Some Saturday Stuff

My workouts are in a state of chaos lately. After the last race I ran, the Cotton Row, my calf injury stopped me from running for awhile, so I was biking. But for some reason I seem to have a problem with my heel now. I think a ligament in my foot is inflamed, but I'm not sure. Whatever the case, biking has been my thing. And the bobcats make the idea of jogging through my neighborhood somewhat less appealing anyway. But this thing with my heel concerns me. I've already got a nagging calf problem. This makes what, 3 years in a row this calf thing has impacted me? If I add a nagging heel problem to it then my running days may be done.

One of the most popular things I've ever posted here was when I talked about the lunatic at my office stealing my coffee cup. When it first began the CIO's assistant immediately said "It's those people who sit around you, that group." And she specifically pointed a finger at 2 women in particular. I don't know why I do this, but I said "no, its not them. They're both nice to me."  I shouldn't have, but that was my reaction. All this time later I realize that I wasn't their first victim and the assistant had reason to point the finger at them without even hesitating. My shielding of them only egged them on.

I researched the worst one of them on the internet and found her various social media profiles. They were unintentionally hilarious in a pretentious, narcissistic way. Her name is Melanie. Her profile photo features her pretending to laugh as she holds a glass of wine. But it doesn't look quite right somehow. It looks like she's trying too hard to convince you. Anyway, she's the source of all the trouble. I hadn't even worked at this company for very long before I had overhead enough of Melanie's endless drama and personal phone calls to realize that she is a huge drama queen who just loves to stir up trouble and then sit in the middle of it and insult everyone caught up in her whirlwind of chaos. It makes her feel important. And that is really all she cares about. Half the time she was on the phone with family members screaming at them for being inferior idiots. Usually it was her mother she was abusing, complaining that her mother called her for help too often and usually for stupid things (Facebook.) But she loved it. She loved having them dependent upon her for certain things so she could yell and abuse them whenever they needed her. And she loved Facebook so much that she talked openly about how much time she was spending at work updating her Facebook profile or worrying over what some random guy 'meant' with his latest status update (whether it was about her.)

Like all narcissists, she would frequently get bored and abuse people to entertain herself. Stealing my coffee cup was her way of making a boring day fun for her. Never mind the trouble it caused for me. Never mind the trouble it caused her entire team after I asked HR to put a stop to it and they dragged her coworkers in and talked to them. She didn't care. She just liked to stir things up and abuse anyone unfortunate enough to come in contact with her.  Luckily for me, I don't have to come into contact with her anymore. I left that company and went somewhere else.

Aside from that, my life is pretty uninteresting right now. I'm studying a lot for my work. I have also been trying to focus on a project for my own personal benefit, but can't seem to stay motivated. The fact that my laptop died and seems to have lost all my work didn't help any, though. I don't want to start over. If I was struggling with motivation before, losing all my previous work has made the struggle a lot harder. Outside it is July and that means hot and humid. There is hot and then there is July in The South hot. It hasn't gotten above the mid-90s yet, but we're on our way there. I can run in heat up to about 95 degrees and not suffer so badly that I have to stop. But after 95 I don't feel like the run is doing me much good. The heat takes too much of a toll and I don't accomplish much. Maybe I'll find a new gym near my new workplace and get back on the dreaded treadmill until summer is past the worst part? Oh speaking of gyms ....

I haven't lifted weights in months. I stopped weightlifting and focused exclusively on running and biking prior to running the Cotton Row race. Since then I still haven't gotten back into weights again. I really should hurry up and find a good place to lift because it isn't good for me to go for so many months without doing any weightlifting at all. But then again, in my current situation it might not be such a bad thing because .....

I have a nagging back injury that won't seem to go away. I'm not even sure what I did to set this off, but it keeps coming back and it hurts like crazy. Sometimes it makes my neck hurt, but only on one side. Other times it is my upper back that is killing me. But again, only on one side. It's a truly strange back injury. It only hurts on one side. This is something I don't really know what to do with.

Do any of you have ideas about this? Any of you ever experienced a back injury that only seemed to hurt you on one side of your body? What did you do for it?

Crazy Coworker Drama and the Coffee Cup

OK, so I had written before about someone in my office randomly and repeatedly stealing my coffee cup and stashing it in the break room for no particular reason. This has gone on for over 6 months, and yet no one has ever identified themselves to me or confessed. Instead, what has happened is that the coworker who sits directly across from me, out of the blue, asked if anyone had stolen my cup recently.

This was instantly suspicious to me. She is best friends with Drama Queen, the office screamer who sits in the cube right next to mine and has refused to talk to me for at least 3 months without ever giving a reason. We didn't fight. I certainly didn't do anything to her. But over the last several months she went from bugging me with questions and rude observations about me to refusing to speak to me at all.

During the week of Valentine's Day, the office administrators went around and stuck hearts to the overhead storage space above everyone's desks. Drama Queen, without asking or being given permission, climbed up on a chair, reached over the cubical wall, and tore mine off. This happened not long before the coworker across the aisle asked me about the coffee cup.

And then, just last Friday, Drama Queen EXPLODED out of nowhere.

I had just come back from the gym and sat down in my cubical. Drama Queen was having a conversation with a coworker who was sitting in his own cubical at his own desk. Drama Queen isn't what anyone would call physically fit or active. And she has a huge ego. So she feels entitled, if you know what I mean. She was sitting in her chair shouting across the office to this coworker, chatting about nothing important. I sat down in my own cubical, pulled a Kleenex out of my drawer and blew my nose. Drama Queen, in mid-sentence/shout, interrupted herself to scream at me, "DO YOU MIND? I'M TRYYYYYING TO HAVE A CONVERSATION! I SWEAR, YOU ARE SOOOOO RUDE!"

I ignored her and began to eat my lunch at my desk. It was lunch hour, after all, and that's what people do during lunch hour. I finished my sandwich and began eating my potato chips. Drama Queen, who was no longer having a conversation with anyone, suddenly jumped up on the cubical wall and screamed again, "CAN YOU AT LEAST EAT WITH YOUR MOUTH CLOSED! I SWEAR, THAT IS SOOOO LOUD!"

I WAS eating with my mouth closed, as if it were any of her business in the first place. This time I shouted back at her, now turning to see a red-faced, sweating, greasy, gorilla hanging from the cubical wall that divides us (she's very short, like maybe 5' tall at the most) "I AM eating with my mouth closed!"

She rolled her eyes like a 12-year-old girl and said "OH PUH-LEEZE!" At this point I want to point out that Drama Queen is the only person in the office who talks like a 12-year-old on a regular basis despite being closer to 45. She says "for reelz" instead of "for real" and "ridonkulous" instead of "ridiculous" and other, truly idiotic and juvenile things that no adult says. And she's the office screamer. She randomly screams like a banshee whenever she wants some attention. It's ear-piercing, but consistent with the middle-school-girl theme she seems to be going for.

Anyway, at this point, seeing her face so red and sweaty and her eyes big and crazy and spinning, I realized that Drama Queen was on the verge of truly going postal, like for reelz. I also know she owns a gun, because I heard her very loud and obnoxious conversations about it many times. And I know she hates my guts even though I have never done anything to her, because she has a GIGANTIC ego and doesn't respect boundaries. People like her frequently end up in wars with their neighbors because their egos push the boundaries defining what is theirs and what is the neighbors until they imagine that the neighbor, even as he sits in his own house minding his own business, is somehow encroaching on her territory. These are the people who put fences across the property line and try to claim a chunk of the neighbor's yard as their own. These are the people who routinely park in 2 parking spaces at once.

Speaking of which, she does that every single day. She parks her pearl white Lexus, with stick-on "look at me" eyelashes on the headlights, across multiple spaces in the far corner of the parking lot every single day. And she LOVES LOVES LOVES to tell people that she drives a Lexus. She loves to talk about expensive cars and even convinced a recently college graduated coworker to spend his last dime, despite being in debt for school, to buy a brand new BMW. Or as she put it "everyone has to have their FIRST Beamer!" As if it goes without saying that you HAVE to buy a BMW or else, well, what are you?

On her Facebook page, because I looked, she has as her header a photo of a glass of wine, indicating either that she is an alcoholic or else wants to portray herself as upper class. Her profile photo features her in extreme closeup (because she's fat) with her head thrown back feigning laughter. So she's a laughing drunk, basically, or at least this is how she wants to be seen by family and friends.

So she's going postal in the office in the cubical right next to mine, and it is me that she's focusing all her irrational, 12-year-old, "ridonkulous" rage at. And I know, being a white heterosexual male, that no matter how I respond to Drama Queen, HR will side with her and fire me. So I do the only thing that I can do. I email my boss and tell him what is happening.

He calls me over to his office and says "take the rest of the day and go home. Let's get you out of the situation while I go talk to her manager and see what can be done."

I already know what can be done. Nothing. Nothing at all. I work for a company where every single decision, right down to where each employee sits, must be approved by the top guy. And since separating me from Drama Queen, even though she is going to go postal and shoot up the place resulting in a massive lawsuit and scandal on the national news, still he will not approve moving either one of us. Not only that, but she won't be fired or written up or anything. But I would if I stayed, even if I simply sat in my chair and did nothing while she climbed like a monkey over the cubical wall and stabbed me repeatedly with sharpened office supplies.

So I went home.

Come Monday, she was still there. I knew she would be. And I knew something else, too.

She is the one who has been taking my coffee cup over and over and over again. The very first time I reported it, the executive assistant said "its that group that sits around you. It's HER." She and her friend across from me were the only ones questioned about it.  But this was when I was still new, and she was still speaking to me and pretending to be nice. She pretends to be nice a lot, but when you really listen to her you realize she is talking down and insulting you. Since most people aren't so extremely nasty everyone always assumes that she is just kidding. I was still assuming she was nice so I actually defended her and her team when she was first pointed out as the most likely culprit.

"No, I'm sure it isn't them. They're NICE to me."

No, it is them. But it's not just them. It's her. And her friend in the cubical across from mine knows it, too. The whole team knows. They talk all day long, day in and day out. When they aren't shouting to each other across cubes, they are on Instant Messaging or writing an email chain back and forth to each other, always talking talking talking.

So anyway, I think I'm going to be cut at the end of this month. I'm almost positive. So I took my coffee cup home and put it in the sink, where it will stay. I drink my coffee out of a paper cup at work now. All the contractors who were always everywhere, everywhere, everywhere are suddenly gone. And full-timers like me are suddenly being treated badly, criticized in the extreme for our work with examples given that make no sense or actually show the opposite of what is intended. My team lead disappeared suddenly. There is hostility coming from above directed at me and a fellow team member. I think we're both going to be cut. I heard a rumor that it's going to happen at the end of this month. So all this drama, and the coffee cup crime-spree, is all going to end very, very soon. I knew when I took this job that it was probably going to be temporary. There is a culture of perfectionism, unreasonableness, demanding the impossible. There is a constant churning of employees. And I am about to get churned.

And then I will be looking for the next job in the worst economic depression since Roosevelt. And Drama Queen and her crew will no doubt once again strip the empty cubical bare, steal the desk keys I leave behind inside the desk in preparation for stealing more personal items from the next victim who occupies that cubical, and start off pretending to be nice to the new person, only to slowly slide the mask off and reveal the crazy Drama Queen that hides beneath.

Office Drama

I have some office drama that is bugging me. It's nothing as exciting as Minxy's Princess problems, but it is driving me up the wall nonetheless.

This is my cup. There are others like it, but this one is mine.

This is my coffee cup. It's an ordinary generic-looking blue cup that I have had forever. I take it with me from job to job, along with the cup warmer, so that I can be conscious in the mornings while I'm trying to work. Coffee is an essential ingredient to my work. I don't like coffee, especially, but I need the caffeine to make my brain go. And sometimes I need the warmth to help me dethaw on winter mornings.

Sometime in late August someone at my job decided that it was their job to take this cup from off my desk and go throw it in the break room. This happened several times, each time with the cup disappearing from my desk and reappearing in the breakroom. Sometimes it was on the counter. Sometimes it was in the sink. A few times it was inside the dishwasher.

I assumed it was the cleaning crew thinking this is a generic company cup that they have to clean, so I asked my boss to put me in touch with whomever is responsible for the cleaning crew. Then I asked that person to please ask his crew to stop taking my personal coffee cup. This is not a company cup.

The response I got back was that I should lock the cup inside my desk every single day any time I leave my desk and further, how do I know it is the cleaning crew since I don't have video cameras set up around my desk to prove that it was them and I can't just go around accusing them like that and it is my fault if I didn't lock it in my desk.

So I had to request a key to my desk and begin locking the cup inside my desk every day at the end of the workday before I went home. End of problem, right?

Wrong. The cup STILL disappears periodically from out of my locked desk and reappears in the break room. It disappeared again in September, several times, and then October, and again this morning. I guess they took November off or something? Anyway, sometime between Friday night and Monday morning someone broke into my desk and took my cup. I found it in the breakroom inside the dishwasher along with several other people's cups.

This sure sounds like the cleaning staff to me. Does it to you?

Anyway, another person somehow involved in this suggested that it is merely a prank by coworkers who sit near me. I said I didn't think so because A) it isn't at all creative B) it isn't at all funny and most of all C) I never said anything to them about it or even indicated that it was going on, so they didn't even know it was happening.

Ah, but this person took it upon themselves to go and question my coworkers anyway, months ago, in fact. And after that my coworkers said to me "we didn't take your stupid cup" and mostly stopped talking to me altogether. Thanks so much for accusing my coworkers on my behalf after I said I don't think they had anything to do with it. Now they think I am some sort of paranoid schizophrenic who randomly accuses people of the very odd crime of stealing my cup out of my locked desk and washing it. So awesome.

In the meantime, I have encountered the cleaning crew on a few occasions. They are contracted from another company. Many of them are mentally handicapped. We used to call this 'retarded' but then one day a wave of political correctness swept the nation (Clinton was elected) and suddenly we weren't supposed to use the word retarded anymore. I personally think that the mentally challenged retarded people who clean our offices believe that my generic blue coffee cup is their responsibility to clean. I think that they believe it to be company property and that they should take it wherever they find it, clean it, and leave it in the break room for any random person to use for their coffee as they please. This is why I specifically asked that the cleaning crew be informed that this is my cup and not to be taken. But they refuse to do this. They refuse to talk to the cleaning crew about it because they say that is an accusation and I don't have proof. But they questioned my coworkers about it even after I said I don't believe it is them. And now my coworkers most definitely feel accused and won't talk to me. So awesome.

Coffee cup ... must take it