From Office Space.. ya know? Like some days you walk into the office and even the furniture and inanimate objects seem to have it out for you..maybe a stapler? Today was one of those days for me; I work in the mortgage business with lots of electronic file transferring.  Everyone wants their files rushed, but I am a good employee and I my work as efficiently as I humanly can.  However; today’s normal stress and some things I have been trying to figure out on my own had really put me in a sort of passive aggressive mood, like i was mentally preparing for some argument- a battle with cutting cynicism and sharp wit.  However, upon introspection I realized this time it was truly better to not lash out at my fellow co-workers whether they deserved it or not.  Instead I traded the Handshake for the Fist;  and as one of my favorite websites would say: Keep Calm and Carry on.

How was your day? Any aggravation? Be cool. Be calm.  Think.  Be.

The fist wins in might and power but may close doors, the Handshake however may open minds, hearts, or an escape.  Until another day; the handshake wins tonight.

It’s professional.

Okay, I am not really sure if this is very apparent when people read my blog, but I can be a little bit…eccentric. Which I don’t say that in the way the some people do where they think it’s really cool to be weird and whatnot.
That’s not it at all.
I’m eccentric like the way I am a girl. I just am.

Anyways, the other day I was sitting in my cubicle, minding my own business, when the receptionist walks back unannounced and asks “Corrie, are you talking to yourself?”

Hmm. Probably.
Well then one of my other co-workers who works nearby walked over to my cubicle and said:

Yes! She is always talking over there and I have no clue what she is saying. Or then she will start to make noises.  I just don’t know what’s going on.

Okay, I happen to know that I talk while I type. And it’s not even me saying what I am typing most of the time. It’s actually me talking to the computer.
Or I am just talking to myself. Telling myself what I am going to do next (as if I didn’t know) or just saying what I am doing at the moment.
I will also keep talking to people after I walk away from them. I know they can’t hear what I am saying, I am the one who walked away, but I still have things to say that will be said.
As for the noises, I mostly only make those when I am walking. Like when I am walking down the stairs or down the hall.

Is that weird? Most likely. But it definitely breaks up the day and it makes working run a lot smoother.
It’s all about keeping myself entertained. If you were working in Accounting, what the hell would you do?
Besides, it’s not like I am yelling these things. Most of them are at mumble level.
And it’s not like I have intricate conversations with myself. Just small sentences here and there.

So anyways, I decided that since someone would mention that I sit and talk to myself while I work, it would probably be a good idea to stop that.
Cause I feel like people shouldn’t bring things up if they don’t mind it.

Anyways, I started to just work. No talking. No noises. Just working like a regular human being.
Typing away in my cubicle without any sounds in the world. Walking down halls without making any noises.
Working like a boring person.

Guess what happened next?
People started asking me if I was upset. The guy who brought up that I am always talking started to ask me if I was mad all the time.
I wasn’t.
But they would all just say “Well, you’re just so quiet.”

So, in conclusion, talking to yourself is not weird or annoying, because when you don’t people assume you are angry at the world.
Then they call you after work to make sure you’re okay and it’s awkward.

Scientific Discovery.

Last week, for example, I encountered a student who had come by our offices to visit one of my colleagues, and I asked her how she was doing. Fine, she explained, except for these horrible allergies. It seemed as if all the trees in the District of Columbia had released their pollen simultaneously, and it was making her quite miserable. I responded sympathetically and didn’t think about it for the rest of the day.

But the next morning, I noticed that I was beginning to feel a heavy sinus pressure behind my eyes, like something was being inflated in there. Oh, no — presumably the pollen intensity that was affecting the student the previous day was now wreaking havoc on me. As the day went on, I felt worse and worse — achy and stuffy and chilly — until I gave in and took some acetaminophen and antihistamines to get some relief. Every few years my hay fever seems to hit really hard, and I figured this was going to be a particularly bad season.

Still, once the Good Friday holiday came, I pushed through my discomfort, relying on meds to subdue it enough to let me spend quality time with my family. Even long weekends are too short to waste wallowing in malaise. A little seasonal allergy wasn’t going to keep me from joining the kids for a long walk in the park or from serving a magnificent Sunday dinner.

By Tuesday, though, the real truth became clear: this was not an allergy, but a nasty, persistent cold. And the reason it became clear was: one by one, the other members of my family were coming down with it. How could they have avoided it? I had just spent the weekend touching all their plates and utensils.

The problem was in the encounter with the student last week. She told me she was suffering from allergies big time, and without thinking about it I let that statement be the seed of a story. When I started feeling miserable the next day, I assumed it was allergies, too. So the story that began unfolding in my head was all about allergies. Anything that fit that story — sneezing, exhaustion, the yellow-flecked windows around my office confirming the high pollen count — was noted and incorporated into the story, and anything that contradicted it — chills and fever, and the fact that my symptoms didn’t intensify when I stepped outside — was ignored or explained away. Once I’d started telling myself the hay fever story, it became a source of order and comfort. If I hadn’t encountered the student who (thought she) had allergies, I might have read my own symptoms more objectively, quarantined myself from my family, and saved them from 7-10 days of misery each.

The human brain is hard-wired to rely on storytelling to help us understand and impose order on the world. When it works, the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts. That’s why we tell stories here at Figuring Out Fulfillment. But sometimes, because storytelling is so powerful and order so appealing, we allow ourselves to accept a story that isn’t actually true, just for the comfort of having a story. Maybe this is more likely during times of stress — so that, feeling ill, I allowed myself to jump to an unjustified conclusion more readily than I normally would have.

We’ve all seen people do this at work — the boss who makes up her mind and won’t be convinced otherwise, the co-worker who is blind to what seem to us to be obviously relevant details because they do not support his view of the situation. And who hasn’t allowed themselves to fall into the same kind of trap? Telling the right story can be clear after the fact; what is more difficult, but just as important, is learning to keep one’s eyes open to the many possible stories that could be told in the moment — so we can grasp when others might be telling themselves a different one, or so that we can teach ourselves to consider all the likely alternatives instead of fixating on a fiction.

I was out there today. Getting my shit together. Just stapling shit. Staple, staple, staple, I was unstoppable. And I was doing it outside. People don’t normally staple outside unless it involves a telephone pole. But they should. Next time you’re in a high rise building and you have some important documents that need to live together, you take them outside and staple them there; right there in the fresh air where everyone can see. Yeah, today I was just collating and stapling. Just fucking making a difference.

Anyways, about two hours after I got into work they told me that the email was down. Which made a lot of sense since I hadn’t received any emails since about 8 a.m.
Well, basically my day has been finding out that one system is down after the next until this moment where I am completely unable to do anything at all.
Every single program I use to do work has individually gone down one-by-one today. For a couple of hours we didn’t even have Internet. But that came back. The other ones still haven’t.

Here’s the thing….Can I go home?
Seriously, I am just sitting here. I’ve been just sitting here for the last couple of hours. Waiting for things to work.
The worst part is I actually had a ton of work to do today. (This is uncommon.) And now I cannot do any of it. Or anything.

I always wonder when things like this happen how I am supposed to act. Am supposed to pretend that I am working even though there is absolutely nothing at all to do?
I mean, they know that all these programs are down. They know that everything I do is in those programs, so why do my supervisors give me such disapproving looks when I am just lounging in my chair.
What do you want me to do right now? Re-paint the building?
Pass.

I have this coworker who is a little bit strange. And this coworker happens to be prone to coming up with conspiracy theories….About everything. Including my life.
This coworker also likes to tell me all the conspiracy theories they have.

So, when every computer program had gone down today, my coworker came into my cubicle and said:

Corrie, everything is down. (As if I wasn’t aware)
Do you think that maybe everything in the world is down? Maybe everything is gone and we are the only ones left. 
What would you do?

I don’t know. And maybe a zombie will jump through the window too.
What the hell everyone? I know you guys are really technologically illiterate, but a couple of servers going down does not mean the Apocalypse has come.
It means that someone was messing with them and did something stupid.
Calm down.

Anyways, bottom line, there really is no reason for me to be here for the last two hours and I have to go to the Post Office.
So I am making an executive decision that I am no longer needed today.
You’re welcome Management.

Band Name? Or Cover for An Album?

I present to you: The Tea Latte

When I was relaying the story to a friend, he said “When someone fist bumps me, I just give them the vagina.”  The WHAT?  He went on to explain “when someone tries to fist bumps me, I put my hand out and then wrap it around their fist.  I call it  the vagina.”  I calmly informed my friend that he was one comment away from a sexual harassment complaint and/or lawsuit.  He replied “I never thought of it that way.”

And you thought this was going to be about hand-jiving.  It’s good to be back.

#LIttle Mrs Know It All

#the vagina handshake

#office etiquette

#handjive

I mean, could someone at least text me and entertain me?

Every day I take a poo at work. Unlike some, that’s a statement that I’m proud to make.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t something that I announce to the rest of the office. Rarely do I stride through the halls with a newspaper under-arm, whistling a jaunty tune as I go, perhaps stopping off at the cafeteria to grab a few back-up paper towels just in case “shit gets messy” – literally. This is however my favourite kind of defecation. Home poos are fine too and we all like to squeeze one out in the comfort of our own bathroom, knowing the only people that might glance an overlooked bowl-skid or survivor nugget will be an unfortunate loved one. That being said, work poos are in a league of their own.

The greatest accolade of the famed work poo only dawned on me a couple of weeks ago, shortly after my morning coffee announced its arrival to my bowels. It struck me that once you have taken-up seat at work to excavate the old bum-tunnel, you are, in general, not at your desk. However, despite not being at your desk and even though you are doing nothing productive for the company (some people would claim the risk of drumming-up a sizeable plumbing bill was the height of counter-productivity) you are still BEING PAID.

This, my friends, is magnificence defined. Right up there with Willy Wonka’s glass elevator.

So there I was on the toilet, post-epiphany, pre-flush. My mind began to wander off with this new tit-bit of information. How much was I being paid per poo? What was my monthly rectum revenue? It had to be worked out; I began to do some potty maths. I didn’t have many things to factor in – just how much I was being paid, how long my average poo took and how many of them I did a month.

Being a placement student working for a company in Paris, my pay is all right. It’s definitely not bad by French intern standards, since they have the legal working rights of marmosets. I rounded my wages off to 1000€/month (it’s not too far off and makes for a nice round figure) and divided it up by the 140 contracted hours I did a month. This brought me to somewhere between 7 and 8 euros/hour (7.14€ when later checked on the calculator). I divided this up by the 60 minutes that we tend to find within an hour and this meant I was earning something like 12 or 13 cents per minute (11.9 cents).

Next, I guessed that the length of my average poo at work was probably about 5 minutes. Adding the journey to and from the toilets, often peppered with polite ‘hello’s, alongside the whole hand-washing/drying palaver and this gave a rough 10 minute round trip. So this was my average poo time (excluding exceptions that involve less than basic mental arithmetic such as this one). I took this freshly plopped piece of data and used it to multiply my cents per minute. I guessed at 1.20-1.30€ a poo. Using this with my calculated 11.9 cents figure this gives me a respectable 1.19€ per delivery of refined brown gold.

I go for one a day at work on average, no question there. Sure there are freak incidents; I get carried away with seafood. But I also know my way around eggs so there are days when the toilet goes hungry. All this balances out to a firm 1 a day. That means 1.19€ a day earned for releasing what I have to offer the world back into the sea. Since I work 20 days a month, this gives me a grand monthly total of 23.80€.

23.80€ a month! I can pay for the average internet bill with my bowel movements. In my six months working this internship I will earn over 140€ just by supplying the villagers with enough fudge to go around, I think that is pretty special. I intend to save up this money I earn during my time shitting in the French capital and use it to buy my plane ticket home to merry old England, it somehow seems fitting.

I have sat through many meetings where a recently promoted colleague quite gladly belittles me just to prove to other managers in the room that he is on a higher plane.  I have resolved to  just surround myself with real friends, and outside interests waiting for karma to strike.  Love karma it always hits the spot.

I have lost respect for many colleagues due to this, and can’t believe that such elevation in the ranks of a company can destroy friendships in the blink of an eye.  I for one try to remain sane, and treat those around me with the respect they deserve.

Jadi awalnya minggu lalu, pas di hari kamis gue masuk kantor seperti biasa. Terus kerja seperti biasa, sampai akhirnya sekitar jam 10an tubuh gue udah ga bisa toleransi lagi. Badan panas, menggigil terus gue nangis T.T iya nangis beneran di kantor. Abis ga tahan bok. Mau minta izin bos buat pulang, eh si bos lagi meeting di Bogor. Ngomong ke sekretaris, doi malah nyuruh gue tiduran di meja aja sampe sore. Issshh~ Akhirnya nekat, gue sms aja Pak Bos GM terjutek itu, minta izin pulang setengah hari. Sekarang masih bed rest, sendi-sendi masih berasa nyeri. Semoga cepet sembuh yaa, Han. Kerjaan numpuk tuh kayaknya $@%!?><*&

Anyways, this job is one of those where you don’t really have to talk on the phone a lot. You don’t really converse with customers or even people you work with that often via the phone. (I definitely go to their desks and bug them for no reason)
I get my own extension, but again I don’t really use it that often.
No one wants to talk to me…
When actually I am okay with them not calling me. It is kinda one of those situations where if you say the wrong thing to the customer, you’re going to get in big trouble.

It’s a multi-lined phone with about 35 different extensions. I guess that is a really big deal.
And about a month and a half ago they decided that when the receptionist goes to lunch or the hour before she comes in and I am already here, they are just going to have the phones forwarded to me.

When they made this decision, they really didn’t tell me much about the phones. I think they just thought that I would be able to handle it.
Funny thing about when people expect you to be able to handle something, you don’t really want to come back to them and say “Yeahhh, I couldn’t figure that one out.”

Anyways, yesterday I just barely learned (through accidentally pushing a button) how to transfer a person to a different phone extension.
Which is good.

Here’s the thing about that though, what have I been doing for the last month and a half?
I thought I was transferring people…

Do you ever have a moment when you realize that you have been an unintentional jerk and it’s a little bit funny to you?

Here let me transfer you.

And then I hang up on them.
It’s funny in my head, especially since I had no clue that I was actually hanging up on people.
But at the same time I would probably get in trouble if people knew.
PFF!

Gonna switch gears in the middle of the post.
Everyone will get over it.

So, on Monday my rolly chair broke and I had to get a new one. But when it broke, one of the screws was torn out of the bottom of the chair. The wood part. Apparently all of the other screws in the chair were not screwed in fully, so it caused that one to rip out after 6 months.
So there is a lot of wood shavings that looks like sawdust around my work area.

Now, I am someone who is not particularly concerned with a little bit of a mess. And sweeping is one of my most hated chores to do.
So, I just figured I would wait til the cleaning lady comes and she will clean it up.

Does this make me a pampered person? No, cause I am pretty sure the company pays her to do that and it’s not like I purposely broke my chair.

Anyways, it is driving my co-workers crazy that there are wood shavings on the floor. Like little OCD monsters, they can’t even walk past my cubicle without commenting on it.
One of them actually asked me if I would stop working for a bit so she could sweep it up. She also said she couldn’t believe that it wasn’t bothering me that there were wood shavings on the floor.

I know this might sound weird, but I don’t actually look at the floor while I work.
It’s strange.

I don’t even know about work this week.
It’s super boring. Why can’t someone start a rumor or something?

Goodness.

P.S.
I hate this post just as much as you. I feel boring today.