work Dread

Posted May 17, 2006 • Comments Off on Dread

I’m so tired of dreading things. I’m so tired of spending my days in worry instead of in actual thought or activity. This isn’t just a work thing; this is everything. Nothing upcoming can ever be good: everything is to be dreaded. Nothing ever turns out as bad as I feared, but I fear everything anyway.

I came in to work early today and have since developed a really wonderful sinus headache. Lovely, considering I’m not even sure if I can buy decongestants without an invasion of my rights. Today I need a Sudafed more than anything in the world, and I’m afraid to walk the block and a half to CVS to try and retrieve some.

I’m tired of repeating myself. This morning, first thing, I spent an hour with one of my favorite users (the Chinese typesetter: she’s really smart, she has a sense of humor, she’s not afraid of her computer, and she understands that I can’t solve all her problems without researching them first). I came out of the meeting with two things resolved and three things I needed to follow up on. I did all my due diligence in the help desk system, then did some research, and I sent emails to the appropriate people (including Calvin) with the followup information, including more detail than I think was really my responsibility.

At 11:15 Calvin came into my cube and asked what time I’m meeting with the Chinese lady.

What. The. Fuck.

At least he doesn’t smell like shit like he did yesterday. 

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NOT A METAPHOR

I told him I'd been and gone, and sent him three emails about it. He said he hadn't been back to his desk. His desk is, of course, between my desk and the door, so he had to have walked right past it. So I opened Outlook and read him the emails I'd just sent.

Meanwhile, a week or so ago someone added my name to a group I'm not in, and now I get an email alerting me to every single help desk/repair situation that happens. My email dings about once every three minutes during daylight hours (not that I can see daylight from my basement cell). Talk about dread. Considering that computer locks itself (as in, you have to ctrl-alt-del and log in to get out of the screensaver) every five minutes, and I don't have privileges to change the timeout setting, I often get these email dings while the screen is black. Then I have to log back in and look to see what the email is. I don't know until I get in whether it's an insta-delete repair notification or something that's actually for me. This causes dread.

Dread dread dread.

Good news, though, is that I did, in fact, write Applescripts that change the names of all the countries in the world in English into their Chinese or French equivalents. This was quite an accomplishment (if you ask me) and is something I can actually add to my resume. Off the top of my head (and not counting the help desk tracking system, which may be proprietary anyway), this Applescript knowledge is the only thing I'm coming away from this job having gained.