All day, today has been like this

I hit print. I wander around to the other side of the cube farm to pick up my print-out. Someone is standing in front of the all-in-one printer, body language of despair, squinting at the information panel on the machine. "I just need one copy," he says.

Printer info panel is saying the printer needs a part replaced -- I walk my coworker over to another machine which can provide his one copy.

New machine supposedly orders its own replacement parts before it needs them, which helps circumvent the one person in our office whose job it seems to be to Not Order Things (name a supply, she'll not order it).

Part needed: "photoconductor." Boxes available in storage closet: "photoconductor kit", "photoconductor unit", pre-opened "photoconductor kit" which looks suspiciously like it has been filled with a used part and put back in the supply closet, instead of being shipped out for recycling.

I pull the pre-opened box and the "unit" box, and by the time I get back to the machine, miss not-my-job-to-order-things is on the scene. I present her with the two boxes, and leave her to it.

As I step away, I hear her say, "I don't think we're supposed to replace this part by ourselves." If true, this means calling the help desk and waiting a few hours for a tech to arrive. Meanwhile, my print-out is hanging half-printed in the output shute.

"I don't know; I don't have an opinion," I tell her, walking away.

The moral of the story is that this was a depressingly boring little story, with no moral. Ce la effing vi.

Beauty Not Beheld

New theory: she's a character in her own real-life movie -- it's a badly scripted movie, and she's one of those characters who's vacant in one scene, but possess key information in another, depending on the needs of the plot. (The plot, in such movies, is never heading anywhere truly satisfying, unless you're satisfied by big explosions.)

Scene 1 (interior, office cubicle)

(we join a conversation already in progress)

GALFRIDAY: Oh, so, um, I have to do a Final Doc for this job --

GEEKGAL: -- No, that's already done, that's what you're holding in your hands....

GALFRIDAY (stares at document she's holding, as if it's someone else's parking ticket).

(Fade to Black.)

Scene 2 (interior, office cubicle)

GEEKGAL sits typing at computer (or, alternatively, reading political news on the internets).

* * * * *

....okay, this pseudo script format isn't doing justice to my annoyance, because your full embrace of my irritation requires too much specific knowledge on your part to appreciate just how frustrating the conversation was, that I overheard, that I was going to somehow capture in script form here.

Here, let me teach you something specific about my job, and now that you understand, get a load of this what I heard her saying yesterday! Can you believe that?!

Suffice to say that she went from damsel-in-confusion to authority-on-what-should-be-done in the space of a couple of minutes, and both of these states were Highly Inappropriate -- the damsel should know how to do her job by now, and the authority shouldn't be telling her superior what to do.

But then, lately, I've been noticing that she doesn't actually treat people all that well, a lot of the time. I previously characterized her as being Nice without Doing Anything, but often, I'm beginning to see, she isn't even that Nice.

Shrug.

Come to think of it...

...maybe I should mention that she's really pretty.

Maybe that's the key to understanding the whole darn situation.

Welcome back

New feeling while doing actual work in office -- dumb.

Dumb for not figuring out (as others have) how to keep job while doing -- shit, I don't know what she does most of the day.

Annoying because I trained her. More annoying yet because when I first met her, I had a gut reaction of really not liking her, but everyone else likes her lots, so I figured it must just be me.

Well it is just me -- me being the only one who's affected by her ability to do something on the order of 10% of what I do and yet get collect the same paycheck. Actually, she figured out how to do 10% and get paid more than I do, by pulling overtime for who the F knows what.

She's clever alright. It turns out that the important part of her job is hanging out talking to other people in the office (especially the supervisor) -- that may actually be the important part of my job, and I just never figured it out. Maybe I've been doing my job really poorly all these years, what with the getting lots of paperwork processed and thinking I was being so helpful. Maybe nobody cares at all how much paperwork somebody gets done, and there's a totally different set of standards against which we're being judged....

...but since nobody freaking told me, I've been working to achieve the wrong flipping goals all this time.

So, like I said, recently, when I'm working, I feel....dumb.