Month: August 2006

There’s a mini-controversy going on at my work about people reading each others’ blogs and using personal information for leverage in the complex and subtle intrigue of office politics, or else just being creepy stalkers. I started looking over my previous entries and realized that, hey, I don’t have any juicy information here that anyone could use to blackmail me or others at my workplace. This post is an attempt to rectify that. My blog is for everyone. Don’t want to disappoint the creeps!

• Man, there’s this one guy at work. You know the sort of guy I’m talking about. Yeah. Man.
   
• My best friend at work is a woman. And we’re both married! For that matter, one of my best friends in college was a married woman too, only back then, I was single!
   
• At a previous employer, I knew a person who was a complete jerk. He’d just walk by me, and I’d think, “What a jerk!” I didn’t say it out loud, though, because that’s rude and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But I was sure thinking it. LOUDLY.
   
• There are a lot of attractive women at my work. No joke there. Just bragging.
   
• You know that one person? Totally sleeping with someone. Probably their spouse, but you can never be sure.
   
• People who read other people’s emails without their permission should be killed with a pitchfork.
   
• I went over to my recently departed coworker’s desk and took her ergonomic mouse pad. Up tha powah!
   
• Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’ve recently come to believe that some of the people I work with may actually have genitals. I try not to think about that one too much.
   
• I once ate an entire slim young gay Thai hooker. No, wait, what was it again? Oh yeah, an entire pie.

A friend of mine is leaving (fleeing?) the company, which is sad mostly because I wouldn’t have categorized her as a “friend” until six months ago even though we’ve been working in the same department for two years. Oh, she’s perfectly nice and all, but it takes a while to crack that work-acquaintance shell. Maybe it’s the litigious nature of society. It’s hard to josh around with someone if you’re afraid they’ll take something you say and twist it into you giving them your house as part of a settlement.

“Nice day, isn’t it?”

“You’re just saying that because I’m BLACK!”

“… you’re not black.”

“You’d notice, wouldn’t you? RACIST!”

And next thing you know you’re having to stay one step ahead of Tommy Lee Jones. Yeah, screw that. Easier just to smile and nod and be absolutely non-committal until you can pick up subtle clues that another person doesn’t want to drive a pair of scissors into your eye. For a normal person, this phase takes a week or two. For me, it averages a year and a half.

Anyway, she says she’s off to “Dallas,” which I think was a TV series once. I wonder whether it’s closer to Hooterville or to Petticoat Junction.

I can keep it a secret no longer: I’m starting my own side business designing Web sites for small businesses. I have far too much Web design “in me,” especially while working at a job where the management doesn’t seem to think much of my ideas (which are, of course, brilliant). You can only update static pages and send out friggin’ mass emails for so long before you start thinking, “Say, I have eleven years of experience doing the professional Web design thing; perhaps I could leverage this somehow to help fill the money bin behind the mansion. Getting kind of sparse in there.”

Of course, these days it’s not enough to hang out a shingle or wear a plain white T-shirt with “WEB DESIGNER” across the chest in block lettering. You also need connections, you need plans, you need bigger better deals *snapping fingers repeatedly*. I’ve spent the better part of two weeks trying to write a business plan as a result, and let me tell you, a more boring and repetitive document you’ll never see. It’s like taking a grand idea and disassembling it, like a music box, until you have a sad little pile of concepts which individually seem mundane. “Companies need Web sites; I provide Web sites” is where my head was to begin with; simple but effective. “Companies need Web sites, and so I do this and this and this and this and this and contracts and hosting and marketing and five-year projections and pricing and blah” takes all the fun out of it. I mean, it’s nice to have an explicit road map and guarantee that I won’t end up in the gutter and everything, but where’s the charm?

I get the feeling I’ll be saying “Where’s the charm?” a lot the next few weeks.