Holy cats, it’s snowing again. Unfriggingbelievable. I walked into the pod (at my company, no one has an office — around a half-dozen people sit in a big room, or pod. Beware of the pod people.) and greeted my boss’ boss (bad thing about pods, besides the utter lack of privacy: you end up sitting next to executives half the time), who (rather uncharacteristically) beamed, “Spring is here, I can feel it.” I thought he was going to explode when I told him that we were supposed to get 3 to 5 inches of snow today.
Despite the weather, I was able to cajole Kevin into walking to Stefani’s for lunch. We got there during the lunch rush, so it was a little chaotic — there’s not much room for people to wait while others are placing their orders; it’s noisy in the behind-the-counter grill area, so customers have to speak loudly and repeat themselves when they order, adding to the overall chaos; the method for ordering and paying and receiving food seems random, leading to more shouted interchanges, more quibbles over orders, and more general confusion. A tall guy came in and ordered a slice. “You been busy?” Mr. Stefani (note: I have no way of proving that this gentleman is actually Mr. Stefani, but he was the oldest one working there, so he’s stuck with ownership) asked.
“Yeah, busy,” the weary, hungry customer sighed.
“Busy is good, yes?”
“Yeah, I guess. Usually.”
“No! Busy is always good!” shouted Mr. Stefani, a man who thrives on chaos. “Things get less busy, they start adding to their vocabulary. Words like ‘reorganization.’ ”
The customer seemed bored by Stefani’s words of wisdom. He’d do well to heed them in these troubled times.
[later]
Help me, I’ve eaten an entire calzone and I can’t get up! That does it. From now on it’s Fantastic Foods lentil pilafs for lunch, I mean it.
She probably wanted to make the racket stop.
Heavens to Murgatroyd! (I am full of exclamatory outbursts today, at least in my head.) I think I am caught up at work. I am doing my best to, as Mr. Stefani would advise, look busy, since my boss right this very minute disappeared into a conference room to discuss April salary increases with the HR Chick. Since I’m on the April increase cycle, I’d much rather she (and HR Chick, for whom I performed a super-rush kick-ass emergency editing job this morning and from whom I received only an email that said “thanks” — perfectly uninflected, couldn’t even be bother to hit Shift or add some cheery punctuation, let alone acknowledge how I dropped everything to clean up her stinking documents) have an image fresh in her mind of an industrious me, a can-do me, a giving-a-tinker’s-damn-about-my-work me.
Just in case you missed this the first time around — your future becomes edible.
I think it’s hilarious how, instead of sending spam from vd0f248[fv9v@hotmail.com or ENLARGEPENISNO@free_deals4u.com, some spammer or other is using recipe names in the From field. So I get mail from “Shredded Chicken Salad,” “Herb Roasted Chicken” (they’re obviously pushing the chicken), “Chocolate Fudge Cookies,” “Fresh Carrot Salad,” “Naan Indian Flat Bread,” “Beef Satay,” and my personal fave, “Fresh Tomato Tart.” Can’t you just see someone building their online persona on a saucy, voluptuous cartoon tomato, with a come-hither stare and plump, moist, pouting lips? You just know that her best friend has to be “Gingered Fruit,” an aging queen with a penchant for matching separates and the tartest tongue in Tucson.
[even later]
Thing that put me in a foul, foul mood this evening: My boss. See, I’ve been working for months on a project that’s been slow, frustrating, and taxing. Put a lot of work and concentration into it. And today, today, the designer and I were ready to send it out for final review. Birthing our baby, or almost — the last step before we could get sign-off and then launch the sucker. I sent the mockups to my boss. A couple of hours pass, during which time I craft a really great email to the reviewers explaining the goals of the project and the great features it has. Around 6 p.m., I asked her if she was OK with my sending the mockups to the reviewers. “Oh, I just printed out a couple of color copies and gave them to [one of the reviewers]. I saw him in the hall. I put the other mockups on [the second reviewer’s] chair.” So, dumb and petty, but after putting so much work into a project, it would be nice if she could distance herself from it — delegate the fucker, even — and let me perhaps get some credit for it. Stupid, and my anger is irrational in the grand sleaze-your-fake-face-way-through-the-office-politics world we all so gamely strive in, but I don’t appreciate having the ladder kicked out from under me by the person who told me to construct and scale the damn thing in the first place. Color me livid, sick to my stomach, mad at the world. I’m going to bed.