Here I sit in the Landfill backyard listening to the banging and beeping of the destructor, which is still deconstructing our loverly driveway. It’s okay, I’m glad the work is getting done.

It was kind of a madhouse when I got home from Cubelandia. The young mooma from down the street was carrying her toddler so he could watch all the activity and heavy equipment from a safe distance. The young woman next door was watering her flowers. That couple is probably less enthused as they are 1) interns who work all kinds of crazy hours 2) recently returned from a trip to China and 3) sleep a couple feet from our driveway. I’m sorry. We needed to get this prodject done.

From the “it-doesn’t-take-much” category FZ and I inadvertently starred in an extremely short one-act play today complete with an audience. Building Moom brought a sympathy card to my cube so I could sign it and pass it on. I passed it on to FZ. I didn’t think I was sneaking up on him. I move like a runaway train. But when I put the card down next to him, he jumped a mile and made a kind of funny noise of surprise! I jumped back a bit and glimpsed the CRD in his office looking totally non-plussed. “That was interesting”, was his comment, spoken in his loverly Russian accent.

In a way this silly little interaction and some others lately mean that I have *finally*, after 10 years, “arrived”. At first I thought the CRD was a misogynist but I soon figured out he can be rude blunt (a better word) to everyone indiscriminately. He is also an extremely talented, valuable member of our team and we all get along with him *anyway* because he is almost always *right*, dang it! I am sure that when I began working there all those years ago he did not expect me to last very long. Baggy Old Bag. What does she know about tech work, yada yada?

Back when I first worked there (and felt a bit intimidated by the CRD) he got to Cubelandia one day to find a coffee mug on his desk with the slogan “Professional Smartass”. Who left it there? For a couple of days he wandered around asking *everyone* if they were responsible. No one would own up to it. Finally… He remembered. He had seen an identical mug on a co-worker’s desk and admired it, “Nice mug.” She replied, “I’ll *get* you one.” And she did. (She worked mostly remotely, which means she wasn’t one of the people he asked about the mug.)

Anyway, the CRD seems to have finally accepted me as someone with at least a rudimentary brain if not one at the higher ends of intelligence.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2018 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.