Work was a challenge today – and I didn’t get there until 11:30. I report to a particular patent lawyer, but he is not my boss. The best days are when I don’t have to work with him. I get along with most people, but something about him just isn’t right. He comes off as a very immature forty something year old man. He gets caught up in office gossip and tries to get information out of me. He tells me I shouldn’t “associate” with the admins or people will start to consider me one. However, I like the admins and I don’t care what people think. Then he comments that our boss probably doesn’t like us (meaning the admins and I) talking during the day. (My boss jokes around with us and has never mentioned us talking.) The lawyer’s office is around the corner so I know we aren’t bothering him. Maybe we should sit at our desk and never say a word to anyone? That doesn’t seem healthy.
Okay, but the real point of this is he comes across as stupid. He can be eloquent and is very good with the lawyerese, but as an engineer – I have serious doubts. We can hear the same inventor talk and he gets nothing out of it. We can talk about an invention one day and the next day I have to explain it all again. Today it took me 15 minutes to explain to him why a unicast signal would be faster than a multicast signal. It seems to me anyone who knows what the prefixes “uni” and “multi” mean could figure out the rest. How infuriating!
And since I am on a roll here. The lawyer and his admin got into it over something (beats me what) and it ended up at human resources. The lawyer made a fool of himself (face turning red, knocking over a chair, etc). When he found out he had some information wrong, he went back to HR and apologized. I was so impressed. I started thinking I had him pegged incorrectly. Then he opened his mouth not 15 minutes later. He started complaining about his neighbors. His neighbor’s kid dared to play basketball until 9 pm at night. Then he explained how his neighbors got their property line confused and planted some shrubs a foot onto his property. He made them move them – he didn’t want to maintain them or be responsible if someone got hurt working on them. I told him the story of the people deeding (at no cost) my mom 9 feet because of a misplaced fence. He laughed and said what a great idea – he could offer the foot of land to his neighbors for $100,000. Wow – what a way to miss the point.
I told my friend Steven that people at work made me mad. This was his perfect response, “Holly, I gave you that rubberband rifle for a reason. these would be the reasons.”
Now I am off to study for another test.
J
Holly, weren’t you supposed to, you know, refrain from discussing this sort of office stuff in your blog because other people (read as: the very same you poke fun of) might be reading?
I only ask as a curiosity since you know how little I care about other peoples’ feelings.
Administrator
Except my wonderful husband has figured out a way to block certain entries from being viewed at work. I guess if they went home and tried to read it they could get to it, but it seems unlikely they would.
steven
i was going to say the same as j. saying bad things about work publicly can come back to you. plus its my thing to do, copycat. but you should still show everyone a picture of the rubberband gatling gun we’re building.