Archive for the 'Life in the Cube' Category

on discovering my temp-job nemesis

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on June 22, 2007
in Life in the Cube and Paedagogy
. 4 Comments

I just had a discussion with a particularly annoying co-worker in which he openly espoused the same worldviews as a Known Nemesis of mine.?

But first, some background: this co-worker is annoying for a wealth of reasons, most of which could be summarized by just stating that he is overbearing with his opinions and desires.??Then again,?when have you known me to be brief about the things that annoy me?? One sterling example of his character is that he spent the week MicroSoft released the Zune running around our offices telling everyone who would listen how the Zune was going to “kick iPod’s ass,” just you wait, and boy oh boy was he eager to see that happen.? I’m sure we can each think of no fewer than fifty things wrong with that scenario, not least of which would be the fact that none of us in the office could fucking care less, and, of course, no one had asked his opinion on the matter.?

So go ahead now, reader, and imagine yourself a teeming nest of annoyances like?this?one, and then hunker down in that teeming nest, all scratchy and festering, and you will have the background lurking behind everyone’s interactions with this dude.? Then, thrown boldly up against that background are his actual work-related behaviors, such as the fact that he is constantly?bungling things and then trying to deflect attention from himself, or to trick other people into rectifying his mistakes.?

Today he tried to convince me to start dissecting all the architect’s orders I receive and creating new spec files doing effectively twice as much work as usual just to create some kind of back-up for the next time he goofs, or, perhaps, to create the illusion that the thing he keeps fucking up is actually my responsibility and not his,?retroactively assuming the blame for his past mistakes.? He turns his own gaffes into an opportunity to come hassle me about whether some unused computer has Illustrator on it and where I would like the hole puncher, and by the way, here are pages 3-6 of some random ten-page document, you know, so I don’t have to print them out myself.

Basically,? I?can not stand this guy.

So when he started asking me today about whether I use the online course management system for my classes (you know, the one I believe we all agreed to call “Chalkboard”), I just knew something horrible?was coming.? Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite sense what it was, and I was unable to deflect the blow.?? It turns out that the annoying co-worker is of the opinion that his professors should all post his grades to?what he calls the “Chalkboard Spreadsheet,” so that he will always know what grade he “has” in the class at any given time (despite the fact that Chalkboard will in no way help him ascertain this; I have?described its mathematical inaccuracies and/or general unhelpfulness?before).? He is incapable of keeping track of his grades himself, see,?even if the professors report his grades to him when assignments are handed back.?

“I just don’t wanna keep track of them,” he whines, sounding exactly like a thirty-five-year-old version of those kids on MTV whose parents throw them hundred-thousand-dollar birthday parties and buy them custom-made “hot couture” gowns [sic], which the kids?then complain are “hideous” and “not hot” and which they then ask if they can take out back and burn, just to escape the multi-thousand-dollar, custom-made, hand-beaded, perfectly-tailored hideousness.? I seem to have digressed a little bit, but while I’m here, let me just say that you should by all means check out this show if you are in any way dissatisfied with your boring, pedestrian, bourgeois life, because these children will make you so, so thankful your parents never bought you a? horrifying, diamond-encrusted watch or a ninety-thousand-dollar car?just to embarrass you.

In that moment, though, when my thirty-five-year-old, ex-military, married, college-educated, reasonably successful co-worker sat there moaning and groaning like a rich brat whose mother had ruined not only her quincea?era but also her entire life, I realized something.? I saw those ridiculous whippersnappers who, with one instance of bad behavior after another after another, become my nemeses, and I saw exactly what is going to become of them.? They are all, every last one, going to be fucking up simple tasks in offices all across America, and trying to trick their colleagues into not only fixing things for them but taking the blame, too.? Keep your eyes open for them, all of you.? Contant vigilance.

That, sir, is no verb.

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on March 2, 2007
in Grammar, Life in the Cube and Neologisms
. 7 Comments

At work today, I had to create a file under the heading "Visioning."  I am now going to look for a pencil I can use to stab out my own eyes.

a different kind of detective work

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on November 29, 2006
in Gumshoe and Life in the Cube
. 4 Comments

I don’t know if I have described exactly what I do at the temp job here, mainly because it’s kind of spotty and changes from day to day.  Right now, though, after having finished the project in which I was completely anal about other people’s penmanship (sigh. I know.), I am doing some work with our company’s property files–we own practically half of this town, I am finding out.  Some of the files go back decades, and I get so absorbed in the stories told by the various collected documents. 

I can’t tell you how many files I’ve read where families, often immigrant families, start their own businesses and fail within two years.  Two years is pretty long, for some of them.  The files always contain an ebulliently optimistic business plan promising to take advantage of Location! Location! Location! and Foot Traffic!  Letters dated only a few months later reveal that things aren’t going as well as planned, and they’re really sorry the rent is past due.  Will they renew the lease for another year?  Will they have to break the lease midway through when the business is forced to close?  It’s so common, and always so sad.  I always wonder; if I had only eaten lunch there more often. 

Then there are files that just raise more questions: mysterious fires, the paperwork for which is cross-filed in a now non-existent folder; a blank piece of notebook paper with four keys taped to it; a document that has been seventy percent blacked out with sharpie marker and that seems outwardly to have nothing to do with the file it lives in.  Sometimes I try to solve these mysteries, poking around in the archives looking for those cross-files or holding that blacked-out page up to the light to try to make sense of the ghostly words lurking under all that ink. 

The other day I read through an especially fascinating one:  a retiree in her nineties and her husband were living in a house we own and they had been for forty-some-odd years.  Their rent was ridiculously low based on an unofficial rent-control-type situation, and the house needed about $15,000.00 in repairs.  As you can guess, we were hard at work behind the scenes thinking of some way to kick Grandma and Grandpa out of their house, and not only that, but we were also discussing ways in which this might be done so that the city wasn’t clued in about it in time to try to have the house declared a historical site (a famous Zemblan had lived there years before).  I cast my memory about my mental map of the city, and remembered that the only thing on that block, these days, is a parking garage. It seems we succeeded.

I probably oughtn’t poke my nose in this sort of thing, and I’m sure I oughtn’t write about it, but hey; that’s just how I roll.  All those years of watching Alias have gone to my head.  Unlike Alias and unlike my usual detective work, unfortunately, this involves neither fantastic wigs nor whiskey.

i talk too much about how i hate talking too much

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on November 25, 2006
in Cheese Sandwich and Life in the Cube
. 9 Comments

My temp job is painfully easy, in the a-monkey-could-do-it sort of vein. Nevertheless, I often find it completely exhausting, and I think this is due to the fact that, at these sorts of jobs, I am always struggling to make small talk and seem pleasant around people with whom I have very little in common.

Our office is, in itself, quiet as a stone, but when people are in it, doing their work-like tasks, it fills up with all sorts of human noise. People are forever on the phone, making deals, having meetings, talking to their neighbors, hanging out at other people’s cubes, and just generally interacting in vocal ways. Not that this is anything unusual, but I mention it because, since the office itself is so quiet, we can hear literally everything everyone else says. I know about my neighbors’ health problems (urinary incontinence! sleep apnea!) because I’ve heard them on the phone with their doctors; I know whose wives and daughters are pregnant and when they’re due; I know who goes to church (hint: almost everyone) and who doesn’t (hint: me); and I know some really scandalous and verrrry interesting information about one lady’s daughter who is in violation of her parole and on the run from the law. But it’s all so wearying. I really don’t want to know these things.

This sort of enhanced transparency (if indeed “transparency” can be applied to the auditory field) makes me stress all the more about the random conversations I have with people. In all honesty (and this should come as no surprise), I’d rather just be left alone to work in peace. What winds up happening, though, is that people toss their little conversational gambits my way and I have to volley back something that’s sufficiently friendly but also fairly benign. It’s a damn minefield: if you wind up praising the homemade cookies someone brought in, you risk freaking out a volatile dieter who’ll wind up on some tear about how the cookies weren’t supposed to be put on the filing table because they were supposed to be in the kitchen because they are too tempting and good lord she shouldn’t have to face walking by them twenty times a day, does no one listen. On the other hand, you may wind up having some very nice conversations when some one asks you for the zillionth time what you study, and then when you say literature, they wind up quoting Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabelle Allende and talking about the emergence of Latin American fiction in the American mainstream. So it’s a crap shoot, I guess.

They’re all just so chatty; I’d probably love hanging around with them when I am tipsy and all yakety-yakety, but since they don’t stock the kitchen with booze, it seems unlikely that will ever happen. I do have very strong opinions about one office subject, though: pens. I like a 0.5 mm ball point, but here, as in many other areas, I am in the minority. Rather than try to persuade them to see the fine-tipped light, I suppose I will continue trying to get things done while attempting to feign interest in Local College Sports Rivalries.

This has all been a preamble to the discussion of work yesterday, which was awesome. There were only three of us there, so it was dead quiet, plus I got bonus points for coming in when I could have stayed home. We finished the huge, stressful floor-plan project ahead of schedule, which really relieved my immediate supervisor, who had been wringing her hands about it for weeks. Her boss had been putting the pressure on, too, so she was pretty ecstatic to see it finally wrapped up, and she took my supervisor and me out to lunch as a thank you. I was happy to be recognized, you’d better believe. Half the time I feel like I am toiling away while a good portion of the manager’s don’t know my name or what I am doing in their office. Honestly, I can’t blame them: it is just a temp job, after all, and it’s not like I am going to be there for very long. That all just makes it nicer, though, when someone’s happy about what I’ve done.

Seriously, though: the highlight of yesterday had to be the absence of the existentially crushing stream of mindless chatter. One whole entire day where I wasn’t silently screaming to myself for them to shutthefuckup already–oh the sweet, sweet relief.

i have a few things to say about penmanship.

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on November 14, 2006
in Life in the Cube
. 8 Comments

I swear to god, this job. I am working on a project that requires a very small bit of artistic ability, a very big tendency toward neatness, and a very high tolerance of tedium. I have to ink the floorplans of the place we’re building in different colors according to department, and then I have to label each department clearly. I like this task just fine–the long sessions of repetitive inking are quite soothing, actually. The problem is that everyone else seems to think so too.

Cries of "Oooooh, I wanna color tooooo" ring through the office, and before you know it, two more people are crowded around the drafting table with me, "helping." That’s annoying enough, as I don’t especially enjoy being pressed up against other people or waiting for an errant elbow to be moved before I can finish inking the HR department. Just an example.

The main reason why I can’t fully enjoy this is that I am about a million times neater than everyone else, or at least a million times more anal. (I take almost no joy in saying this: on the one hand I don’t think having nice writing is anything to brag about, but then on the other hand, I don’t think there’s any excuse not to write neatly. If a person has functioning hands and eyes, what’s the damned problem?) The person who asked me to do this very pointedly inquired first as to whether I had neat handwriting (I do) and then whisperingly showed me the work of another person on this task as an example of "what not to do." Fine, I thought; I will just be neat.

But that same messy person whose work my supervisor had shown me is still working on the project, still scribbling happily away. New recruits have joined forces, mimicking his hideous anti-aesthetic. If I were in charge, I would just tell these shiftless no-’counts to stop with the damned chickenscratch already or I would have to cut them deep. I am not, however, in charge. Therefore I must continue to sit there and witness their general incompetence, my blood pressure rising with every scritch of pen against paper, all the while trying to dodge their flailing limbs. Gah. Time for lunch.