I ain't no brilliant boy...
- The Rentals, "Brilliant Boy"
"Stupid"
Today was a master-class of stupidity at my job.
I know that everybody deals with stupid shit at their job, and I'm not about to pretend that the stupid shit I deal with is somehow stupider than the shit you deal with at yours, because frankly, what am I trying to win there?
I've been at my job for almost nine years. (I'll vent that panic attack on April 25 -- BE THERE, BLOG FANS!)
I spent two hours trying to hash out how best to keep three paragraphs of text that only three people on the planet care about from making them a little mad if it didn't show up in just the right way on a product WE GIVE AWAY FOR FREE.
I was needlessly named as a potential candidate to hold a camera while our VP of Publishing and/or Whatever taped a short video for a presentation for our team in Hyderabad. I had NO INTEREST in doing this, AT ALL. Mostly because, I've got actual work to do and I'm in the middle of a major re-watch of "The Mentalist" -- but mostly, WHO CARES?
Apparently, a lot of people care.
When this email asking if I'd participate in this first showed up, I had no idea about the utter nonsense behind this, so I was vaguely worried I needed to take it seriously. How did this happen you ask/don't care? For big office political reasons (also somehow completely unrecognizable as "stupid high school bullshit" to the people in management positions above me, but maybe they get off on that}, the discussion of who should tape the video came up in a supervisors meeting. One of the supervisors really wanted to do it, but two other supervisors remembered that there's an employee going through the ambition-minimizing motions of our work who actually went to film school.
This became an absurd back and forth about how this guy would understand "special technique" about a very simple short clip of a guy talking at a desk vs. a supervisor who has a really cool camera and wants to make some face time with a higher up. I've been made to understand that at least one of the supervisors fighting for film school guy thought that maybe this could miraculously somehow segue into a job in our HUGE ASS COMPANY's video department for film school guy -- who's actually a dear, dear, friend of mine -- but that's about as far-fetched as me becoming the guy who gets to interview Anne Hathaway -- which was one of my first, naive excitements about the merger.
So, it turns out, film school guy can't do it because he won't be around next week. Instead of just going back to the supervisor with a camera, however, they ask him who else he'd think would be good for something like this, and for reasons I cannot fathom, he suggests me and this other guy who happens to be right next to me cubicle-wise.
I have no desire to do this. AT ALL. Because I've got actual work to do and one of my absolute goals is to fly under the radar at this place in which I work as I haven't been promoted in something like five years OUT OF CHOICE. The next level up means no overtime. And while I don't get overtime now, it's very important to me that if they wanted to make me work more hours, it would cost them, because otherwise, they'd straight-up slave me...
Oddly, I vaguely think that my cubicle-neighbor thinks this is an honor or a big break or something -- he actually asked me if I was cool with him taking it, because he didn't want to steal my thunder -- which is funny/stupid in its own way... Maybe he was being sarcastic and I didn't pick up on that. I'm sure that's how he'll play it if he ever suspects that I think how ridiculous it was for him to ask for camera specs...
I don't want you to think that any of this stupidity is somehow beneath me, though, because it ain't.
I've come to realize that the people who end up working where I work for years end up doing so because there is something deeply, sadly wrong with them, and this is the place that will put up with their horrible, dark flaws of character.
One of the ways I used to like to put it is that if somebody showed up and said that everybody in the building was part of some "Once Upon A Time" style curse, and we were actually fairy tale characters never meant for this world, I'd be the one saying, "YES! I know which ones are the bridge trolls!"
I don't want to believe it, but I'm pretty sure I've been at my job all these years because this is where I belong. I'm good at it because I have common sense and I'm literate and, if I'm honest, incapable of asking anybody else for help, which has forced me to learn things I don't need to know. Plus, the basic way to explain what I do for a living is that I post a tax blog. I don't write it. I don't understand it... but I take the DULL-ASS words of people who know stuff about getting all those evil corporations out of paying the government that lets them make BILLIONS from giving it one penny more than they legally have to and make sure those terrible excuses appear correctly on our outlandishly priced website for our subscribers. But whatever... I had to figure out how to make my blog look right, so I'm good at making this stuff work.
Man. Remember when my big concern was that I was going to maybe be making weapons ha ha?
FAR WORSE: I'M A WELL-GREASED COG IN THE MACHINE THAT MAINTAINS GLOBAL WEALTH INEQUITY!
But I've made my peace with that. (I have a solely unjustifiable belief that I might be a sociopath, but that's completely borne of my desire to believe I'm special in some blatant way, while explaining why I've never had a girlfriend. IGNORE IT.)
When I talk about the stupidity of today, sure, there's the weird office politics, the hemming and hawing about three paragraphs that we giveaway for free that could show up a day late, but OH MY GOD, WE CAN'T LET THAT HAPPEN!, or that guy who asks the question that he could easily have answered himself if he took two seconds to look at the very product he's asking about...
Yeah. That's the unnecessary bullshit of our working lives. We all got it. We all put up with it, because in some way it's worth it. I kind of want to make some jokey argument about how all of this is worth it, because at least I have someone to come home to at the end of the day -- the joke being that I don't... But on the way home, on the train, I read some pretty good comics that made me smile and think about how I could write better, and I paid for those on the wages I earned soaking in the stupid all those days before.
And, honest and true, I actively created some truly wicked stupid today.
I spent two hours not making two mouse-clicks I could have made in as many seconds just to irk a co-worker who crossed me once by pushing their tedious work onto my lap. I got them to send five different emails wondering why their ASAP request on their NOBODY-GIVES-A-SHIT product hadn't been done
In their haste, some of those desperate emails went to their boss's boss because he has the same last name as me and they were just that riled up. and that still brings a smile to my face.
Because I work on the Island of Misfit Toys and I'm one busted-ass AT-AT Imperial Walker...
NEXT: 1 + 1 = 1
- The Rentals, "Brilliant Boy"
"Stupid"
Today was a master-class of stupidity at my job.
I know that everybody deals with stupid shit at their job, and I'm not about to pretend that the stupid shit I deal with is somehow stupider than the shit you deal with at yours, because frankly, what am I trying to win there?
I've been at my job for almost nine years. (I'll vent that panic attack on April 25 -- BE THERE, BLOG FANS!)
I spent two hours trying to hash out how best to keep three paragraphs of text that only three people on the planet care about from making them a little mad if it didn't show up in just the right way on a product WE GIVE AWAY FOR FREE.
I was needlessly named as a potential candidate to hold a camera while our VP of Publishing and/or Whatever taped a short video for a presentation for our team in Hyderabad. I had NO INTEREST in doing this, AT ALL. Mostly because, I've got actual work to do and I'm in the middle of a major re-watch of "The Mentalist" -- but mostly, WHO CARES?
Apparently, a lot of people care.
When this email asking if I'd participate in this first showed up, I had no idea about the utter nonsense behind this, so I was vaguely worried I needed to take it seriously. How did this happen you ask/don't care? For big office political reasons (also somehow completely unrecognizable as "stupid high school bullshit" to the people in management positions above me, but maybe they get off on that}, the discussion of who should tape the video came up in a supervisors meeting. One of the supervisors really wanted to do it, but two other supervisors remembered that there's an employee going through the ambition-minimizing motions of our work who actually went to film school.
This became an absurd back and forth about how this guy would understand "special technique" about a very simple short clip of a guy talking at a desk vs. a supervisor who has a really cool camera and wants to make some face time with a higher up. I've been made to understand that at least one of the supervisors fighting for film school guy thought that maybe this could miraculously somehow segue into a job in our HUGE ASS COMPANY's video department for film school guy -- who's actually a dear, dear, friend of mine -- but that's about as far-fetched as me becoming the guy who gets to interview Anne Hathaway -- which was one of my first, naive excitements about the merger.
So, it turns out, film school guy can't do it because he won't be around next week. Instead of just going back to the supervisor with a camera, however, they ask him who else he'd think would be good for something like this, and for reasons I cannot fathom, he suggests me and this other guy who happens to be right next to me cubicle-wise.
I have no desire to do this. AT ALL. Because I've got actual work to do and one of my absolute goals is to fly under the radar at this place in which I work as I haven't been promoted in something like five years OUT OF CHOICE. The next level up means no overtime. And while I don't get overtime now, it's very important to me that if they wanted to make me work more hours, it would cost them, because otherwise, they'd straight-up slave me...
Oddly, I vaguely think that my cubicle-neighbor thinks this is an honor or a big break or something -- he actually asked me if I was cool with him taking it, because he didn't want to steal my thunder -- which is funny/stupid in its own way... Maybe he was being sarcastic and I didn't pick up on that. I'm sure that's how he'll play it if he ever suspects that I think how ridiculous it was for him to ask for camera specs...
I don't want you to think that any of this stupidity is somehow beneath me, though, because it ain't.
I've come to realize that the people who end up working where I work for years end up doing so because there is something deeply, sadly wrong with them, and this is the place that will put up with their horrible, dark flaws of character.
One of the ways I used to like to put it is that if somebody showed up and said that everybody in the building was part of some "Once Upon A Time" style curse, and we were actually fairy tale characters never meant for this world, I'd be the one saying, "YES! I know which ones are the bridge trolls!"
I don't want to believe it, but I'm pretty sure I've been at my job all these years because this is where I belong. I'm good at it because I have common sense and I'm literate and, if I'm honest, incapable of asking anybody else for help, which has forced me to learn things I don't need to know. Plus, the basic way to explain what I do for a living is that I post a tax blog. I don't write it. I don't understand it... but I take the DULL-ASS words of people who know stuff about getting all those evil corporations out of paying the government that lets them make BILLIONS from giving it one penny more than they legally have to and make sure those terrible excuses appear correctly on our outlandishly priced website for our subscribers. But whatever... I had to figure out how to make my blog look right, so I'm good at making this stuff work.
Man. Remember when my big concern was that I was going to maybe be making weapons ha ha?
FAR WORSE: I'M A WELL-GREASED COG IN THE MACHINE THAT MAINTAINS GLOBAL WEALTH INEQUITY!
But I've made my peace with that. (I have a solely unjustifiable belief that I might be a sociopath, but that's completely borne of my desire to believe I'm special in some blatant way, while explaining why I've never had a girlfriend. IGNORE IT.)
When I talk about the stupidity of today, sure, there's the weird office politics, the hemming and hawing about three paragraphs that we giveaway for free that could show up a day late, but OH MY GOD, WE CAN'T LET THAT HAPPEN!, or that guy who asks the question that he could easily have answered himself if he took two seconds to look at the very product he's asking about...
Yeah. That's the unnecessary bullshit of our working lives. We all got it. We all put up with it, because in some way it's worth it. I kind of want to make some jokey argument about how all of this is worth it, because at least I have someone to come home to at the end of the day -- the joke being that I don't... But on the way home, on the train, I read some pretty good comics that made me smile and think about how I could write better, and I paid for those on the wages I earned soaking in the stupid all those days before.
And, honest and true, I actively created some truly wicked stupid today.
I spent two hours not making two mouse-clicks I could have made in as many seconds just to irk a co-worker who crossed me once by pushing their tedious work onto my lap. I got them to send five different emails wondering why their ASAP request on their NOBODY-GIVES-A-SHIT product hadn't been done
In their haste, some of those desperate emails went to their boss's boss because he has the same last name as me and they were just that riled up. and that still brings a smile to my face.
Because I work on the Island of Misfit Toys and I'm one busted-ass AT-AT Imperial Walker...
NEXT: 1 + 1 = 1
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