Diana's Diary

2001-09-04 - 7:55 p.m.

Work is Weird. Plus, a Box of Porn!

Not to go all Thoreau on everyone, but I was sitting in my cubicle today, and it occurred to me that work is absurd.

No, that's not exactly a new thought.

A hundred years ago--hell--even 20 years ago--my job did not exist. We had another network outage today, and everything came to a halt. Without our computers, we cannot function. Everything revolves around technology.

This is my typical morning: I come into the office, and check to see if there's anything on the fax machines for me on the way to my cube. Then I check both of my voice mail lines (my direct line and the forum main line) while my computer boots up. Once my computer's up, I check email. Depending on how busy things are, I can have anywhere between 5 and 50 new emails waiting for me each morning. I work my way through these, responding to direct questions, printing off certain ones to deal with later. A good portion of these emails are requests for passwords to our web site. So then I open up Netscape, log in to our web-based database, and hook them up.

Depending on volume, this stuff usually takes up a couple of hours in the morning. I respond to new requests throughout the day. The rest of my time, I'm still on the computer--researching stuff on the internet (marketing stuff, potential fun events for the meetings, etc.), working in Excel spreadsheets, typing up all manner of stuff in Word, and updating our web page.

We have all of this technology, supposedly to help us, but it's turning us into drooling morons.

The network goes down at work, resulting in a system-wide reboot. For 20 minutes or so, work stops. Everyone wanders around saying, "I can't do any work." We might as well be saying, "Duuuh...what do we do now?"

Truth is, there is stuff we could be doing. Review contracts, go over specs, push papers around. But without that comforting glow and hum of the computers...it's like we derive energy from the machines.

Who are the vampires? Us or the computers? It's like a mutual-benefit host-parasite relationship.

I oculd probably get a hell of a lot more work done on certain things (like those blasted Japanese specs) if I just turned off the damn computer and focused. The computer is always distracting me with new emails and stuff. But to turn off the computer at work seems sacrilegious. Not to mention the fact that I would probably have about 12 people ask me, "What, not working today?"

I'm not even going to go into the part where I try to find the sum result of all this toil is.

And you know what? I like my job.

This is the part where JB or Orange or Ex or Silver would tell me that I think too much.

~~~

Cleaning out the garage, my mother found another box of my dad's old Playboys. Pardon me while I am disconcerted by this. And note that I said "another." About a year and a half ago, she found a box, which she threw away. Then, last summer, she found two more boxes, which I gave to Mil. Mil has, I kid you not, a trunk full of porn. Magazines, videos, whatever. I would have given this last box to Mil, too, except Mil has disappeared to parts unknown. (Looong story, probably for the best that I don't know what happened there. The bits I do know don't make for a happy story.) So my mother gave this last box to Uncle Co for him to "dispose" of.

Don't want to know, don't want to know, don't want to know.

I'd ask what is up with guys and porn...but like I said, don't want to know.

-Diana, signing off

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2003-12-16 - Ow! My Nose!
2003-12-15 - 'Tis the Season...For Moving
2003-11-17 - Rush, Rush
2003-11-03 - Apartment Hunting Sucks
2003-10-22 - Apparently, "nauseated" is a good look for me.

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