Daily Archives: January 31, 2008

Quicksand

It’s Thursday and it is to laugh. My sister took a Laughter Yoga course last weekend. Apparently, laughter IS the best medicine. If you laugh you feel good, and even if you fake laughing you can still get the benefits. With the day that I had today, I got some laughter in this afternoon and it really helped my mood. You know, last Thursday when I was sick, was a better Thursday than today. One of the things Tom Chin said, as a warning perhaps, that this week would be employee reviews, to determine the mythical bonuses.

A few people were called into closed door sessions, but not me. Neither was one of the Stooges, Moe. He’s been on the outs with Vivek who smiles in Moe’s face, while sharpening a knife. Last month Vivek asked me to find out how soon someone could be expelled from the network. The answer was, it could be within minutes, depending on where the IT was, if he was available or not, or he would send his assistant into the office to do it. So that could all be tomorrow. Getting rid of myself and Moe would save the company some money. I’d prefer it doesn’t happen, but in the event that it does happen, I set about cleaning out my desk.

I admit I was disappointed it didn’t happen today, I was on pins and needles all day. I did get a lot of work done, which means if I don’t get fired, I will have very little to do next week. Already some tasks hat I used to do have been reassigned to Lydia. I talked to a temp, Peaches, who works for another company that sublets office space from us while having a smoke.

She told me about how she was once let go from a company that gave her six months salary as a severance package. That would be nice to have. She called it shut up money, whereas other people or companies would call it hush money. A tidy amount to keep one’s mouth shut. I do have things to shut my mouth about. Monkeys in trees eating bananas while singing dirges in the original Latin. Things like that. I think Tom Chin who was more than likely bullied when he was growing up 50 years ago might see this as an opportunity to lord it over me. I see that mentioning those two things might give me some leverage. Dirge singing monkeys banana smeared mouths spewing Latin. I’m fucking Matt Damon.

It was an odd day. The only people that spoke to me was Moe, Curly and Lydia. Greg Stevens said hi in passing. Vivek totally ignored me after saying hello to just about everyone else in the office. Tom Chin didn’t say anything either. Whatever it is, I did my best. I tried to create a system in the office so things would run smoothly. True there was that file that was on my desk last week, though to my credit, I did phone in and tell them where it was.

Not good enough I guess. If I didn’t get sick last week this all could have been avoided, but I got sick and that’s that. Nobody got hurt, no rules were broken, no information or identities stolen. So this is where I stand. Not feeling secure in my job, but able to laugh, and that’s what’s important. I guess that’s why I’m feeling pretty positive, not the negative person I could be and have been when in situations like this. And so I laugh! Like so…and I’m not being sarcastic