So let me preface this by relaying that I’m in a shitty mood today. Something’s tweaked in the neurons and due to my distaste for megapharma, I can’t just pop a percocet. I’ve pretty much had a hair-trigger on annoyed the entire morning. After a rough dose of winks Monday night, and another example of an absent-minded ass being inconsiderate last night, I just have no patience.
And now for some setting: meeting in the conference room for web items after a brief standup listing off current and pending projects. Myself, along with four others are half into a long list of changes that are more looming than currently pressing. Each list item seems to spark a redundant discussion about how and who’s doing what and when. Roughly four items have actually changed since last week—out of 2.16 pages landscape layout though, so don’t get ahead of me.
Something comes up; a very simple change to a form that likely has an admin attached to it. I don’t know where the admin is, but I’ve made a note to find it. There are really two paths for these discussions; either mention an incredibly simple item as an elaborate monstrosity, or breeze over an intricate problem as if it should already have been done. The form is incredibly simple; it’s almost to the point of ridiculous. But I still have to find it. This has little-to-no bearing on the meeting because the person who will be changing the items in the admin isn’t present.
After we’ve gone over this in detail for a few minutes I start to grow impatient. With my aforementioned low tolerance for irritation I blurt out, in response to a question about the complexity of the form, “It’s real simple. Down-syndrome simple. Not a problem.”
Whoa. Yah, I know. This is something I say to make a joke around the lakehouse. I use extremes for the reaction. This has no place in the workplace. In no way do I cater to the politically correct crowd, but it’s also fucking disgusting and I immediately have regrets about saying it. But at the same time I was amazed.
In reaction to a comment as distasteful and inappropriate as that, I received only one sideways glance. It was from the woman at my eight-o-clock and sparked immediate guilt. I couldn’t see the reaction of the girl directly across, but neither the woman at my ten-o-clock nor my three-o-clock gave even the slightest pause.
This could mean one of three things: these women are already accustomed to my idiotic comments, are unsympathetic of the disabled, or are too wrapped up in their own existence to even notice something so ridiculous. I’ve only been working here a few months— so it’s not the first, and I find it hard to believe even a socially-handicapped person could be that insensitive, so I’m led to believe that they were just too absorbed in what they were trying to get across to be paying close enough attention.
That’s incredible. To be that concerned with a list of tweaks that hasn’t changed for three weeks that you can’t afford a reaction to something so verbally apprehensible? Because of their disregard I felt like I was robbed an opportunity to apologize by the uninterrupted conversation.
What the hell is it with people whose personal bubbles are so opaque they run into shit? And for some of them it’s like there are mirrors dangling from the interior. They stare at you, but simultaneously off in the distance like they see some reflection of an out-of-place follicle. How the fuck do you pass through life like this? The woman who was sitting to my right seems like a nice lady, so I have to hope she just wasn’t paying attention. The egocentrism of the other is almost tactile, like a fat man eating sausage behind me at a game, so it’s hard to say in her case.
Either way it’s a dick thing to say and I take it back.
how fitting for this, the one hundredth post of this particular web log eh?