i am so persecuted today

I was coding some bills, and because I had nothing more exciting to think about, I became annoyed with the pen I was using. It had a big barrel, a little tiny point, and made my letters look weird.

So I reached into my pen holder, took out my favorite pen, and took the cap off. Except the cap was still on. But I just... oh.

My favorite pen is dead. It was a Sharpie pen, and it was the first gift that I ever received, as official office supply bitch, from Office Depot. Sitting on my desk, it looks like I let a dog play with it. It was fun to chew on and wrote well. I loved it, it's gone, and I'm officially in mourning.

In fact, I'm so upset that I'm in mourning retroactively. I've decided that the demise of my beloved pen explains the funk I've been in all morning. Also the remarkable lack of any activity that might be characterized as "work."

and then office depot threw the kitchen sink at me

There's an odd quirk that I've found in the search function on the Office Depot site.

Usually, the more words you add to a search, the fewer returns you get.

For example, when I type "HP" into the search, I get 904 results. When I type in "HP 88", I get 104 more-specific results.

If you type in something just completely non-sensical, you get no results. I put in "jk," and Office Depot returned nothing.

However, if you give Office Depot a special blend of stuff it recognizes ("HP 88"), and something totally non-sensical ("jk"), it will say "I don't know what the fuck you want - here's everything but the kitchen sink."

My search for "HP 88 jk" returned 1,178 results - more results than I got for just "HP." To which I say, "WTF, Office Depot?"

where was i?

Every now and then when I'm entering data, I find that my eyes have come unfocused, and I've been thinking about something (I rarely remember what) for some unknown amount of time.

I read what's on the screen, but I don't recognize it. I don't read this stuff, I just type it.

So I scroll to the bottom of the list and find that yes, two or three or five minutes ago, before I started thinking about what I'd make for dinner or the book I'm reading or the tone of that email I just received, I did enter that project.

I'm hoping it's just extreme boredom and not some slow mental decay that's causing me, more than once a day, to find myself staring at a corner of my screen, unaware of what I've just been doing or thinking.

all of our agents are busy helping other customers...

You know you've spent too much time on hold with Egencia (that's the new Expedia Corporate Travel - isn't it corporate-y?) when you're walking around the office humming their light jazz muzak crap.

who brought the cupcakes in?

Yesterday afternoon, brownies emerged in the break room. I didn't go into the break room yesterday afternoon, I know that the brownies were there because I heard the women around me asking where they came from. Not idly wondering, mind you. These women were on a mission, because if they didn't know who brought the brownies in, they weren't going to eat them.

This morning, a cake and a tray of cupcakes joined the brownies. And at least two dozen times today, I heard the question "who brought the cupcakes in?"

Here's the thing. I don't care who brought the cupcakes in. I don't work with anyone dirty enough that I wouldn't eat their cupcakes. But if I took a cupcake back to my desk, these women, dying for a cupcake, would ask me who brought them in. And I'd have to admit that I was willing to eat dirty cupcakes from unknown origins.

So I put a piece of cake in a styrofoam cup and took it to my desk. It was delicious.

bummer!

Today, I got someone fired. There was no way for me to do my job without getting him fired.

Technically, he was fired because he did something wrong. But I can't deny the basic cause and effect that if I hadn't brought it to someone's attention (and if that person hadn't forwarded the matter to freaking everybody, including the Executive Vice President), he would not have been fired.

And that is a bummer. It was really fun researching the answers to all these little puzzles, until one came along to which I didn't want to know the answer.

farhad manjoo hogs all the fun jobs

So, I've had a crush on Farhad Manjoo for a while. I like reading Slate.com, and he is by far my favorite writer there (sorry Emily Yoffe!)

And then he wrote an article titled "Kill your RSS reader, and use my amazing system for browsing the web." And it is amazing, even though it made me feel dumb for not having an RSS reader yet.

RSS was always something that I saw at the end of articles and ignored. I knew RSS readers put all the stuff you wanted to read on one page, but I didn't know how exactly you could "sign up" for one, or if that was even the right terminology. I read a Wikipedia article that could not have been less helpful if it had tried, and kind of gave up for a while. Scrolling through pages looking for content was therapeutic, kinda.

Then, right after reading Farhad's article, I signed up for Google Reader, which he had oh so helpfully noted in his article. Was that so difficult, Wikipedia? Of course, he noted it while, umm, rendering it obsolete. In my defense, I have a crazy old version of IE on my computer at work that doesn't have tabs, so his amazing system would not work for me. (What? Shut up! I read stuff during lunch...)

But there was a bigger take-away point to the article than my finally getting an RSS reader or learning Farhad's amazing system (which totally sounds like a real estate get-rich-quick scheme, when I put it like that). Because Farhad just had to go and say this:

And that's pretty much how I spend my day—opening up a lot of tabs,
middle-mouse-clicking all of their pertinent links, and then going from tab to
tab in a never-ending quest for new news. I'm telling you, it's totally fun.

Farhad, you do not have to tell me, I know that's totally fun! And you get paid for it, and now I want to go all Freaky Friday on you. Because there aren't any job descriptions out there that go "Tab through the internet for 8 hours and then write something pithy about it." And that picture of you, from the beginning of this post? That was from a University website. And you have a book. And since there's no way I would qualify for your "totally fun" job, now I have to research body-snatching. Are you happy now?

fake it 'til... it's 5

2:44: Start a log of my inactivity for my blog.
2:44: Recreate spreadsheet someone sent me. She thinks we have a credit and I think she’s wrong. Let’s fight about it.
2:47: Boring! Order business cards instead. I know how to use a fax machine!
2:58: Look for french onion soup on the cafeteria menu for next week (I ♥ sodium!) Search ends in disappointment.
3:12: I’m one incorrect login away from locking myself out of a program for which I’m the administrator. Remember I have a new password and type it in very carefully.
3:31: Paying bills: it’s more fun when it’s not your money.
3:49: OMG someone’s inane ringtone has been playing nonstop for like 15 minutes. Someone really wants to talk to someone.
3:50: The phone just made a noise that I can only guess means there’s a new voicemail. Does that mean it’s over?
3:51: No, no it does not.
4:02: It’s still ringing, and now it’s harshing my data entry mellow.
4:03: Panic. There is no scanning for today. If I can’t pretend that removing staples, scanning, renaming files, and moving them into a folder takes an hour, what will I do during that hour?
4:19: Work is falling out of the sky! I am so oppressed!
4:41: Did my left armrest just get lower?
4:43: The Controller & Treasurer just printed something to the printer behind me, collected it, and said “Yes!” Is that usually a more difficult process for him?
4:53: Read news articles about people killing people and look at the clock in the right-hand corner a few times per minute.

absurd, self-referential title - CHECK!

Exchange between myself and a co-worker (we'll call him Milton), as I fill a cup at the water cooler.

Milton: You drink a lot of water.
Me: I try. It's good for you.
Milton: Like a camel.
Me: *blink*
Milton: *walks away*