Sunday February 13, 2005

THAT FOOT IS ME

Let's see. I promised a friend I would start working on finishing my half written horror novel, Revenants, because, despite the fact that the first half of it is a dismal piece of shit (in my humble opinion), this person likes it and really wants to read the rest of it.

As always when I commit myself to finishing up a writing project, especially something that involves structured fiction there might actually at some point be a market for, I immediately find myself overwhelmed with other projects I'd rather spend my time on. For example, there's this HeroClix related thingie that I actually wound up devoting most of last weekend to.

For some reason... the general perversity of human nature, or just the specific perversity of mine, I guess... when I decide I'm going to start working on something that might at some point have some pragmatic value and purpose, it motivates and inspires me to spend a great deal of effort on worthless, pointless crap like the above project instead.

Still, I should be able to do a few thousand words of Revenants this weekend, I imagine. Or at least, I hope.

What may get in the way is depressing work related shit. I don't generally talk about work related shit here, just in case someone from my job happens to do a Google search on my name and come directly to this page, but, well...

No. That's all grim and annoying. Before I get to that, let's talk about some of the good stuff in my life:

Some guy, who has asked me not to use his name or even part of his email address on the blog, sent me a nice note about this blog and my various other writing projects on the 'net that he's read. Even better, he also put $100 into my PayPal account, which I immediately and with great speed transferred into my checking account, in case he, you know, remembered where he put his anti-psychotic medicine.

Actually, I deeply appreciate the gesture. I can't thank him by name, but I do thank him.

My closest friend, whom I am also not allowed to name on this blog for various reasons, some of which involve the fact that this person will dismember me if I do, has decided to spoil me rotten this month. To date, I have received in the mail from this person a large box of meat from Omaha Steaks, several CDs -- Harry Nilsson's Nilsson Schmilsson, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Damn The Torpedoes, and something by a band named Nickelback that is going to have to go into the category of "well, it's the thought that counts"... although maybe not. I'll listen to it a few more times. This same friend sent me a copy of an Evanescence CD a few months ago, and I didn't like that the first time through, either, but I have since grown to like a couple of the tracks ("Bring Me To Life" especially) enormously.

I am told I will receive a large package from this friend on Monday, filled with many and sundry goodies, including HeroClix and at least one book and probably a few more DVDs, and, knowing my friend, enough junk food to kill an army of Brown Eyed Handsome Men. So, you know, that's something to look forward to.

Yesterday... well, Friday, actually, this still feels like Saturday night to me because I haven't slept yet... I got one of many books I have ordered recently from Amazon.com, The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman. The second of Newman's Anno Dracula books, this one is set in WWI. I've only just barely started it, but I'm enjoying it enormously so far.

Newman has an economical style that reminds me, at least slightly, of John M. Ford's, although Newman isn't as lyrical. He's quite good at succinct, sharply vivid imagery, though. I've read synopses of a few of his other books online, and I suspect that just as Anno Dracula is clearly the direct inspiration for Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so too are his other books inspirations for a lot of Neil Gaiman's Sandman work. Or, I guess, it could be the other way around (with Sandman, I mean... there's no denying to an educated, analytical eye that Anno Dracula is what gave Moore the idea for LOEG).

I recently finished re-reading the first five Chronicles of Amber, and upon looking through my Zelazney books, realized I didn't have the fourth of the second five, Prince of Chaos. So I've ordered that online as well, and will wait to start rereading Trumps of Doom (one of my all time favorite fantasy novels; I spent most of the summer of 1985 reading and re-reading it, after getting back from Basic Training) until I have it, so I can read straight through. My recollection is that the second series is only about half as good as the first, but still, that's pretty damn good.

I also have a lot of Modesty Blaise stuff that should be showing up sometime soon, as well as the other two Anno Dracula books, the first (with that specific name) and Dracula Cha Cha Cha, which is set in, I believe, 1959.

All right, depressing and grim work stuff -

For those who don't know, I work four ten hour days a week, Wednesday through Saturday, and have Sunday through Tuesday off. Yeah, it's a nice schedule; it's one of the very few things I really enjoy about my job. Now, here's something I really hate about my job:

There is a woman named Gloria where I work (not her real name, naturally) who is a human toxic waste spill. I am very serious. She is a deplorable, despicable, wretched miserable rotten no good excuse for a human being, who poisons everything she comes into contact with. She revels in causing other people misery; I honestly believe it is the only way she knows she's alive.

Gloria has two friends at work, named Lisa and Rachel. The three of them call themselves "the triplets". Lisa is a woman I've never gotten along with well, but until Gloria came along, she and I observed a mutual professional detente. Rachel used to be reasonably pleasant to me and everyone else at work, in an absent minded sort of way.

Since Gloria came on the team about four months ago, though, these two have become more and more unpleasant, as impelled by Gloria's example. They also enable Gloria's meanness; Gloria deliberately does unpleasant, childish, vindictive and spiteful things to various people on the team (including me) and Lisa and Rachel laugh at her antics and provide her with positive reinforcement. When Gloria isn't playing some unnecessary and usually cruel practical joke on someone else on the team, she and the other two 'triplets' sit around maliciously gossiping about everyone else.

me, specifically. I have worked at probably at least fifty different jobsites, mostly offices, in my life (I temped for the entire decade of the 90s, and for several years in the mid 80s when I first got back from Basic Training, too), and more often than not, there has been someone in every office who has disliked me on sight, and manifested that dislike in various unpleasant ways. I've learned to deal with it, and, as I say, until today, I thought this nonsense with Gloria was just more of the same.

See, over the past three weeks, someone has been turning my computer off at work. This is really exasperating, because in my job, we employ about fifteen different programs, most of which have individual (different) passwords on them. Because of this, we leave our computers on overnight, but with the screens locked, so we will not have to spend half an hour every day re-opening every single program. Everyone on my team does it, and everyone gets really really pissed off if they come in and find that their computer has been shut off while they were gone. Our supervisor, Jane (I've probably given her many different names in the past; I can't remember right now, but 'Jane' isn't it, either) throws a MAJOR hissy fit if she comes in and finds that someone has shut off her computer.

And, as I say, for the past three weeks, I come into work every day and find my computer has been shut down by someone. Everyone else's computers are still up; when I ask around, I find that, no, nobody's else's computers were turned off that morning, so it wasn't a power failure, or IT doing a software migration (when they upgrade a program, or our network, they come around and shut off everyone's computers, and I swear to God, it's been a quarter of a century since personal computers first came on the market, why can't people write programs that can update themselves on your system without you having to reboot everything?). It has obviously been someone specifically doing it to piss me off. And, of course, I knew who it was... but since it always happened when I wasn't at work, I had no hard evidence, and no Human Resources department that has ever existed, or boss, for that matter, wants to hear you complain about a co-worker unless you have, like, a signed confession and videotape of them doing something bad.

Last Saturday (a week ago yesterday) though, Gloria made a mistake. See, I always work Saturdays, as do two other people on my team, Maureen and Daria. A fourth person also works every Saturday, but that rotates between four other people on the team. Last week, Gloria was scheduled to work, along with, as I say, me, Maureen, and Daria.

Well, Maureen and Daria called in sick, so it was just Gloria and me. Gloria showed up at 8 am; I rolled in at 12:30, for my usual 1 pm to midnight shift. The first thing I asked was, where's everyone else? Gloria told me that the other two hadn't been in.

And then I noticed my computer was shut off.

Now, as I just said, I work normally from 1 pm to midnight. This makes me the last person in the back room where my team works, every night (and, while we're passing by that point, let me casually note that if I were as big a turd as Gloria is, nobody's computers would be on when they showed up the next day for work, because I could turn every single one of them off and nobody could do a damned thing about it). And on Saturdays, just to add to the fun, the magnetic locks on the door to the side of the building we work on will only open for members of my team, because we are the only ones supposed to be over there on weekends.

When I left on Friday night, at midnight, right before the center shut down for the night, my computer was on.

When I came in the next day, it was turned off... and nobody had been in that side of the building (or could have been) except Gloria.

So, while this is a locked room mystery, it's not exactly one we need to Sherlock Holmes to solve for us.

Now, it seems awfully stupid that Gloria would do what she did, given the givens, but, well, she's a woman whose vindictiveness far outweighs her intelligence. She also probably thought that Maureen and Daria were going to show up any time, and she'd be able to point at either of them as possible suspects if I accused her. She does seem to be extremely knowledgeable of how the grievance investigation procedure works at our place of employment; she is always very careful to keep whoever she is doing something unpleasant to from actually seeing her doing it. (Our HR department will not allow you to file a grievance on someone else's behalf. So if Gloria does something mean to Maureen and I see it but Maureen doesn't, it's hard to file a grievance on it, because Maureen would have to do it, and HR doesn't want to listen to anything anyone says that is 'speculative'.)

Anyway, I'd pretty much known it had to be Gloria, and now, well, I absolutely knew it... but again, you can't take deductive logic, however obvious a no brainer the conclusion is, to HR. They don't want to hear it. If you have to lay out a chain of reasoning for them, they just don't have the attention span. All they want is "I saw such and such do this". And, actually, they don't want that; they don't like to open investigations or discipline people, which is why they make it so hard to file a complaint in the first place.)

So, I sent an email off to Jane about it. I did not accuse Gloria, I just told Jane what had happened and let her draw her own conclusions. Jane gave a 'generalized warning', verbally and through email, to our entire team about tampering with each other's workspace. She also advised me, while 'the triplets' were in the room, that power outages happened, and IT shut people's computers down from time to time, and she was sure no one was doing it to me deliberately. Then, when the Three Bitches all went on break, she told me that she didn't know who it was, but whoever it was was doing it while she was out of the room, and if it continued, she would just shut off EVERYone's computers when she came in in the morning, and see how they liked that.

That last struck me a truly rotten idea, because there are no secrets on our team, especially as pertains to anything you tell to Jane, and everyone knew by now that I'd complained to her in writing about my computer being tampered with. So if Jane started doing that, guess who gets blamed?

Now, all this week, Gloria was out of work, other than Friday, when I was pleased to come in and discover that even though she was sitting her ugly spotty ass in the chair next to mine, my computer was still on. I hoped that meant that Jane's generalized warning to everyone about tampering with other people's workspace had scared Gloria into behaving... or that maybe, like bad tempered children will, she'd just gotten tired of that particular antic. (Turning off a computer is so easy to do, though, that I suspect it must have been the former, rather than the latter, especially since her station is right next to mine.)

So today (okay, yesterday) I went into work hoping the problem had worked itself out. Oh, Gloria was still an emotional tire fire, polluting everything within smelling distance of her, but, nonetheless, I hoped that at least this problem had been resolved.

And boy did I get an earful. Turns out, it isn't just me at all. Gloria has been shitting all over about half the team, and, well, Daria, at the very least, is as sick of it as I am.

Daria told me that the previous week, before I'd gotten to work, Gloria had referred to her, loudly, and in front of the entire team except Jane (who was out of the room) as a 'retard on medicine'. Daria is going through a bad divorce right now, and she's on mood elevators to keep her relatively sane, and, well, that sort of comment is very typical of Gloria. The worst thing about it was, it provoked Daria into screaming at Gloria, and of course Jane walked in in time for that, and Daria got written up for it.

That bugged me. And so did Daria telling me that both she and another woman on the team who is kinda friendly to me, Kathy, had seen Gloria turning off my computer, and heard Gloria brag and sneer about doing it, and they had both gone to Jane and told her Gloria was doing it, and Jane hadn't done a single goddam thing about it. That really kind of bugged me, given that Jane had directly told me she did not know who had done it, and had threatened to resolve the problem by taking general action against the entire team, rather than dealing specifically with the person she knew was doing it.

But what was the final straw for me, was... well, we have a person on our team named Amy. Amy is a pleasant, harmless older woman... in her mid 50s... who has some health issues. She is kind and sweet natured and wouldn't hurt a fly, and she has chronic lower back problems. She has a chair that she has adjusted in a very specific way to provide her with lower back support (the back cushion is pretty much parallel with, just further back from, the seat, in a way that would be very uncomfortable to anyone who didn't have chronic lower back pain).

And what I found out today (hearsay, from Daria, but I believe her) is that Gloria has been going over and messing around with the alignment and adjustment of Amy's chair, whenever Amy gets up and leaves the room for a minute.

Just, you know, to screw with her. Because Gloria LIKES doing shit like that.

Now, here's a thing about me. You can mess with me a lot, and I will be patient, because I don't like stress and I don't like confrontation, and I generally hope that if I set a mature, adult, reasonable example, eventually you will get tired of being a twit and just leave it out.

If I do get sick of being messed with, I will generally take reasonably measured steps in response, such as sending a very carefully worded email to my boss in which I accuse no one of anything, specifically, but simply set out the facts and ask for some kind of help.

This is what I do if you mess with me.

If you mess with my friends, though... or even with people who are absolutely harmless and doing nothing wrong... and I find out about it... I get really fucking cranky.

I can't stand bullies, and I won't tolerate a sneaky, mean spirited, toxic piece of garbage whose only purpose in life is to make everyone around him or her nearly as miserable as he or she obviously is.

So, either Gloria is losing her job soon, or I am, because I am going to start pulling every string I can get my hands on, and pushing every button I can reach, to get her out of there.

I am generally reluctant to start kicking those kind of rocks downhill, because it always turns into an avalanche and the avalanche always gets really ugly. I know the grievance process where I work as well as or better than Gloria does, and I have a few friends in high places there as well. I don't like playing those cards... I despise nepotism and influence peddling and the favor bank and am always reluctant to start meddling in office politics. I have been on the receiving end of far too many personal grudges played out in a professional environment to ever be comfortable lodging a grievance against anyone else.

But, at the same time, I know this dance very well, and I've got the shoes and I've got the tux, and much as I hate to take them out of the closet and put them on, well, Gloria has got to go. Work sucks enough without having an active, pulsating malignancy sitting right next to me.

So, tomorrow I will have a chat with someone I know who is high up in the food chain at work that I have a good personal relationship with, and ask them for advice, and next week, well, much as I dislike sounding melodramatic, I guess I'm about to go huntin' bear.

Of course, if Gloria has better contacts than I do, and is more skilled at manipulating the system than I am, I may be the one who ends up shitcanned, but, well, then I won't have to deal with her ass any more, either.

One more big card I have in my hand that came out today, though, is that apparently Gloria isn't even supposed to be working with us. She was actually fired at the time that Jane recruited her onto the team, by her previous supervisor. According to Daria, Gloria's termination papers were signed and on our General Manager's desk, and one of the several things she was being terminated for was egregiously unprofessional behavior towards her co-workers at the time. (The others, sez Daria, were being unprofessional with customers and fraudulent sales, so you see what a charmer Gloria is.)

Now, the way it generally works at most places of employment (including where I and Gloria work) is that, when you get written up for something, you get warned that if you get another write up for this issue, you are gone.

Which, come to think of it, may very well be why Jane seems to be so reluctant to take any specific action against Gloria over any of this... if she does, Gloria probably gets fired.

But, well, that may make this simpler than I am anticipating right now.

Whatever the case may be, Gloria's got to go. I hate spending any time or effort at all on work related nonsense when I'm not at work, but, well, I'm going to have to do something here.

All right. I'm tired and I wanna go to bed. So I'm gonna. I hope everyone is having a good weekend.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.