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expressing guilty rage
Wednesday, February 17 1999
I've noticed that my hair always looks best if I go a day without washing it. But something in our consumer culture makes washing it one of the several habitual acts I always perform in the shower. And I have to take a shower every morning or I am unable to face the day. 6:45am is frightfully early for a person with my resumé.
We in my company share a pair of restrooms with the California Franchise Tax Board, a place where tax cheats are ordered to go once they're finally caught. Thus it's no surprise that our restrooms are a mucky shambles. The urinals are usually in need of a shave, and well, I won't go into the other problems except to say that sometimes the "challenge" is apparent even when the door of the stall is closed. After all, tax cheats have few ways of expressing their guilty rage. Consequently, I use the men's room on the second floor, which is mostly empty, unfinished space waiting for a tenant.
Al drove me home to Ocean Beach last night, so I needed him to pick me up this morning. He's perpetually low on both cash and time, so he has a tendency to ignore routine things with a potential to impact his life. Recently he spaced out on the oil in his aging American car, "Red Thunder," and a few days ago it overheated. It hasn't run quite the same since. And this morning it didn't run at all. So Al got his next door neighbor to give us both a ride.
With the ongoing massive hiring binge, my company has had to reshuffle seating arrangements on occasion. Recently the business development people, the fast-talkers who are always on the phone, have wanted to cluster in the center of the office sycophantically around the Grand Pooh Bah. Since the center of the office was where I had been sitting, I was displaced. This might have been an insult to one of my many ass-kissing co-workers, but not to me. Being trapped between the Grand Pooh Bah and the Director of Web Development had many downsides. Both men suffer chronically from bad gas, and I never liked the idea of them peeking over my shoulder when I'd be doing such things as I'm doing now. After the displacement, though, I actually have a window cubicle in an infrequently-traveled part of the office. The privacy and insulation from distraction have been a godsend.
Poor Al and John, the editor boys, didn't come off nearly as well after their displacement. They ended up pressed against a wall in a high-traffic part of the room, with their monitors directly facing the Grand Pooh Bah and his marketing henchmen. Al's comment was something like, "It sucks!" More specifically and less Beavisandbuttheadedly, he added that his job requires him to do a certain amount of random web surfing, and he's sure this would be impossible to explain to the narrow-minded money people seated behind him.
Note from the Gus: It was me who termed the people sitting behind Al "narrow minded money people," not Al. More on this in the next entry.
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