Sup guys, update time. But first, in response to my last post, I guess I’m not doing this shit forreals, …yet, or I don’t know, I guess I’m only doing it forreals when I feel like it. So yeah, also Happy New Year! It might be the last one we all have! Or at the very least it might be the last one you have! That’s a valid statement regardless of the Mayans and their calendar, because no one knows when they are going to die. It might be in five minutes, you don’t know. The reason I’m telling you this is to make you happy. Being reminded of one’s imminent death forces one to be happy because then you’re not even sure if you can afford the time to be sad, so you should be elated just in case. I mean noone wants to die sad, right? so anyway, you’re welcome.
Back to the matter at hand. I wrote this at work today, why? Because a good part of my workday is filled with doing absolutely nothing, sitting in front of a computer with no internet access, waiting for a call that could never come. And today I was informed we’re not to read books, and so I decided to free write. Here’s what I wrote.
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We can no longer read books at work. I find it frighteningly idiotic. The reasoning behind the prohibition is that yesterday (a day I was fortunate enough to be absent), the client whom we work for stopped by the call center to inspect us. Having sat with a number of agents they quickly were made aware of the embarrassingly small amount and pathetically low quality of training we received, having bore witness to the fact that a lot of us don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. I’m sure that realizing that the majority of the agents are obnoxious morons didn’t help.
I always get shit from my coworkers for being too quiet. I never talked during “training”, even though it consisted of nothing more than sixty people being locked into one room for eight hours a day, five days a week. Everyone else conversed and carried on discussions as crude and unintelligent as any that you’d expect to hear amongst people of substandard mental capacity; I read instead. Not that all my co-trainees were intolerable, but the lot that were, were extremely so. One girl, I’m still unsure of her name, Jennifer or Jessica ( I’ve overheard her say it, but only long after I learned to take no note of anything she says) was probably the one I held the most contempt towards.
She isn’t entirely hideous-looking, but she’s far from attractive. If she lost fifty pounds and gain one IQ point for every pound she lost, and did something about her acne, she would be much more pleasant and I’d be inclined to like her more, even if only due to biological reasons.
However, at the present, such is not the case. The main cause of my dislike towards her was her constant auditory presence inside the training room. Not only did she insist on adding her own opinion and commentary on each, every and any issue brought up, even interrupting the trainer if necessary (albeit she was a trainer in job title only), but she did so without adding one iota of insight of useful information whatsoever. Now I’ve no qualms about having my attention boldly and brusquely demanded if you have something of import or of quality, but I resent someone who demands my attention merely to fulfill their need to be the center of attention. I feel that such behavior is nothing more than an external expression of the person’s own delusions and robs all those whose attention is drawn of one of their most precious resource for success; focus.
As an example of the utter lack of substance that Jennica? considers invaluable for all to hear, I recall a particular conversation she held with another trainer who was brought into introduce herself as she may become direct supervisor to some of us once training is over.
The trainer’s name was Cheryl and she blathered, ” I once ran a doughnut shop when I lived in Rhode Island. That’s why I’m always on the go! gogogo! Why, when I moved down here I was surprised to see how much slower (ie; lazy) people are in the South. You can’t be easy-going to run a successful doughnut shop! No sir, not in Rhode Island, you can’t! You gotta be up and at ‘em, and not let anything slow you down! that goes for this job too! Why just the other day on a call I got called ‘the most incompetent person the pharmacist ever had the displeasure of talking to’, but did I let that slow me down? No! I took like a true Rhode Islander and kept going! Also the only Oreo’s I eat are double-stuffed and I have this very particular way of eating them. Here, let me tell you about how I eat Oreos while I mime the procedure…”*
After her spiel I made a mental note to myself to never visit Rhode Island. However, the speech seemed to deeply impress Jessifer? as she immediately blurted, “If you like Oreos, you must like me! See?” and proceeded to hold up her tubberware container with a few Oreos, the doomed survivors of the lunchtime carnage, inside. After my inital digust that she would somehow think anyone gave a fraction of a fuck, I found a bit of comfort in that Cheryl quickly dismissed Jesnicer? once finding out they were not, in fact, double stuffed. Then I felt a bit ashamed for having mentally picked sides in this retard battle.
Now some of my detractors may say I’m being too harsh on the girl for an admittedly stupid but generally harmless exclamation. I say that they didn’t have to be in my position and be forced to listen to this incessant stream of time-consuming, mind-degrading idiocies, ranging from her love of Justin Beiber to how unfortunate the individual who played leapfrog with a unicorn must be. Even then, her overall stupidity only lays the foundation of my disinterest towards her. The principal reason for my personal dislike of her lies in her all too regular greeting towards me.
There I am walking into work in the morning, not very pleased with the terms of my wages slavery, having been forced to stir before noon. My general unpleasantness having been subdued a tad due to the bowl of dank smoked during my morning commute. As I swipe my card key and pry the door open, my excitement for my daily lunchtime bowl begins to build. I walk towards my cubicle, planning on immersing myself in whichever book I’ve chosen that day (currently The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, if anyone cared) when I see the unmistakable, absent-minded grin of our antagonist waddling towards me. I quickly focus my gaze on some light fixtures on the other side of the room, when I hear
“HOLA!”
in a thick southern American accent, and see that absentminded grin turn into a full-fledged half-witted smile. I purse my lips into my ‘I’m-acknowledging-your-greeting-only-out-of-my-innate-manners’ half-smile, mutter “hello..” and walk briskly to my work desk, attempting to refrain from deriding her on the office floor. The matter wouldn’t bother me as much if it didn’t happen EVERY FUCKING TIME. And on the few times where I just ignored her and carried on, I’m pretty sure she had to gall to say to the person next to her something about my lack of friendliness, as if her entirely too obtuse salutation had nothing to do with it.
Now it’s not that I’m ashamed of my heritage, but I’m not particularly proud of it either. I find pride to be a very corrupting thing, and while I feel it does have it’s beneficial uses, it is only a good thing when one does something and earns that pride. No one earns their ethnicity, race or nationality, so I consider all of those things very stupid to be proud of. On the other hand if you earn a doctorate or do something noble, then I think you should be proud. But black pride and “Viva La Raza!” is just as stupid as White Pride, in my book. My problem with this bitch though is that she, like an unfortunate amount of people I’ve come across in my years, takes my skin color as an open invitation to practice their Spanish with me. Now doing it ironically or just the first time we meet, I can kinda understand, I don’t like it anymore than usual, but obvious racial jokes are the moron’s last resort for wit (with this I mean witless racial jokes like greeting every hispanic person with “Hola!”, people who do racial jokes well, ala Dave Chapelle, are not morons in the slightest), and I can testify to the uncontrollable urge to at least seem witty as much as possible. But doing it regularly, even after my initial attempts of making you seem stupid by replying with only my What-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you-face; well that takes a certain type of density in a person.
I presume that she’s unaware of how stupid she sounds (or even worse, is a member of a certain ideology that takes pride in their ignorance, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt). In fact, this situation may be similar to the Oreo one. In the same way that she felt Cheryl must like her due the their shared interest in Oreos, she may have thought we share a similar kindred spirit because she can say basic phrases in my native language. She may even feel proud of herself and her observational skills, because she managed to piece together my skin color with that of being hispanic and concluded that since hispanic people speak spanish, that I must speak spanish. If that were the logic behind it, I should probably call some fancy university or something, because I may have discovered the first use of inductive reasoning in chimps. Either way, despite her good intentions, the first impression she left me with was so dense, I feel a second one might kill me.
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*paraphrasing, but that was the basic gist I got out of it.