Monday, January 24, 2011

Mondays

There are many types of Mondays, and they usually are like hurricanes.  They have five categories, just like hurricanes do on the Saffer-Simpson Scale.  I hope you enjoy this, as it is hysterically funny, and I am sure that you can identify with at least one of these situations.  Enjoy!

Disclaimer: All stories contained within this script are completely fictional (thank God). All character personalities and company settings which are similar to anything in real life are completely a coincidence.

MONDAY WARNING SIGNS



Category 1 Monday:

It’s a half hour before your alarm goes off and you can’t sleep, so you get up to take advantage of the extra time to prepare for the 8:30 meeting. The material you critically need before the meeting could only be made available on Monday morning at 7:30 am, and now is a good time to come in to work.

Right? … ?

You get caught in an hour-long accident with accompanying cleanup as one of many members of the also accompanying traffic jam, from which you can not escape no matter how much you thump you head against the steering wheel, sigh and look around periodically, and repeatedly leave voice messages on both your boss’s work phone and cell phone, knowing they both are checked only at the end of the day. Your boss’s cell phone is almost never turned on at work in a client’s meeting, and if it is, it’s set to vibrate and left in the said boss’s office. Your half-hour-early-into-work-attempt inverts itself to half-hour-late status.

Why can’t jokers like that one crash into a tree off the road instead of straddling the @#$% cement median, blocking both lanes of traffic, in a position you have no effing idea how it got that way in the first place? Though, when you look at the fine pieces of debris on all 4 lanes in the road, you can tell it has something to do with driving at weekend-for-fun speeds on this road during one’s weekday commute. Well, at least it’s a good thing the rich young invincible-in-his-mind lad walks out of there not seemingly injured too badly, despite his attempts to do otherwise, and just needing 2 pairs of jaws-of-life and a lot of other people’s critical commuter time to make room to get him out. How do you know about this lad’s financial status? The remnents still carries the make and model of a German made, high-end sports car, no doubt designed with the Autobahn in mind. Just as tough as a twisted wreck that it becomes after it saves your life, as it is when it was a fully intact vehicle before it saves your life.

You get into the meeting 5 minutes late with a fraction of the hastily setup laptop-based-presentation you intended to be full and informative when you expect at least a half hour time to prepare, and as a result have to give the long expected, cheap sounding but true, “Sorry I’m late, got caught in an extra long jam and didn’t have time to prepare this morning” line. By looking at the expressions from everyone’s face, every one of which belongs to someone who does not commute from your direction including your boss and the client, you know that asking for sympathy is as futile as carrying a pea shooter and asking mama bear to peacefully hand over her cubs.

Now for the rest of the day: Your half-hour of sleep deprivation manifests itself, and because the meeting was not complete due to the pretty young boy who doesn’t even value his life, much less you and a bunch of other fellow losers’ work schedule, another one has been scheduled. No doubt, the only opening you have is, guess when? … next Monday morning at 8:30am. Fate’s giving you the finger.

Your boss mentions that the client was unappreciative of the lack-of-promptness-and-preparedness by you, but before you can interrupt to defend yourself with the fact you actually tried to come in early, he puts up a hand in order to interrupt your interruption and claims to understand your predicament, but tells you that the client doesn’t, and that he was just letting you know this out of “courtesy.” You can clearly see the blatant frustration on this paycheck-signer’s face, that knowing that your situation was totally out of your control isn’t really actually relevant, and so you don’t buy the implication that this boss, or any boss in this company for that matter, is actually understanding. You wait patiently and in your mind, dare him to say, “you should in the future come in to work earlier on days with important morning meetings to accommodate possible delays like that,” but you weren’t entertained with that or any similar phrase, unfortunately.

Frustration of a day caused by Ivan Pr@#$sworth IV’s new lesson in life that daddy can’t bail him out of seeing images of his life flashing before his eyes. You should have tried to sleep the extra half hour.

This insult of a day is a shoo-in for Mondaycane-strength Category 1.


Category 2 Monday:


You hit a cat on the way to work, and your heart sinks because you own a cat. You consider turning around to see if it’s somebody’s…

…Sniff-sniff…awwww! [hack, gag]

That wasn’t a cat!

You aren’t all that relieved that it wasn’t someone’s pet because that skunk you hit gave a last-stand heroic chemical weapon of mass odorification to its enemy (your car) before succumbing to its fate and now you, being the courteous one that you are, and also a little sheepish about your … new situation, have to park in the back of your company’s lot until all of the skunk stuff passes.

You arrive at work after the long walk from the Senora Dessert, passing a cactus or two, and sit down at your computer. A short time later you get a very professionally written email, sent to you as part of the email group: “Rest Of The Employees In This @#$% Building,” reminding how this company panders to high-end clients and that every part of the campus, from employee’s hygienic practices to cosmetic conditions of vehicles in the parking lot should represent the best this good company can offer.” It’s obviously a reaction to your car, as if clients choose to park their cars at the back of the lot looking for a long sandy stroll. Would customers be that anxious to delay coming in here as much as possible to park that far away? What about that secret member of the lot police? Aren’t there enough rustbuckets with offensive stickers parking in front of the building, in that they should not have to traverse to the back of the lot with canteens and camels in hand?

You realize you must sneak out at lunch time, and move your car to another parking lot, and walk the extra X number of blocks back to work from the Sahara Desert, instead of the Senora. Then it hits you, who would know about your car but your health-freak department director who parks in B. F. E., next to where you parked this morning, and makes the desert walk part of his exercise routine. You know he is a nice guy pretty much all of the time so you’re sure he will allow you wait until lunch time so you can be more discrete about it, when you overhear from his office talking to someone else:

“I wish who-ever it is that owns that Silver Toy-ota that smells like fresh poll-cat would get the hint and move it outa here! We gotta big-whig from an o’l company commin’ in this mornin’.” You guess it can’t wait until lunch time. Not only that, your visible reaction to that blast-off by the normally docile Southern Gentleman that he is, causes people to turn around and whisper.

Gotcha! It’s in the grapevine, firmly implanted like a virus from a tick in your @#$. You know that it will spread around the office now, and you have to go out to banish Mr. Stinkburger to another lot right away, while everyone is staring at your and the floating overhead multicolored spotlights and disco ball illuminating your way out the door, glittering off you and your new tail-between-the-legs appendage. You know you are now doomed to a week’s worth of cubical gifts like plush skunk toys with heart-shaped “TY”’s tagged to their ears, jumbo packs of air-freshening hang-tags for your mirror, and 48-oz cans of tomato juice with the familiar V8 logo, along with the “oh my God, you killed Pepe! …” comments from your office “friends.” You, of course, force yourself take it in stride because being visibly angry might encourage more of the same. Who are you to interrupt one of the very few sources of corporate morale around here?

Maybe if it was a BP executive who was coming in, you could dump tarballs on your car as a passively-aggressive way of covering up the smell.

Outed as the proud owner of a new stinkmobile. Good enough for Category 2 on the Monday scale.



Category 3 Monday:


Some numbskull doesn’t know what every teenage joker who works a store counter knows. Even the dolts who ring up your convenience-store sales with cell-phones shouldered to their ears know this: orange decanter for decaf, brown decanter for regular! The later-stage caffeine addicts in your office are grumbling and neither you nor they know why, until you get the beginning stages of what will soon be a full-grown, mature, ripe, grade A, fresh from the farm, harvested today, murderous migraine.

You are the poor @#$%^&* who needs decaf for that very reason!

You almost never have migraines unless you have substantial doses of caffeine like the accidental dose you received today, and for that reason, the following things you can ignore most days, but you have to struggle to endure today:

• The flickering florescent near your cubical, which needs ballasts, which are on back-order for who-knows-when.

• Un-shaded window bordering your cube with direct view of the sun, which makes you wonder why the florescents in bullet-point number 1 are even on during the day.

• Click-happy Cube-neighbor #1 who refuses to learn about a miracle invention of a quiet little rollie-thing on top of the mouse called a “scroll wheel.”

• Cube-neighbor #2 who has his ringer on volume 10dB above a 747’s jet’s roar even though Cube-neighbor #2 is not here.

• Persistent caller-every-15-minutes of Cube-neighbor #2 who refuses to learn about a miracle invention called “voice mail.”

You guess they did not consult migraine sufferers as to whether or not to call window-side cubicles a way to reward people for “positions of prominence.” Because your floor is full of people who take their work home all the time, working 10 hours a day at home sometimes, you are sure your boss will understand so you dare to ask, this one day out of 10,000 that you don’t, to do the same today. Without answering a direct “yes” or “no” to you, you wait patiently through a spiel about how this-and-such customer may come in anytime this week and we need employees to be more visible before realizing you are going to receive nothing anywhere near an explicit yes-or-no. This is typical of this boss. Your best bet is to assume that this response means no. Time to go back to your light-and-noise blight of a cubicle. You think about asking him, “boss, can you at least waterboard me so I can get some relief?”

Migraine sufferers know that this Monday is at least a Category #3.



Category 4 Monday:


The list isn’t complete without computers.

[Grind-grind-grind blue text screen of unintelligible technical babble instead of accounting software screen full of your morning’s hard-work.]

That’s the last dying dramatic speech of your hard drive. IT geeks confirm the obvious: data permanently irretrievable. Hard drive has been rendered to paperweight status. No problem. Every machine in this building is scheduled to make automatic copies of your local data every day and you can borrow a PC while the cheap company finally affords you a new hard drive, bigger in capacity only because the hard drives with the same capacity as the one with X’s over its eyes that used to be yours is no longer made.

Supposedly your data has been backed up. Key word: “supposedly.” Well, somehow the miracle operating system, the brainchild of some Harvard dropout, had quietly failed to back up your work for the last 2 weeks because of a software problem unrelated to your six-foot-under hard drive. It’s the end of the fiscal year tomorrow and you have exactly 52 hours and 28 minutes to make up 2 weeks worth of work. Your appraisals, and therefore your raises, are purely results-based so expletive-laced computers with 5-year-old hard drives can bring your annual net change in pay to zero in an instant like that, without any hope of pleading your way out of negative reviews, except maybe after next fiscal year, even though you repeatedly asked that you get a new hard drive for the last 2 years to prevent disasters like this.

You go back to finish your extra-extra-extra-[276 more “extras”] long Monday to get what you can get done and then have a little more leverage, perhaps, to evoke that miracle drug that is scarce around here called “understanding.” It’s still worth it to try as an absolutely considerably even less-than-futile attempt to save your face and sense of respect to them, … you think anyway. You know that they will acknowledge that this is firmly planted in the “abso-f@#$%^&-lutley beyond your control” pot but will still hold you to that joker standard that they do anyway, because someone else was hurt by, the afore mentioned uncontrollable-factors-are-no-excuse standard in the past. They don’t have deaf ears, just ignorant ones, though the results of deaf or ignorant ears are indistinguishable. Save money on computer equipment = saving money on raises. You thought they would rather have the work done on time. God bless corporate America. Scott Adams definitely worked here.

Modern technology for one day = career flatline for a year. Who ends fiscal years on a Wednesday smack in the middle of a month anyway? Answer: to make this a Category 4 Monday.



Category 5 Monday:


You are slaving away, not unlike any other typical Monday, or any other day of the week, when you get a very startling email from the VP office as a CC: recipient saying: “A client caught a 2 million dollar error on his account and I suggest that this get fixed NOW!!! Because if it does not get fixed before I find out whose fault it is, they will be through!”

When you are the “big f@#$%^& grand f@#$%^& poo-bah of a …. junior Vice President” with the same last name as the company founder of a “highly professional firm” like “ours,” and have a largely absent real VP, and in an economy like ours right now, you can get away with a little bit of less-than-professional tyrannical overreactions that make Donald Trump and Steve Jobs look like Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo. You know immediately who made the common mistake that everyone makes, but not usually at that high amount, so you decide to reply-to-all on the email trying to gently stroke one of the two giant heads of this dragon, assuring that the issue will be resolved right away, and this castle doesn’t have to burn down to the ground right now. You BCC your reply to the guy who you know is the culprit so that person will fix it right away and avoid eminent danger to life and limb. Right…?

Dumbs@#$ you sends it to the wrong person who has one miniscule letter different in first name as the person whom should be the recipient of this email. Dumbs@#$% wrong-person-with-the-one-miniscule-letter-different-in-first-name-as-the-person-whom-should-receive-this-email hits a reply-to-all correcting the name of the intended recipient, with the CCs including the email address of the double-flame-thrower who has the 30-year-dead-founder as a great uncle. This ignorant fool just gave this dragon a large tractor-trailer of gasoline to swallow and a target in which to aim all of its contents in a form of matter resembling the contents within the center of the earth.

You of course reply to the bozo, without hitting reply-to-all ... let this jerk get the example so this will be repeated loudly: WITHOUT HITTING REPLY-TO-ALL: “Thank you for correcting me, but was it necessary to use reply-to-all as a BCC recipient, which stands for ‘Blind Courtesy Copy,’ with the correct recipient’s name???”

Having enough of the gist of the mail-chain to know who the real BCC target is, but not enough to know not to throw a fellow employee under the bus? Yes indeed, this employee works a safe thousand-miles away, in another facility of this “great company of ours.”

Now how do you kindly let new victims of your latest screw up that they are about to be canned because of you, and that they should run before his cubicle gets turned into a heap of black sooty cinders with little pieces of flames here and there still trying to stay alive on what meager bits of fuel the JVP has mercifully spared for them? Before you even get a chance to forewarn anyone, the victim is already having three security guards standing in the soon-to-be-former cubicle: two firmly locking arms behind the back pushing the victim out to the elevators, and one of them hastily finishing packing a box of personal items before scurrying to catch up to the rest of them. This is how they roll around here when you get fired, even though there is nothing here which needs such Pentagon-wannabe-type requirements of our security company. Just as the elevator doors close like coffin lids on the newly career-deceased, that JVP dares to say to you in front of the whole d@#$ floor, including the afore mentioned career-deceased, “I should turn back-stabbers like you loose on our competitors, as maybe only that will save our client from moving his account someplace else,” of course with no honorable mention of the other one a zillion light-years away who had p@#$-poor judgment on use of company email.

Of course only in your mind, you are performing all kinds of cutesy and acrobatic ways to give him a well-earned one-finger-salute. The Middle-Eastern-snakedancing arms almost gives you the chuckles. There’s also the old dzork-dzorking of the two offending digits in position to be members of the familiar Jacob’s Ladder devices in old black-and-white mad scientist films. The double-vertical spin sounds nice, as well as the cha-cha version. You think you might as well join the fate of the poor @#$%^&* you just threw to the dogs accidentally by attempting one of the above acts, for real, but you can’t think of a dramatic and clever enough act to make it worth it so after you quickly make the corrections the ex employee was to make. You spend the rest of the day attempting to do work between wonderings of how you are going to even begin to make up for this one’s burning-at-the-stake, and long sad looking stares at imaginary portraits on your monitor of you with a wicked smirk on your face and a dripping red-tipped dagger in your hand.

When the day decided to mercifully end, you go back to your familiar old silver vehicle to find all four of your tires resembling the shape of gumdrops: slashed, of course, by the newly career-deceased. Because you have to call the cops in order for your insurance company to cover vandalism under Comprehensive, and because you know the culprit and that your insurance would go after the newly unemployed to recover their money, you decide it best to eat this one yourself out of pocket. You know that you probably earned this one anyway, as much as you wish the ignorant e-mailer with the similar name had suffered an even worse fate. And as for the JVP, anyone know a good dragon slayer you can contract?

On your insurance, can you reclassify disgruntled ex employee vandalism as damage from a Category 5 Monday?

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