insert clever, revelent to the content thought provoking title here


I hate to get all Andy Rooney here, but…

Don’t you hate it when the drive time DJs don’t play music? All the stations don’t play music all at the same time. So no matter how many buttons you punch you get no music. You get ads, you get moronic chatter and you get traffic.

They play two songs an hour and they won’t tell you what the titles or artists are. Shouldn’t they let me know who sings it so I can run out and pay for the CD? Full price? Keep me in the dark and I’ll learn how to MP3 . Damn it. My ancient computer has never heard of MP3s and couldn’t play them even if I did learn how to play them.

Don’t you hate it when technology moves faster then your annual cost of not living increase? I forgot, I don’t get COLI. I work for the damn state. We don’t even have Windirs 98, no that isn’t a misspell. We got our software from a guy named Skeeter.

< self-pity>don’t you hate it when some one else sets your priorities? I have two tasks. Task one is brutally tedious and mind numbing. I have been led to understand that if this task isn’t filled the very world will fall off its axis and we will all die.

So I save the world everyday. All day. Until.

Nominal Boss asks about Blindingly Tedious Task Two. Task Two is enough to make Brutally Tedious Task One look thought provoking by comparison. I haven’t thought about Task Two in a while, as Task One was so pivotal to our continued survival as a species.

Much to my shock, Nominal Boss says it is really Task Two that will protect us from obliteration. Imagine my surprise.

So now I get to spend two days a week on BT Task One, which I will never get caught up on if it not done all day every day, and three days a weeks with BT Task Two, which will never get done if it is not done all day everyday. Job security my ass. I hope you are all grateful for the planet still turning.

Sisyphus and I are at one. I files thousands of sheets of paper, I purge from the files thousands of sheets of paper and I do it all day long. And after I have done that the Bitchwhoreslut (one of Nominal Boss’ two minions, the other being The Zombie. TZ will punch holes in the filing if requested, but she won’t punch holes in all the pages. Periodcally, there are unpunched pages. She does this on purpose) wanders in and smirks as she brings me more bins to file. I hate her. To mix things up once a month I file the single page filing. Imagine a foot and a half of paper, one sheet at a time one chart at a time, 436 charts total. The file cabinets were constructed in hell and those that open don’t open all the way, those that close I cannot open. Every cabinet is of different construction and design. They are all broken in a different way.

Well, I have been delivered from all that. Now I get to spend hours standing in front of a copy machine. The “Good” Copy machine. Eight years old and counting.

Front page, second page, third page, back page, inserts. Over and over. After the hours on my feet doing that I get to redact all of it. Redacting being a fancy way of saying Censoring. And Blindness Causing.

So I get to read all those copied pages. Hundreds of hand written pages. Looking for names, dates, room numbers, anything that could be construed as identifying I read every, if I’m lucky, boring word. If I’m not lucky it’s words about horrendous neglect and abuse of the elderly. All Day.

Then when I’m finished I get to copy all the pages again. This part is faster unless the machine is wonky then it is one page at a time. I hate it when the machine is wonky. So I hate it a lot. How much does your job suck? Not very much by comparison does it? I do all this in a building with bars on the windows and increasingly, the odor of acetate in the air. The ceiling is falling in and the plaster (God let it be plaster) is turning to dust.

So Much Fun.

And I don’t actually hate my job. That much. At my old job I was a walking census. I knew who died, when; of what and at what time they went out 911 and where in the parking lot the EMS guys finally stopped CPR. I gave better Report at the end of the day then the nurses did. Yay Me!

The dead people did me in. And getting laid off.

At least at this job the dead people are paper dead people. So much better then stubbing your toe on the Funeral Home gurney. And the funeral home gurney driving asshats. Talkative Asshats. I do not want to join in on a chorus of “On the Road Again” over a dead body. I don’t care how dead they are.

Nothing is as Brutally Tedious or painfully repeatitive as elevator rides with men in cheap black suits with gurneys that want to sing duets.