All posts tagged with "the-office"

A bunch of nonsense about getting a drink at Circle K and then going to work from the library. I had a couple of run ins with odd people. Also, I love the new checkout gadgets at Circle K.

At one of the offices I visit for work, there are these filing cabinets, which have stood ajar for close to a year. Handwritten signs forbid closing them. I close inspection shows that the keys are in the locks. I can't figure out why they need to stay open. If I were an employee there, I would be bitchy about how trashy it all looks, but as a contractor, I don't feel like it represents me in any way.

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A bunch of work correspondence getting made fun of.

I did very little of anything this weekend, and boy oh boy is that a welcome change. Because prior to this weekend, my schedule was like this:

Many years ago, I was fairly certain that Scott Adams had a secret camera in our offices, and used it to grab the easy pickings for Dilbert strips. Now, I've gotten to be fairly certain that he loaned the tapes to the group of people who write episodes of The Office for NBC.

I'm posting this from a short work trip to North Carolina. I flew into Raleigh with Tyler (of sporadic haiku acclaim) and Ann, a sixty year old career woman whose energy and patience is double what we younger guys have. While we were walking out of the Raleigh airport, she's moving along at a good clip, toting what appears to be seventy-five pounds of luggage. We got to an intersection, and she asked, "You guys want to take a short cut out of here?"

Several years ago, I was a true corridor crawler, spending all day every day going meeting to meeting to meeting. We reorganized the company a few years ago, and the resulting structure and physical layout eliminated 90% of the internal meetings that wasted the days away.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been out and about a ton lately. I spent the week of December 4 away from the office, on a rather dull work trip. It was four straight days of meetings, and through almost all of it, I was talking or people were paying attention to me. (That might seem natural to you if you don't do a lot of meetings in corporate America. In reality, most meetings require you to only pay about 35-40 percent of your attention.)

One day, right before Thanksgiving, we rode down to Best Buy during lunch. He put in an order for something boring, and while we were waiting for the paperwork to be completed, he started to talk to the sales girl. Somehow, it came up that he had some sort of surgery scheduled for his eyeballs. I would screw up the specifics, but it wasn't an elective, corrective type of thing that people have become familiar and comfortable about.

I have a friend, who works for a guy that I will refer to only as "The Big Doofus" for the remainder of this post. The Big Doofus works for a company with corporate headquarters in California. So I guess he has to fly to corporate for meetings every now and then.

I have anger issues this morning. I don't have any good reason to be annoyed, but the messages in my Inbox at work are getting on my last nerve. Reading documents with crap like this are part of my problem:

I woke up at 4:00 this morning, and instead of dropping right back off to sleep, I thought about an email from work yesterday. With most people -- and sometimes, even with me -- this would signify a project gone hopelessly awry or an urgent need for a vacation. But my reasons this morning were different. I started to laugh at the message. I was able to hold in the noisy, audible part of the laugh, but I couldn't help the abdominal convulsions, and it jiggled the bed enough to disturb Mrs. theskinnyonbenny.

I'm not gonna lie. I'm tired. I've been working long days, and then spending as much awake time as I can trying to enjoy Waikiki. In other words, I've pretty much kept up the routine that I described in the last post, but I am indeed ready to go home. There are a few moderately amusing things from the office this week.

It's an odd thing to be sent to Hawaii on a business trip. Of course, there's the excitement that you're going to such an awesome destination, but then again, you're being sent away for business, so you spend your days working while you know that all of your co-guests at the hotel are swimming, taking in sights, and doing generally fun vacation things. You get back to the hotel at 6:00 pm, just in time to see all of the beautiful tan people head in to wash the salt and sand out of their cracks and to hit the nightlife. You, on the other hand, have time for a swim, a bite, and a relatively early bed time.

Some long winded work story, but then it takes a turn for the wet and gross.

I think I alluded to the fact that I would be in Las Vegas all of last week, so naturally, I have a story or two to share. The week was scheduled where Sunday evening through mid-day Wednesday, I was there as a representative of a vendor hosting a conference. There was some time for fun, but not a whole lot. From mid-day Wednesday through the next weekend, I was there just for my own recreation.

The loud, blaring noise goes on and on and on and on. It fails to respect that you're trying to think. Or talk on the phone. Or reading your favorite blog on company time. It's incessant. It's painful. My singing in the office? Well, yes, that fits, but I really meant the fire alarms.

The best office/work related party that I've ever been to -- and one of the 10-15 best parties of any kind that I've been to -- was an APPRO Users' Conference party at the House of Blues in New Orleans. This was probably somewhere around 6-8 years ago, but I think anyone who was there will confirm that it was a mighty powerful throwdown.

This description of a very short exchange is longer than the actual post.

Last week, I looked up from my desk as a new woman was being led through the office from area to area for the "first day new guy tour." The proper etiquette, of course, is to nod politely and say, "Welcome aboard," as if we're all happy little shipmates. For some reason, I was possessed to boo. I didn't get too obnoxious with it. It was just a medium-volume, low-pitched booooooooo, similar to what I would do when the opponents come out on court to warm up before a basketball game.

There are some pretty funny images here, all having to do with holiday greetings.

Any time I start dreaming about work, I know that it's time for a vacation. I suppose I should be worried when updating content for this site becomes a subject of one of my dreams. Actually, one recent dream included both.

It's been over a week since I mentioned college football here, so we're long overdue. I've enjoyed just about every LSU game this season, particularly the overtime wins over Alabama and Auburn. The Bama win is a fresh memory. The Auburn win will go down in history as "the missed field goal game."

Wednesday and Thursday last week were a pain in the ass.

I don't know if there was ever any debate about whether a credit union places more value on technology or on business knowledge. But if there was such a debate, I can resolve it here and now. I went to a client site last week. My trip happened to coincide with another person's trip from the office at the same time. Ann's mission was to educate users on configuration of credit policy and scoring. My mission was to meet with the programmers about interfacing the system to other things in their universe.

Back in the spring, our company had a users conference. We bring as many clients down to New Orleans as will come, and bombard them with all of the gee-whiz neato things that they could do with their software but probably aren't. There is also a lot of opportunity to socialize (or kiss asses, depending on one's nature). They make a particular effort to schedule activities where clients interact with the teams of people that support them specifically.

Once upon a time, I worked for a company with a VP of sales who was a complete doofus. Come to think of it, that describes more than one sales VP that I've had the pleasure of knowing, but one particular guy is story-worthy. I called him "Date Rape Dan," because in a meeting where we decided to decline some particular client request, Dan had this immortal quote, which seemed to be taken right from the date rape handbook.

Here's an amusing thing that just happened to me.

I suppose that some of you know that my employer was recently acquired by Equifax. This is my first experience working for a big giant company, and I eagerly await the day that this site gets me fired.

People need some fucking manners. Here are some workplace stories about when they don't have them.

My own quote file was once one of my favorite pages on the site. I've shamefully neglected it while bringing up other content. It's one of the few pages that still has very sloppy formatting, and it even got accidentally omitted from the menu on the left when I rewrote that code. I just added a new quote, but that's the first one in a while.

And now that the obligatory seasonal good cheer is out of the way, let's continue to make fun of my coworkers. Oh yes, it didn't take long after my last post to get an email with the other groups who had to take those photos. I was too just busy cooking and herding people through my house to cut out images and make up captions. Let us proceed....

In the interest of job security, I don't normally use this forum to make fun of my employer too much. But once in a while, the satire gods throw you such a beautiful opportunity, you can't pass it up. You see, some genius at work had the bright idea for each different team to take a picture, to format that into some sort of Christmas greeting PDF file, and to send those out to the clients that this particular team supports. As my emailed response to these put it, "let the ridicule begin..."

This may seem like a trivial issue, and in fact, it really is. But, it's one of those things where a question pops into mind, then lingers and grows and puzzles the brain for months and months. It's like the question about how the Saints can suck for 30 years in a row or why you can't wait to get back to Las Vegas, even though you know you're just going to end up hung over and without your money.

I noticed the current front desk woman last week. She seems friendly enough. She's about the age and demeanor where you might expect her to be doting on new grandchildren. I did notice that she stared at me bug-eyed one day as I crossed the lobby, but I figured she was just really curious, and I really haven't given her much thought one way or the other. Turns out, she's crazy as hell.