Unless you are among the privileged few who work from home, you've probably experienced what I consider to be some of the biggest dregs of society: Breachers of Bathroom Protocol.
It is my belief that colleges and universities - heck, even high schools - should require a course in Professional Behavior & the Work Force. This would include, among other things, lessons in not stealing your co-worker's ergonomic mouse the second they go on vacation, not leaving your leftover lunches in the office refrigerator for three weeks until it turns moldy, not conducting conference calls with your office door open, and not expecting the person who has the misfortune of sitting in the office closest to the printer to fix every paper jam for you.
While these are important lessons, however, the crux of the class would be focused around Office bathroom etiquette. Namely:
1) ALWAYS, ALWAYS check that everything was flushed before leaving the stall. Women are especially bad about this, probably because we're so embarrassed that we had to go number 2 that we try to scurry out of the bathroom as soon as possible and don't take long enough to even pause to check the toilet.
2) Don't use the handicapped stall for going number 2. You're not fooling anyone. Just because it's the farthest away from the door and harder to see shoes and thus identify the person in the stall doesn't mean we don't all know what you're up to in there the second we walk in the door. We know there's no other reason for going into the handicapped stall, and you're just making life really unpleasant for a poor disabled person who actually needs to use the handicapped stall - especially if you fail to observe Rule #1.
3) Cell phones are NEVER to be brought into the bathroom. I don't care if it only takes me 45 seconds to pee and get out; I don't want to have to hear about your asinine argument with the cable company while I'm in there for those 45 seconds. Plus, have you ever thought about how many cooties on now on your cell phone? Disgusting.
4) Even if you don't wash your hands after going to the bathroom at home (you're gross!), at least do it at the office. Especially if you're someone's manager. Your co-workers will lose all respect entirely if they don't see you at least stick your hands under some running water for a few seconds. Use soap, and I bet they'll be more likely to stay late to help you meet that deadline.
5) Those of you who go to another floor in the office building to go number 2: you're also not fooling anyone. We see you when you walk out of the bathroom and head straight to the elevator. We're on to you when you walk out of a stall and you're not one of the 30 familiar faces we've been peeing with for the past 6 months. We know you just left us an unpleasant gift in the bathroom, and we hate you for it.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Narcissism is boring
It's been 5 months since I "quit" my job and I'm still unemployed. Well, I'm employed part-time: 30 hours a week. I have to admit, working three 10-hour days is actually not so bad. I hate the 30 hours I'm at the office, but only having to do something I hate for 30 hours a week is a heck of a lot better than doing something I hate for 50 to 60 hours a week. Plus, I'm an hourly employee now, so putting in a few extra hours on the weekend means I'm now actually being compensated for them.
You'd think with all my free time (at least 20 hours more spare time per week!), I would have some great blog articles to show.
And you'd think wrong.
I don't know where the spare time has gone. Maybe wedding planning? Although according to all the overdue alerts I'm getting from my checklist on the Knot.com, I really haven't done all that much wedding planning. (Though, as a side note, I did order the cutest brooch bouquet in spite of all my protestations that anything more than $10 for a bridal bouquet is a complete waste of money. I consider myself now ahead of the game since I have a bouquet picked out and am now justified in doing nothing else on my wedding planning for at least 3 weeks.)
Perhaps my spare time has gone into exercising? I did start a half-marathon training program, but I'm doing the bare minimum mileage required for it and interpreting the days where the program calls for an "easy" run to mean an "easy" sitting on the couch and watching "Say Yes to the Dress" re-runs. (Which I suppose counts towards wedding planning, as I am voyeuristically getting ideas for my own wedding that way.)
At any rate, I can't say that I've edified myself, improved society, or even cleaned out my closet since shifting to part-time. I've certainly not been writing, I can say that much.
However, I did spend some of my free time thinking about writing, which I will allow myself to consider as productive use of time. While "thinking" about writing and watching the highly mediocre Julie and Julia movie about some obsessed Julia Child narcissistic blogger with a tiny kitchen and inexplicably large amounts of cooking equipment stored in said kitchen, I realized that most blogs people write are, well, boring. I've certainly never read one for more than about 10 minutes, unless it was making fun of someone else.
And that's when it struck me: blogs about people other than the writer are interesting. Blogs about how the writer spent his Tuesday afternoon wanting to shoot himself at the post office are not. And maybe writing blogs about people other than the writer are more interesting to write, and provide needed motivation and inspiration for writing. Experiencing the post office on a Tuesday afternoon is bad enough; why re-live the mundane in a blog? Why not write about the mundane experiences of other people at the very least?
Unfortunately I'm at work right now - getting paid by the hour! - and need to return to productivity to ensure that my place on the payroll isn't usurped by someone who is actually interested in working here. But I have very high aspirations of returning tomorrow...soon...someday...to start blogging about the lives of other people.
You'd think with all my free time (at least 20 hours more spare time per week!), I would have some great blog articles to show.
And you'd think wrong.
I don't know where the spare time has gone. Maybe wedding planning? Although according to all the overdue alerts I'm getting from my checklist on the Knot.com, I really haven't done all that much wedding planning. (Though, as a side note, I did order the cutest brooch bouquet in spite of all my protestations that anything more than $10 for a bridal bouquet is a complete waste of money. I consider myself now ahead of the game since I have a bouquet picked out and am now justified in doing nothing else on my wedding planning for at least 3 weeks.)
Perhaps my spare time has gone into exercising? I did start a half-marathon training program, but I'm doing the bare minimum mileage required for it and interpreting the days where the program calls for an "easy" run to mean an "easy" sitting on the couch and watching "Say Yes to the Dress" re-runs. (Which I suppose counts towards wedding planning, as I am voyeuristically getting ideas for my own wedding that way.)
At any rate, I can't say that I've edified myself, improved society, or even cleaned out my closet since shifting to part-time. I've certainly not been writing, I can say that much.
However, I did spend some of my free time thinking about writing, which I will allow myself to consider as productive use of time. While "thinking" about writing and watching the highly mediocre Julie and Julia movie about some obsessed Julia Child narcissistic blogger with a tiny kitchen and inexplicably large amounts of cooking equipment stored in said kitchen, I realized that most blogs people write are, well, boring. I've certainly never read one for more than about 10 minutes, unless it was making fun of someone else.
And that's when it struck me: blogs about people other than the writer are interesting. Blogs about how the writer spent his Tuesday afternoon wanting to shoot himself at the post office are not. And maybe writing blogs about people other than the writer are more interesting to write, and provide needed motivation and inspiration for writing. Experiencing the post office on a Tuesday afternoon is bad enough; why re-live the mundane in a blog? Why not write about the mundane experiences of other people at the very least?
Unfortunately I'm at work right now - getting paid by the hour! - and need to return to productivity to ensure that my place on the payroll isn't usurped by someone who is actually interested in working here. But I have very high aspirations of returning tomorrow...soon...someday...to start blogging about the lives of other people.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Things not to do in your lifetime
In your lifetime, based on (unfortunately) personal experience, I do not recommend doing any of the following:
1) Quitting your job without another job lined up unless you are prepared to accept financial, social, and psychological consequences
2) Quitting your job but letting the HR department talk you into just taking a "vacation" for a week and a half instead and then resuming your job in a part-time/temporary role while you look for other opportunities (Trust me: it's HIGHLY embarrassing to have everyone think you're leaving but then having to walk shamefacedly back into the office a week and a half later after you've failed to secure other employment and actually had to stare the prospect of paying for your own health insurance in the face. It's probably better to either tough the job out until you find other employment or to quit once and for all and pray your savings last you for a while.)
3) Stealing office supplies from the office of a co-worker who has left the company but caveated his resignation with the potential for coming back soon. There is a good chance he will be coming back, and there is a 100% chance that he will notice that someone scavenged his office in the week and a half he was gone. Seriously, to all the office supply vultures out there: please leave us our ergonomic mice. Our carpal tunnel does not disappear overnight, and it's already painful enough for us to be back at a job we hate without having to deal with severe wrist and hand pain on top of it.
4) Asking a co-worker who quit his job but returned to work a few weeks later any of the following:
A) "I thought you had left. What are you doing back here?"
B) "Why did you want to leave in the first place?"
C) "Is the job market that bad that you can't find work in a week and a half, or are you just a
big loser and incapable of finding any other gainful employment?"
D) "Did you put on a few pounds while you were out?"
5) Eating sugar-free gummy bears in any sort of quantity while at work. They do a number on your digestive system, believe me.
1) Quitting your job without another job lined up unless you are prepared to accept financial, social, and psychological consequences
2) Quitting your job but letting the HR department talk you into just taking a "vacation" for a week and a half instead and then resuming your job in a part-time/temporary role while you look for other opportunities (Trust me: it's HIGHLY embarrassing to have everyone think you're leaving but then having to walk shamefacedly back into the office a week and a half later after you've failed to secure other employment and actually had to stare the prospect of paying for your own health insurance in the face. It's probably better to either tough the job out until you find other employment or to quit once and for all and pray your savings last you for a while.)
3) Stealing office supplies from the office of a co-worker who has left the company but caveated his resignation with the potential for coming back soon. There is a good chance he will be coming back, and there is a 100% chance that he will notice that someone scavenged his office in the week and a half he was gone. Seriously, to all the office supply vultures out there: please leave us our ergonomic mice. Our carpal tunnel does not disappear overnight, and it's already painful enough for us to be back at a job we hate without having to deal with severe wrist and hand pain on top of it.
4) Asking a co-worker who quit his job but returned to work a few weeks later any of the following:
A) "I thought you had left. What are you doing back here?"
B) "Why did you want to leave in the first place?"
C) "Is the job market that bad that you can't find work in a week and a half, or are you just a
big loser and incapable of finding any other gainful employment?"
D) "Did you put on a few pounds while you were out?"
5) Eating sugar-free gummy bears in any sort of quantity while at work. They do a number on your digestive system, believe me.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The next stages of unemployment: the IRS strikes back
I got home from working out last Friday - hey, I was being productive on my unemployment vacation and exercising!- and decided to be a helpful roommate and collect the mail. My roommates and I are not very dedicated mail collectors, and as I typically only receive bills, junk mail, and 10,000 Victoria's Secret catalogs per month, I'm especially lax in going out to check the mailbox for our house. Upon retrieving the mail last Friday, I immediately wished I had continued to slack in my mail collection duties.
Apparently, there are two certainties in unemployment: feeling like a loser, and taxes. The IRS, in its all-knowing malevolence, decided to wait until I had decided to quit my job to send me a letter informing me that my 2008 tax form didn't match their records for what I earned in 2008 and that I owed them the nice tidy sum of nearly $18,000, payable by July 28.
Now, I fully admit that for me, filling out a tax form is a bit like handing a blind person a wad of darts and facing them in the opposite direction of the dart board. Especially anything involving capital gains and investments. Looking at my tax form and what the IRS sent me, I am 99.9% sure I did fill out my tax forms incorrectly. I'm also 99.9% sure there is no way I owe $18,000. To owe $18,000 would mean I had to have made at least $100K in capital gains. Considering 2008 was the year my investments - and everyone else in America's investments - went kablooey, I'm pretty darn tootin' sure that I didn't make at least $100K off my investments.
So now, instead of interspersing my job searching with reruns of the Golden Girls and the occasional trash Bravo TV show, I'll now be interspersing my job searching with desperately trying to figure out how much money I do or do not owe the IRS. And potentially selling plasma, eggs, a kidney, or all of the above to pay off $18K in money I apparently made but never saw a penny of.
Apparently, there are two certainties in unemployment: feeling like a loser, and taxes. The IRS, in its all-knowing malevolence, decided to wait until I had decided to quit my job to send me a letter informing me that my 2008 tax form didn't match their records for what I earned in 2008 and that I owed them the nice tidy sum of nearly $18,000, payable by July 28.
Now, I fully admit that for me, filling out a tax form is a bit like handing a blind person a wad of darts and facing them in the opposite direction of the dart board. Especially anything involving capital gains and investments. Looking at my tax form and what the IRS sent me, I am 99.9% sure I did fill out my tax forms incorrectly. I'm also 99.9% sure there is no way I owe $18,000. To owe $18,000 would mean I had to have made at least $100K in capital gains. Considering 2008 was the year my investments - and everyone else in America's investments - went kablooey, I'm pretty darn tootin' sure that I didn't make at least $100K off my investments.
So now, instead of interspersing my job searching with reruns of the Golden Girls and the occasional trash Bravo TV show, I'll now be interspersing my job searching with desperately trying to figure out how much money I do or do not owe the IRS. And potentially selling plasma, eggs, a kidney, or all of the above to pay off $18K in money I apparently made but never saw a penny of.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The early stages of unemployment
Reality hasn't quite sunk in yet. I'm still living in a blissful, paycheck-filled existence, complete with health care benefits and access to my old work email (helpful for those acquaintances who don't seem to follow directions when you send out an email notifying them that you will no longer be checking that email account and to please send future correspondence to ijustquitmyjob@gmail.com and who send you emails to your old account asking you what happened, and did you have the $10 you owed them from two weeks ago). My jaw is still sore from the grinding and clenching of teeth I'm apparently doing at night in my sleep, induced by stress from work. My boss is still calling me to ask where I saved some information on the company intranet.
I quit my job last week. And if felt good.
Well, it felt good until the part about not having a source of funding for things like rent, food, gas, prescriptions, cell phone plans, gym memberships, and of course, wine, crossed my mind. That's when I started caving in to work a bit, and instead of walking out the door from work that morning - I'd reached my limit of irascible clients, unrealistic deadlines, weekends spent in the office, and a corporate culture of treating its employees like drones, and had stormed into work and delivered to my boss the perhaps-not-so-eloquent-in-hindsight diatribe about needing to quit ASAP in order to preserve my sanity, my personal life, and my desire to move on to a bigger and brighter career - I gave in and said I'd stay three more days to finish up the report I was working on. Then, when doing a call with HR the day before my supposed final day, I caved in when the HR director gently reminded me of the nasty expenses of COBRA. I decided to just go on "vacation" for a week and then come back in a part-time role.
So here I am, on the second day of vacation. I feel a bit like one of the real housewives of Orange County except with a lot less money, a lot smaller boobs, and a lot fewer sugar daddies in my life. In the two days I've been on vacation, my life has been like that of an OC housewife: I've been a lady who lunches (albeit with a male former co-worker), I've dined with a group of girls (granted, it was a sorority alumni group event I attended in the hopes of networking and having those networking dreams dashed when I realized all of the women in attendance were middle-aged housewives), and I've gone shopping (for a new-every-two free phone from Verizon to replace the piece of garbage that had been moonlighting as a cell phone for me the past 3 years). In between my busy social life, I've emailed former co-workers about any potential openings they might know about, added connections on LinkedIn, applied to five jobs, and scoured Careerbuilder.com. No leads yet, but at least I can say I've been trying.
My fiance suggested I start a blog to help dust off my writing skills, which, given that the past 7 years of my life have been spent toiling away in market research and political polling, have accumulated a rather thick layer of dust. While I'm not convinced that my life is interesting enough to necessitate (or even justify) a blog, I'm also not convinced that 99.9% of the blogs out there are interesting enough to warrant their existence. If there's anything my market research experience has taught me, it's that we Americans are a narcissistic lot, and I might as well be true to my American blood and throw another narcissistic blog into the mix.
So, without further ado, I conclude the first entry to my blog. I think my effort in writing this deserves the reward of a nice glass of white wine, even if the content in this entry quite possibly doesn't really justify a reward of any sort.
I quit my job last week. And if felt good.
Well, it felt good until the part about not having a source of funding for things like rent, food, gas, prescriptions, cell phone plans, gym memberships, and of course, wine, crossed my mind. That's when I started caving in to work a bit, and instead of walking out the door from work that morning - I'd reached my limit of irascible clients, unrealistic deadlines, weekends spent in the office, and a corporate culture of treating its employees like drones, and had stormed into work and delivered to my boss the perhaps-not-so-eloquent-in-hindsight diatribe about needing to quit ASAP in order to preserve my sanity, my personal life, and my desire to move on to a bigger and brighter career - I gave in and said I'd stay three more days to finish up the report I was working on. Then, when doing a call with HR the day before my supposed final day, I caved in when the HR director gently reminded me of the nasty expenses of COBRA. I decided to just go on "vacation" for a week and then come back in a part-time role.
So here I am, on the second day of vacation. I feel a bit like one of the real housewives of Orange County except with a lot less money, a lot smaller boobs, and a lot fewer sugar daddies in my life. In the two days I've been on vacation, my life has been like that of an OC housewife: I've been a lady who lunches (albeit with a male former co-worker), I've dined with a group of girls (granted, it was a sorority alumni group event I attended in the hopes of networking and having those networking dreams dashed when I realized all of the women in attendance were middle-aged housewives), and I've gone shopping (for a new-every-two free phone from Verizon to replace the piece of garbage that had been moonlighting as a cell phone for me the past 3 years). In between my busy social life, I've emailed former co-workers about any potential openings they might know about, added connections on LinkedIn, applied to five jobs, and scoured Careerbuilder.com. No leads yet, but at least I can say I've been trying.
My fiance suggested I start a blog to help dust off my writing skills, which, given that the past 7 years of my life have been spent toiling away in market research and political polling, have accumulated a rather thick layer of dust. While I'm not convinced that my life is interesting enough to necessitate (or even justify) a blog, I'm also not convinced that 99.9% of the blogs out there are interesting enough to warrant their existence. If there's anything my market research experience has taught me, it's that we Americans are a narcissistic lot, and I might as well be true to my American blood and throw another narcissistic blog into the mix.
So, without further ado, I conclude the first entry to my blog. I think my effort in writing this deserves the reward of a nice glass of white wine, even if the content in this entry quite possibly doesn't really justify a reward of any sort.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)