things i have to do this weekend

• wear a tuxedo (my sister's getting married and i'm the best man eh!)
• shave (see above reasoning)
• drink beer (again, see above)

i actually shaved today in preparation for tomorrow.  i figured i probably hadn't done so in two or three weeks so if i tried scraping all that hair off my face tomorrow it would probably be more painful and bloody than a mel gibson movie.

 

also?  i ordered an iPhone from my cell phone provider the other day and was informed that there are backlogs in shipping them out still so i might not receive it until october even though i want it now.

 

the people that clean the office where i work seem to spend an odd amount of time trying to make sure that my desk is neat and tidy.  every morning the mess of papers is stacked and the plethora of cereal and cracker boxes that are strewn about my desktop are neatly aligned by size and content.  the pop cans and water bottles that litter my desk are always taken away, my pens are lined up neatly and my cutlery is put in proper order (fork, knife THEN spoon).

 

the only thing the cleaning staff doesn't seem to do is wash my coffee mug which is, in my opinion, probably the easiest thing they could do.  it's probably the most obvious thing that warrants attention on my desk too.  lined up cereal boxes and stacked paper are great, but day old coffee starts to smell if it's not attended to in a prompt manner.

 

but then again, nothing really makes sense in this place.  it seems like everyone in the company is extremely busy with shit to do EVERY DAY and that i'm the only one who's making their best effort to just kill time but not make it blatantly obvious that i'm doing so.  the really odd thing is that i think it's largely because other people here are ridiculously inefficient in their day-to-day tasks.  like an executive or a manager may request a report, i'd run the report and send it to them.  assuming that i do ever hear back from one of these people it's usually to the effect of "can you export this to Excel - it's not working on my computer for some reason."  this is usually a result of them trying to just copy and paste the information from the reporting application directly, which just plain doesn't work - so they have to ask for help.

 

and not just ask for help, but get in the elevator, come down two floors walk over to me and ask me at my desk rather than just pick up the phone and call me (i.e. pick up the phone, push four buttons, talk, hang up).  the whole "getting help exporting to excel" process generally eats up about 20-25 minutes of executive/manager time because they've got to stop and shoot the shit about how much rain we've had, and is this nice weather we're having going to last, and holy crap is gas ever expensive eh?

 

you know, another odd thing about this place is that i've never worked anywhere that had such an emphasis on the end of the day and the end of the week.  i'd go out on a limb and guess that at least one in ten computers in the office has a screen saver set to say something like "is it friday yet???" or "is it 5 o'clock yet???"  is that a regular thing in office land or have i been magically transported to some bizarre tv show?

 

i wonder if Jack White will give me guitar lessons.