A Serious Breach of Discipline and Other Stories

(I feel sorta guilty posting this, in light of what's going on over at Pisser's place. Everybody go give her a hug.)

As you can see, we here at TSOW are experiencing a serious breakdown of the natural order of things. Or maybe it's actually the natural order of things reasserting itself. That's probably closer to the truth.

Exhibit A:


Mister Personality, on the left, is now known as Snickers, and he is the catalyst for all this newfound chaos. The picture you DON'T see, because it happened too quickly for me to take it, followed this one by about eight seconds, and involved Snickers doing a backflip off the table, through the rungs of the yellow chair at the right, and landing on his feet. He's a regular Carl Edwards, is this one. It was only today, after two weeks of cohabitation, that I caught this little guy actually SLEEPING for the first time. I'm assuming the rest of the time he only sleeps when no one's looking.

I've been lacking quality time with Mr. Kitten for the past ten days or so, however, thanks to The Job.

The Job moved from the south side of Chicago, where it had been for many many years, to a new facility in the west suburbs, near Darien. This coincided with an announcement of a shift in priorities, from manufacturing to marketing. Accordingly, they closed the factory, outsourced the manufacturing, and...

You thought I was going to say "hired more marketing people," didn't you. Because that would be what YOU would do, if you were thinking of taking your moderately-successful company in a more marketing-oriented direction. Which is why you don't work for Place Where I Work, apparently, because what they did was to FIRE, rapidly and entirely without warning, 80% of the marketing staff.

Okay, says I. Whatever. Because frankly, the firing of four people who I didn't really like all that much was, by that point, the least of my worries.

See, out in the factory that was closed? Were a lot of computers, and a lot of printers, and a lot of other technical crap which we needed. And most of it had been there for a long, long time, and was wired behind desks, and under equipment, and through fields of dirt and yuck and mouse-doots and the crumbs of innumerable lunches, and it was partly my responsibility to retrieve the useable computers from this morass, and to move the rest to an elephant’s graveyard of technological relics. In other words: heavy lifting. Lots of it. And it was HOT out there, in case you were wondering.

We were told to expect to work this past weekend—the official weekend of the move. So when Jim, my immediate boss, came to my desk and asked me what my availability for the weekend was, I was a little surprised. “For whatever hours you need me,” I said. “I hadn’t made any plans.”

“Okay, so you’re okay for Friday night late? Like, til midnight?”

I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t.

So all last week we packed, filling orange and black moving crates with the contents of our offices, our data center, and our storage areas. It was a lot of stuff, and that’s after we threw out a bunch of trash and unneeded crap. By Friday, we had all the stuff from the office together, except for the computers and printers which were still in use. All day Thursday, my co-worker Kelly and I hauled equipment out of the factory, unplugging cords, and winding cables thick with grime and schmutz. I think I washed my hands fifty times in the course of eight hours. And—did I mention?—it was hot. About ninety degrees in the factory, and the A/C in the offices was none too robust either.

One of the side effects of methadone—and there are many, none of them much fun—is excessive sweating. If it gets to be much above seventy degrees, I am simply POURING with sweat. I come from a long line of people who run about ten degrees warmer than the rest of the populace just by nature, so put a good dose of methadone on top of that and I’m like a little pink water-fountain. On Thursday? My shirt was soaked through to the waist. Add to this the muck of the factory, which was coating every available inch of skin and clothing, and you can imagine: I was a soggy, grungy, gross and grimy girl.

There are some showers in a woman’s life which eclipse all others. For example, there’s the shower-after-pulling-up-those-godawful-weeds-that-took-over-the-yard.
Then there’s the shower-after-sex-with-that-guy-you-never-would-have-slept-with-had-you-not-been-drunk; or the shower-after-scraping-and-painting-the-entire-garage-in-one-afternoon.

However, I’m here to tell you: the shower-after-collecting-computer-equipment-from-a-moldy-old-factory-in-million-degree-heat? Leaves them all in the dust, so to speak.

By the time we were ready to move on Friday, the total collection included about fifty crates, plus an abundance of monitors and CPUs and ancient printers. And then we started unhooking the office machines. By the time everything was ready to go, it was ten PM, and my affection for Frank, the uber-boss, had been irrevocably damaged.

Around seven that night, you see, a good six hours after lunch, long after the soda machines had been hauled away and the water-fountains disconnected, Jim-my-immediate-boss took a look at his grimy, sweaty, dishevelled crew and decided to go perform an errand of mercy. “I’m going to the gas station down the street to buy drinks for everyone,” he said. “What do you want?” After putting in an order for a tanker-truck sized cup of Pepsi with lots of ice, I went back to work disconnecting computers.

About an hour later, I went into the data center and was surprised to see Jim, working on removing cabling from a server. “I thought you were going for drinks?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, “well…” And he looked at Frank, who was perched on a counter a few feet away, watching the action. Under the noise of the servers and the fans, he said, “He says we can drink when we’re done.”

“Frank?” I said. “Can Jim go get us drinks?”

“Well, the good news is, the pop machines and everything are all filled up at the new building, ready to go,” said Frank. And the bad news, he didn’t say, is that we’ve got a good two or three hours left before we can even THINK of going over to that building. Because apparently, in his book, that wasn’t bad news at all.

When he left, Jim said “You thought I was kidding?” I said “I thought you HAD to be kidding.”

I wasn’t the only one incensed by Frank’s answer; it’s become the most oft-repeated story of our working conditions in this move. It just kills me; no one was asking him to do anything, and it wasn’t as though it would have taken more than ten minutes, or taken more than one person away from work—and it would have been a good managerial gesture, a nice morale-builder, a “thanks”. Not from Frank, though—that wasn’t important to him.

We worked til 12:30 Friday night, and then 10-6 on Saturday and Sunday, and back to work at 8:00 sharp on Monday. And when the rest of the employees showed up Monday morning for the first day in the new digs, ours was the ONLY department who had come through completely; Maintenance had left desks disassembled, and the janitors hadn’t even vacuumed, and the movers were in and out through the whole first day of work. One of the department heads said she would give I.T an A-plus, and Moving, Facilities, and Maintenance a D for this move. Which was a better “thank you” than even a large Pepsi would have been, although on Friday night I would have given up that A-plus without a second thought, even for a Diet Coke.

But it’s over—we’re in the new building—and I’ve got to say I like it better than the old one. We have a bathroom on our floor, for one thing, which we didn’t at the old place; and it’s not on the South Side of Chicago, which is a big plus for any place, ever. (I grew up on the South Side, and it’s not a place I like to frequent. That’s a blog post for another day.)

More kitten stories to come, I’m sure, to say nothing of pictures. This little guy is a constant source of entertainment; I’m beginning to think that everyone should always have a kitten around, just for the sheer joy of them.