In the latter half of last year a giant project descended on
my place of work, settling over the horizon in a vaguely threatening shadow, a
portent of many dark days in the distant future.
That future? Is now.
For months I’ve known it was coming, this specter of a bloated messy dossier looming around the edges of reality. For months I’ve
done a pretty good job of not freaking out about it and the chokehold it was bound to have on my life and the lives of all of us working on the project, and even now when I’d like to freak out it’s
not an option because there’s just so much to do that freaking out would make
me lose track of what it is I have to keep control of, so NO FREAKING OUT.
And, if predictions and history hold true, this is only the
start, so freaking out at this point would be laughably premature.
Is it possible to schedule a nervous breakdown for sometime
around next May? Because from now until
then, I’m going to be one barely-contained sweaty bag of not NOT FREAKING
OUT.
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In other news, I have stopped listening to new radio or NPR when
the news is actually, you know, ON. I
can’t stand it, all this Syria. I’d have
an opinion on sending in trains, planes, and automobiles to ‘intervene’ (OH
HELL NO!) but of course I don’t understand all the complications and political
mess and global implications of a squirrel passing gas in the Golan Heights, so
will refrain from pretending know what’s
going on (but still, OH HELL NO!), and thus have stopped trying to keep track
of who is tickling who behind the back in exchange for certain future
favors/not being wiped off the face of the earth.
It’s much more important that I fret about the upcoming
cubicle move at work, and who is getting the good spots and who is getting
screwed. My move is kind of lateral,
though I will be sitting one cube toward the walkway (on the end of a 3-fer
instead of in the middle) and more toward the front of the building but about
equidistant from the coffee area so nothing really gained or lost. At least I’m not IN the hallway right in
FRONT of the coffee area like they wanted to put me in last time. Because what could be a more perfect place to
stash a writer than that, eh? Just the
noisiest place of all, and this cube had the added bonus of being right outside
a conference room! SWANK! So, I guess this move could be worse – there wasn’t
even the barest whiff of being co-located to the fishbowl this time.
In a show of I-don’t-know-what, all the bigwigs at the front
of the building who have big offices with doors and everything are being
relocated to what were formerly small conference rooms, and their offices are
being converted to conference rooms.
This is like all the way to the TOP kind of relocation, with some folks
giving up offices that equal 6+ cube spaces (about 6x8 each , if I’m any guesser)
with a space that’s essentially 2-cubes big.
Still with a door, so there’s some vestige of hierarchy remaining, but oh, what a comedown for some of them, I"m sure.
We are teetering one step closer to just going full-bore
open plan, but in the bright-side way of thinking, we’re not there yet.
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I’ll leave it there, with my tales of work woe (and remind
me to tell you about a very nice award recently received). Just wanted to get it here for posterity and
future memory-jogging. And also because I wanted to complain to someone. Anyone. Even you.
Tiff out.
