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| Good things happen when you don't expect them, even if you've stopped expecting them. |
Saturday 21 June 2014
20th of June, 2014
Tuesday 17 June 2014
First Day As An Intern
So, first day as an intern, eh? Man have I got a story to tell you. Let's take it from the top.
My tummy declared war on me at 6 o'clock. It was my first day as an intern at UN Women and I was terrified. I tend to keep people at an arm's distance at all times, so I didn't really have any of those chummy buddies to calm my nerves and tell me everything's gonna be alright. Instead, it was a lot of breathing exercises and walking around the house while my detaching mechanism locked and loaded. I had to leave as soon as I could because the internship was a governorate and a half away. And leave early I did. I got lost in the subway because I made the mistake of trusting the system, and had four more stations to add to my already long commute, then had to change lines twice to get to my destination, topped off with a cab ride. I was squished and couldn't reach my hands, let alone call in to explain why I was late, so I figured what the hell, I'm an intern, it's my job to fuck things up the first day, I'll just leave an hour early.
Three hours later I was there. You know how all these sitcoms portray your first day on the job as a series of unfortunate events, throwing in tarantulas and broken down facilities, with a possibility of setting the office on fire? Well, turns out they weren't exaggerating for comic relief. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The security at the foot of the building was as thorough as they could possibly get, I was surprised they didn't go through my shoes for explosive material. They gave Scrooge McDuck a run for his money; mines, catapults and all, for yours truly was the evil witch come for his first lucky coin. They rummaged through all that could be rummaged through, confiscated all that could be confiscated, and ruffled the rest for the heck of it. By the time I was done with that, I looked like a poodle fresh out of a car wash. Then the fat lady sung, I was there and it was happening.
I walked into the office on the sixth floor. Again, the sitcoms weren't exaggerating. Codes for the door, flags for the wall and each head was matched with a plant, a stapler and a monstrous printer-scanner contraption that demanded paper munchies. I was clueless, of course, so I walked straight to the first person I ran into, who I later found out to be a fellow Italian intern that called dibs on the reception desk for funsies and was later chained there by the director to take calls. Halfway through mumbling 'Hello, I'm here for the internship', an old lady with short black hair and ominous stilettos swooped in and snatched me for a quick investigation. The director, a lady who sent out electromagnetic waves of intimidation that x-ray your bones for incompetence shrapnel rained me with questions about my person, use and whereabouts, she was interrupted by calls and flew off to her nest on top of the nearest mount of doom to take them. I was more or less nailed to the ground by what remained of her presence, only to have the Guido come and slap me out of my noob trance. The Nazgul had finished her calls and came back in time, and they both took my supervisor's number and called her. Turns out she had to go to the bank on a Monday and the bureaucratic overlords claimed her soul, so she might be a little late. She relegated me to the Guido after a phone call of nods and yeses. He hung up, my training began.
But not quite. He was an quadrilingual Italian know-it-all that had a tendency to gesture theatrically, with spaghetti hair, a last name that was Italian for spaghetti hair and a colorful patchy vest. He gave me a tour of the offices on both floors, which was interrupted when he was called into one of the offices and assigned a task for materializing in front of their wishful door. It was going to be a long day, I understood that much, so get off on the right leg I must. I went into the kitchen, made coffee and retreated to the roof - which doubled as the second floor of offices - for a smoke.
I took my time, finished the coffee, had a few smokes and went back to the kitchen. I walked into a conversation between the guido, an officious-looking bald giant and a bling-choked diva with flowy black hair. They stopped talking and stared blankly at me. I broke the silence with an apologetic "I'm new here", to which they broke out in laughter. I was confused. The bald giant walked out still chuckling to himself, and the diva walked the kitchen runway to introduce herself, then asked me if I'm the new graphic designer. I don't know, I said, I'm the new intern but I can design. From that moment on, I was her bitch.
She was friendly though, they all were, don't get me wrong, except for the Nazgul, she was just there to scare the working momentum into motion. I followed the diva into an empty meeting room and she put down her stuff and started talking while working. It was a vision, multitasking at its most divine stage. She was doing a presentation, researching for her dissertation, talking to her boyfriend and ranting about her boyfriend to me, to which I just sat there listening and trying to figure out what it was I should be doing. I took the presentation off her hands to appease my workaholic tendencies, and she replaced the slot with another task that was on her pending list. Her laptop was hard to tame; it was a constantly beeping creature that kept popping messages at me while humming to itself. In my head it was furry, although I'm sure it wasn't, but it was pink. I immersed myself into the research and presentation, which was about great Egyptian women of achievement. She occasionally broke into my trance to interject anecdotes about the women I'm writing about, and I'm not gonna lie to you I was already daydreaming if I'll ever do half of what they did with their lives. Three hours later, I started seeing pixels, so I retreated to the roof for another smoke.
And god I wish I hadn't.
Little did I know that was all the work I would be doing today when I sat smack into a puddle of water that had mysteriously collected on my chair. So there I was, on my first day on a bigass internship at the UN Women HQ, looking like I peed myself.
I was gonna be there for while. Drying my butt in the sun. The roof was empty, so I chainsmoked, answered messages and updated social networks. My little accident gave my friends quite the giggle, but trying to hire an assassin in monthly installments and begging for a mercy kill didn't work and they were supportive as they always were. Not that I believed this kind of thing 'happens to all of us', but I was a klutz and I was okay with it. I inspected the bathrooms for blow dryers, turned out feminists didn't really acknowledge their existence, much like yours truly. Drying my butt in the sun was taking too long, and I had to get back to work. So I had to come up with another strategic plan: Butt toast.
So there I was, sitting on a sunny hot spot on the roof to the sound of my sizzling butt, when a lady walked out of the second-floor offices to take a call. Shit shit shit, I thought as I smiled in her general direction. She finished the call and came up to me all smiles. What's wrong, she asked with a hand on my shoulder. She seemed friendly, and frankly anything was friendlier than the Nazgul. Are you a nice person, I asked. She burst out in giggles and said she was, warming up to me. I shared my little incident and we chatted as my butt considerably dried off, then she had to get back to work.
I had to get back to work too, and that's when it hit me. Why hide it out here when I can shake it off and get a little laugh out of it? And laugh it off, I did. I walked into the office after a two-hour disappearance with an orange butt stain. It did not go unnoticed, and thanks to my butt I made two new friends. I worked some more then I called my supervisor to check if she was coming in today, turns out she wasn't. I updated her about my tasks and she assigned me 242387492387493 designs I had to get done in three days, then said she'll be at an event at a hotel for the next couple of days and told me when I could come and help out. For now, I could head home.
It was a long way home, so I ordered food, although in this context I should better call it sustenance. The italian made the call, and I had to stifle the urge to giggle as he busted out his Arabic vocabulary in the most hilarious word choreography I heard ever since Andy said his vows. One of the directors was nice enough to bring out treats for us lost puppies since it was our first day and all, and I got to see an office fight! Diva accidentally closed Guido's tabs and he broke out in the most stereotypical fit possible, a fluent range of Italian slurs worthy of a youtube video.
Three hours later, I was home. I was broke, mortified and exhausted, but my first day as an intern was in the bag and I had three months to go. I passed out for 14 hours, woke up to a thousand notifications of people laughing at me, and I'm laughing along.
And that's how you intern, bitches. Cheers!
My tummy declared war on me at 6 o'clock. It was my first day as an intern at UN Women and I was terrified. I tend to keep people at an arm's distance at all times, so I didn't really have any of those chummy buddies to calm my nerves and tell me everything's gonna be alright. Instead, it was a lot of breathing exercises and walking around the house while my detaching mechanism locked and loaded. I had to leave as soon as I could because the internship was a governorate and a half away. And leave early I did. I got lost in the subway because I made the mistake of trusting the system, and had four more stations to add to my already long commute, then had to change lines twice to get to my destination, topped off with a cab ride. I was squished and couldn't reach my hands, let alone call in to explain why I was late, so I figured what the hell, I'm an intern, it's my job to fuck things up the first day, I'll just leave an hour early.
Three hours later I was there. You know how all these sitcoms portray your first day on the job as a series of unfortunate events, throwing in tarantulas and broken down facilities, with a possibility of setting the office on fire? Well, turns out they weren't exaggerating for comic relief. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The security at the foot of the building was as thorough as they could possibly get, I was surprised they didn't go through my shoes for explosive material. They gave Scrooge McDuck a run for his money; mines, catapults and all, for yours truly was the evil witch come for his first lucky coin. They rummaged through all that could be rummaged through, confiscated all that could be confiscated, and ruffled the rest for the heck of it. By the time I was done with that, I looked like a poodle fresh out of a car wash. Then the fat lady sung, I was there and it was happening.
I walked into the office on the sixth floor. Again, the sitcoms weren't exaggerating. Codes for the door, flags for the wall and each head was matched with a plant, a stapler and a monstrous printer-scanner contraption that demanded paper munchies. I was clueless, of course, so I walked straight to the first person I ran into, who I later found out to be a fellow Italian intern that called dibs on the reception desk for funsies and was later chained there by the director to take calls. Halfway through mumbling 'Hello, I'm here for the internship', an old lady with short black hair and ominous stilettos swooped in and snatched me for a quick investigation. The director, a lady who sent out electromagnetic waves of intimidation that x-ray your bones for incompetence shrapnel rained me with questions about my person, use and whereabouts, she was interrupted by calls and flew off to her nest on top of the nearest mount of doom to take them. I was more or less nailed to the ground by what remained of her presence, only to have the Guido come and slap me out of my noob trance. The Nazgul had finished her calls and came back in time, and they both took my supervisor's number and called her. Turns out she had to go to the bank on a Monday and the bureaucratic overlords claimed her soul, so she might be a little late. She relegated me to the Guido after a phone call of nods and yeses. He hung up, my training began.
But not quite. He was an quadrilingual Italian know-it-all that had a tendency to gesture theatrically, with spaghetti hair, a last name that was Italian for spaghetti hair and a colorful patchy vest. He gave me a tour of the offices on both floors, which was interrupted when he was called into one of the offices and assigned a task for materializing in front of their wishful door. It was going to be a long day, I understood that much, so get off on the right leg I must. I went into the kitchen, made coffee and retreated to the roof - which doubled as the second floor of offices - for a smoke.
 |
| It was gonna be a good day. |
She was friendly though, they all were, don't get me wrong, except for the Nazgul, she was just there to scare the working momentum into motion. I followed the diva into an empty meeting room and she put down her stuff and started talking while working. It was a vision, multitasking at its most divine stage. She was doing a presentation, researching for her dissertation, talking to her boyfriend and ranting about her boyfriend to me, to which I just sat there listening and trying to figure out what it was I should be doing. I took the presentation off her hands to appease my workaholic tendencies, and she replaced the slot with another task that was on her pending list. Her laptop was hard to tame; it was a constantly beeping creature that kept popping messages at me while humming to itself. In my head it was furry, although I'm sure it wasn't, but it was pink. I immersed myself into the research and presentation, which was about great Egyptian women of achievement. She occasionally broke into my trance to interject anecdotes about the women I'm writing about, and I'm not gonna lie to you I was already daydreaming if I'll ever do half of what they did with their lives. Three hours later, I started seeing pixels, so I retreated to the roof for another smoke.
And god I wish I hadn't.
Little did I know that was all the work I would be doing today when I sat smack into a puddle of water that had mysteriously collected on my chair. So there I was, on my first day on a bigass internship at the UN Women HQ, looking like I peed myself.
 |
| Good day, it was NOT gonna be. |
I was gonna be there for while. Drying my butt in the sun. The roof was empty, so I chainsmoked, answered messages and updated social networks. My little accident gave my friends quite the giggle, but trying to hire an assassin in monthly installments and begging for a mercy kill didn't work and they were supportive as they always were. Not that I believed this kind of thing 'happens to all of us', but I was a klutz and I was okay with it. I inspected the bathrooms for blow dryers, turned out feminists didn't really acknowledge their existence, much like yours truly. Drying my butt in the sun was taking too long, and I had to get back to work. So I had to come up with another strategic plan: Butt toast.
 |
| Not your average sunbathing experience. |
 |
| Not your average work selfie. |
I had to get back to work too, and that's when it hit me. Why hide it out here when I can shake it off and get a little laugh out of it? And laugh it off, I did. I walked into the office after a two-hour disappearance with an orange butt stain. It did not go unnoticed, and thanks to my butt I made two new friends. I worked some more then I called my supervisor to check if she was coming in today, turns out she wasn't. I updated her about my tasks and she assigned me 242387492387493 designs I had to get done in three days, then said she'll be at an event at a hotel for the next couple of days and told me when I could come and help out. For now, I could head home.
It was a long way home, so I ordered food, although in this context I should better call it sustenance. The italian made the call, and I had to stifle the urge to giggle as he busted out his Arabic vocabulary in the most hilarious word choreography I heard ever since Andy said his vows. One of the directors was nice enough to bring out treats for us lost puppies since it was our first day and all, and I got to see an office fight! Diva accidentally closed Guido's tabs and he broke out in the most stereotypical fit possible, a fluent range of Italian slurs worthy of a youtube video.
 |
| Yes, I sneaked a picture. |
And that's how you intern, bitches. Cheers!
Friday 13 June 2014
Sunday 8 June 2014
Of A Derelict Cookie, A Fashion Fail & The Day It Rained Candy.
I've had a wibbly wobbly timey wimey couple of days that absolutely need to be blogged about! Let's start at the beginning.
Do you know that nightmare we all have about being naked in a public place? Well, I spent the whole day shopping for a nice dress to attend a good friend's katb kitab, and I had tactically chosen a light blue shirt to make the fitting room battle slightly easier. I successfully managed to finish the girl errands in record time, and then set off to get my friend her weight in chocolate because she broke her leg on a freak bus accident. I didn't want to get her sick people chocolate, so I figured out with etiquette and in with the yummies! The Metro Market aisle it was, since it's Egypt's neighborhood equivalent of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Up I reached and down I bent, sideways I chatted with a dozen staff personnel to find the missing bars then to the cashier I bolted to charge and bag. The personnel were unusually giggly for Metro Market, known for their rather hostile staff, I figured they're having a good day and was all smiles. That was until I glanced down my own shirt, perchance on my way to unpocket the money, to find that two out of the four buttons were unbuttoned and I had flashed the entire Metro Market staff Daisy Duke style. Apparently, two hours of buttoning and unbuttoning the shirt had loosened the cuffs, and my messenger bag had the sleight of hand of Charlie Sheen in his naughty days. Let me rewind a little bit. Do you know that nightmare we all have about being naked in a public place? Well, it's not half as bad as the real thing.
How does one react to that? Mortified doesn't quite cover it, my body's heat was abandoning ship through my face now that I knew that it was in fact my boobs that made the staff's day, and not kismet. I kept my cool and buttoned my shirt, then maintained eye contact with a dozen menial workers who were openly giggling and suggestively glancing, took my time at the cash register with middle-eastern fucks who undoubtedly shamed me as a slut for the fashion slip and walked out of there in a normal gait when every instinct told me to bolt. It took me 10 minutes and about 160 muffled 'FUCK!'s to finish my errands and head home.
The day was not nearly done. In fact, it hadn't even started yet. I changed my shirt and took a quick shower, adding about 45 more not-so-muffled fucks to my verbal quota of the day, then headed off to see my friend. I got lost for about an hour trying to get there, spent another hour telling her about it (and every other piece of gossip she could have possibly missed) after throwing etiquette out of the window and raining her with candy in bed.
Dad picked me up at 10 and we headed off to a family reunion. An estranged relative came for a visit, and true to my expectations the two hour visit was testing to dolphins everywhere. A squeal over me being as tall as her, a scream at the haircut, a squeal at the lost weight. Hysterical chuckles over jokes that aren't nearly as funny as she made them sound, and audible awws up to live studio par at the news of my getting sick. The room was refrigerated to sub-zero levels in an attempt to appease her now cold-blooded physique, and the main dessert was a bear-sized bowl of ice cream to my red-riding-hood-fitted tummy. Around 12 we had to drive grandma home, who in turn insisted we come up for a nibble. Little did I know that she had an agenda, for she took it upon herself to make me regain the pounds that were squealed at. Half a watermelons and two main courses later, we headed home at 2. We came home to find that all the cars in our square were wrecked, their windshield smashed and their doors bent at unseemly angles. Turned out there was a fight and had we come home so much as 30 minutes earlier, the biggest part of our car would have been the sideview mirror, and the largest patch of skin left unmangled of my body would have been squeal-inducing boy scalp. Good things happen when you spend quality time with Teita. Let me digress for a second, but grandma is the kind of person who, when bored, gets creative with her pearl earrings:
By the time we found a safe parking spot and walked about a mile back, I had a baby belly and wasn't feeling so good, only to come home and find that my mother decided to get me fast food in a medical experiment to 'see if I can handle it yet.' I wasn't supposed to eat take out, drink juice or anything remotely related to the outside world until my liver stopped pursuing Broadway, but I didn't want another yelling match and frankly couldn't be more excited at the sight of pizza and lasagna after so many boiled vegetable servings.
You probably see where this is going, and you're right. I went to bed, woke up a short while later and threw up for an hour and a half, taking naps when my tummy elves had to reload food into what I imagined to be a catapult only to run off to the bathroom for another medieval attack at the sink. I seem to be innocent in the arts of war for I woke up to a full-fledged fight between our family's noble houses, grandma blaming my aunt for the AC, my uncle blaming grandma for not noticing, my grandma yelling at mom for not being there and mom yelling at aunt for not foreseeing it. I was fine, but it took about 6 phone calls to re-instate a truce. I had run out of arguments by the 5th and apparently 'hey at least now I don't have to worry about a kersh for the dress today!' was not good enough.
The katb kitab was nice, I got to see my friend's panicky face as he realized he's getting irrevocably wedlocked. I only got lost for about an hour, almost crashed a stranger's wedding, had a stranger give me chocolate, hid a juice box for allergy-related feeling-saving purposes, and got caught by a hot neighbour carrying my shoes Fouad-El-Mohandess style to use the stairs. Just your average Rory day. Amidst the chaos of day 2, there was one heartwarming tidbit (other than getting to see my friend's face going on an emotional rollercoaster), I saw this:
Now let me tell you what's special about this. For one, this mail box has been broken down, dusty and abandoned for as long as I remember living there. What's more, a little detail that I failed to see when I was shorter, is the Borio pack. This version has been out of production for ages; they no longer make single cookie packs and only produce the 6 pack, which means that this cookie has been there for ages, which also means that nobody took it. And I don't think it's because stealing mail is a federal crime. That won the race and made my day. With all the ugliness in the world, some people still have integrity, even if it's as little as not stealing a derelict Borio cookie.
Do you know that nightmare we all have about being naked in a public place? Well, I spent the whole day shopping for a nice dress to attend a good friend's katb kitab, and I had tactically chosen a light blue shirt to make the fitting room battle slightly easier. I successfully managed to finish the girl errands in record time, and then set off to get my friend her weight in chocolate because she broke her leg on a freak bus accident. I didn't want to get her sick people chocolate, so I figured out with etiquette and in with the yummies! The Metro Market aisle it was, since it's Egypt's neighborhood equivalent of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Up I reached and down I bent, sideways I chatted with a dozen staff personnel to find the missing bars then to the cashier I bolted to charge and bag. The personnel were unusually giggly for Metro Market, known for their rather hostile staff, I figured they're having a good day and was all smiles. That was until I glanced down my own shirt, perchance on my way to unpocket the money, to find that two out of the four buttons were unbuttoned and I had flashed the entire Metro Market staff Daisy Duke style. Apparently, two hours of buttoning and unbuttoning the shirt had loosened the cuffs, and my messenger bag had the sleight of hand of Charlie Sheen in his naughty days. Let me rewind a little bit. Do you know that nightmare we all have about being naked in a public place? Well, it's not half as bad as the real thing.
How does one react to that? Mortified doesn't quite cover it, my body's heat was abandoning ship through my face now that I knew that it was in fact my boobs that made the staff's day, and not kismet. I kept my cool and buttoned my shirt, then maintained eye contact with a dozen menial workers who were openly giggling and suggestively glancing, took my time at the cash register with middle-eastern fucks who undoubtedly shamed me as a slut for the fashion slip and walked out of there in a normal gait when every instinct told me to bolt. It took me 10 minutes and about 160 muffled 'FUCK!'s to finish my errands and head home.
The day was not nearly done. In fact, it hadn't even started yet. I changed my shirt and took a quick shower, adding about 45 more not-so-muffled fucks to my verbal quota of the day, then headed off to see my friend. I got lost for about an hour trying to get there, spent another hour telling her about it (and every other piece of gossip she could have possibly missed) after throwing etiquette out of the window and raining her with candy in bed.
Dad picked me up at 10 and we headed off to a family reunion. An estranged relative came for a visit, and true to my expectations the two hour visit was testing to dolphins everywhere. A squeal over me being as tall as her, a scream at the haircut, a squeal at the lost weight. Hysterical chuckles over jokes that aren't nearly as funny as she made them sound, and audible awws up to live studio par at the news of my getting sick. The room was refrigerated to sub-zero levels in an attempt to appease her now cold-blooded physique, and the main dessert was a bear-sized bowl of ice cream to my red-riding-hood-fitted tummy. Around 12 we had to drive grandma home, who in turn insisted we come up for a nibble. Little did I know that she had an agenda, for she took it upon herself to make me regain the pounds that were squealed at. Half a watermelons and two main courses later, we headed home at 2. We came home to find that all the cars in our square were wrecked, their windshield smashed and their doors bent at unseemly angles. Turned out there was a fight and had we come home so much as 30 minutes earlier, the biggest part of our car would have been the sideview mirror, and the largest patch of skin left unmangled of my body would have been squeal-inducing boy scalp. Good things happen when you spend quality time with Teita. Let me digress for a second, but grandma is the kind of person who, when bored, gets creative with her pearl earrings:
By the time we found a safe parking spot and walked about a mile back, I had a baby belly and wasn't feeling so good, only to come home and find that my mother decided to get me fast food in a medical experiment to 'see if I can handle it yet.' I wasn't supposed to eat take out, drink juice or anything remotely related to the outside world until my liver stopped pursuing Broadway, but I didn't want another yelling match and frankly couldn't be more excited at the sight of pizza and lasagna after so many boiled vegetable servings.
You probably see where this is going, and you're right. I went to bed, woke up a short while later and threw up for an hour and a half, taking naps when my tummy elves had to reload food into what I imagined to be a catapult only to run off to the bathroom for another medieval attack at the sink. I seem to be innocent in the arts of war for I woke up to a full-fledged fight between our family's noble houses, grandma blaming my aunt for the AC, my uncle blaming grandma for not noticing, my grandma yelling at mom for not being there and mom yelling at aunt for not foreseeing it. I was fine, but it took about 6 phone calls to re-instate a truce. I had run out of arguments by the 5th and apparently 'hey at least now I don't have to worry about a kersh for the dress today!' was not good enough.
The katb kitab was nice, I got to see my friend's panicky face as he realized he's getting irrevocably wedlocked. I only got lost for about an hour, almost crashed a stranger's wedding, had a stranger give me chocolate, hid a juice box for allergy-related feeling-saving purposes, and got caught by a hot neighbour carrying my shoes Fouad-El-Mohandess style to use the stairs. Just your average Rory day. Amidst the chaos of day 2, there was one heartwarming tidbit (other than getting to see my friend's face going on an emotional rollercoaster), I saw this:
Now let me tell you what's special about this. For one, this mail box has been broken down, dusty and abandoned for as long as I remember living there. What's more, a little detail that I failed to see when I was shorter, is the Borio pack. This version has been out of production for ages; they no longer make single cookie packs and only produce the 6 pack, which means that this cookie has been there for ages, which also means that nobody took it. And I don't think it's because stealing mail is a federal crime. That won the race and made my day. With all the ugliness in the world, some people still have integrity, even if it's as little as not stealing a derelict Borio cookie.
Tuesday 3 June 2014
Monday 2 June 2014
Corporate Vs. Soul: The Ultimate Slashdown
You know that whole shit they sell in pseudo-spiritual neo-hippy self help books about you getting the vibes you give out into the world? Well it's wrong. I just got another call this morning about a job that I applied for two months ago, back when I was this close to stuffing my CV in an atom gun and shooting out its gazillion particles at the part-time job world hoping one would stick, and I had to tell them I can't take it right now because I'm sitting my finals and asked if I could call back after the 10th. Well I can't call back after the 10th, because even though I'm doing this to keep my options open, I've already decided to take an unpaid internship I care about. This triggered another one of my familiar yelling at the ceiling episodes as I threw my head back, glared at the chandelier and let my vocal cords discover their inner Zeus as I shouted "STOP CALLING ME WITH JOBS WHEN I'VE DECIDED TO TAKE AN UNPAID INTERNSHIP, IT HURTS! WHY COULDN'T YOU GRANT ME A CALLBACK WHEN I WAS WILLING TO FAN A SULTAN'S SWEATY ASS FOR DOUGH?"
Which leads me to another job-related rant I've been bottling in since 4 am, when I decided to reply to the work e-mail I've been dreading in an unfortunate middle-of-the-night random awakening (BIG MISTAKE!): There's a special place in hell designed for bosses who make you re-write or re-design because you can't read minds. Here's the punch line, I'm both an aspiring writer and graphic designer, so you could say I pulled the short end of the stick, twice, on a cosmic-scaled Titanic-styled ballot.
You see, the art of writing professional work e-mails can roughly be described as the art of crafting insults. You're either fuming with medieval/neanderthal-ic rage that you're forced to dilute and formulate into a pleasant insult-free e-mail that does the job of getting the point through without grazing your boss's sorry epidermis with shrapnel, or you were picked for a vicious tango where the winner is the one that offends the other without having it register as offensive material in gracious power play, the metronome ticks away an impossible rhythm as you're forced to learn the delicate art otherwise known to the women species as small talk. It's a lot like learning how to be a woman, and I had to dig, deep down, into that untapped part of myself where an angular-limbed, make-up choked woman in stilettos was hiding under a couple of comics and discarded Cheetos bags.
I've had a lot of practice with that unholy part of the game, and I had to learn the hard way, by trial and error that cost me my job, health and took away countless hours of sleep that could have added inches to my height that is now horribly lacking on the hobbit-human comparison chart. It still, however, pisses me off, and that anger is soothing because it reminds me that I haven't quite sold my soul to the white-collared corporate overlord yet. That's the only silver lining to this Loki-shooting apocalyptic cloud of doom that I can think of. You could say I'm selling organs to the highest bidder, but my soul's still there, and it's kicking.
I wanna hide in a pillow fort and re-read Harry Potter. Rory, out.
Which leads me to another job-related rant I've been bottling in since 4 am, when I decided to reply to the work e-mail I've been dreading in an unfortunate middle-of-the-night random awakening (BIG MISTAKE!): There's a special place in hell designed for bosses who make you re-write or re-design because you can't read minds. Here's the punch line, I'm both an aspiring writer and graphic designer, so you could say I pulled the short end of the stick, twice, on a cosmic-scaled Titanic-styled ballot.
You see, the art of writing professional work e-mails can roughly be described as the art of crafting insults. You're either fuming with medieval/neanderthal-ic rage that you're forced to dilute and formulate into a pleasant insult-free e-mail that does the job of getting the point through without grazing your boss's sorry epidermis with shrapnel, or you were picked for a vicious tango where the winner is the one that offends the other without having it register as offensive material in gracious power play, the metronome ticks away an impossible rhythm as you're forced to learn the delicate art otherwise known to the women species as small talk. It's a lot like learning how to be a woman, and I had to dig, deep down, into that untapped part of myself where an angular-limbed, make-up choked woman in stilettos was hiding under a couple of comics and discarded Cheetos bags.
I've had a lot of practice with that unholy part of the game, and I had to learn the hard way, by trial and error that cost me my job, health and took away countless hours of sleep that could have added inches to my height that is now horribly lacking on the hobbit-human comparison chart. It still, however, pisses me off, and that anger is soothing because it reminds me that I haven't quite sold my soul to the white-collared corporate overlord yet. That's the only silver lining to this Loki-shooting apocalyptic cloud of doom that I can think of. You could say I'm selling organs to the highest bidder, but my soul's still there, and it's kicking.
I wanna hide in a pillow fort and re-read Harry Potter. Rory, out.
Sunday 1 June 2014
Of Bouquets, Doppelgangers & Social Death Traps.
Finals are in two days, and I'm so overworked I'm imagining screen savers on turned off monitors. I got a couple of boulders out of the way though, so I have time to let off some steam.
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Something pretty sweet happened today. I've been e-mailing back and forth with my favorite professor, to apologize about missing so many classes and explain why and such. When she found out I'm sick, she started helping me out with the material I missed, offered to re-explain it to me and encouraged me to ask question with anything I find trouble with. She's a very passionate professor, one of the few left who really care about their job, how well their students are doing and how innovative their lectures are. She's made it a habit to celebrate random people's birthdays in class with a custom made cake that's personalized to depict whatever it is that they mentioned they liked in one of the many conversations she had with them. She somehow manages to balance the whole being professional and still remain a kind human thing. Today, she did this:
I've never been sent flowers before. Nobody ever really cared that much, especially at uni; I've been having trouble with the whole attendance fiasco and missing classes and none of the other professors or kids were that understanding (let alone civil), and I was left to pretty much extrapolate what it was I could have missed and materialize it out of thin air. It made my day. There should be more people like her in the world. Her kindness confuses me; I don't understand it.
On the other hand, I got a call from two of my friends, who I haven't really heard from for two months and who haven't noticed me falling off the social grid or getting sick or all of that, claiming that they saw me with a stick up their ass complaining why I didn't call and tell them I'd be in the area. My HIMYM city doppelganger was stuffing her face with sushi when they 'drove by and saw you but couldn't really stop the car', because apparently the brakes were off and they were on a high-speed car chase with the CIA on a top secret mission to locate and exterminate a south Korean spy. That pissed me off, and I let them have a piece of my mind about making an effort that they found 'not cool.' Another friend dragged me into a social skit and thought it was okay to fake hostile conversation then put on an act of social power play for a good show. I got back at him with a Game of Thrones spoiler, and now he won't talk to me. Three ex-friends later, adding up to five ex-retards this month, let me put on my grandma monocle and wonder what's wrong with kids these days, because I'm honestly done with their pretentious ass shit.
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