office martyr

it doesn't take much to make me feel cunning. granted, it also doesn't take much to send me careening speedily back the other way, but that's not the point of this rant.

the point of this rant is that i spent a fair amount of time this morning trying to locate a friend of mine that i haven't seen in ages. it seems that his email provider has decided to take a sabbatical of sorts, and as such every message i've sent to him has come bouncing back to me with the sort of contempt that only an autoresponder can muster. needless to say, this has caused me no end of distress. i hate not being able to find my friends. it's like not being able to find my keys, only much more painful (but without the worry and threat of getting rained on). so, after receiving something like...oh...four emails from his autoresponder, i decided to take matters into my own hands. seven searches, several obscenities and a reminder of why i hate bureaucracy later, i tracked down a phone number for him.

i am so calling him this afternoon. as soon as it hits a reasonable hour in the land of the california college student.

whoever says that the internet needs to be regulated is obviously not using it for the forces of good.

in other news...

i swear i'm getting thisclose to just taking a swing at sally sue, the creature from another cubicle.

today's altercation (well, quasi-altercation. we don't believe in real confrontations here):

i, stupidly, ask to be reminded what it is we're going to be discussing in this afternoon's meeting. there are three major topics that we could conceivably be talking about, so it was actually a valid question.

sally sue (because all three of the things we could discuss are actually projects that she's been spearheading): oh, the factoids for the brochure.

shivery (because i'm supposed to be doing something that is as yet undefined with these factoids): okay. i'm not going to have as much to discuss as i would have hoped. i don't have all the numbers in yet.

sally sue (with a big, sad sigh): no, no don't worry about it. i don't want to waste anyone's time. it's my responsibility.

okay, admittedly, an innocuous sentence. this is why storytelling is not always so apt for the internet--so much is lost without inflection. anyway. the inflection here said this: "oh, poor me, no really, i couldn't ask you to take responsibility for any of this. you can't possibly understand the burdens i shoulder doing this work that is so much more important than yours. you should really be volunteering to help because what you are doing is useless in comparison to what i'm doing. but really. only if you want to actually be useful."

ordinarily i would sympathize with that sort of feeling--every now and again, life just feels like that. sometimes my job is kind of useless. sometimes what she's working on is more important than what i'm doing.

BUT.

these projects are not exclusively hers. last time i checked, we were working in some sort of team capacity. yeah, she may be the ringleader on these things, but the rest of us are slightly more qualified than the clowns in the volkswagen.

i'd put us somewhere between the trained monkeys and the chinese acrobats.

you know, actually capable of being useful. upon occasion. and i feel maligned when my work is trivialized in favor of another project and then i am cast off of said project as unnecessary. it's kind of a double whammy blow to what little ego i've got left.

i think i may really be starting to hate my job. or maybe just sally sue. difficult to tell.