I’ve noticed a pattern over the last few weeks wherein I turn out to be really pissy on Wednesdays. Wednesdays are my Fridays, and apparently, after five days of my noisy, insular, deadline-oriented workplace, I have reached my limit. My limit is different from what it was a few years ago, when I had a higher-stress job I twistedly loved and thrived in. Somewhere along the line, my tolerance for that waned and I had to drop back. I don’t regret it in the slightest. But apparently I just can’t take the little madnesses anymore.
For example, yesterday…
-I would not have minded stabbing in the eye the coworker who kept sniffling every ten seconds. Yes, she has a cold. And yes, I really like her. But she was sniffling every ten seconds, and that makes me homicidal on a good day. You could be Santa, I’d still want to stab you in the eye.
-If the basement wherein I work had windows, I would have hurled my computer out of one. It crashed twice in the first hour and a half I was at work, which necessitated two reboot attempts that take at least 10 minutes apiece. This is after the initial boot-up, which takes 20 minutes because I have to log in, then find out whether one of the applications I need is going to function properly, discover it won’t, which means it’s lost connectivity to the server, and then reboot. This is every day. Wednesday, I had had enough. And the IT guys can’t fix it because the problem is the company I work for is too cheap to buy the newest version of the programs we use, and there are no longer patches available for the ones we run.
-I wanted to pull the hair of one of the interns. The one who used to be a stripper, not the one who called herself “mini-hottie”– she’s gone now. Yesterday, the former stripper was wandering around trying to get someone to eat the cookies she was carrying. In her hands. “Eat this!” she kept whining. Occasionally the tattoo that stretches across her lower back showed as she reached toward people with the cookies. Nobody told her they didn’t want them because her hands had fondled them all up.
-I want to say all sorts of terrible, mean but true things to the guy who chews food and gum louder than anybody I know. I sit five feet from him and I can hear everything he sloshes around in there. He smacks his lips louder than I would think is humanly possible. I’m practicing right now and I don’t think I’m doing nearly as loudly as he does. He’s also a walking malapropism. He says he wants to throw caution “in the air” instead of “to the wind,” and “If you may” instead of “if you will,” and “be that as it is” instead of “be that as it may.” He says “long story short” and proceeds to talk for a full five minutes. He says “a’pposed” instead of “supposed” and “gots” instead of “has.” He never. Stops. Talking. He injects himself into other people’s conversations, loudly, often, and having no idea what they’re really talking about. When people ask him to tone down the volume, he says, “I didn’t know we worked in a library,” and mopes. He is wildly inappropriate and offensive. When he talks to professional, educated people outside of our shop on the phone, you’d think he was talking to his best friend from college: “Hey baby, how you doin’?” “What’s up, m—–f—-er?” He yawns and stretches and blows his nose loudly. When you ask him how he is, his response is the same every time: “Livin’ the dream.” Every conversation is a “good talk.” He cannot spell anything. Or pronounce anything. He just basically looks at a word and takes a shot, and whatever syllables or letters make it out of his mouth are apparently good enough. He is obnoxious. He was raised by wolves. He is a used car dealer who has somehow been separated from his tweed jacket and white wingtips. I want to bash him in the head with a phone.
-I wanted to tell my former-as-of-last-night co-worker exactly what I think of her self-centered way of operating. She is leaving to take another job, and while I genuinely like her as a person, she’s one of those people who is constantly freaking out about projects and turning everything about anyone into something about herself. Example: yesterday was another co-worker’s birthday, and he took the day off. Her way of wishing him a happy one was to post on his Facebook page that he was missing her going away party. This is better than her frequent status updates in which she reports “her” project successes. As though nobody else had anything to do with them. And people “like” these updates. They post comments like, “Way to go!” and “Woohoo!” You have no idea the restraint it has taken for me not to post a comment that says, “Wow, and you did it all by yourself!”
It seems that, once a person reaches his or her late 20s, it is apparently too late for them to ever learn social graces. The rest of us have grown up and now keep our mouths shut rather than saying something that could make things uncomfortable in the work environment. (More uncomfortable than when the guy behind me makes comments about how hot some of his co-workers are.) If one has not learned by the age of 27 that one should not manhandle food and then attempt to give it away, one will never know it. If one has not learned to filter, one never will. If one has not learned humility and grace, consider it a dream.
I sort of think that, if the rest of us were allowed to, just once, haul off and say exactly that which needs to be said, maybe these people would be struck by the realization that they are annoying and should work on that.
Then again, if everyone went by my theory, all of you would comment forthwith and posthaste that I am a total critical b*^%h.
But I told you: It’s Wednesdays. Today I’m totally fine.
What do you want to tell someone who irritates you? Do you have a day of the week when you’re more easily annoyed than others?
thesinglecell 