Okay, I’m all caught up again in responding to all the comments. Sorry I only get to it a few times a week, I really ought to be better about it, I know. It’s my goal to always be the last commenter in the thread so that everyone gets responded to – which I shouldn’t reveal to you because now you’re all going to go out and post one-word comments, which I will respond to, which you will reply to, and we’ll battle it out in an effort to get the last word.
“Okay.” “Fine.” “Fine!” “Whatever!” “Good!”
AcronymCo’s e-mail server is down, which means that I have very little that I can accomplish until it comes back up. I mean, there ARE things I could (and should) be doing, because I can access all the other programs and systems (hi, Internet!). My routine is thrown off, though. On Wednesdays I go straight to the morning meeting before I even go to my desk, sit for 10 minutes while they tell me what they need from our group, go to my desk, log in, go get hot water for tea and a cup of ice water while my computer boots, come back, peruse my e-mail, and eat my breakfast. This morning I did all that, but no e-mail. Thus, blog entry.
I don’t even know how we as a company got by before personal computers, before the Internet, before e-mail. I can’t imagine doing all that we do by hand, type-written, drawn on charts and graph paper. I mean, IMAGINE having to WALK ACROSS THE FLOOR to the co-worker you need to speak to, face-to-face, instead of IM-ing them. IMAGINE having to do calculations with a calculator?!? IMAGINE having to stand at the copy machine for HOURS making enough copies to hand out to all meeting participants? GAH. How stone-aged can you get?
Thank God for technology, is all I’m sayin’.
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You know what’s jarring? Hearing a 70-year old woman tell a guy one-third her age to “Fuck off.”
I had to go down to the stockroom yesterday afternoon to remove some non-standard parts so they wouldn’t get issued out to the manufacturing floor by mistake. There is a series of carousels along the back wall, with rotating shelves that house segregated “locations” in which smaller parts are stored. I had a handful of parts to retrieve, but when I approached the designated carousel I saw that a couple of the stockroom technicians were there ahead of me, stocking parts. So as I waited for them to get done, I observed this exchange:
Betty – “Uh oh, it’s a Buyer! Quick, look busy.”
Joe – “You’re never busy. You’re always asleep.”
Betty – “Fuck off, Joe.”
Me – “BWAAAHAHAHAHAAAA.”
Betty – I’m seventy years old. I get to say whatever I want.”
Joe – “Seventy? You’re older than my Grandma!”
Betty – “What part of ‘Fuck off’ didn’t you understand?”
Now, the inside joke is that Betty is NOTORIOUS for falling asleep in one of the booths in the cafeteria. We always see her, every afternoon, just slumbering away while hundreds of people around her eat, talk, hold meetings. We really ought to rig a cot for her, stashed in some quiet corner of the stockroom. At seventy, I don’t even know what she’s doing still working here, forcrissakes.
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Okay, I’m going to go place some purchase orders and pull some reports and do various other sundry things while I wait for my e-mail to return to me. Behave yourselves until I get back, children.
Snerkology 