Tired Thursday afternoon

I met up with Heidi yesterday after work. It was good to see her and catch up on things. Who knows how many more chances I'm going to have to hang out with my friends in person before I'm out of here. Heidi's an absolute hoot - I'm glad we were able to coordinate a time to see each other.

After I got home I made a batch of cookies to bring into work. I was confronted with the dilemma of workplace etiquette regarding the distribution and sharing of food product. There are people I like at work, and people I don't. I really only wanted to share the pains of my labor with the people I like, but it would be pretty damn obvious if I was only handing out cookies to a select few people. (I made the cookies from scratch. This wasn't a package of Oreos.) I didn't feel like sneaking around, surreptitiously handing cookies on the sly to people hoping I didn't get "caught" by someone.

I decided to send out the obligatory "I brought cookies!" e-mail to the whole team. I hit send and put the cookies out. The container had hardly hit the table when one of the guys I work with, that I don't like, was there to grab a couple cookies. I smiled and went back to my cube. I sat down and tried to calculate in my head how many cookies that guy and another gal would eat combined, and hoped that I had enough for everyone, knowing that these two yahoos have little regard for other people and scarcity of resources.

I've got two co-workers in particular that are driving me nuts right now. A gal and a guy. The gal is one of those people who talks on her cell phone in her cube half the day. Loudly. She also frequently just yells out questions at jpd from her cube, without getting up. Sometimes jpd doesn't hear the questions, because like the rest of us jpd is listening to her headphones, so this gal just yells louder. Nice. She drinks TaB all day and consumes potato chips like they're going out of style. She's got a fine layer of snack crumbs in her cube, which she wades through in bare feet frequently. Apparently magenta-colored lipstick is permissible in her world and she continues to rock the blonde-hair-with-roots a la 1984-Like-a-Virgin-Madonna.

The guy? He just moved in. That is, his cube used to be on the other side of the LL. (It stands for "lower level" a.k.a. basement, but sometimes we pretend it stands for "luxury level". Why? Because cinder blocks are pretty glamorous.) When we downsized the temp pool last week he moved closer to the remaining group. This was an unfortunate turn of events. He's always up, walking around, either talking to the aforementioned gal, or asking jpd questions. Lots and lots and lots of questions. Questions that shouldn't be asked by someone who has been working on this project for a couple months. And since I sit right next to jpd, I have to listen to him so he's distracting her and me. And he's kinda creepy. He seems like the kind of guy who might have a pit in his basement like the guy in Silence of the Lambs.

I'd like to think that I'm above badmouthing people that I work with, but I'm not. They aggravate me to no end. And I'm in no position of authority to do anything about them. My job is to put my head down and work which, in the interest of a paycheck, I am more than willing to do for a few more weeks. I just hope with all my heart that jpd will escape the LL and make it up to a floor with windows. And for now, I'll just think about beaches and mai tais, and look forward to a change of employment in about two or three months.