Your Share and Share Alike Quizo Update

I woke up this morning and peeked out my blinds to see how hard it was still raining, as the night before I had been seriously worried that I could drown walking from my house to my car. Five inches of rain in the last day and no end in sight. FIVE INCHES OF RAIN! That's the equivalent of, like, twenty-five feet of snow. Or two feet, I can't be bothered to figure out how much it actually is.

I could not tell how hard it was raining, however, because my window was covered in some kind of opaque white substance. "Now," I said, "that can't be snow, because it's April 16th, and for me to be unable to see out my window on April 16th because it is covered in snow is just insane."

I instead chose to believe that, somehow, my window had been covered in white paint by some malicious third party. Possibly leprechauns. The fact that my window is some 25 feet or so above the ground was merely a logical inconvenience, and I went about getting ready for work convinced that gold-hoarding pituitary dwarfs from County Cork had painted over my windows, as the alternative was too terrible to contemplate.

Then I stepped outside to go to work to find that not only was it, in fact, snowing, but it was snowing sideways.

Snowing. Fucking. SIDEWAYS. On April 16th.

I just stood on the front step, sighed, and said, "it's going to be one of those days."

And, lo, it is. I had almost an entire hour to myself in the office this morning before the thrice-damned woman who also sits in this room arrived and showed me that a day when I wake up to sideways snow actually CAN get worse.

Let me explain something to you.

I like my job. I really like my job. Those who know me well realize what a freakish statement this is, but it's true. Aside from the occasional grunt work - like back in February or so when I spent two weeks looking up zip codes, which is as much fun as it sounds - my job is challenging and interesting. The people, for the most part, are very nice.

But I swear to god I'm going to kill this fucking woman.

I know more about this woman's personal life than I knew about the personal lives of most of the women I've DATED, since even when we were dating I didn't spend forty hours a goddamned week listening to them talk - talk very loudly, for hours at a stretch - about their personal lives. I know where she lives. I know what her husband does for a living. I know what her EX-husband did for a living. I know where her children went to college. I know where they work. I know what kind of car her husband drives. I don't want to know these things. I know them anyway.

This knowledge, mind you, comes JUST from when she talks on the phone. This activity takes up, I dunno, maybe 3-4 hours a day. The other 4-5 hours are spent talking to the never ending stream of people who are constantly in and out of this room to talk to this woman. As close as I can figure, approximately 3% of these visits are work-related. The rest are just her talking about meaningless nonsense to other people - sometimes as many as FOUR other people at one time - about, I dunno, whatever stupid shit is rattling around in the sorry excuse for a birdcage this woman calls a brain.

Not to mention that she has what might be charitably considered the most annoying speech pattern in the history of sentient lifeforms. Imagine listening to, say, Fran Drescher doing an impression of Kelly from The Office reading the Declaration of Independence while jabbing icepicks into your eyeballs every time the word "for" or "he" comes up. It's like that. When ending a conversation or when someone leaves the office she says bye-ee. Two syllables. "Bye" and "ee." I hear the word bye-ee about 40 times a day. At one point, when someone came in here to tell a story about their newborn son, she said the word "awww" fourteen times in sixty seconds. I counted. FOURTEEN TIMES IN ONE MINUTE. I am not making this up. This is the background noise of my day.

At least it was. Initially I listened to my iPod while working because it helped me concentrate while I was trying to do extremely detailed systems administration. Now I just blast whatever I've got - at this moment it's the soundtrack to The Matrix Revolutions - at the highest volume possible to drown out the incessant noise in this room. Because, you know, programming a massive database that has to accurately track every penny that comes into this place lest the IRS seize the hospital's assets, I wouldn't want to work WITHOUT FUCKING DISTRACTIONS while doing that, would I?

I look outside and it's still snowing, though at least right now it appears to be coming straight down.

Anyone still wonder why I'm bitchy?

JLK