Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

One would think that the struggle of working 55 miles away from home everyday would be the long drive in the wee hours of the morning, especially during these winter months. That doesn’t happen to be the case at all. I’ll admit that there are times that I don’t want to make that drive at 6:30 in the morning, and I would be remiss in not admitting that I miss coming home at lunch time, watching an “I Love Lucy” rerun and playing with the cat whilst I write my daily blog entry. These things are on my mind as I work 55 miles from home, but there is one specific thing that I can not get used to.

I struggle with doing my business in the bathroom at work.

We have around 200 people working the building and there is one common bathroom for the entire facility, and it’s rarely empty. Oh, I’ve heard rumors that there is an executive bathroom, appropriately located in the executive wing, but during the few, brief visits I’ve enjoyed in that part of the building, I’ve noticed that the executive bathroom, which appears to be a broom closet with some plumbing, is never in use. During my visits to the common bathroom I frequently see those that have multiple letters after their name on their office nameplates, opting to poop in coach instead of first class. They’re usually friendly. There’s no limp, blue curtain.

At my old job the bathroom had one urinal and two stalls, though usually only one stall worked at a time. Since there were heating issues in that building, I would never risk sitting on the toilet during the winter for fear of freezing into place and not being able to move until I thawed out at spring; and since I worked close to home back then I could make the trek home at lunch time and take care of my business.
I don’t have that luxury in my current employment situation.

I’ve mentioned before that my brief glimpses of the common ladies’ room (when the door has been opened and I can see in) revealed a two room affair, complete with a lounging area that has couches and easy chairs and a television for many to enjoy. As long as you’re female. My friend Sandy once mentioned that she was selling greeting cards at work. I asked where the display was and apparently they were on display in this lounging area that precedes the main event of the ladies’ room. They have a shopping district in there and everything. The actual rest area of the ladies’ lounge (as it’s marked on the building evacuation plan) shares a common wall with the mens’ room (we know when they flush but little else), which has four urinals shoved into the corner and four stalls, one which contains a telephone company truck hazard cone strategically situated next to the toilet. There are seven sinks along the front and a random number of paper towel dispensers; since the dispensers break once in a while, the maintenance folks just relocate the dispensers for the handicapped individuals to a higher location for those not in a wheelchair. I feel bad for the folks that are trying motor their wheelchairs with wet hands.

The sign on the door proclaims that the mens’ room is closed weekdays from 6:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. for cleaning. No exceptions. Don’t make it a habit of having an emergency because the cleaning staff isn’t leaving to accommodate you unless you’re doing it in the hall, apparently. This declaration is interesting to me, since the cleaning staff only comes to the building three days a week. The head cleaning woman is rather young, and named after a month in the year, but she’s not named March or August. August is a guy’s name. She has quite a few tattoos. At times she seems to have a mood adjustment assist to her day; I don’t know what counter her assists come over to fulfill her needs but she’s always quite friendly. I don’t mind the fact that she occasionally uses people that are walking the perimeter of the parking lot in the interest of staying fit as target as she comes flying into the parking lot. She’s smiling when she does it. 
I end up having to do my serious business in that bathroom at least once a day, though I pee quite frequently due to large consumptions of water. I hate doing my business in there because I know that people recognize my feet under the stall wall. I’m afraid that each individual has a distinct odor and that I have been rightly identified. I am conscious of the noises and gases. I worry that my suspenders drag on the floor. This is an interesting aspect to my habits and feelings of this nature, because I can go to a public restroom on the interstate or in a Macy’s and making some of the most foul noises and sounds known to the human race and not think twice about it. I don’t like it when people know me in the bathroom. When at a house party, I avoid using the “guest bathroom” which is usually located under the stairs, right in the middle of all the party traffic. On the occasions that I have to use the “guest bathroom” at a party, I usually end up farting loudly in there when there’s a lull in the conversation on the outer side of the door. I worry I kill the gaiety.

I don’t like it when people talk in the bathroom. Conference calls in progress at the urinal are just weird. One of my co-workers, a very jovial southern gentleman, usually flashes his trademark smile and says “Hello there, J.P.” just as I’m making a bee-line for stall #2, which does not have the hazard cone but does have the best wi-fi reception in the room. I smile on the outside, but I die a little on the inside, because he has identified who I am to any other person that may be doing their business and now they’ll be able to identify my smell. This terrifies me in a small way.

There was a different voice in there today when I thought I was alone in there. “HElllooooooo!”, chimed the mood-adjusted voice as the cleaning lady came in.

“I’m here”.

“I know, sweetie.”

Sigh. I needed to pass some gas to get things moving. Now she would know how my digestive system works.

I glanced at my watch and confirmed that it wasn’t between 6 and 6:30. What the hell was she doing in there? I didn’t want to have to evacuate and do my business in the broom closet with plumbing.

“I’ll be just a moment.”

“Ok.”  I heard her leave.  I then made a noise that I don’t really need to describe here during this dialog. And forget about the smell.
I find it interesting that I’m rather freaked out about this, aside from the fact that doing it where people don’t know me doesn’t bother me, because I have been nude in public on countless occasions in my life and back in the day I did a lot more interesting things in public without a second thought.

As I walked out of the restroom, she asked, “Everything come out ok?”

Oh my god.

 

Well, whaddya know, it is winter after all. The snowfall is still a little anemic for this time of year, but at least the view is starting to match the season now.

When I got this morning I could hear the wind howling and the sounds of either really thick rain or sleet pelting the bedroom window. I looked out, expecting to see the lawn and driveway covered in snow, but instead saw that everything was just wet. It was that fun 33ºF that everyone loves to drive in. “Is it ice or is it rain? Who knows?”

As I made my way east along my daily commute, the rain quickly changed to snow as I descended into the Mohawk Valley. Apparently the plowing crews were not alerted to the fact that it’s January in Upstate New York, because very little had been done to clear the roads. It can’t be a budgetary thing, because there hasn’t been that much snow this season, so I don’t know where everyone was. When I got off the Thruway and onto the back roads (up by Farmer Bear’s place and the like), I was making my own tracks. I discovered that the new Jeep is a little more feisty on the slippery surfaces than his predecessor; popping into 4WD tamed him a bit. By the time I got to Amish country, I was following a Saab that was fish tailing all over the place at around 20 MPH. I made my way around the Saab, waved to the Amish commuters and continued along my daily trek, arriving to work five minutes late.

I did the best I could.

Honestly, I’d rather have a big snowstorm where temperatures are in the 20s instead of doing this ‘hover around freezing’ thing. It’s much easier to drive in snow than it is to drive in slush and it’s not quite so heavy when it has to be moved.

But on the bright side, at least January is looking like the part today.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Sleep is apparently not on the agenda for the week. Last night I stayed up for an hour beyond my bedtime. I wasn’t doing anything fun or anything, in fact, I just stared at the ceiling and wondered when I was going to fall asleep. I then woke up at 2 a.m. for a little while, just to keep things interesting. At 4 a.m. my body apparently thought it was well-rested and I ended up just laying in bed pondering the meaning of life until the alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. That’s when I officially started my day.

Last night was a repeat of the night before.

I don’t know why I’m not sleeping. I suspect it has something to do with the pressures of work and the chaos of my daily schedule. On the positive side of things, I can say that I am happier today than I was back when I would try to eek some sleep between pager beeps that plagued my old job. I don’t miss that on-call gig at all.

They’re trying out a new on-call schedule at my current job this year, where by seniority we get to pick which holidays we want to work. Theoretically, we have to work one holiday every two years. I think it’s a pretty sweet deal: being on-call only once every 13 weeks and having to work one holiday every two years. Others are not thinking as positively about the new way of doing things, though. I get tired of unrest.

Perhaps it’s the unrest in the world that is keeping me from sleep.

As I closely follow all the shenanigans leading up to the Presidential elections in November, I start to wonder what the world would be like if one of the social conservatives got to sit in the big chair. I’m all for a fiscal conservative sitting in the big chair; I think that we are throwing too much money at a wall and hoping it will stick and I think there are too many people that live off the system (without giving anything to the system in the first place), but the idea of a social conservative in the White House scares me a little bit. On one hand I think it’s arrogant for a man or woman to think they can sit down in the big chair and on day one nullify every marriage they didn’t agree with in one broad pen stroke. On the other hand, I think it shows that they’re quite stupid and out of touch with reality. Too much stupidity and arrogance plague the politics of our country.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be thinking about these things while I’m trying to sleep.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Earl and I spent the weekend in suburban Philly spending time with Earl’s family. It was the first time we had seen them since his Dad’s funeral services; we gathered with Earl’s family to go through boxes of photographs and other mementos from the family. It was a pleasant stroll down memory lane for many and a nice learning experience for those of us that are newish members of the family.

As we got in the car to leave yesterday morning, I told Earl that I was going to go home “up the Jersey side”. Normally when we visit down there we end up going through the Poconos in both directions and the making our way up home once entering New York State near Binghamton (please note, no “p” in Binghamton). It’s been a few years since we’ve gone home “up the Jersey side”, which involves taking the Jersey Turnpike up to I-287 and then joining the New York State Thruway a few miles north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. I was just in the mood for a change of pace. I haven’t had a lot of changes in pace the past couple of months.

I have been pretty vocal about my dislike of New Jersey. Most of my experience has been along the New Jersey Turnpike where it’s very much industrialized. Any venturing off the the Turnpike has involved traffic jams no matter the hour and, no offense to anyone, but I find the typical Jersey accent to be a little offensive to my ears. Not that my somewhat nasally Central New York accent is that much better, but we are lot closer to the neutral Midwestern accent that most associate with “generic American” than anything along the east coast. Of course, New Jersey is also unfortunately represented by the travesty called “Jersey Shore” and that is an abomination on society as a whole, fueled by people from Jersey.

Let’s say I’m not the biggest fan.

There’s always talk in our house of where we would like to relocate to someday, given the right opportunity, and my answer has always been “anywhere as long as it isn’t Jersey.” Florida comes to a close second in that line of thinking but I don’t mention it because we like the House of the Mouse. All of that being said, I think I have been rather shortsighted in my opinion of The Garden State.

Earl and I chatted about Jersey a little bit as we whizzed by all the construction on the Turnpike. We both decided that if we ever had to live in New Jersey that it would have to be south of Trenton. There was no way that we were going to live in New Jersey. It’s too crowded, too depressing to us and way too close to the Big Apple for our tastes. However, South Jersey might be a different story (though we agreed that Camden was a no go). Once you get away from the Jersey side of Philly, there’s actually some open area of the state, complete with farms and rural communities. That’s the part of Jersey that I rarely see, hence my unfair assessment of the state. It’s kind of like someone being overwhelmed by the magnitude of Times Square and then saying that they don’t like Pulaski, the little town I grew up in, because after all, they’re both in New York.

I guess I had a pot-kettle-black realization yesterday. If I have offended anyone with previous anti-Jersey rants in the past I apologize, and as god as my witness, I apologize to DJ Sam Storicks for an email exchange we had about Jersey a few years ago.

So now that I have reassessed my feelings about the Garden State, I have decided that we might want to spend a weekend sometime this year in the rural area of South Jersey. If any of my gentle readers have a suggestion, I would love to hear it.

There are really small things that happen in my life that I just find very intriguing and amusing. It’s usually something rather trivial that people wouldn’t take a second glance at, but for me, while it’s no earth shattering or traumatic event, I still take notice and ponder upon it to find a hidden significance.

Upon leaving my cubicle for lunch today, I forgot my iPad. That’s right, I left my iPad sitting on my desk at work, waiting for it’s opportunity to assist in the blogging process. I made my way down the hallway and out to the Jeep before I realized that I was not following my lunchtime ritual. Deciding to be adventurous, I opted to not return to my cubicle and instead make the decision to leave the iPad behind and write my blog entry on my iPhone today.

Now because of the way that I am wired, I am wondering what caused me to forget my iPad. There are a couple of possibilities as to why I have taken this alternate course of action during my lunch today.

1. Earl asked if I would buy lunch today instead of brown bagging it like I usually do every day. When I brown bag my lunch, I usually eat it at my desk before my actual lunch hour, because I’m usually hungry shortly after 11. (I blame the high school programming of the 11:04 lunch period during my formative years, but that’s just a hunch). I can hold out until 11:45 or so before needing to consume my lovely homemade lunch, but because I didn’t have a homemade lunch today I was either calorie starved and not thinking clearly at 12:00 or I was thrown off by not having followed my ritual of eating at 11:45.

2. I’m getting old and starting to forget (more) things. I’m never really good at remembering names and quite frankly I don’t trust that the words coming out of my mouth are the ones that I actually intended to say around 25% of the time, so forgetting things is not a big deal to me except when it comes to technology. Oh I can still recite the dumb stuff, like the license plate of my grandparents’ 1971 Chevy Caprice (564-LPO), but the fact that I forgot my iPad, or for that matter, any Apple product usually in my possession, is just a bit confounding to me and tells me that there’s an increasing amount of gray hair on my face for a reason, I’m aging. Today the iPad, tomorrow the Jeep, next week, pants. I see what lies ahead.

3. It could be that I’m tired. Earl and I had to take care of some family business at my Dad’s house last night and we didn’t get to bed until after 11. This made 5:30 feel like it arrived a lot sooner than it should have this morning. I still have the required amount of pep I need to get through the day, it’s just a sluggish pep.

I will probably ponder the “root cause analysis” (work jargon creeping in here) of my forgetting of the iPad through my lunch hour before dismissing it as something trivial and moving on with my day.

However, if you see me next week and I’m (not intentionally) without pants, please do me a favor and let me know.

Getting back into the swing of the work has been interesting. One of the things that I don’t particularly enjoy about the first of the year at work is our yearly reviews. I always feel like all the work that I have accomplished over the past year has to be substantiated and well documented in our yearly evaluation so that I get the raise I feel I deserve when they hand those things out in March. The worst part about the yearly review is that the company I work for is big on the “self-evaluation” concept. Basically, I have to rate myself on a scale from one to five on a whole slew of topics that have been decided for me. Last year’s evaluation included goals that I worked with my supervisor to formulate; this year’s evaluation has no such thing, we were handed team goals that we all tried to strive to reach together. I like this team approach to this in many respects, but my concern is that I write applications and support systems that provide the rest of the team the ability to reach their goals. My goals don’t exactly match theirs, but because I am part of the same group, I have to play along with the rest of the crowd.

It makes writing my own self-evaluation a little more of a challenge than I am in the mood for.

I get the concept of writing a self-evaluation and rating myself on a scale from one to five. I know folks that rate themselves as all fives, which I find ludicrous. I think I’m realist will the scoring I do, but last year I had one or two points knocked down a point (from a 4 to 3) so that I would have room to grow in the future. Keeping this in mind, I’m being even more realistic this year, but I’m afraid that if I score myself to low (on the valid points where I know I have room to grow), that no one will disagree and bump me up a little bit and then I’ll get less of a bonus than I probably would have gotten had I been a little more confident with my contributions.

We have another section of the evaluation that is called the “values” portion; here we rate ourselves on a dozen points or so on how we demonstrate the values of the company and we must give a specific point or reason supporting our number rating on a scale of 1 to 5. The values section includes statements like “I come to work with a positive attitude everyday.”  If a person is a quiet person that kind of works alone in his cubicle and doesn’t say much to the rest of team on a daily basis, how does he or she support their number rating? “I didn’t slap anyone on my way in or out of the building today.”  “I confined defecation habits to the rest room.”  Would it surprise you if I admitted that these statements did cross my mind as I was working on my self-evaluation this morning?  In a year that has been plagued by a feeling of being completely overwhelmed, I worry that I don’t have enough of a positive attitude and that I’ll score low, be scorned and then be relegated to a cubicle in a cold part of the building where the pipes clank.  I suppose having a smile on my face every morning is a good way to support that company value.

I guess because I have worked in many situations where there were no evaluations at all that at least I feel like I’m being recognized for my contributions to the great scheme of the big corporation I work for. But on the other hand, it’s not easy to make your number stand out when you’re surrounded by 15,000 other numbers, and because of that, I just want to make sure I give myself the right number so that it stays the right number.