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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
I’ve been told — several thousand times by now, I’m sure — that sometimes I overthink things.
And it’s true. I’ll confess. I like to lift the curtain, to see what’s behind what is. I want to know the ‘why’ of things, how a thing has come to be, what might have happened instead, what could happen next, and what it all means. That’s just how I tick.
Of course, sometimes there’s nothing behind the curtain. It’s just a stupid curtain, and when you lift it, you wind up with your pants down in public.
I should probably connect those dots, from ‘overthinking’ to ‘public depantsing’. Lest you think I’m all weird or something.
(Oh, shut up. I know what you think.)
At work this week, a sign appeared on the stall — single stall; small company — in the mens’ room. The sign read:
THE DOOR HINGE IS BROKEN! MAINTENANCE WILL FIX SOON
Or words to that effect. I have to admit I didn’t look especially closely; I do my very best not to require the services of an enclosed bathroom stall at the office, so I noted that the door was amiss and went on about my business.
(My number one business. Because if I were doing other sorts of “business”, then… oh, you’ve got it? Super. Moving on.)
The sign stayed up all week, until this morning. As I took a pre-lunch constitutional down by the boys’ room urinal works, I noticed that the sign was no more.
“What’s the washroom chain of command here, and who notifies us grunts when the latrine is AWOL or not?”
That’s when the gears started whirring.
I realized that I didn’t know exactly when the sign came down. It could have been last night, or earlier this morning. Either way, we’ve got some people working long and strange hours some days. It might have been nice for someone to have sent out a notice — some kind of “stall’s well!” email, perhaps.
That train of thought just drove me further down the rabbit commode. What would the distribution list be for such an email? Only the guys care about what’s going on with the mens’ room stall, presumably. Do we have an email list of just the men in the company? Should we? Is that sexist somehow?
What if the email went out to everyone, including the women? Would they really want to read about every miniscule repair and update and paper roll restocking that goes on in our rest room? Would that be sexist? More so, or less?
Then I considered who’d be sending such an email. Most of our staff who would coordinate with maintenance are female. And most of the maintenance staff I’ve seen in the building are male. Would the person doing the work declare it done? Or would one of our administrators have to go in to sign off on it? Who does the final testing? What if it was a clog, or a wonky flusher handle? What’s the washroom chain of command here, and who notifies us grunts when the latrine is AWOL or not?
These questions raced through my head — spinning, like water down a bowl. Soon enough, it had my stomach keeping time with the churn. Finally — despite my strict personal policy — I could hold out no more, and I sat down in the recently de-signed stall. For business.
(Oh yeah. You know the kind I mean.)
I’d just dropped trousers and settled into the job when the mens’ room door opened and a couple of the execs came in, chatting. I heard them head to the sink — washing up for lunch, perhaps.
That’s when the stall door, hinge thoroughly busted, eased a corner from the frame and swung wide open outward, possibly hitting one of my uberbosses in the back.
They turned. I sat. I waved. They gaped. I asked for, “Little help, please?”
Which they gave, to very little avail. It just swung right back at them again. By the time their hands were clean, I was slumped half in the floor, trying simultaneously to keep the door hooked with my foot and not fall headfirst backwards into a bowl of my own “overthinking”.
I managed only one of the two. But I did keep my hair clean. I think I made the right choice.
And I vowed to try — oh man, will I try — not to overthink things in future. Some curtains are simply never meant to be peeked behind.
In other words, sometimes a bare bathroom stall door is an enigma, leading to all sorts of ‘whys’ and ‘what shoulds’ and ‘how’s the best way to bes’.
Other times? The sign that’s not there isn’t there any more because SOME HORSEHUMPING JACKASS STOLE THE DAMNED SIGN!
And that’s all I have to think about that.
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(The ‘Eek!Cards’ explan.)
(Also! There’s a new Zolton Does Amazon number over at ZuG. Check out Summer Like It Hot!. It’ll warm yer cockles, you betcha.
Speaking of Amazon, and books thereon, don’t forget the Woe of the Road book reading at Books on the Square in Providence this Saturday. It’s gonna be woe-tastic!)
Permalink | No CommentsMy office did an awful thing to me when I was hired. They bought me an outrageously kickass laptop to use.
You might think that would be a good thing. More power equals less frustration, right? And to a degree, that’s true. With all those extra-snappy electrons zooming around, my huge to-do lists open faster. Emailing those hourly TPS reports takes no time at all. Solitaire practically plays itself. So there are perks, sure.
But faster isn’t always better. Speed kills, too. Or at least gets you a big fat ticket and points on your license, and has you sent to a remedial adult ed. driving classes where they have one of the nastiest gross-out slide shows this side of “The Disgustingly Horrific Miracle of Birth“.
Or in this case, what speed gets me is “not off the hook”. Which is nearly as bad as those pictures of mangled sedans and throbbing placentas.
(It’s possible I may be confusing slide shows. On the bright side, I now have two top picks for band names, if I ever start that punk rock group.)
The thing is this: I’m a programmer. I sit at the computer all day, writing code and slurping files and poking at databases with a pointy electronic stick. Hence the hefty laptop. We’ve got these big jagged hunks of data, and I’m supposed to smooth out the edges, carve away the noise and sculpt something beautiful from the signal hidden in the hulking slabs.
“I’m accustomed to megabytes of RAM and noisy hard drives and Blue Screens of Damn-You-to-Hell-Bill-Gates-You-Four-Eyed-Weenie. “
(Never mind that all I know how make is lumpy ashtrays. No, you shut up.)
This is all well and good, and the muscle in my laptop’s chassis helps me get more things done in less time, at the same time, and practically all the time. It’s a rare moment when there’s not some window or other busy loading data or parsing data or breaking data down into little humbled bits, just to show it who’s freaking boss. Because sometimes tough love with computer files is the only thing they respond to.
“Give me an error, will ya? So help me, I will slap those smirking zeros right offa your ones, buster. You do not want to push me, blinky.”
So things are just peachy when I’m puttering away at my desk, alone. But it doesn’t always work that way. I’ve been around a few weeks now. People know where to find me. They mosey by my desk, hot on the heels of their data, and say:
“Hey. Show me what’s cooking.”
And therein lies the problem. Because with the bulging behemoth of an overgrown abacus on my desk, I can.
That’s new. And pretty damned inconvenient. I’m not used to this next-generation sci-fi-worthy sort of tech. I’m accustomed to megabytes of RAM and noisy hard drives and Blue Screens of Damn-You-to-Hell-Bill-Gates-You-Four-Eyed-Weenie. With the computers I’ve known, I might not get a big spreadsheet open if I moved the mouse the wrong way during the load. I’d get emails faster if you sent them in semaphore from a dinghy in the closest bay. “Multitasking” was a four-letter word.
(According to spell-check, anyway. Which took for-freaking-ever.)
So when someone asked for a report or a PowerPoint slide or a beautiful lumpy ashtray on the spur of the moment, I’d give it the old college try — and more often than not, the hardware would crap out. The screen would freeze, or blink, or fall on its pixelated knees and beg for mercy.
“Oh noes!” I’d say. “It looks like I’ll have to get this to you later.”
In other words, “off the hook”. Say what you will about four-year-old Dells. But those hunks of junk can come in pretty handy in a pinch.
This machine, though — this one is different. It doesn’t matter what else the computer is doing. It could be churning through fourteen files, calculating pi to a million digits and digitally remastering Star Wars to draw Leia bikinis on all the Jawas — because how cool would that be? — but there are still enough cycles lying around to do whatever insane computational gyrations are requested.
There’s no “later” any more. There’s only “more now”. All the “laters” in the day pile up and run at the same time, channeled down Slip-‘n’-Slides of RAM to separate humming processors at the core of this insatiable beast. No job is too large, too wide, or too “do it right now; I don’t care if you were totally about to wipe that smug grin off Freecell’s face”.
And then “later” gets filled up with tomorrow’s “nows”, and then tomorrow’s “laters”, and pretty soon this machine is doing work I had every intention of putting off till next summer. It just won’t stop. It’s relentless. It’s a machine.
So productivity’s through the roof, which is good, I guess. And people who stop by my desk get their answers right away. I’m know they appreciate that. They say so in the emails that come careening at warp speed into my inbox now. I suppose I should be happy. It’s just…
With all that work getting done all the time on the machine, I haven’t had the time to beat Minesweeper into submission. And damn, are those bytes getting uppity. I might have to fake a blown keyboard soon, just for the chance to put that game back in its place. “You wanna piece of me, hotshot?!”
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