News Flash From The Planet Obvious

In other news, I work for a pack of moronic power-tripping jackwads. (Just thought I'd share.)

I thought, once, in my naive and blissful youth, that there was a limit to idiocy. I figured that there had to be a tipping-point, at which the universe would say "ENOUGH"--probably in a booming voice reminiscent of Charlton Heston, or maybe Barry White--and suddenly the gears of the Rube Goldberg idiot-factory would grind to a noisy, satisfying halt.

Oh, what a trusting soul I was.

My eyes have been opened. (Yeah, I know--lucky Gladys, made it almost all the way to 35 without realizing that it's the idiots who run the show. I never claimed to have lived a non-sheltered life.) To paraphrase one of Tyra Banks' little television hamsters, I was in denial, but now I know.

I don't think I have ever been as angry as I was today. And that's saying something. Rage has kinda been my hallmark, a lovely little piece of my identity which I've consistently masked with people-pleasing doormat-ism and a healthy coating of snark. Underneath it all? Make no mistake--I'm pissed. I worry when I'm NOT pissed, as a matter of fact. I see it as a sign of complacency.

I have no such fears today, however. This was like the Vesuvius of pissed-ness; this was the Grand Canyon, Old Faithful, and several other western tourist-attractions worth of anger. This was like the return of "Nine-Inch-Nails-is-Like-Muzak-For-This-Kind-of-Anger" anger. (Last experienced, summer 1994. I used to fall asleep to "Downward Spiral".)

All through this whole ghastly, infinitely-delayed process of our database-upgrade-that-was-supposed-to-happen-at-Thanksgiving-and-it's-now-nearly-Easter, I have had one, single, simple request. Over a year ago, during the planning stages, when the question came up of when to do this upgrade, I voiced that one, single, simple request; to wit:

"Please," I said, "don't do it during the spring marketing mailing."

The spring marketing mailing is a yearly ritual, like the returning of the swallows to Capistrano or the running of the bulls at Pamplona. (And there's less bullshit in Pamplona, might I add, but--as always--I digress.) It is a remarkably complicated waltz of paper, orchestrated and choreographed by Noreen, who has been doing this since approximately before I was born. It involves the printing of many, many different forms in many, many different orders, in varying combinations and permutations specific to our client base. Some clients get one from Column A, one from Column B, an envelope and a form; some get A but not B, or B but not A, or a special envelope, or several copies of the form, or...You get the idea.

It is my responsibility to generate the items for this mailing. I am the database queen, and thus I am the one who gets to craft the queries that will result in the right people being in the right pile when the time comes to stuff their envelope. Unfortunately, I am not in control of this entire process; there is outside data also involved, for which we wait feverishly each year.

What I'm telling you here is: this is DIFFICULT. This is COMPLICATED. This is TIME-CONSUMING and very exacting, because if any mistakes get made we'll have a repeat of 2002, when I ended up sobbing hysterically in Amy's office after being told that because I'd run something off in the wrong order, we were now going to be two weeks off schedule and about $5000 over-budget. And that? Was not fun.

So when we started the planning for the database upgrade, I said "Just please, don't do it during the spring marketing mailing. Any of the other 50 weeks out of the year, no problem--just not during the mailing."

Would any of you lovely readers care to guess what's happening this week? Or when they've decided to do the database upgrade? I will give you a hint: this week and next are the highest-stress point of the mailing, and this weekend is the database upgrade. I cannot concieve of any plan more outstandingly STUPID than this. This is painfully stupid; this is a whole higher level of stupid magnitude. This is stupid-like-whoa.

The mailing will not be done by this weekend. Not even close. As I write this, it's nearly 7 PM and I'm sitting here watching the database chug away at part of the data-processing. I'd be on the way home--or already there!--but I was told in no uncertain terms by Amy: "You might want to think about working late to get some of this stuff done, so you don't have so many problems with the mailing."

Around here, that's practically a threat. This office is full of people who can make the most syrupy-sweet requests in the most menacing tone, and when Amy starts pouring the Mrs. Butterworths on every sentence, you pretty much know it's time to sit up and take notice.

Add to this the fact that no one has been trained--Samuel, the alleged database guy, is in charge of the training and I haven't even SEEN any training materials, besides which he's holed-up with the stomach flu. And the upgrade supposedly starts tomorrow at 5:00.

I tried to tell them again today--no one listened. Amy gave me the whole "I understand your concerns", which sentence, as usual, ended with an unspoken"...but I'm going to ignore them and do whatever-the-hell I want." And what kills me is: I will be the one responsible for dealing with the mess when this mailing is off-track. I will be the one working all kinds of bullshit late hours trying to get caught up when everything goes haywire. I will be the one absorbing Noreen's evil stress-vibes for days--and let me tell you, when provoked, that woman can generate enough bad energy to power Satan's cookstove.

Then, in the middle of all of this, I was given a useless, meaningless busy-work task that did not need to be done at all, let alone by me. I attempted to explain that the numbers that were needed did not change from year to year, but Beverly decided no, I still had to run the numbers which would yield exactly...the...same...result. Which I attempted to explain, but once again--no one listened.

My next job, they will listen.