The building in which we conduct our daily business was built by us, for us. It has aesthetically pleasing proportions, and is very tastefully appointed.
But, having expected that an architect would follow function over form, I was surprised to discover that this building has a few unexpected behavioural quirks.
My work area has a two-story high ceiling, a large window that runs the length and breadth of one wall, and expensive marble floor tiles. Visually, it's quite impressive.
But it also has no heating on floor level (instead, there are vents in the ceiling), there have been no provisions made for shading the window, and the marble is as slick as zamboni-resurfaced black ice.
Over the course of our first winter here, I've discovered that in practical terms this translates into:
1} a room temperature that hovers just below the Goldilocks zone.
Bonus: Though it is uncomfortable, suffering this daily cryotherapy will preserve my good looks better than Botox and extend my natural lifespan to that of a Galapagos turtle.
2} a brightness that makes all reflective surfaces potential resonators for eye-blinding laser beams.
As the sun now creeps higher towards its summer path, it becomes increasingly apparent that the greater part of my day will be spent under the magnifying glass of a young god who is intent on burning out my retinas like a juvenile delinquint incinerates ants.
Bonus: I will have to acquire a pair of sleek, dark, faintly intimidating and fairly expensive UV-rated sunglasses, and write them off as a work-related expense. Does anybody know where the feds get theirs?
3} a treacherous-when-wet floor, which is just a lawsuit waiting to happen.
It has been impossible to prevent snow from being tracked in, and we have had to lay a narrow runner of carpet to allow people to traverse in safety. Thankfully, in the summer we will only have to fear a broken sacroiliac when it rains outside, when the floor has been freshly mopped, or when beverages have been spilled.
Bonus: My desk is protected by The Millimetre Moat of Doom(TM) ~ Just Add Water!
Eternal youth, expensive sunglasses and an inaccessible lair... this could be the start of something villainous...
Started off on the wrong foot by getting to work late this morning, and was out of sync all day.
I never take a lunch, and I always stay late; still, my tardiness pissed off my superiors. VP Minions was kind enough to fill me in on how upset my absence made them, and what they said about me...
It is helpful to know when bad things are being said about oneself...
but it does fuel paranoia.
And so the hamster running in the wheel on the rational side of my brain has had to run much harder & faster than the hamster in the wheel in the emotional side of my brain in order to maintain mental equilibrium.
Both hamsters must finally be knackered, because I'm not nearly as anxious about my job security now as I was this morning. It's also possible that they've tagged out and were replaced by their partners, Denial and Distraction.
If the superiors do see fit to axe me, then in addition to severance pay I'd also receive the six weeks of extra pay I've accumulated by not taking any vacation in the last three years. And the HR Dep't likes me, so I do hope that means they'd manage to arrange it so I'd be eligible for Employment Insurance.
The only pain in the butt would be having to admit I'd failed in balancing an honest day's work with astutely judged amounts of slacking off.
I don't know whether VP Minions thought this up all on his/her own, or if this is actually an urban legend s/he ripped off just to give me a laugh.
And now that I am considering it, it does strike a distant chord of memory that niggles my nether brain. I've definitely read this somewhere before... If anybody can point me to a link that proves this is part of our urban mythdom, please post it.
But, at the time, it was presented to me as a fact; and, at that very moment, it gave me a good hearty laugh -- probably because I don't use the upstairs kitchen. :)
I am still relishing the afterglow of the chuckle that it gave me, so I am very much disinclined at the moment to verify for myself whether this is true:
~ {&} ~ {&} ~ {&} ~
After posting unmissable signs, dropping pointed hints every day in conversation, and, finally, sending a company-wide email, VP Minions has gotten fed up with being the only person who washes the dirty dishes left in the sink.
S/he told me today, I have posted a new sign over the sink. It says:
Fine.
You WIN.
I will wash your dishes.
I will wash your forks.
I will wash your coffee cups.
I will wash your spoons.
And then I will lick them,
and put them away.
My characters took on a life of their own, writers have been known to claim, they wouldn't do what I told them to do; the story took an unexpected turn and started writing itself without me.
I'd originally meant to explore the philosophy of trash in this blogsite, but have instead habitually trashed my Boss.
*shrug*
They say, you write what you know...
So for the sake of making it a wee bit more official, here is a smattering of some work-related links. Anything I decide to keep, I'll make available later on a sidebar. In no particular order:
First, be forwarned if you are surfing from work.
On the other hand, forwarned is forarmed. (It's a shame my Boss is not even remotely associated with Australia.)
The Commission des normes du travaile is always a good place to start your investigations if you ever need to verify your rights and obligations as an employee.
CBC Radio's Workology is no longer broadcasting; but their webpage allows you to download all the old shows. Its sister site, The Clockwatcher, is also a source of edutainment.
Since most jobs are no longer guaranteed for life, Human Resources Development Canada will probably come in handy some day. There's also Monster, Jobstar, and JobBoom.
If you think you've got what it takes to be your own boss, then you might benefit from SEDI; they help young entrepreneurs get off the ground. No-one will loan you money if you are without some sort of business plan; and Infoentrepreneurs is a damn good place to start. Industry Canada may even be of interest to you.
Microcredit is a money-lending model worth exploring, if cash-flow is a problem. The BBC article on microcredit has a the added value of a link to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Heaven forbid your workplace is that bad... but if it is, maybe the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety could help?
Under the heading Fire Your Boss is a slightly more anarchistic perpective to employment.
PlayPen Office is no longer being updated; but I had fun reading through the archives, maybe you will too.
You might peruse the Escape Artist if you are looking to work in another country.
If you're not allowed to leave the country, you can always telecommute. Also, the About.com site has a section for Working from Home under Small Business: Canada.
That's enough work for a Friday. Enjoy your weekend, go out and play.
Job applicants have been coming to the office for the last few days, dropping in every half-hour.
I play the guessing game of, who will they hire?
The first applicant of this morning was a very nattily dressed man. His body language and manners were the equivalent of Received Pronunciation.
If he was of a type, then I would describe that type as The Understated Yet Über-Sophisticated Cosmopolitan European, the kind sometimes found in commercials for the inaccessibly expensives.
When I handed him a brochure to inform him about who we were, he accepted it as befitted a gentleman; but as he did so, he looked me in the eye and said, thank you, but it won't be neccessary; I've already researched your company.
Then, unlike other job applicants who waited patiently in their seats, this man stood. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, and took the opportunity to peruse everything that could be seen out our front window.
He had a quiet, unassuming air; and yet he looked for all the world like a man standing at the window of a penthouse office gazing over his empire, having taken the moment to reflect on his baby son playing with their new puppy.
And I caught myself thinking, he'll never work here. He'll never be demoralized enough.
I'm hoping he gets hired if only so I can watch how the human events will transpire and cascade.
Boss' Assistant dropped by later in the day to inform me of his/her new title; s/he is now self-crowned VP of Minions. I asked our new VP who was the front-runner so far.
They like the Über-Sophisticate the best, said the VP of Minions. But they don't think they can hire him; they know his personality won't gel with Boss' personality.
It reminded me of an anecdote; I think it's a well-known one in some circles. I'll attempt to repeat it from memory. It begins with a CEO:
This CEO convened a board meeting, and presented each member his board of directors with a gift-wrapped box.
Inside each box was nested a set of Russian dolls. The CEO encouraged everbody to open the doll, and then the doll within the doll, etc.
Inside the final hollow doll, there was a note which read, if we persist on hiring people smaller than us, we shall become a company of midgets. But if we persist in hiring people bigger than ourselves, we shall become a company of giants.
Mind you, politically somewhat-less-than-perfectly-correct midget reference aside, the image of a company full of hollow people, each one snug inside the next one up, isn't a pleasant metaphor no matter in which direction it is interpreted.
But I'm hoping, vainly hoping but hoping nevertheless, hoping for their sake and for my entertainment, that they hire the Über-Sophisticate.
Other people have such admirably insightful, honestly touching, and intrinsically useful things to say.
I don't really have anything to say.
Unfortunately, I feel that something ought to be said.
That is never a good starting point.
~ {&} ~ {&} ~ {&}~
Eeyore stood by the side of the stream, and looked at himself in the water.
"Pathetic," he said. "That's what it is. Pathetic."
He turned and walked slowly down the stream for twenty yards, splashed across it, and walked slowly back on the other side. Then he looked at himself in the water again.
"As I thought," he said. "No better from this side."
~ {&} ~ {&} ~ {&}~
It's a perceptual thing; I'm keenly aware of how hard it is to separate what's being seen from the person doing the seeing of it.
When I hear someone making generalizations about another person / a group of people / world events, I think to myself: no person has the absolute grasp on truth. This statement reveals to me more about this person and their thought process than it does about the subject at hand.
So, when I try to grasp at the truth of things, it's difficult for me to separate my assessment of world events from meta-thinking those assessments; and I'm uncomfortably conscious that any "analysis" I might proffer would really be more about me.
I might try pretend I am not part of the equation, and attempt to assess the motivations behind every scrap of news/information/propaganda/opinion put forth by everybody else. But then there are so many possible aspects to consider that I reach a point where my brain shuts down like a sci-fi robot foiled by paradoxical logic. I can't possibly comprehend it all.
Some part of my ego eggs me on, saying, now is the time to try to organize your thoughts, make sense of this incoherent situation, have the guts to impose a narrative thread, find your voice no matter how embarrassing it may sound to your own ears, and to hell with whether or not it comes back to bite you on the butt.
Like I said upstairs, I can't help but feel that it is important to try to say something, anything, to acknowledge this day. Even though it is going to be self-centered, even though it's just going to be about how I feel, I don't want pretend this is just another day.
But, now that I've come down to it, the honest, ugly truth is: I do want to pretend that this is just another day, and that there is no need to say anything at all.
No need to get my thoughts straight, or my affairs in order. No need to think about the future or lack thereof. No need to be considerate of others who are already suffering. No need to assume any reponsibility for anything.
No need to worry about whether I should buy duct tape and stay, or buy survival gear and run. No need to bewail the fact that I haven't the money to afford either.
Frankly, I'd love to totally ignore what's going on in the world right now.
It helps that I do not have fingertips that thrum with the political pulse of world events; that I do not have a heart that instinctively empathizes with others; that I do not have eyes that are perceptive enough to see through the eyes of others, nor skin sensitive enough to feel under the layer of another's skin. It helps that I am perfectly capable of walling off the world.
I know bloody well that I oughtn't.
But it's what I crave.
And the frightening thing is, I think that I could manage it.
We'll see if I don't. I'm not laying any odds.
~ {&} ~ {&} ~ {&}~
It's not like any of that needed to be said, or read; the world's hardly a changed place for me having posted it, and certainly not an improved place.
But I have marked this day.
I hope there are a great many people out there with better things to say today.
If anybody sees anything well-said about this day, about this whole turn of events, please let me know.
Meanwhile, Eeyore's going back to his gloomy place. TTFN.
... did a search for my own website and read myself quoted out of context...
Apparently my impulse to write is suscitated by some inane demiurge who revels in the purple gore of slaughted prose and gloats over the sacrifice of my human dignity.
*harrumphs like a victorian spinster*
Shocked and appalled, I am, just shocked and appalled.
Can't get enough of my narcissism? Read onwards!
I've always been neurotic about writing -- must have exactly the right word in the right place, can't trust that a scrap of a paragraph can illuminate a world of thought so must write five words where one, or none, will do; and then I moil and toil through Sisyphean rewrites, so the whole damn thing stretches on to take up all of forever.
How embarassing to discover I've foisted this onto the world when this self-concious, self-absorbed phase ought instead to be quietly smothered between the sheets of private journals.
They say it's a phase that every writer goes through... emphasis on "through" in the "and out the other side" sense.
I don't want to go through it, in the double sense of the word "through": I don't want to have to suffer it in the first place; and yet, paradoxical soul that I am, I don't want to move on from it.
There's something very security-blanket-like about a very tightly woven paragraph baffled with words and stuffed with fluff. It provides the comforting illusion of substance when I'm grasping at the intangibles of reality-at-large.
(Why couldn't it be like thumbsucking? At least thumbsucking has mythological precedent.)
I know I've got to make the effort to leave it behind someday, I just don't want it to be now... not yet... not while I'm still having fun writing this turgid crap.
You poor dears. You're just going to have to suffer a bit longer.
I feel as if I should catch up on some old posts...
...actually, I'm really trying to put off doing some nasty work. A rather unpleasant customer has to be informed of bad news - and the buck was passed to me. :)
After having worked here for so long, I've built up an immunity to the guilt of passing on a passed buck. But I can't find it in my heart to wish this one on anyone else; and, to be fair, this particular assignment does fall within my job parameters, so I can't honestly justify not doing it.
So I will consider it a booster shoot of sorts, bite the bullet and make the call... in a minute... or two... just give me a second... I'm getting my nerve up...
*sigh* put the world on snooze alarm, just let me blog for five more minutes...
~ {&} ~ {&} ~ {&} ~
The bosoms I wanted for Xmas have been acquired; it is so marvelous to be able to put on a fresh new pair of tastefully bodacious tatas in the morning before going to the office and then to be able to unload them after getting home from work... it's almost like having corrective contact lenses for your breasts.
I finally succumbed to the promise of spring, and started preparing for a garden this year. With the help of some small fluorescents, some mylar and a timer, I'm adapting a pair of bookshelves into a plant nursery.
If it works, then I will also have a place to keep my kitchen herbs. Last year, I began a flowerbox herb garden on the back balcony; it ended a day later when I realized that birds perching on the balcony above were not only perfectly positioned for both precision- and carpet-pooping, but that they further augmented their target practice with fly-by poop-strafing runs over the potted plants.
And then there were the squirrels who methodically dug up every plant by yanking out the glass pebbles used as pot supports and burying them back in the pots, as if glass pebbles grow into Tiffany lamps.
Between the birds and the squirrels, I've come to appreciate that coldframes & hothouses aren't just all about temperature. But S.O. & I can't yet agree on how (or even whether) to enclose the balcony; so mylar-lined bookshelves it is.
~ {&} ~ {&} ~ {&} ~
And this procrastination has done some good; after letting the situation percolate in the back of my mind, it occurred to me that I'd seen an email address for the client somewhere; all I had to do was find it, and then relay our standard impersonal form letter for bad news.
It doesn't really let me off the hook, as our standard impersonal form letter for bad news includes my name and phone number; so the client can still call to give me an earful.
And it's an earful I'm dreading. I don't have any authority to change anything on his behalf, I'm just the cog that turns the wheel that relays the standard impersonal form letter for bad news.
But me taking the earful means that the ears of authority don't have to suffer. So I'm taking the earful on their behalf. I'm taking an earful for the company. I'm taking an earful so that others may live, and so that their ears might ring only with the deafening silence that is the sound of Freedom...
I'm hoping he won't call.
~ snooze ~
Tee Hee. :)
Boss just accidentally reprimanded a client by email.
*strangled snort*
Yes, it's evil of me to take joy in Boss' mishap. Yes, it shows what a petty, impotent, small-minded and small-hearted person I am to find so much glee in another's humiliation.
But I console myself by thinking, I'm not really laughing at Boss; I'm chortling with Fate, slapping the back of Poetic Justice, and drinking a toast to Hubris & Hamartia. Because it was SO apropos.
Over a year ago, Boss had our SysAdmin set up the network so Boss could personally access all of our email. This means that not only can Boss electronically look over our shoulders all the time, Boss can also electronically breathe down our necks by firing off micromanaging emails about our emails.
Now of course companies monitor email; this isn't a gripe about that. I don't even mind micromanaging. But...
...but it's a question of Boss' kneejerk mental reflexes. Boss thinks fast... far, far too fast for safety. Boss' mind races at such a reckless breakneck pace that hasty conclusions often supply the grounds for hot-blooded and intransigent injunctions.
It's as if Boss is imbued with so much life force, so much kinetic energy, that it would be a scientific impossibility for Boss to even momentarily hesitate. To expect Boss to prudently take a minute and actually read every word of the email and mull things over before making a decision would be like expecting a waterfall to willfully resolve itself into a tranquil pond in mid-air.
Mind you, I suppose one could argue frames of reference; from the waterfall's point of view, it's being absolutely still while everything goes whipping by or comes crashing up to meet it.
At any rate, Boss is the only human being I have met whose personality could in all fairness be poetically likened to a primal force of nature.
If humans are a watery incarnation of the Stream of Time & Gravity, then Boss is a seething cataract plunging headlong at terminal velocity into future towards that State of Final Inertia, while the rest of us drift aimlessly down like snowflakes.
By that reckoning, I suppose Reincarnation could be thought of as a sort of Evaporation Cycle of the Soul...
But as usual I get carried away by my own verbosity as I wax rhapsodic about Boss. All that purple prose was meant to set up the background for this:
A client had emailed some questions, the email was forwarded to me, I answered the questions and CC'd it to a few other people to whom the information was relevant.
When I got the consequent email from Boss, it took me about fifteen minutes to figure out what it really meant. Boss had done a "Reply All" and, addressing the comments to the client, delivered a brief and significant yet rather puzzling knuckle-rapping.
Boss has given hell to clients before, so I presumed it was intentional; but in the context, the text didn't make any logical sense. I think it took me as long as it did to understand it because I'm resigned to Boss not making sense.
I finally twigged that the client had the same first name as one of the employees here; and it was the knuckles of that employee Boss had clearly meant to rap.
With a blind presumption that is vexatingly typical, Boss had paid no heed to the fact that the client's email suffix is not even remotely close to our company email suffix; and neither, too, are the surnames at all alike.
Fortunately, the employee was vindicated at closing time. Boss, while rushing out the front door, asked in passing about said employee's involvement in the matter; and I, with as much nonchalance as I could muster, pointed out emails and surnames.
An abashed look nearly passed across Boss' face, but lost all nerve and fled. Boss promptly found fault with the client over something else, and left with dignity intact.
And that's the story of the mis-sent email.
Yes, I could have written this entire post in plainer language, and with less extraneous matter. At its practical essence, it is just about an email mis-sent. But that wouldn't do justice to Boss, nor to how Boss makes me feel.
I appreciate that Boss is no more or less fallible than average; it's just that Boss' status and power magnify these ordinary flaws into tragic flaws. By Boss' very nature, a normally insignificant event becomes epic.
And, frankly, I'm going overboard with words because this is my first blogsite and it's the first opportunity I've had to really, really play (and cavort & frolic!) with writing.
(Who was it who wrote, of a lovelorn youth: "He threw himself upon thorns of purple prose and bled"?)
For the sake of brevity, though, I ought to experiment with limiting myself to haiku for the next few posts...
To: Err is Human
Send! Boss lectures @client
not @employee.
"The more things change, the more things stay the same." The more things start looking like Orwell's 1984, the more that phrase gives me a chill...
I know, that's probably just my own personal pessimism; I've just enough optimism to hope that's what it is. I'm hoping that, after having aged well past the adolescent phase of self-centered brooding without actually having grown out of it, I've simply learned to project my melancholy onto the world around me.
But even considering everything reported ("reported"?) in the news ("news"?), I think working here at Yellapalooza has been pivotal in terms of my paradigm shift towards "we're all going to hell in a handbasket."
Up until now, I had never personally experienced trying to interact with someone who wields power the way Boss does, nor have I ever had to try to survive the group dynamic of people under such a yoke.
It is still incomprehensible to me that someone could acheive status and power without also having the ability to grasp the obvious. It baffles me as to why someone in this day and age would choose to motivate via intimidation and shame when it only engenders more problems than it solves... but then, that returns us to the inability to grasp the obvious.
It has given me a hint of a wisp of an inkling of how bad things must be outside my sheltered life; if my boss can be this bad, what must people who wield real power be like? If Boss is this bad, what must Bush be like? :) Yas'm, I. Am. Canadian. ;)
I can only suppose instilling fear and guilt in others is a way of trying to divest yourself of similar emotions; and so I'm running with the theory that the more guilt and fear Boss tries to inflict, the more you can bet that Boss is feeling really frightened and peccable.
And as a motivational technique, I can only suppose it fulfills Boss' need for instant self-gratification, repercussions be damned... which brings me to the other side of the Boss Coin.
To Boss' credit, Boss lives very much in the moment; it is a childlike state of grace that other people meditate or pray or take therapy for years to achieve. Boss is kind of like a zen master without the enlightement: lightning fast reactions and immense force of chi, yet peculiarly eluded by satori.
So. Back to the point. The whole point of blogging today was to discuss an email which I was asked to disseminate. It came from a VP who suffers the brunt of Boss and typically acts as a civilizing buffer/translator between Boss' raw emotions and employees' raw nerves.
For years, VP Suffer-Brunt has worked for impulsive and idiosyncratic entrepreneurs. One of the survival skills garned from such experience is the ability to rephrase and reissue Boss' commands in such a way that they appear more or less reasonable - it comes off like corporate jargon that has had a British private school education. For our purposes, let's call it Yellapalooza Doublespeak.
When I receive a directive from VP Suffer-Brunt, I usually play this mental game: an adaption of Broken-Telephone/Website-Translation where phrases are re-translated until they are unrecognisable, it is called What On Earth Does That Really Mean (and How Does It Affect Me)?
The email which I was asked to disseminate states that "to better serve our customers" yadda yadda blah blah, we are moving to a forty hour work week, hours will be 8AM to 5PM with 1/2 hour flex time to be arranged with your supervisor beforehand.
And I forgot to play the mental game. My first, kneejerk, thought was: oh, goodie! It sucks to have to be in earlier, but then I'll be paid more.
So I investigated my paystub to calculate the difference, and discovered that I am already paid for a forty hour work week. So far, everyone else I've talked to has confirmed they also are currently being paid for forty hours, even though they generally work more.
It's my guess that the email was VP Suffer-Brunt's Yellapalooza Doublespeak for:
1) your lunch and your breaks will no longer be paid time, and
2) you can consider yourself officially warned that lateness will no longer be tolerated.
It reminds me of the chocolate rations which were always being "raised" to lower levels... which reminds me I have to go order some boxes of hot chocolate packets for the office beverage stash...