It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

During a call to Kristy, I was venting on the failure of a particular manager o’ mine to grasp the basics of proper sentence structure.  No, this particular moron is not ESL.  English is his mother tongue.  Were it otherwise, I might be less apt to judge.

This led us to a discussion of the fact that both of us seem to harbor a kind of hierarchy of  grammar failures.  Some things are totally acceptable in my world.  For example, placement of commas is a subject that I’ve heard well-respected English teachers debate to a point where I was expecting violence.  I tend to rank those errors lower on the scale of offense since reasonable minds could differ.  Some errors I care less about in certain contexts.  For example, I tend to overlook one-off there/their/they’re errors in an e-mail partially because I am totally guilty of slamming out a message and, for reasons I’m still trying to understand, using the wrong “there” even though I know good and well the proper choice.

But Kristy and I both agreed that subject-verb agreement errors are something that ranks as highly unacceptable once you’re above a certain age (approximately 6 in my world).  I’ll forgive a verbal mix up that’s clearly born from one’s tongue going faster than one’s brain.  Even a written subject-verb agreement error may be understandable in those cases where the writing is informal and the sentence is one of those complex beasts with mixes of plurals and singulars (none of those, however, excuses the particular moron about whom I was venting).

I also have a slightly greater than average aversion to people who don’t know how to use “myself.”  I’ve noticed that this error is VERY common in cases where the speaker is both arrogant and ignorant (a dangerous cocktail).  Somewhere along the way these people were yelled at for using “me” instead of “I” and they internalized this to mean that “me” is bad.  To make sure they sound suitably educated, they now refuse to use “me” and wind up substituting “myself” as if it means the same thing.  It doesn’t! (Side note:  usually, these people will also make the I/me error).  To the scores of people who don’t care much about grammar, maybe this sounds fantastic.  To me?  Fingernails on a chalk board.  I can’t help thinking less of people who do this.

So, ‘fess up, folks:  What grammar errors drive you batty?  Anything in particular that makes you want to strangle people (and feel free to point out the shit one which I consistently error out around here).

First off, Note to Kristy:  I’m not sure if it’s my turn or not!  But I’ll post tonight!

Now, for the rest of you, gentle readers, I’m all kinds of screwed up on my days.  I made the dubious choice to work through the night the other day.  My first all-nighter since, I would say since law school, but  I’m sure that’s not accurate.  It was definitely my first time ever to pull an all nighter for job related reasons.

The good news is, I got done what needed doing and aside from some meetings next week that involve travel (crap), my workload will drop off dramatically from here until the turn of the year.

The bad news is, well, you remember when I proclaimed I am way too old for this shit?  Yeah, I’m way to old to recover adequately from a literal all-nighter.  I’m still not sure of what day it is, and that’s not an exaggeration.  I’ve checked my phone for the day no less than three times today.  Sad.

The experience has been surreal.  For one thing, do you know how shocked the baby-boomer set is when they find out you were at work the entire night?  Yeah.  As my buddy Stephen said, “You ARE the water cooler.”  And I was.  I didn’t go out and proclaim my dedication to work, but the early arriving employees noted the frost on my little car, already in the lot, I couldn’t hide it.  In fact, I got more than one call at my desk to check on me.  I think the initial fear was that my car was there because something had happened to me.  I don’t think it reassured them much to think I spent the night typing in my cubicle like a fiend.  I suppose I should be touched that they care, but mostly, I was mortified that I wasn’t going to be able to hide it by not talking about it.

Is it just because for my older colleagues, the last time they pulled an all-nighter is separated by more years than my last attempt?  Or is it so strange to think I would be that intent on finishing a task for a job that’s rather thankless?  Either way, I didn’t expect news to be that big.  I ran home around 7:30 for a shower and breakfast and I was back in around 8….and apparently, this news traveled with as much fire as the initial over-night event.  But I couldn’t help it.  There was shit I had to do, and the drop-dead date was that day at 5pm.  What was I supposed to do?

I am tempted to defend myself on this whole thing by saying that the situation that necessitated my not going home wasn’t my doing.  For once, I wasn’t pulling this shit through any fault of my own procrastination.  It was 100% because people did not listen when I told them the time I would need to finish something and kept re-assigning my time, without extending this particular due date.  I was caught in a mess not of my own creation.  And I’m not sure if this fact made everyone more or less inclined to question why I put myself through the wringer to get it done.  By all rights, I could have (finally) put my foot down, not turned it in complete and refused to take blame for the situation I was put in.

Instead, I did the work, inverted my day and have remained in state of foggy semi-confusion since.  Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much that could compel me to do this again.  I think my 24+ hour marathon effort days are done.  I can’t say that it’s beauty rest I’m in need of, it’s more like “ZOMG-at-least-try-to-avoid-getting-any-uglier-and-also-to-not-die” rest.

At any rate, I don’t think I’ll live this down at work.  I had senior level people looking at me in a state of wonder, “You didn’t go home last night, did you?”  ”No.”  ”What are you running on?!?!?”

I was honest in my response, “Caffeine and the fear of missing a deadline.”

So my apologies to all of you expecting something from Kristy, if this is her day.  I knew not what I did.

As I’ve reference previously, ye olde bill-paying, meat-space job has put me in the big middle of a hot mess of a project.  Said project is approaching a deadline (unrealistic, as most deadlines set by business majors tend to be), and for this reason I’ve been hurled back in the time machine from hell, to law school finals.

Honestly, I’m too old for the kind of marathon effort involved here.  Marathon effort for something I really love and give a damn about?  I’m there could probably tap into some reserve of energy built on eagerness.  For this?  I’m done.  I can take no more and the reality of my age has smacked me in the face.  If I thought I loved sleep in college, that’s nothing to my love for it now.  And the sedentary requirements of this project combined with the characteristic slowing of metabolism that starts to rear it’s awful head around my age, have made me fat, flabby, and completely unenergetic.   If there is a word for the kind of stiff pain in my shoulders right now, I’m not aware of it.  I’m thought of trying to coin something but all that came to mind is OMFG I HATE STRESS GET ME OUT.  Not quite succinct enough to catch on, I’m afraid.

It’s all rolled up as one nasty little reminder that, time is marching all-the-hell over me.

Yeah, cause I TOTALLY wanted to ponder that one 20 days out from my birthday.

For the first time in my life, I really understand why people count down to retirement.  But I realized when I was about 14 that my generation would never get to retire, so the sober reality that I could possibly die in a cube with no sleep and sore shoulders kinda makes for a down day.

Feel free to tell me this will pass.

No, really.  TELL ME THIS WILL PASS.

I’m sure there are some out there who would deride me over this, but, I’m willing to take the hit.  I am, once again, failing to even bother starting Nanowrimo.  November has to be the single most craptastic month of my year to attempt this.  In school, it fell in the midst of tail-end mid-terms, and the opening season of finals.  I mean, I definitely could have more than made my word count some years….it just would have been in the form of a legal brief rather than a novel.

And in my particular line of work, well…..not much better there.  For some very particular, but sadly dull business reasons, it’s a highly inauspicious time of year to attempt taking on anything else.  And my pay-the-bills job would have zero understanding for an attempt like this.  Not that they’d fire me, but they would look at me like I’d grown another head, and it would probably take 3 attempts to explain what it was before the meaning would even start to sink in.

The one year I started….and clearly didn’t finish….was 2008.  That one started out strong…and then got completely derailed by a very happy event–I got my passing score on the Texas bar exam, and had to drop everything to drive to Austin and get sworn in.  Then I wound up going back home with my parents in anticipation of Thanksgiving….and it was all down hill from there.

So, here we are again.  The general job issues are actually magnified more than normal this year.  I’m  missing enough posts right here because of meat-space.  If I were to try Nano, you’d basically have to write me off for the month.

I’m strongly considering declaring my own month.  Unfortunately, half the greatness of Nano is the effect of the masses and the support group atmosphere, and I can’t recreate that if I try this in, say, February or June.  So, either I fire up my own gumption, or I can cling to the hope that one day, I’ll see a November where joining the rest of the would-be authors will not be total stress-inducing folly on my part.

The bill-paying-job has had me in solid meetings for a day and a half.  Today’s grueling session started at 7:30 and ran until after 5.  We even ate lunch in the room.  It’s exhausting.

And it’s a total time suck.

It’s not just the time whisked away by the unfathomable boredom of 14 power point presentations all in the same corporate-barfed-here standard templates.  That’s bad, but what’s worse is everything else job-wise that doesn’t get done when you’re having to down caffeine to look like you care about statistics on shit that does not impact your job directly.  While I’m locked away in this corner of hell, the e-mails are still coming, the data still needs analyzing, the phone is still ringing.

So, thanks to this meeting impeding the flow-rate at which I would normally handle my workload….I’m going in on my Friday off.

Again.

And my Saturday.

And possible my Sunday.

This time vampire might just be the most evil of all.

Gee, Dowager Countess, I’m not sure I know what a “week end” is either*.  While the unbearable dullness of paying calls to the same people, dining in the same circles, and making the same complaints about one’s staff would definitely yield a week that seems never ending, so too does returning to one’s corner of the cube farm to bask in the glow of monitors shining multi-layered spreadsheets for 7 days straight.

I think ol’ Lady Grantham got the better end of the deal with her reasons for confusion over this “week end” concept.  It’s like we’re in the same boat, but she’s first class and I’m crammed in next to the boiler pipes. And the ship is probably the Titanic.

(Thus goeth my excuse for missing Friday’s post.  Worked late.  Then worked some more and if you think Sunday was a day of rest, au contraire my Freunden….Now I face the horror of returning yet again bright and early tomorrow.)

*Apologies to the non Downton Abbey viewing set who do not get this reference.

As overdone as the zombie thing is these days, it’s still totally acceptable in the form of geeky music.  Especially when it’s a song dealing with a zombie take over in the office.  Because, well, a zombie take over in my office would be a total delight.

“Re: Your  Brains” is a staple in the diet of Jonathan Coulton fans–so I’m sure it’s nothing new to many of you.  It has all the key features of Coulton’s well-known songs: great music with a catchy tune and hysterical/geeky/just damn-good lyrics and high-quality delivery.

This particular ditty is a musical e-mail from an un-dead co-worker who really just wants to eat your brains.  Bob from the office down the hall is totally polite in his message, and–accompanied by great guitar work and a rock-anthemic chorus you can belt out with co-workers–he lays out the memo and the ultimatum  ”All we want to do is eat your brains.  We’re not unreasonable/ No one’s gonna eat your eyes.”

What’s not to love right there?  But, it goes further….it’s got all the necessary elements of a typical corporate office e-mail–all the phrases, the cliches, the passive-aggressive comments.  That’s actually more horrifying than the idea of  having your brains eaten.

Bonus fun for this song:  you can listen to the whole thing (and lot more) online for free at Coulton’s website (downloads are a buck), and it’s available under a Creative Commons license (along with all the other songs written by Coulton).

I was going to blog about one of two new delightful conspiracy theories I’ve discovered in recent weeks (I’m not telling what they are.  I may need blog fodder for another Time Vampire.)  But something else has been eating up so much of my time for the past three weeks that it needed to be blogged.

HTML coding.

Does it seem strange this should be something eating up my time?  It should.  I’m a folklorist!  I minored in dance.  My computer requirement was fulfilled by a course that consisted entirely of building a webpage on Microsoft Frontpage.  This is Cammy’s area of expertise (actually Cammy can program in much more advanced languages, that’s not the point).  So why am I doing it?  Because at the moment, it’s my job.  And I’d comfort myself that at least I’m getting paid, except I’m not getting paid.

What I’ve been doing specifically, is formatting a bilingual ethnopoetic transcript for display on a WordPress page.  And while in so many ways WordPress allows for easy copy and paste from MS Word, it does not deal well with such transcripts.  So I’ve been painstakingly fixing the html code line by line.  All the while reminding myself that if I wanted to do html code for the rest of my life I’d have gone into a field that pays a hell of a lot better than folklore.

And yes, html is very easy to learn (though I would argue, difficult to master). And googling is very helpful in problem solving.  But it seems like this should be something for which there is a quick fix.  And I’m going to posit that the reason there isn’t is because it would involve two worlds communicating that don’t like/know how to communicate.  To completely generalize and stereotype:  The sorts of people who work with ethnopoetic transcripts are often also the sorts of people that are… let’s say intimidated by computer coding (it reminds us that we’re stupid, when we’ve spent all that time getting degrees to fool people into thinking we’re not.)  And the sorts of people who write computer code, rarely have occasion to encounter ethnopoetic transcripts and therefore don’t really understand why they must be formatted the way they are (general advice of the internet to me: Don’t format it that way.  Me:  It has to be formatted that way).

So instead, I spend weeks in my office (jamming to my headphones because it’s summer and there’s no one else in the building except the ghost of Richard Dorson) fixing code line by line and thinking “I speak three languages.  And none of them are helping me right now.”

I will not blog about work, I will not blog about work….WTF, I’ll blog about work!

In keeping with my usual habit of refraining from talking about the job I have to hold down for the sake of bills and such, this will be highly general.

Of course, you don’t need to know many particulars to understand the frustration involved, but here’s the run down:

I am working on a very important project (which isn’t saying much…in a world of MBAs–which, incidentally, stands for Massively Big Assholes–every potential for a dollar is like the cure for cancer….which would actually make them the most happy as they could totally charge for that…..).  It’s highly visible, yadda, yadda, yadda.  The whole world of my employer knows it’s huge, and apparently those of us stuck working on said project are allowed to ask for anything and everything we deem necessary, probably including ponies (but not including time off or a bigger paycheck).

Sweet.  So, I need certain information for said project.  I don’t have it, and I am not the best person to access it, and it’s essential and has all manner of muckity-muck people concerned until I get it.  So, on orders of muckity mucks, I had to A) write a report on what I knew about the data I needed B)identify who would be the best people to get this data and C) a go-forward plan for making sure that data stays updated and at my adorable fingertips.

Aye-aye, captain!

So, I do some research, write a very concise report in the form of a two page outline stating what the data should be, what I’ve found so far and what else I needed.  I also wrote up an action plan for who the best source was AND….I even made suggestions on where said source could start the inquiry to complete this whole picture and provide me with the awesomeness I’m seeking.  In reality, the source I tagged OUGHT to have all the information already, but that assumes the source was taking care of its actual job, which, pffffffffffft.  Ya.  Richtig.

Anyhow.  This little report got sent to the responsible source….and cc’d to muckity mucks….several weeks ago.

I have LITERALLY sent an e-mail asking for an update every. single. week.  since. then.

And if you guessed that I haven’t had jack shit back….you’d be almost right.  A couple of weeks ago I had a whole message of excuses (none of which held water….they were all issues either answered in my little summary report, or which they could have asked me for because it was intuitively obvious from the mere fact that I wrote the summary that I had the information they needed to get started doing this job).  Other than that, I’ve had nothing.  The muckity-mucks I’d CC’d got some messages promising information the next day….we’re not going to talk about how many weeks ago that “next day” was.  So, I wrote something no one bothered to read AND, I’m still without data that really should have been an easy pull for someone.

So, my blood pressure?  Kinda been on the uphill side of things.  Gonna have to eliminate salt to try and balance out the impact of the stress of being ignored.  I might also need to consider investing in a punching back to eliminate the potential for me being brought up on assault charges.

Is it really so difficult to at least acknowledge a request with a “We’re working on it?”  When someone asks you for an estimated date when you could have a finished or even mostly finished product (that’s right–this whole time?  My actual question has been “Please let me know when you think you might have an initial draft of the info.”), is it really so hard to say, “I think I might be able to get you something by next Tuesday, and I’ll let you know if that changes”?  Seriously, that’s all I needed!

WTF, yo.  Just, WTF!

For years now, I’ve had the type of jobs were most of the actual “work” does not take place at “the office.”  I’ve either worked entirely from home or had jobs where I had to do a lot of work at home.  Over all, I really like this.  It gives me added flexibility.  It means I can run my errands while people with normal jobs are sequestered in office buildings.  It means I don’t have to be around people very much.  (Yes, hello, I’m an introvert).

The one thing I hate about this kind of job is that people with “normal” jobs don’t get it.  They don’t respect that the work you do at home is work.  It’s just as important and essential as the stuff that they do in their offices.  People think it’s perfectly acceptable to strike up a conversation with you while you’re doing said work.  They don’t understand why constant phone calls might be inappropriate.  At least now I’m salaried, but at one point I was working from home and being paid by the hour.  My mother would call and ask what I was doing.  If I answered, “Working,” she would continue talking.  I’d have to make note of the time she called and the time I got her off the damn phone (usually at least an hour later).  She would never call either of my siblings at their offices and think it’s appropriate to have an hour long personal conversation with them.

Right now I’m on an extended visit to my parents.  In order to do this, I brought a lot of work with me.  Admittedly I haven’t been accomplishing as much of it as I should have, but I’ve been setting aside a certain amount of time each day to do it.  Last week my father decided it was a good idea to lecture me about being a workaholic.  Since I know I’m anything but I asked him how he would know I’m a workaholic.  He explained it was because I was doing work while “on vacation.”  I asked him when the last time he took a two month vacation was. (Note:  If my father takes an extended weekend he takes work with him)  His response?  “Well I can’t.  I have a real job.” Thanks, Dad.  You know what would really help here?  Belittle my occupation a little more.

And yes, it’s true that my parents don’t really “get” or respect my career in general, but honestly, if I was doing the exact same job but doing all of my work in an office somewhere they would respect it a lot more.  It just seems a little absurd in this world of increasing telecommuters and such that working from home still doesn’t rate as work.