Rule #21: From the Employee Handbook

If something goes wrong... PANIC! What is the point of keeping your composure when the compost has already hit the fan, covering you from head to toe in decaying shit?

Rule #11: From the Employee Handbook

If it's not broke, by all means try to fix it. What could possibly go wrong? If it is broke, well... fuck it, I retire in less than two years.

It's called "E-mail" not "Twitter"

Thanks again for the play-by-play on every little detail of your charities. Honestly, I really do care.

Rule #13: From the Employee Handbook

When writing an automated script to fix a particular problem, one must never test the scripts to make sure they work prior to going live with them. Furthermore, once the scripts have gone live, one must never double check that they are actually working as intended. Assumption is good enough, and the burden of proof consumes too much time that could be otherwise be spent jumping through a series of bureaucratic hoops and accomplishing nothing. Besides... what would one do tomorrow if the problem was solved today, before it blossomed into a full blown cluster fuck? (See Rule #4)

Rule #6: From the Employee Handbook

"If work begins to run low, we must wait until it has completely dried up and our employees are sitting on their hands doing nothing before we light a fire under the asses of our property managers to keep our contractors busy. This will ensure that there is always a reason to nag."

Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck

In a blood lusting fit of rage, I turn around to give Snapper Man the stink eye, accompanied by a Clowers Headshake of Disapproval. I do this every time he walks by, yet he still continues to do it incessantly. Does he realize what an obnoxious prick he is, and keeps doing it for his own nefarious and spiteful reasons, or does he think he's perpetually in an off-broadway production of Westside Story? I think the former... how else would one develop such an annoying habit, unless he realizes how distracting it is and gets his rocks off by being a nuisance to others for no apparent reason? Even with my headphones on, I can still tell when he is passing by, and even though it's happened at least a thousand times since I started here a few weeks back, I still haven't acclimatized myself to not turn around when somebody walks up behind me and starts snapping, because in my experience it's always been impersonal asshole-speak for, "Hey, you!" As peevish as that is to me, it's twice as bad when you turn your head in response only to see somebody walk right past.

Rule #4: From the Employee Handbook

"Even if a potential problem is realized ahead of time, we must wait until it blooms into a full-scale cluster fuck before we even begin to take steps to alleviate said problem."

Snap, snapity, snapiness

I find that in the workplace its nice to pull back from your desk and pause. Pause and have that moment of still, a chance to stretch and close your eyes....reset from the dual monitor stare down. Unfortunately there are those in this world that see the aisles and cubes of the corporate world as their own personal area with which they may do as they please. And by that I mean, snap your fingers, sneeze loud enough to wake the rotting corpses of a far off cemetery, or clip thy finger nails. Don't get me wrong, a mani/pedi can be relaxing and well groomed nails are always a good idea, but it should never be done in the company of others. GO TO THE BATHROOM. GO OUTSIDE. GO HOME. These are your options for grooming yourself. What next? Trim pubes in the cafeteria?

The nervous habits of the overactive, under-stimulated folk come out in the workplace quite often. Tapping on the desk, bouncing the legs, humming, clicking a pen...but snapping your fingers? All the time? Really? Join a swing band fucko. Snap yourself silly.

I keep waiting to get up to grab some water and see brains and skull bits from the bombastic sneezer guy down the way. Its nasal evacuation on the herculean level. I think I shot out of my seat the first time it happened. I just want to know if its necessary.

If you could care any more, I couldn't care less...

Since getting my work e-mail up and running, I've been subjected to a constant barrage of new mail notifications. As with any e-mail account, except for the most clandestine of super-secret alias accounts, it mostly just fills up with junk. The only difference between my home account and my work account is that, at home, the sender and subject fields are usually usually filled by randomly generated strings of alphanumeric characters, letting me know that I could increase the size of my junk, whereas at work I am flooded by messages from our 16th floor Receptionist / HR person notifying everybody in our department of different charitable opportunities.

Now, the issue here is not "I worked hard to earn my money and those filthy poor people should do the same," because that argument is invalid nine times out of ten. Afterall, not many employers that could afford to pay their employees a livable wage would seriously consider an applicant with no home address, and thus no shower, etc. Anyway, I digress... the issue here is, "how in the hell does forming a human chain across a pedestrain bridge help anybody?" It may be a weak metaphor for solidarity and interconnectedness, but that symbolic crap isn't putting any food on the table (or the curb, if you will).

Can we please stop pretending that we care about other people? Really, it's cute, but please stop.

The "Test"

It has come to my attention that perhaps this place is conducting some sort of sadistic psychological experiment on its employees with the goal of determining what the breaking point of the average human mind may be. These experiments are conducted via a variety of different test procedures, depending on the subject's floor and department. Here on the sixteenth in the Real Estate division, we are subject to many different tests, including, for example, being forced to endure a man who sideskirts the main aisle, instead opting to walk between our cubicles while constantly snapping his fingers on his way to and from the printer station at the rate of approximately 4 round trips per hour. We are forced to listen to small talk that even the person speaking seems altogether disinterested in, ranging from topics of muscle cars and motorcycles, oafish things that they or their spouses recently did, the improving physical fitness of [still old and fat] individuals, how brilliant and talented everyone's [hideous looking] children are, what [atrocious] bands they are 'hip' for listening to (Kid Rock?!), talking about how terrible a certain brand of [kickass] beer was compared to something [unpleasant] such as Heineken, a number of quirky and goofy sounding laughs and/or nervous tics, etc. Furthermore, we are given an impossible task in that we are supposed to map sales and leases as accurately as possible as they fall upon the right of way (or formerly right of way, in the case of sales), but with highly imprecise, often missing or otherwise insufficient data. Furthermore still, we have an entire totem pole of bosses, underbosses, managers, demi-gods, and gods constantly maintaining a vigil on our activities, making us feel like like slackers even despite the fact that we are quite literally unable to do any work at the moment.

Lending just a bit of a tinfoil hat degree of skepticism to my conspiracy theory is an interesting fact about our building. The entire HQ building operates within a closed-air environment, more or less, where very little outside air is let in to mingle with the recirculating air inside. It is a measure to improve energy efficiency, given that very small volumes of air take less energy to heat or cool to the desired temperature than larger volumes of air. The concern with efficiency absolutely must be some kind of farce, however, as the way everything else is set up within the company breeds inefficiency with the furor of a cage full of teenaged rabbits on prom night. The only logical explanation is that they are pumping some sort of neurotoxin into our closed atmosphere. Without the proper lab equipment, I am unable to capture a pure sample of our oxygen here at the HQ with which to deduce how this neurotoxin interferes with our brain processes, but surely it doesn't help kill off all of the microbial bacteria floating around in the closed system loop, causing even further discomfort among the masses as the flu season approaches.

This place is designed to foster madness and insanity. We know this much... but for what purpose? World domination? Just bored?

The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Starting a job with the railroad is much akin to trying to crawl your way out of a water spout during the middle of monsoon season in the rain forest. With every inch of progress we make towards getting access to the proper servers and databases, we encounter a new problem that sets us back twice as far. It's a seemingly neverending hierarchy of error messages that exponentially builds upon itself.

The amusing thing is that these are all basic problems that somebody such as myself, a mere peon in the grand scheme of tech support gurus, could easily fix provided I had administrative access. Instead, process impedes progress, and I am getting paid to surf the internet until the chain of command gets back to me with a solution, at which point I send my brand new set of problems back up the chain. Just to give an idea of the process:

- I start working on the project and get towards the end of step 1

- I get an error message that prevents me from moving on to step 2

- I asses the problem to see what might be throwing the error in case it's operator error or just something I can fix locally on my own, else it just helps to explain the problem to Tech Support

- I run a series of tests to fix the problem, based on hypothesis determined at previous step

- I find out that I can't fix the problem locally due to lack of admin rites, even though it is a local problem

- I notify my supervisor of the problem

- Supervisor notifies manager

- Manager breaks balls of supervisor about how it should theoretically work

- Supervisor pwns manager

- Manager actually listens to the problem this time, but still has to question every little detail as to what stuff I need access to and exactly why

- Supervisor pwns manager again

- Manager finally caves to the request, but doesn't really know how anything works, so refers us to Tech Support

- Supervisor and I call Tech Support to explain problem

- Tech Support busts our balls for interrupting their "work" by actually making them work

- Tech Support calls manager to make sure they have clearance to perform operations

- Tech Support bumbles through the problem and doesn't fix anything

- Supervisor and I determine how to fix the problem on our own, but still need admin access

- Supervisor and I call Tech Support back and hold their hand through the problem

- Problem is fixed the next day as the software is automatically "pushed" onto my machine over night

- I log on to my computer the next day to find out what other problems were created by solution to previous problem

- I go home from a long and slow day of "work" and talk myself down from the ledge after a few beers

- ???

- Profit

As you're probably thinking right about now, Rube Goldberg himself couldn't possibly come up with a more complicated machine to accomplish our menial day to day tasks if he was suddenly named CEO.

Biding My Time

They call it "working" when you donate 8 hours of your day towards the continued progress of a business, but I wouldn't exactly call my experience so far "work." As of yet, a more accurate description would be "parasite," due to circumstances beyond my control. The bureaucratic nature of such an organization condones such relations like a shallow plastic swimming pool full of tepid water begets malaria-laden mosquito larvae.

When I was offered the job on Friday, I was asked if I could start the following Monday. After nearly eight months of a similar parasitic arrangement with the Nebraska Department of Labor, I enthusiastically agreed. Now I am beginning to wonder "why the short notice when clearly you weren't ready for me?"

On day one I was not able to log into my terminal: an essential function when your entire job description revolves around computers.

On day two I was not able to access the geospatial database: an essential function when your duties include computer-aided geospatial analysis.

On day three I was not able to access my e-mail: an essential function when all of your duties are assigned strictly through such a method of correspondence.

On day four I am just a baby step away from actually being able to do some work, but in the meantime, I can do nothing else but sit down and collect my paycheck for doing absolutely nothing while the five-headed Bureaucratic Hydra in charge of daily operations here continues to squabble over what permissions are allowed by which head and who gets to eat first. Meanwhile, none of the heads has decided which one is in charge, because they all seem to have an elaborate system of checks and balances on one another that one couldn't possibly understand even with a hundred brains, thus one or two leaches riding on the back of the beast is of little consequence to the big picture. And so it goes until the body of the beast starves itself and the parasites have sucked all the remaining lifeblood from the company.

Day 3

A damp fog shrouds the glass that will be my prison for the next 8 hours. The dreary, tired morning is reflected in the empty streets as I look out on the city. The usual torrent of foot traffic along the sidewalk has been reduced to a slow, patchy drizzle much like that which is falling from the low hanging clouds that grow stale lingering near my window. The varying shades of wet pavement and the lush green vegetation, grown heavy with precipitation, blend into a uniform darkness, absorbing what little sunlight filters its way through the cloud layer. The horizon is obscured by a ghastly white apparition, in contrast to the drab streets below, which, like veins, continue to lazily pump automobiles through the heart of a sleeping downtown and prove that, despite appearances and premonitions, the city is still alive and breathing.

As the city awakens from its slumber, it exhales its foggy breath from whence the sun rose upon the Loess Hills, like the first light of day peeking through the slats of a drawn venetian shade. The sun's energy reanimates the city from the dead of the morning rain. The glare reflects off the bodies of the edifices, illuminating the shadows of despair and ruin until they reveal themselves as hope and possibility. The horizon is now clear of its haunt, giving promise that the sun will once again spill its life giving energy on yet another new day.