Some questions:
1. We have a couple of trash bins at work that are used specifically for people to place documents that are to be shredded. It's my responsibility to empty these bins on a consistent basis. Something that drives me about as nuts as I can be driven is when someone tears up their paper into four or more pieces before dropping it into the bin. Are you freaking kidding me? It's going to be shredded, why in god's name would you ever think you need to tear it into pieces beforehand? It's stupid, it's inconsiderate, and above all, it's embarrassingly inefficient.
2. I was watching Seinfeld last night for the first time in a while and found myself laughing harder than normal. But something I never paid much attention to: why in the hell are they always driving places in that show?
3. Does anyone else agree with me that it's time we come up with some new words to describe familiar things? Ironic is a word that used to clearly communicate something specific, but it's been so heavily used in our culture that it's taken on a life of its own and doesn't often effectively communicate the idea that it's supposed to anymore. Maybe you could say something is slappy instead, so that slappy represents the actual dictionary definition of irony, whereas irony will then only represent the popular usage. Irony isn't the only or even the best example of this, of course. Pathetic or pitiful are two similar words. When people now hear that something is pitiful, they probably think of something bad or weak or shameful, while either missing entirely or only getting secondarily the simple true meaning of pitiful: something that inspires pity. It's a word that is more about empathy than judgment or condescension, but due to it's commonness, it has lost its specific meaning. When using pitiful, I find myself having to state that I mean it in the dictionary way, and to me that signifies that pitiful has stopped being an efficient and effective word.
Imagine that blue, in our culture, was a word that described not just what we now know as blue but more broadly the whole range of colors including purple, violet, and green, and that the words purple, violet, and green have become too obscure to have much meaning. In this scenario, we've lost effective descriptive words for purple, violet, and green, which is a lamentable thing, but we've also lost the word for blue, since blue has been bastardized into encompassing all of purple, violet, green, and blue. In this scenario, not only would we be wise to recover those words purple, violet, and green, but we'd also probably need to give up and scrap blue and come up with a new word for blue.
Basically, the more popular a word becomes, the less communicative it becomes. Kinda slappy, actually.
Showing posts with label WORK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WORK. Show all posts
Monday, June 8, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
A Conversation, Part II
So I was drifting along the fringe of this little conversation, mostly just waiting for it to be over and trying not to make it seem so, kinda enjoying the fact that I didn't have to join in much, when the other woman finally focused on me, and I'm pretty sure she only did so in a trying-to-be-nice way so I wouldn't feel excluded or so she could show how nice she is by showing interest in me, someone she'd probably never see again. Her question was so predictable that you might be amazed that at this point in my life I haven't ever bothered to create a stock answer for it.
"So what do you do?"
This is not even a difficult question to answer. And yet. I hate this question. It's not just the chit-chat banality of it, either, though I do hate mindless chatting.
When engaging in conversation with someone you don't know, 99.9% of the time the other person will be looking for a quick and easy way to stereotype, judge, and compartmentalize you(1), in that order; or, if you're lucky, they're not doing that very actively and are instead just trying to ask the flattest questions possible so as to fill the time until someone else shows up without having to mentally engage at all. "What do you do?" is the quintessential example of the latter, but its insidiousness lies in that after your brief chat is over, the other person will quite often actually remember how you respond to it and from then on that is how they will know you. To them, you will not be you, but instead a first name and an occupation(2).
Ah but this is my blog and this is going to be more personal than that. So let me admit that the other big reason I loathe "What do you do?" is because--at least compared with most people--I don't have a very good answer to it. I've been seriously employed for 6 years now so naturally I have a perfectly suitable answer, but I don't have a "good" one, an answer that engages the interest or, presumably, respect of the questioner.
My official title is Assistant Facilities Manager, but mostly I answer the question with Office Manager, because that word Facilities tends to confuse a lot of people. But everyone knows what both an Office and a Manager are. Telling a near-stranger that you are an "Office Manager" doesn't really elicit much interest; I know this because I don't often get a follow-up question outside of "Where at?" or "What company?"
Some of the reasons people don't find much interesting about my job title: I usually don't like talking to strangers all that much, I don't with any comfort brag about myself(3), I am pretty much biologically wired to hate all things pompous, and am therefore unable to engage in the same phony bullshit that people do to try to impress other people, and finally, I myself simply am not all that interested in talking about jobs, so my general inability to disguise my feelings about a subject can pretty easily influence another person's reception of it.
I am not what I do. A lot of people are, but not me. I don't take my work home with me, and I would change careers almost instantly if that were to ever change. I'm not usually very productive with my spare time, but I rather zealously will defend my right to it.
For me, a job is a way to make enough money to make myself, and now my future wife and presumptive family, happy. I've never really had much of a desire for a specific job. Maybe that's laziness and maybe it's a lack of ambition that's followed me most of my life, but I don't really care. It's hard to make other people interested in what you do if you don't devote terribly much of your own interest to it.
None of this is to say that what I do is boring or unfulfilling or in some way shameful. Well, I work in an office, so sometimes it actually is boring, but not usually. I will say that at one point I did wonder how essential my position was. Basically how replaceable was I? But that passed because I realized that yes indeed some of my personal skills provide sometimes great value to the company. It can be hard to effectively explain with any brevity what I truly do. Mostly this is because I do a lot of different things. Truly, I am not an Office Manager. I do many different things in many different degrees of intensity for almost random durations, and so I often don't know what I'll be doing in the next week.
Sometimes I am an Accountant. Sometimes I work in Real Estate. Sometimes I stock shelves. Sometimes I am a Financial Analyst. Sometimes I am a plain old Manager. Sometimes I work in HR. Sometimes I am a Project Coordinator. Sometimes I am a Painter. Sometimes I pass myself off as a Lawyer. Sometimes I clean up messes. Sometimes I am a Creative Consultant. Sometimes I am a Carpenter. Sometimes I work in Demo. Always I am looking for ways to be more efficient. Almost always I am a professional. I could probably get a lot more milage out of some of the specific aspects of my job when trying to impress people talking about what I do, but I don't try to impress people. I have heard friends or acquaintances answering the "What do you do?" question in the way that you are supposed to: embellished and aggrandized. I cringe when this happens. You see, it's the delivery and acceptance of this practice that makes people seem almost let down when I answer simply and reservedly. "What do you do?" isn't even really a question, it's an invitation to show yourself off. It's like a job interview question. And most people will bullshit with the best of them when given the opportunity.
Fuck those people. If you ask me what time it is I will say "4:15" or whatever, I won't talk about how great or expensive my watch is. If you ask me what I studied in college I will say "English," I won't give a dissertation on why I so dislike Charles Dickens. If you ask me if I have a girlfriend I will say "yes," I won't talk about how I often honestly feel like I have a better relationship than anyone else in the world. If you want to honestly know about my relationship experiences, then you're going to have to honestly ask. If you want the description of my job to sound like a CEO or a famous artist or goddamned race car driver(4), then you're going to be disappointed. Contrary to the way most people talk about themselves to strangers, those interesting or prestigious jobs are filled by a tiny tiny minority of the population.
What I do is I enjoy myself. Who I am is a much deeper and more complex topic than could or should ever be discussed with a stranger.
1. Those other 0.1% of people are the ones who become my friends.
2. This is only vaguely related, but I went through a phase a while back where I used to not want people to tell me their names when I met them. This was for two reasons: first, I would often just forget the name anyway; and second, since a person's name isn't of their choice it really doesn't say anything about him. I much preferred to see first if I enjoyed the other person any, and if so, only then would it really be necessary to know the name. After all, if I turned out not to like the person, I would not be communicating with him again and would have just wasted a tiny space of my brain by putting his name there. Efficiency.
3. I should say "truthfully" brag about myself. I used to, and sometimes still do, love to display a faux arrogance. I do it for laughs or to diffuse situations, but since I'm such a naturally gifted actor I can give people the wrong impression that I actually am that arrogant.
4. This is almost straight out of the movie Swingers, but I don't care. What kind of pretentious asshole society are we in where we are just as well making up some ridiculous fanciful lie about ourselves as telling the simple truth? It doesn't seem to matter that a person is happy with his life if he doesn't get appropriate approval from a stranger. Being proud of yourself is a 100% internal personal emotion.
"So what do you do?"
This is not even a difficult question to answer. And yet. I hate this question. It's not just the chit-chat banality of it, either, though I do hate mindless chatting.
When engaging in conversation with someone you don't know, 99.9% of the time the other person will be looking for a quick and easy way to stereotype, judge, and compartmentalize you(1), in that order; or, if you're lucky, they're not doing that very actively and are instead just trying to ask the flattest questions possible so as to fill the time until someone else shows up without having to mentally engage at all. "What do you do?" is the quintessential example of the latter, but its insidiousness lies in that after your brief chat is over, the other person will quite often actually remember how you respond to it and from then on that is how they will know you. To them, you will not be you, but instead a first name and an occupation(2).
Ah but this is my blog and this is going to be more personal than that. So let me admit that the other big reason I loathe "What do you do?" is because--at least compared with most people--I don't have a very good answer to it. I've been seriously employed for 6 years now so naturally I have a perfectly suitable answer, but I don't have a "good" one, an answer that engages the interest or, presumably, respect of the questioner.
My official title is Assistant Facilities Manager, but mostly I answer the question with Office Manager, because that word Facilities tends to confuse a lot of people. But everyone knows what both an Office and a Manager are. Telling a near-stranger that you are an "Office Manager" doesn't really elicit much interest; I know this because I don't often get a follow-up question outside of "Where at?" or "What company?"
Some of the reasons people don't find much interesting about my job title: I usually don't like talking to strangers all that much, I don't with any comfort brag about myself(3), I am pretty much biologically wired to hate all things pompous, and am therefore unable to engage in the same phony bullshit that people do to try to impress other people, and finally, I myself simply am not all that interested in talking about jobs, so my general inability to disguise my feelings about a subject can pretty easily influence another person's reception of it.
I am not what I do. A lot of people are, but not me. I don't take my work home with me, and I would change careers almost instantly if that were to ever change. I'm not usually very productive with my spare time, but I rather zealously will defend my right to it.
For me, a job is a way to make enough money to make myself, and now my future wife and presumptive family, happy. I've never really had much of a desire for a specific job. Maybe that's laziness and maybe it's a lack of ambition that's followed me most of my life, but I don't really care. It's hard to make other people interested in what you do if you don't devote terribly much of your own interest to it.
None of this is to say that what I do is boring or unfulfilling or in some way shameful. Well, I work in an office, so sometimes it actually is boring, but not usually. I will say that at one point I did wonder how essential my position was. Basically how replaceable was I? But that passed because I realized that yes indeed some of my personal skills provide sometimes great value to the company. It can be hard to effectively explain with any brevity what I truly do. Mostly this is because I do a lot of different things. Truly, I am not an Office Manager. I do many different things in many different degrees of intensity for almost random durations, and so I often don't know what I'll be doing in the next week.
Sometimes I am an Accountant. Sometimes I work in Real Estate. Sometimes I stock shelves. Sometimes I am a Financial Analyst. Sometimes I am a plain old Manager. Sometimes I work in HR. Sometimes I am a Project Coordinator. Sometimes I am a Painter. Sometimes I pass myself off as a Lawyer. Sometimes I clean up messes. Sometimes I am a Creative Consultant. Sometimes I am a Carpenter. Sometimes I work in Demo. Always I am looking for ways to be more efficient. Almost always I am a professional. I could probably get a lot more milage out of some of the specific aspects of my job when trying to impress people talking about what I do, but I don't try to impress people. I have heard friends or acquaintances answering the "What do you do?" question in the way that you are supposed to: embellished and aggrandized. I cringe when this happens. You see, it's the delivery and acceptance of this practice that makes people seem almost let down when I answer simply and reservedly. "What do you do?" isn't even really a question, it's an invitation to show yourself off. It's like a job interview question. And most people will bullshit with the best of them when given the opportunity.
Fuck those people. If you ask me what time it is I will say "4:15" or whatever, I won't talk about how great or expensive my watch is. If you ask me what I studied in college I will say "English," I won't give a dissertation on why I so dislike Charles Dickens. If you ask me if I have a girlfriend I will say "yes," I won't talk about how I often honestly feel like I have a better relationship than anyone else in the world. If you want to honestly know about my relationship experiences, then you're going to have to honestly ask. If you want the description of my job to sound like a CEO or a famous artist or goddamned race car driver(4), then you're going to be disappointed. Contrary to the way most people talk about themselves to strangers, those interesting or prestigious jobs are filled by a tiny tiny minority of the population.
What I do is I enjoy myself. Who I am is a much deeper and more complex topic than could or should ever be discussed with a stranger.
1. Those other 0.1% of people are the ones who become my friends.
2. This is only vaguely related, but I went through a phase a while back where I used to not want people to tell me their names when I met them. This was for two reasons: first, I would often just forget the name anyway; and second, since a person's name isn't of their choice it really doesn't say anything about him. I much preferred to see first if I enjoyed the other person any, and if so, only then would it really be necessary to know the name. After all, if I turned out not to like the person, I would not be communicating with him again and would have just wasted a tiny space of my brain by putting his name there. Efficiency.
3. I should say "truthfully" brag about myself. I used to, and sometimes still do, love to display a faux arrogance. I do it for laughs or to diffuse situations, but since I'm such a naturally gifted actor I can give people the wrong impression that I actually am that arrogant.
4. This is almost straight out of the movie Swingers, but I don't care. What kind of pretentious asshole society are we in where we are just as well making up some ridiculous fanciful lie about ourselves as telling the simple truth? It doesn't seem to matter that a person is happy with his life if he doesn't get appropriate approval from a stranger. Being proud of yourself is a 100% internal personal emotion.
Friday, February 8, 2008
you remember that pathetic woman i work with? well i still can't stand her. "hi josh! happy friday!" -- i can't here effectively describe the pluckiness present in this greeting, nor the transparency of the pluckiness. she's a bitch. she knows it, i know it, and worse--she knows i know it. so why carry on the charade? on a more fundamental level, what disgusts me not so much about her specifically but people like her that have nothing in their lives (that comment might sound harsh but let me specify that her circumstance is through no fault but her own, it's not like she's lost friends and/or loved ones through tragedy or anything of that sort), is that these people don't get any joy from it actually being friday. they only look forward to the ability to say "happy friday!" in other words, she couldn't care less about having a weekend ahead of her (in fact she probably despises them as it cuts her off from her only real connection to the "real world"), she only enjoys the ability to be awful and obnoxious and waste people's time. and i can't stand it. it make me upset and uneasy so that i have a physical need to recoil from it. kinda like how some people feel about being around nursing homes. sure, maybe it's insensitive on my part but let's get real, that shit is just unpleasant.
Friday, January 4, 2008
i don't know where it's coming from, but there is a lot of energy going out of me today. i should be exhausted as a continuing byproduct of not just the move wednesday night, but also the slow process of putting the little material pieces of my life back together. though i'm feeling good--for now--so i'll take it and not ask questions.
we put together our new sectional black leather couch last night. in related news, last night was a very good night.
i now live in an apartment that makes a big sectional black leather couch look small. in related news, this year is going to be a very good year.
maybe this is unnecessarily intimate information, but my girlfriend and i are "making love" now. so big cheers to me, her, and us.
i won two more fantasy football leagues this year for a total prize of $950. i won one last year worth $1000. and i'm doing extremely well (20-9 vs the spread) so far in a bowl pool right now. i really should quit my job and devote myself full-time to fantasy sports and other sports-related gambling/contests. by my count, i've participated in 10 fantasy leagues covering 3 sports over 3 years, plus one league (basketball) that is currently in midseason. of these 10 leagues, i've won 5 and placed third in another. my total buy-ins for all 10 leagues has been $970 and my winnings have been $2725. that's a 281% return on my investment for the non-MBAs out there. if only LaDainian Tomlinson and Albert Pujols were NYSE trade-able commodities, then maybe i'd have some chance at being a successful member of society.
here's something negative now. not negativity emanating from me, but something that bothers me. we've got a middle-aged (45ish) woman working as an executive assistant here who--and i'm saving myself some adjectives here--is just pathetic, in the dictionary definition. and unfortunately, she likes me, and not in a platonic way. i'm pretty sure i'm at least an occasional subject of her sexual fantasies. let me state now for the record that this woman is as attractive as a bucket of vomit and the mere mention of this has caused my testicles to assume their natal size and position. she's fond of coming to my office and standing in the doorway while asking me to do something, which will invariably require me to get up and check it out. except she doesn't much like to move out of the doorway. she'll sorta half-turn so it's not incredibly awkward but still forces me to brush up against her to get by. i told you it's pathetic, but i'm 95% sure these little brushes are what she uses to get her rocks off later on. (now i know what some of you are thinking. and yes i do often like to joke about chicks being into me when obviously they are not, but you'll just have to trust me on this one. if i were female and she were male, what this woman does would be called sexual harassment.) she also likes to ask me to come help her with a painfully obvious problem with her printer, which just so happens to be all the way around her desk so i've got to essentially crawl over her chair to get to it. most non-perverts would just get out of their chair and let me do my work, but not this one.
so this morning as i'm stocking the fridge, standing with the door open probably about a foot back from the shelves, she comes bounding into the pantry and with no warning leans down to the lowest shelf and just shoves her whole head and shoulders in front of me to grab a bag of something. if you're wondering, yes, this put her directly in line with my crotch. and these things happen--not all the time, but as often as she can find a way.
through most of the 4.5 years i've worked here i haven't minded these silly encounters. i mean, it bothers me but not in any serious way, more like how someone tapping their finger constantly would bother someone. in some deviant ways (because i can't stand her), it almost amused me to think of what a sad human being she is to sink to these depths. and really, if someone wants to use a little folg-candy to enliven the later experience of double-clicking the mouse, then sure, i'm happy to help.
but today, and one other time in the recent past that i can't as effectively recall, i have been annoyed by it, in more than a passing or frivolous manner. i have a girlfriend now, so it irks me a bit to think she has the right to get a cheap thrill from me. this shit ain't hers to take. it's sara's. so i don't like it. so there was a lot of words on the subject, more than such a pathetic person deserves.
we put together our new sectional black leather couch last night. in related news, last night was a very good night.
i now live in an apartment that makes a big sectional black leather couch look small. in related news, this year is going to be a very good year.
maybe this is unnecessarily intimate information, but my girlfriend and i are "making love" now. so big cheers to me, her, and us.
i won two more fantasy football leagues this year for a total prize of $950. i won one last year worth $1000. and i'm doing extremely well (20-9 vs the spread) so far in a bowl pool right now. i really should quit my job and devote myself full-time to fantasy sports and other sports-related gambling/contests. by my count, i've participated in 10 fantasy leagues covering 3 sports over 3 years, plus one league (basketball) that is currently in midseason. of these 10 leagues, i've won 5 and placed third in another. my total buy-ins for all 10 leagues has been $970 and my winnings have been $2725. that's a 281% return on my investment for the non-MBAs out there. if only LaDainian Tomlinson and Albert Pujols were NYSE trade-able commodities, then maybe i'd have some chance at being a successful member of society.
here's something negative now. not negativity emanating from me, but something that bothers me. we've got a middle-aged (45ish) woman working as an executive assistant here who--and i'm saving myself some adjectives here--is just pathetic, in the dictionary definition. and unfortunately, she likes me, and not in a platonic way. i'm pretty sure i'm at least an occasional subject of her sexual fantasies. let me state now for the record that this woman is as attractive as a bucket of vomit and the mere mention of this has caused my testicles to assume their natal size and position. she's fond of coming to my office and standing in the doorway while asking me to do something, which will invariably require me to get up and check it out. except she doesn't much like to move out of the doorway. she'll sorta half-turn so it's not incredibly awkward but still forces me to brush up against her to get by. i told you it's pathetic, but i'm 95% sure these little brushes are what she uses to get her rocks off later on. (now i know what some of you are thinking. and yes i do often like to joke about chicks being into me when obviously they are not, but you'll just have to trust me on this one. if i were female and she were male, what this woman does would be called sexual harassment.) she also likes to ask me to come help her with a painfully obvious problem with her printer, which just so happens to be all the way around her desk so i've got to essentially crawl over her chair to get to it. most non-perverts would just get out of their chair and let me do my work, but not this one.
so this morning as i'm stocking the fridge, standing with the door open probably about a foot back from the shelves, she comes bounding into the pantry and with no warning leans down to the lowest shelf and just shoves her whole head and shoulders in front of me to grab a bag of something. if you're wondering, yes, this put her directly in line with my crotch. and these things happen--not all the time, but as often as she can find a way.
through most of the 4.5 years i've worked here i haven't minded these silly encounters. i mean, it bothers me but not in any serious way, more like how someone tapping their finger constantly would bother someone. in some deviant ways (because i can't stand her), it almost amused me to think of what a sad human being she is to sink to these depths. and really, if someone wants to use a little folg-candy to enliven the later experience of double-clicking the mouse, then sure, i'm happy to help.
but today, and one other time in the recent past that i can't as effectively recall, i have been annoyed by it, in more than a passing or frivolous manner. i have a girlfriend now, so it irks me a bit to think she has the right to get a cheap thrill from me. this shit ain't hers to take. it's sara's. so i don't like it. so there was a lot of words on the subject, more than such a pathetic person deserves.
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