Extended Christmas

     My office has a propensity to create a party or an excuse to go drinking for anything. This year our office Christmas is going to be held at a brewery, in the middle of the day. The party is from noon to 4pm at a brewery that is about 25 minutes from our office. What this means is that at about 11 people will stop working, start i.m.ing or calling around to carpool, and generally kill time until they can reasonably leave the office. This includes members of upper management as well.
     Don't get me wrong, I'm always up for a party but while I use the excuse the same as everyone else I see the ridiculousness of it. Let me lay out the month of December for you in terms of our office. Today we are getting out of half a days work to go to a party at a brewery. Next week is secret Santa with a secret Santa party on Friday. For the week of secret Santa (our office does a week of clues and gifts) people will spend hours comparing gifts, talking about gifts and clues, and ruminating on who their Santa could be. The week after that, the week of Christmas, we have two days of paid vacation (though most of the office will be gone for the entire week and the next week). The week of New Year's Eve we have Friday off also, even though most people won't be here that week anyway, myself included.
     It just amuses me that our office takes any excuse to not work. I'm sure most offices are like this but I feel like every time I turn around we're having some kind of event, party, or time off. I have been here 7 months today and in that time I have had 3 paid holidays, 2 events where we got half days off, and 8 parties/events.

I love this place.

Happy Awkward Days

Happy Holidays Awkward Days everyone!

     I have not been a good Christmas shopper this year. So far I have bought 3 items total. I suppose I just haven’t been in the “Christmas Spirit” this year. We haven’t had any snow here yet and our office didn’t put up any decorations until yesterday. I’ve been making my plans for purchases as I’ll be going shopping this weekend (after payday of course).

     I’ve resigned to purchase a real Christmas tree this year, one with character. A cross between the tree from Charlie Brown Christmas and the ones they put around the department stores every year. I want a tree with character but one that still has style. We’ll see what happens when I go to the lot tomorrow. No matter how much I wish it wasn’t going to be, this Christmas is going to be as awkward as the previous ones of my young life. I figure I should have a tree to match.

     I am the last one of my family who is still single. Both of my brothers and all of my cousins are now married. My singleness is highlighted every year in our family Christmas card picture. I won’t scar you with my description of the great Christmas card incident of ’08, suffice it to say that if I wasn’t so embarrassed I would submit it to awkwardfamilyphotos.com. 

     I will admit to a deep, dark love of ugly baby Christmas Card photos. You all know the ones I'm talking about. Bobby and Sue send you a card with a picture of their new baby and that baby looks like a character from Star Wars or Alien. You want to laugh, but you tell yourself that it's mean to laugh at babies, they can't help it that their parents genetic combination created something infinitely mockable. Well, I laugh and I can't help it, but I do feel some semblance of remorse later if that makes you feel better. 

     In our Christmas card picture this year I once again showcase myself as the odd duckling. My oldest brother stands with his perfect wife and their 3 gorgeous children (perfect kids for Gerber and fruit juice commercials), my other brother and his paragon and their dog (that they treat like a child), and me. ♪♫ ♪ One of these things is not like the other ♪ ♫ ♪

     I’ll get to live my misery over and over when I visit my grandparent’s house for New Years while everyone asks me why haven’t I found someone yet, and am I dating anyone right now, don’t I ever want to get married? It’s a vicious circle that gives me plenty of time to reminisce on the failure of my last relationship. The breakup with a guy who was everything I wanted but he turned out to be a colossal jerk who is now engaged to his high school sweetheart. Ain’t it always the way? Girl falls head over heels in love with boy. They break up because boy is either A. a cheater, B. a loser/deadbeat, C. a jerk, or D. a liar. Girl goes back home heartbroken and doesn’t date while boy ends up engaged to someone the total opposite of their ex. It’s the theme in countless romance novels and country songs.

     So, as I plan my Christmas shopping attack I also plan my way through the awkward days. I will play with my nieces and nephew, laugh joyously with the family, crack jokes, eat way too many cookies and sit very awkwardly through PDA and intrusive questions. I should probably purchase a flask while out this weekend…

The Office Abyss

     Today I arrived at my office 3 minutes early. This is significant because despite the fact that I live no more than 5 minutes away I make it to the office before 8am only 1 day in 3.

     Apparently no matter how many times I tell myself that going out to warm up my car at 7:48 is early enough, it never is. It probably would be enough time if I scraped my windows rather than letting them completely defrost while I sit inside and stay warm, but my coat, while fabulous, is not all that warm. There’s no way that I’m going to freeze off my rear scraping off some frost when I can sit in the warmth and not have my teeth chatter.

     So, I arrived early at the office, hung up my coat on the back of the door and started my computer. I waited for my email to load and realized that I had a whopping 4 emails, all of which were junk. So, at 8:08 am (after getting a cup of tea and returning to my computer) I realized that I have absolutely nothing to do today. I watched a two hour key note speaker at a conference that I wasn’t attending and while slightly interesting it didn’t really have anything to do with my job function. It’s going to be a long day.

     Most people are probably thinking that I’m nuts. They would kill to have a breeze of a day like I am having. I say to the HA! And I say it sarcastically and with derision. There is a difference between an easy day and an empty day. An easy day means you have enough work to fill your time, but there is no rush so you can complete it at your own pace. An empty day means you have to fill your 8 hours will mindless dribble.

     BUT WAIT! I have just received an instant message from a coworker. I have been invited to assist with inventory. Counting endless vials from the freezers, burning myself on dry ice (yes, it’s so cold you can literally burn your skin), and looking like a great white snow beast in a lab coat are not my ideas of a good time. However, in the face of the abyss that stretches out before me without it I find myself looking forward to freezer burn and snow beastyness.

ROR

     I want to preface this by apologizing to any readers who are Japanese or love the Japanese. I urge you to look deep inside yourself and you will hopefully realize that this is actually pretty amusing. If not, this is a blog and by definition created to piss people off and create controversy. I do not go gentle into that good night (brownie points if you can name the author without googling).

     A few years ago our company was bought by a multi-billion dollar Japanese company; therefore making us a wholly owned subsidiary of said Japanese company. Like any good parent they drive us a little nuts, make us want to rebel, force us to keep them in the dark about certain things, force us to enlighten them about certain things, and overall maintain the idyllic mentality that we are better.
     Because we are owned by the Japanese we have a few Japanese people from the corporate headquarters in Japan working in our office. This brings me countless minutes of enjoyment. I flatter myself that I am pretty good with imitating accents (doubt if you must but it's pretty true). Despite this proficiency I cannot master the Japanese accent; however, I greatly enjoy listening to my Japanese coworkers discuss things in English.

      I was walking down the hallway to our customer service office, much like I do every day, when I heard some of my coworkers laughing. As I got closer I realized that one of my Japanese coworkers was telling the story. The only part of I heard; however, was "and i was raffing and raffing." Of course what he was say was "and I was laughing and laughing," but the Japanese accent changes Ls to Rs. From that point on anytime someone talks about laughing, or says LOL, or even when my Japanese coworkers come to talk to us in our office all I can think about is the raffing. I told this story to some friends of mine and now it's ROR instead of LOL in txts. Little did my coworker know that by telling his little story he, and all of his countrymen/women would become infinitely mockable to me.

My life is a Dilbert cartoon

     Normally I would start this story in the middle, but since this is a new blog I’ll preface with a little background.

     I work in marketing. My degree? Not in marketing. I work for a niche biotech preclinical research company. My degree? Not in biotechnology or research. I majored in English and got a minor in Biology. What this really means is that I couldn’t hack it in the pre-med program so I switched to something I was good at. I am good at B.S. Normally this would be a precursor into the wide and exciting world of politics, but I don’t really like to argue with people so that was out. On top of that my college was a small, holiness tradition, private Christian school, so you can imagine the type of yahoos in our poli-sci department.

     I got my job about two weeks before graduation through a staffing agency I had been working with throughout college. I graduated on a Saturday and by Monday I was working. I don’t know what these people were expecting when they were looking for a new hire, but obviously their perceptions were way screwed up.

Yes, I majored in English. No, I am not amazing with grammar and spelling (if you’d had my prof. you wouldn’t be either). Yes, I majored in English. No, I am not a good sales writer.Yes, I have a minor in Biology. No, I do not understand the complex toxicological reasoning for drug-drug interactions. I don't know how you mix up "minor" and "PhD" but there it is.

     I will admit that some of my skills are teasingly diverse. I can tell you how many bricks are on the side of the building next door or how many people are wearing sneakers in a room. I can tell you what page of a book a certain picture was on. And on a good day I can even figure out that the license plate on a dodge charger I saw on the way to work yesterday, ANL1924, is probably a veiled reference to anal sex (ANL+(19=S)+(24=X) = ANLSX = Anal Sex). But I cannot come up with a quippy title for your email blast promoting your skewed discounting structure no matter how much cajoling you put in your voice.

     Like most college grads in their first “real” job after college I am a gofer (i.e. go for this, go for that). While there are both positives and negatives with this existence it provides me with an income slightly below market value, a tiny apartment of my very own, and enough cash for cute boots.

     Normally my day goes a little like this: Arrive at office, check email, delete majority of emails, respond to email questions that people probably could have answered on their own, respond to emails that have nothing to do with my regular job duties, doddle, update the company’s Twitter and Facebook, go back to my apartment for lunch (I only live about 3 minutes from work – a genius move in my opinion, less travel, less gas wasted, more money for aforementioned cute boots), arrive back at office and sort through emails again, do some work, send something FedEx, stalk our competitors, doddle for the last 5 minutes before leaving for the day. Some days there is less doddling and more working, but for the most part it’s doddling. Exhibit A: This blog.

So, the story…

     My biggest pet peeve in the workplace is doing something twice. I would much rather spend 15 minutes going over a project in the beginning so that I can complete it and move on to the next thing than having something tossed off to me with little to no explanation, complete it the way that makes the most sense, then having to redo it because I did it wrong.

     My boss is the boss from the Dilbert cartoons, except that she’s a woman and works in marketing instead of IT. The problem is that she doesn’t really know what she wants until she figures out what she doesn’t want. What I mean is that she hands you a project and says, “Oh just work something up. You’ll be fine.” Then after the work up is complete she decides that she doesn’t like it that way, she figures out what she really does want, and then you go back and redo your project. Raise your hand if you’ve had a boss like that. If you didn’t raise your hand breathe a sigh of relief and pray to whatever entity you worship that you never have to.

     On a somewhat related note, she likes to have all her data represented in a percent and then that percent put into a bar graph, a BAR graph. Perhaps you don’t understand my annoyance, let me explain. Bar graph = count representation, pie graph = percentage representation. PIE GRAPH FOR PERCENTS! 

     She just doesn’t get it, but what are you gonna do? Tell you what I’m gonna do – nothin’. I’m going to sit in our office, face my computer screens and make some freakin’ pie graphs because this is America, land of the free, home of the brave where people do what their told and fade into the fabric of their ugly grey cubicles.