Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Blogget "Effed Up" Jones

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Monday, November 28, 2005

Ah! The Traditional Thanksgiving....Flu?

Another smashing Thankgiving has flown on by. Family. Turkey. Dressing. Sweet Potatoes. Pie.

And the stomach flu.

Luuuvvvlllyyy

Those trimmings aren't nearly as appetizing in reverse.

And where was my dear sweet love? They guy who says he can't do without me? His life is over if I'm not in it?

About 7 hours away. He had a good excuse, I suppose. Family, blah, blah, blah. So, when he hadn't heard from me that "luuuvvvlllyyy" morning, he finally called to find me barely coherent in a dehydration-induced stupor. I had to tell him I couldn't talk. I didn't have the energy to hold the phone any longer without losing consciousness.

Later that day, when I was more lucid due to the miracle that is Phenergan (and if you've taken it, you'll know what really says that I was MORE lucid on the stuff!), he says he's deathly worried about me and can't wait to get home. He's obligated to see an old friend that night, but he doesn't want to be out for long, so he can rest and get home to take care of me. What a sweetheart!

Flash forward to 1:30 AM: Ring goes my phone. I manage to swim out of my Phenergan-cradled sleep and grab it. On the other end is my boyfriend's slurry voice. He just got home and would like me to know it. He's been "good" (which apparently involves splitting pitchers of too-expensive beer at a place whose chief draw is skimpy-outfitted "lumberjack girls"), he wants me to know. I can't remember the end of the conversation because we both fell asleep.

At a more reasonable hour, I let him know I'm making arrangements to be able to see him that night. He says okay and he'll let me know when he's leaving town to head home.

[Insert the spinning clock face here, as the hours tick by.]

No word from Sweetie. It's early afternoon when I finally call and get an answer. His dad informs me Sweetie is asleep on the couch. "He'll head home tomorrow," he tells me.

Great. Thanks, Sweetie.

I'm understandably upset. Again. But too weak to be too agressive about it. Truth be told, I haven't talked about it with him yet. I'm even more weary of having to stick up for myself with this guy. What the hell is wrong with me that this is the best I get?

And he wonders why I don't feel important to him. Wow.

I finally decided to drag my ass out of bed on the third afternoon after coming down with the crud. A shower and fresh jammies and it's bedtime again. Heaven knows, I need a good night's sleep for work.

Monday, November 21, 2005

New blood!

The office has new blood! Usually, I'm not so insistent, but I wasn't about to let the testosterone in this place overrule common sense. With all of our personnel changes and problems, we're a bit behind in some areas. Heaven forbid we hire someone who can actually help!

Backstory: G the Backstabber tried some rather nasty shenanigans against me. Turns out, she does that to mask the fact that she has no effing idea what she's doing. Cut off his head to make yourself look tall -- that should be embroidered in a sampler for this woman. She even went to the trouble of documenting what I did "wrong" -- only to prove that she was incompetent and I wasn't.

The real story is long and astronomically frustrating, so I'll spare you and say it backfired. E actually asked A in my presence, "Why did we hire G again?"

To summarize: We were down one person due to OCD's departure. Truth be told, we were down two people, since G is an idiot.

Let the hiring process commence!

A whole new field of idiots comes out of the woodwork when a job posting goes out. My favorite had to be the one who created a GIGANTIC graphic as some horribly pretentious letterhead that covered half of the page. No exaggeration. HALF of the page! Then, the one-paragraph cover letter was set in tiny script font. Yeah, I wanna work with that one!

The required interviews droned on. In the end, we had four choices. Gee, which would you pick?

1. a guy who had the experience and required skills, plus the bonus skills.
2. a bubbly blonde girl who didn't meet the required experience, had some of the skills, and said she could learn the bonus skills.
3. a woman with lots of experience, but a padded resume, who asked for more money than the boss makes.
4. another bubbly blonde with the experience, but lacking skills.

Seems a no-brainer, yes? Sure, when you're thinking with a brain and not a less-rational appendage.

One of my brilliant coworkers actually said, out loud, in public, "1 sounds good, but I like 2 better because she's prettier."

No effing kidding. To quote one of my new favorites songs: "This time somebody's getting hurt." I mustered every drop of professional hard-ass I could find in me and pushed. The fact is, we need help. NOW. What if 2 can't learn the skills? I mean, G can't and has us pickled over it.

The boss doesn't want another pickle. 1 is here now and has been doing a smashing job ever since. Except that he talks ALL THE EFFING TIME! In my office. You'd think that would quit being fun after awhile, but then again....it's me .

Catch ya later, diary.
Blogget Jones

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Blogget's Home Away from Home (i.e. WORK)

The winds of change have swept my office! And they've turned things around in a good way for yours truly!

First of all, the personnel changes.

Y "The Short-Timer" is gone, as I mentioned previously. OCD is gone, too -- off to explore greener pastures.

Four new people have joined our disfunctional little family:

G of the "Intelligensia"
G is the newest one. I say "Intelligensia" not because I consider her among their number, but she certainly does. So many nice email discussions have come to a dead halt because she decided to respond in Latin or French, and it disgusted us into silence. We don't like show-offs.

In my experience with her, she has proven her incompetence repeatedly and persistently. For a kicker, she's also a liar and political maneuverer. She pulled a bunch of crap a couple of months ago, trying to take me down, but it all backfired in her face. See, I work above-board and within what I know my bosses will approve. Read: I cover my ass. She's an idiot. A Latin-French-speaking idiot.

B is cool
Really. He's a really smart, cool guy. Kinda cute, too. He's experiencing some bitter personal problems and they occasionally take him down for awhile, but he hangs in there. He's sharp and makes a good contribution, but doesn't buy the crap from The Powers That Be. Needs to wash his hair more often, but he's a good guy.

M is naive
M comes to us after retiring elsewhere, so he's used to being in administration. The Powers That Be have assigned such tasks to him, even though he's one of the new kids on this block. He's blind to the problems with The Powers That Be, and likes it that way.

A shake-up happened in our company, and one division was splintered and reassigned to other divisions. We got two new kids in our family because of that. They are:

T is for Tough Cookie
She's sharp as can be, knows the system inside out and upside down. She should be in the administration now, but they royally screwed her out of it. Didn't even buy her dinner first. It was an ambush. She's come through it gracefully, though. T certainly doesn't buy the crap doled out by The Powers That Be!

U has T's back
They used to work together in that defunct division. U witnessed the travesties that happened to T. They're in it together. She's a sharp one, too. She's caught on to what I've taught her quickly. She hasn't realized yet that (1) sound carries in our offices and (2) she talks REALLY LOUD on the phone.

There's been a division of duties in our area, too. E and A are still joined at the hip, but their offices are separated by a floor and they have equal amounts of authority over their new areas. I've emerged as a content expert, after finally being allowed to do more of what I do best. That's when G made her challenge at me, and lost. I think E would have fired her, to my absolute and total glee, but A is softer than that. Ho hum.

I've become Queen of the Conferences, too. I actually come back with proof that I learned something, and sometimes I'm presenting a paper there. They figure it's money well spent. Unlike G, who came back from spending the company's money to say, "I didn't get anything from it." Three whole days and you didn't manage to get ANYTHING from it?! WTF?!

I had a ten-page report on what I got from it. She's an idiot.

Back to the grindstone. More later.

Blogget Jones

The Dilemmas (Men) of Blogget Jones

Man, oh, man, time flies! I just noticed that it's been a loooooong time since I've updated my diary here. Apologies to anyone who was actually reading before! I'll do my best to catch you up and keep things current. Promise!

One thing at a time. Personal stuff, then work stuff later.

Personal stuff: Men. Mr. "I'm freaking out!" did eventually send me a message. Get this -- he asked why we ever fell out of touch. Can you believe that?! WTF is wrong with this guy? My response was short and not-so-sweet. I pretty much said it was because he couldn't handle it and I didn't push it, and I moved on. No more messages. Funny thing -- a curious Internet search revealed the possibility that he might have been married at the time, with kids. Great. What a jerk.

There was another brief jerk. All the things a girl loves to hear: "You're wonderful!" "You're beautiful!" "I can't wait to see you again!" Then...weeks of silence. Nothing. Finally, a message with a story I can't quite believe, but decide to leave alone. We make a date. It goes great. We make another. He stands me up. I get the story the next day -- another hard to swallow story. So, I do what I do best -- hit the Net. From that, I find out for sure that he's full of crap. This is the Information Age, people. Lies are easy to find. What a jerk.

Then there was the guy I met once, then he started text messaging me all the time. This guy barely knows me and he thinks it's a good idea to send me something that says just, "Booty Call!" all the time. He was shocked that I was insulted by that. Go figure. What a jerk.

Oh, then there's the guy I met for a lunch date once. He seemed into me, but he didn't impress me as my type at all. After lunch, he sends me an email that says, "I know you really wanted to kiss me. How about next time?" No, thanks. A couple of days later, I get an email from a woman I don't know. I'm one of about 20 recipients. She says she's engaged to this guy and found all of our names in his email address book. She wants us all to just be honest with her -- have any of us slept with him? Did any of us know about her? I wrote her back and said that I didn't know about her, but that I just had the one lunch with him and nothing more. No sex. She responded that it was good to hear that, but that at least 15 others had responded so far that they WERE sleeping with him and none of them knew about the others. I felt bad for her, and them. Wow, what a major jerk!

I have to backtrack here. Before all of these fine examples of manhood, I had been seeing the same guy for years. Then, he kinda fell apart and stopped managing his life. It fell to me, but that's not a grown-up relationship. So, we moved apart, but we still managed to see each other. I had dates with other guys and realized that these guys just couldn't love me like this other guy has, when things were good. He started working on getting his life back together. I finally give in totally one night. To make a long, really painful story short, 48 hours later, he gets drunk and sleeps with his neighbor.

NOTE: If you ever consider cheating on someone, be aware that the pain you'll inflict on them is profound and devastating. You just can't imagine the hurt and the torturous thoughts that they'll go through, possibly forever.

It's particularly bad when the one being cheated on has had others pull similar stunts in past relationships. The underlying feeling of being inadequate, or just "not enough," can be crippling emotionally. Cheating on them only reinforces and intensifies that feeling.

I found out about this because his behavior became strange with me. He later said it was guilt, not wanting to face me. I went to his place and this woman comes from another apartment, saying I don't have any reason to come by any more. She starts advancing on me, threatening. He about decks her, to stop her from coming near me, but lets her know that she'd have gotten her ass kicked by me if she'd followed that threat. I was in no mood for anyone's crap.

So, I heard the whole story. We went through a hard, hard week after that. He was saying he didn't realize that me being physically available to him meant that I was now emotionally available, too. He said he was drunk, and he wouldn't have done such a thing sober. He said he told her, right after it happened, that even if I left him forever, he wouldn't be with her. I was the woman he loved and nothing would change that.

Tell me, is it wrong for me to take pleasure in knowing he picked me over her, no matter what? See, she'd known him awhile. She knew he was in love with me. She'd been told by other neighbors to leave him be, that trying to take him from me would backfire on her. She persisted, anyhow. She wanted me to be mad enough to leave, so he'd go to her. It didn't happen that way. So, is it wrong for me to take pleasure in the idea that she sees him with me, and she knows she failed? It probably is, I know, but she isn't going to manipulate anyone while I'm around.

So, he and I decided to work on it. A few months later, I find that during our "off/on" time, he posted an Internet personals listing, saying some pretty mean things about me in it. That was hurtful, and I almost left. Maybe I'm too understanding, but figured that it was created during a time when things were rotten for us. He deleted it.

So, I live with the paranoia of having another incident, finding out about someone else. That's a daily struggle and I hate it. The problem is that I'll be just as paranoid about anyone else, forever. A couple of weeks ago, I found that he'd placed an ad at an "adult" site, for "erotic email" with someone out there. I confronted him. He said he was just horny that night and I wasn't available, and he didn't consider email as personal contact. It's faceless, after all, like reading porn.

I was understandably upset.

We've talked about it a lot since then. That day, I hated him for the first time ever. I was furious and hurt. I wanted to hurt him back. I told him that my relationships seem to prove again and again that I'm just not enough for the men in my life. I never have been. Even though I feel condemned to not being enough, I still hold to that ideal of having a relationship in which I am enough for that man, and he loves being with just me.

He said I *am* enough, that he was just being selfish and stupid. I'm not sure that's enough for me.

So, we are still together, but it's shaky. He knows that I am not sure it'll work out. He knows I don't trust him. He knows that, despite his reassurances, I feel inadequate. He knows that I need to feel that I'm better than adequate and that I'm loved enough to not hurt. He know that if I find someone who might be a chance at that type of love, I'll most likely take it.

He wants to be that person to me, but I just don't know if he has it in him. I wish he would. I've wished that for a long time because we're a great match otherwise. He keeps up with me intellectually, listens to me, supports me, and cares when it seems no one else does. But he also lets me down more than anyone else.

I went to a conference recently, and seemed to catch the eye of a colleague -- who lives half a continent away. I bumped into an old classmate last night, and seemed to catch a spark from him, too. So, what will happen? I just don't know. All I know is that I seem to find an ache in my chest no matter what solution I consider.

More on my work life later. I actually need to do some of it.... ;o)

Thanks for reading!
Blogget Jones