Wednesday, February 08, 2012

All The Live Long Day

The chaos continues unabated. I should really write down the stories so they are never forgotten, but it seems almost cruel to the people who don't realize how ridiculous they are being. How anyone can be that un-self-aware is beyond me, but there you have it. I guess if you're the kind of person who needs to call someone in another department to yell at them for 5 minutes for not turning off the bathroom light, you're also not the kind of person who does a lot of thinking about good time management skills.
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There's a growing misconception that I have direct access to my boss' brain waves. I keep getting questions that start with "Is he going to___________?". I always - and I mean always - have to resist the urge to say "How the hell would I know?", because I try pretty hard not to even mildly curse at my employees. Rest assured - if I had a telepathic link into his brain, I would spend my time trying to get him to bring cheesecake to work every day. I would not be worrying about where he's thinking about placing the clock.
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The entire organization - ~75 people - had a team-building day a couple of weeks ago. One of the "games" we played was a version of bingo that's pretty popular around base. Each space on the bingo card lists something like "Born in the same month as you" or "has the same favorite color as you" or "has visited at least 3 other countries". You have to find a different person to fill in each square. So I had to find a person born in November, and a different person that likes the color blue, etc. I learned 2 things about how people think of me that day: 1) One of the squares was "Likes to cook". Now: I know I love to cook, but I didn't realize a) how many people know that, and b) how many people do NOT like to cook. I think I was the name on about half of those "likes to cook" squares. 2.) One of the squares was "has at least 1 tattoo". About 5 people - and these were people I actually spend breaks/lunches with, not people I barely acknowledge - have always assumed I had a tattoo somewhere and asked me to put my name down. At least I had the cooking thing to fall back on.