What You Are Laughing At

Fakin' It 'Til I'm Makin' It

Here's what I do at my job, to stay sane.
1) If it's the day after a drawing, I check my Lotto numbers at work. I wait until I'm at work so that I can have a dramatic exit that includes the words "leverage," "market share," and "my honeybaked ham in your face." Why hang out for references? I'M RICH!
2) I walk around with my earbud from my cell-phone plopped in my earhole, and my phone in my hand. If someone I no wanna talky to comes by, I nod and silenty say "Hey," then wave the phone as if to say "my pending ear tumor beats your ideas of upgrading the Sonics by a long shot. You suck."
3) Fake keyboard: I want one so I can hammer away, quickly, and make people think I'm throwing work around like beads at Mardi Gras. Most of my work goes to boobs, anyway. Yes, I see the loopholes in using a fake keyboard. Send me your comments in the form of cash.
4) Conference Room Ninja attacks. Lots of meetings going on. When one wraps up and another one is happening soon after, I'll sneak in and write something on a whiteboard to mess with folks. Just make a fake list, if you like. My recent favorite is as follows
1: Budget & Restrictions: Cut training, cut promotions, downgrade bonuses, decrease benefits
2: Headcount Reductions & De-Hirings: Most of NW Corner of building gone in 25 days
3: Office Supply Purchase Moratorium: Must supply own Pens and Chairs
4: Executive Trip: Hawaii or Mexico?, Discuss menus, entertainment, duration of stay (5 or 7 days?)

Paranoia works two ways, no?

What I Do For My Job:
Do not read this entry while operating heavy machinery.
I run reports that reflect the amount of time it took for an IT-related issue to get resolved. The time-to-resolution is tracked in an application called Remedy, which is pretty close to an old "buttons and sh-shing!" cash-register. The time starts when a new record is created by an employee. Each record has an assigned "Severity Level," depending upon how big the problem is. A big issue would be, for example, when a heavily-used file, e-mail, or web-server decides to do something other than work properly, and there are about 300 different reasons for that to happen, to be modest. A small issue is accidentally deleting an e-mail and needing to have it recovered. That usually means a call from "beeg weeg" who needs "to have the e-mail team back the server up to the time the e-mail existed and re-fresh my mailbox, because I need that (insert recipe or directions to some lawn party at a fat white dude's house) ASAP," usually pronounced "ay-sap" because the caller's self-importance far outweighs their courtesies or coolness or knowledge of retrieving deleted e-mails. [Click on Deleted Items>>Tools Menu>>Recover Deleted Items>>Choose proper message to retrieve>>Understand that we all get laughed at for this kind of thing]
So when the work is done and the record rolls off "live" status to "closed" status, it is available to my database for retrieval. I enter a date range to grab all data for a month (it's cumulative, a Latin word for "morbidly useless data"), and it takes about 90 minutes for the database to pool the data, and that’s only if the database runs all the way through. Sometimes it runs for 2 hours then vomits an error message, but I don't know it vomits because the screen goes blank after 20 minutes and I'm not always at my desk, as you read above.
Next I run an Excel spreadsheet that formats the data, which is then accessed by another report in Access (it goes from Access to Excel, back to Access… um…), and then kicked back to Excel… wake up… to be formatted into the weekly or monthly reports. Then I send those reports out to peeps hosting LawnParties this weekend, and they don't tell me how they liked it, and I don't get invited to any parties.
If anyone needs me I'll be drying my tears with Dilbert "bathroom tissue."

Help Me Help Myself to Office Supplies,
Geoffers