Today at work, we were discussing a why a customer’s phone lines had cut out, and I was pretty rapidly losing interest, so I said “I’m not saying it was aliens…”
They all just looked at me like I was going to tell them something mind-blowing. None of them knew what I was talking about.
I just…I couldn’t do it.
Angel was asked to make one copy and this is what happens. One job, Angel, you had one job.
Is it Tuesday yet?
Once again, our IT department at work has notified everyone in the company of an issue with sending and receiving emails by sending out an email to everyone in the company who might be affected by the issue and not doing anything else (such as, perhaps, updating our intranet news feed with the information.)
“What did you do over the weekend?”
“I hung out with friends, went to a bar, and saw a really great band. What about you?”
“Oh, I surfed the Internet and looked at lots of GIFs of some dude humping a Google sign. It was pretty intense.”
He hasn’t been in the job long, but has basically decided (because I told him so) that I “lack social skills”. He’s mentioned certain members of my team and company view me as difficult to approach and abrasive, though most people feel that this is a result of me beiing “extremely intelligent, but not able to understanding that other people can’t always keep up with you” rather than any inherent nastiness. He has talked to former co-workers at my previous company who say the same thing.
He acknowledged that my attitude wasn’t really helped by the fact that I’d been in my current role for too long, with no real opportunities to advance or take on new tasks, as well as ongoing frustrations outside my control that have never satisfactorily resolved. But he also said, “Look, this is a small issue in the grand scheme of things, but you need to know that you may be limiting your career by fostering this reputation as being a hardass.”
Putting aside the fact that this is not my “career” (it’s what I do to earn rent until I go back to uni) this did get me thinking about how I act at work. I’m a cunt. I’m rude, sarcastic, and mean to people who don’t do exactly what I want. I shout at people until they cry. And then I walk out the door and I’m the nicest person in the world again. I say please and thank you, apologise for brushing against people in the street, and never raise my voice or put someone out.
The biggest copout of all would be to say, “Well, that’s OK, because Work Me is not the Real Me.” If I don’t consider this an appropriate way to act most of the time, why am I allowing myself to act this way at work? I could blame the culture of my team and the company, and the abovementioned frustrations, but the reality is that I’ve let my standards slip and allowed myself to succumb to bad habits. The people that I deal with at work are real people with real feelings (even if they’re mostly mental midgets with the IQ of a fencepost) and they don’t deserve to be treated this way.
So starting today I’m going to try and be nicer at work. I’m going to try and have more patience. I’m going to try and stop myself from throwing out sarcasm whenever someone asks me a question I consider “stupid”.
How hard can it be, right?
I am going to answer every question anyone asks me with, “Is this a trick question?” Then I will laugh madly and go back to watching cat videos.
We had a new temp start with our little team at 9:30 this morning. We had her in training with one of the most experienced (and nice!) members of the team on some basic tasks.
My boss and I went into a quick meeting at 10:30. We came back 15 minutes later to be told that the temp had suddenly stood up, declared that the job was “too hard” and left.
What’s funny is that we didn’t even let her near the actual hard stuff we do; i.e. dealing with the absolute morons that work in other departments here.
Just had to spend half an hour listening to a guy in my team explaining to another guy in my team how he had been passed over for a role in a different department because they didn’t realise how awesomely skilled and knowledgeable he was. So he decided to demonstrate to this other guy (who has no relationship whatsoever to the interview process or the new position) how much he knew. With charts. And diagrams. And reference material.
No dude, you did not get passed over because you don’t know stuff, you got passed over because your last two team leaders (me being one of them) all said you were an idiot with no initiative or people skills who couldn’t be trusted with anything but the most basic tasks.
I really wish I could just say that out loud.
[insert Weezy talking about it being MY FUCKING CUP here]
I am so completely burnt out from work right now. I can barely function.
I’m going to take next week off. Either that or I’ll have a full fledged nervous breakdown, and probably kill a couple of people by dual-wielding stapler removers and clawing their faces to mush.
This is a shitty weather. It is made of shit and weather.
For me, 100 emails is manageble, just barely. Most of them are just projects I need to provide signoff for, or FYIs, stuff like that. The problem is right now I have so much other stuff going on (i.e. looking at naked chicks on Tumblr meetings and reports and things) that i’m not even going to be able to look at them until tomorrow. By which time there’ll be 200.
Just after I got back from a two week holiday a few months ago, I had something like 2,200 unread emails. That was fun.
Hi I'm Andre! I'm a cat-obssessed philosophy grad living in Devonport, in Auckland, New Zealand. This blog is not much more than a collection of my interests: bad humour, comics, fantasy, sci fi, gaming, cats, feminism and philosophy.
In particular, I post a lot of screenshots from the games I'm currently playing. If you're interested, here are some of the games I've played (feel free to ask for screenshots of particular games if you can't find them here, I have plenty more saved that I haven't uploaded):
One time I went hiking in the Coromandel and took lots of pictures.
Anyway, I'm always up for a chat. Feel free to drop me a line any time.
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