously is not a good idea for my wellbeing. But what about the people I have to deal with at work? Are they fair game? Of course I would never put their real names or their titles or anything, but still I’m very hesitant to write about them. And did I mention there are a shitload of stuff I want to share with you guys?
What do you think? Why am I so hesitant? I mean besides the fact that I’m a chicken.
Serious Stuff. Seriously
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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