Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

work

Peeking Through

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Dreary from my new desk, but closer to air, free and flowing just outside the window.

There has been, apparently, a fit of jealousy about my desk. Everyone wants a window so that they too can be closer to the outside. It’s more than that for me, though; sometimes I like it because it reminds me that I don’t mind being in here so much at all.

The days alternate between long and longer, though I find that I don’t mind. Yes, increased hours actually decrease my wage, and yes, the corporate world is taking advantage of me in my impressionable youth, but I like it. I love arguing over point sizes at eleven thirty at night, and I love electronically reviewing materials for a meeting at seven forty-five while still in my towel.

I’m sure the novelty of it will wear off eventually. My Director speaks about time in broad strokes, painting a month here, a couple of years there. Every day the same, in it’s way, but each with a unique challenge.

On Monday, our new interns started. One of them has been ostensibly paired with me, I think to feel out my ability to delegate. I think I do a decent job, but the dichotomy between my spindly guffawing twentysomething self and my seemingly emotionless communications automaton mode might be a little too unnerving.

I wouldn’t want to do this forever, but it is a terrific fire to forge a more steely me.

Stalling

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Sometimes I get so enamored with seeing a particular post come up while I load the page that I abstain from writing anything else just to keep it there (rather than writing another post I’m enamored with, perish the thought). I have a great post composed for you at home. It’s great. It has links in it, and stuff. I just couldn’t bring myself to post it.

Ahh, but isn’t it amazing what boredom can drive me to do.

Why is it so much easier to fall asleep when you’re trying to do something else, like take notes in a meeting or play guitar? Is it just because your attention is already engaged, making it easier for you to drift into slumber, rather than lying with your mind busy working overtime?

I often I fall asleep sitting on our bed, playing electric guitar … sometimes literally while playing – plugged in and everything. The sleep comes so suddenly that I have no recollection of what transpires between playing guitar and waking up (which, I have to say, was a little disconcerting).

On a related topic: carrying a gig bag is a better conversation starter than commenting on the weather or grumbling about the elevators, especially when you are carrying it inside a corporate fortress such as this one. I’ve already lost track of how many people have asked me if I would be “rocking out” on my lunch hour. I’m surprised they don’t just yell “Freebird” at me from across the lobby.

I at once relish and shun these moments, where it is made so clear that I am young and vital and still alive. On one hand, I love the affirmation that no, I will not give into the doldrum routine of adultness. On the other, I fear the doldrum groupthink, where the young one with the shaggy hair and the guitar case must be transgressing because he is not dour enough.

The groupthink intimidates me. Even though I don’t buy into it I still find myself noting when men’s pants aren’t ironed, or when anyone wears an inappropriately casual shirt on a weekday. Why should I care? Rationally, I don’t, but irrationally I just want to make sure everyone is being held to the same standards that I am. I can foresee how looking at someone’s shoes in the hallway transforms into, “Her lunchbreak already came and went – why is she wearing sneakers?”

Now that I have a lighter, smaller acoustic guitar, I’ve been thinking about bringing it with me to play on my lunch breaks. I could learn a new song every day, easily blowing through my standing 50+ to-do list of Beatles tunes. I don’t necessarily want to wander the streets while trying to learn a new song, but I remember the puzzled stares I drew last summer the few times I played in the courtyard. Will the groupthink suffocate my artistic urges?

I think the answer so far is YES, but not in the way that I meant it there. Oh, to be a well-fed starving artist.

Ah, but who am I kidding, I’d still play City of Heroes all day. Hi, do we remember my Senior Project.

If I’m the only one to survive, they should triple my pay.

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Good lord.

If I call technology support with a simple question – say, that my QuickLaunch bar disappeared and I can’t get it back because I’m not an administrator on my machine – why don’t I have it back after three days and seven phones calls? Why? Why is it that they can’t figure out what to do even after calling in their co-workers on conference for assistance? Why, after I research the answer and subsequently TELL THEM HOW TO DO IT because I know more about computers than they do, can’t they can’t figure it out still? What am I supposed to do?

Maybe if I were to unplug my network connection after they remotely logged into my machine I could surreptitiously fix my settings and then plug back in before they’re any the wiser? Hmm.

(I’ll never understand why IT people make so much money. Good IT people deserve it, but the only good ones I’ve ever met have been my friends at Drexel.)

In other news, it seems as though Blogger altered the longstanding variable “BlogItemUrl” to display a full domain url rather than just a file name with a target attached, thus breaking every single permalink from the past four years. That’s 2500+ permalinks. I had to have an emergency template-editing session in the middle of the day so that you can obsessively link all of my highly entertaining writing from your own pages. So, yeah.

Meanwhile, my department is dropping like flies. One of my coworkers left the office in the middle of the day yesterday so suddenly sick that she literally had to bring a trash bag for her cab ride home. Then, this morning, two more people had to go home before our morning meeting was even underway, with a third turned a color so yellow that I think he may have developed jaundice overnight.

That’s a fifth of our entire department! I refuse to catch their sickness; I haven’t involuntarily thrown up for a reason other than alcohol consumption since middle school. Rest assured, my OCD is in high gear today – I typically treat every surface in the office as if it was thinly coated in poop anyhow, but today I have expanded that distinction to include fellow associates and added the additional precaution of wearing an imaginary fencing mask, so that I am unable to touch my hands or any office supply to any area near me face. And I still feel queasy; damn placebo effect.

Maybe it’s ebola or something, and I’ll prove to be resistant due to my iron-clad stomach, and after everyone dies I can sneak down to tech support and fix my damned Start bar.

Um, it’s a hankerchief?

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Note to self: Take the blue, bikini, leopard-print underwear out of your work bag when you get home.

Either that, or stop pointing out that they’re not Elise’s.

Brains Dribbling Out From Between My Teeth

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I have become a whistler. I’m not sure how it happened, really. I don’t whistle especially well.

Certain songs tend to earworm their way into my brain, leaving me unable to stop whistling them (and variations upon) for the duration of the day. This is especially true when I’m walking from my desk to the printer, or at home when I walk from my desk to the refridgerator.

The tunes are mostly standards: Yankee Doodle, Old Susanna, the theme from Star Wars. However, I occasionally throw together a medley, my favorite so far being “Movie Tunes of the 30s, 40s, and 90s,” which included a terrific seugeway from Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” to a Judy Garland Overture, complete with key-change.

Elise has deemed my new habit completely unacceptable to the point that she seemed to be delighted when I spent half an hour playing major scales on my guitar last night – a practice whose duration is typically frowned upon. Honestly, I find my new habit unacceptable too… the sort of aimless, pointless, eccentric thing that makes me wonder at the intelligence of the person doing it. Couldn’t they expend all that lip-pursing effort lost in thought, or some other silent activity.

Of course, now I understand: it’s a 9-to-5ism. Hopefully an isolated one, because if i get to the point where i hum the same note over an over again for six minutes at a time like the woman on the other side of my cubicle wall i think my head will explode from the dissonance between the habit and my complete and utter contemptual annoyance with it.