Living in Interesting Times.
I get sidetracked more easily than a Conrail freight train making local deliveries. I originally wanted to title this entry “Living in Interesting Times”. I think that may be too long for the display, though, so I haven’t made up my mind if I’m going to truncate it to “Interesting Times” or not. Maybe I’ll change it altogether. I think I’ll wait until I hit the “submit” button and surprise myself.
Anyhow, I’ve used this phrase before, and I’ve seen others use it, and they usually say it’s an old Chinese curse. I decided to do a quick Google search on it, to verify it was Chinese and to make sure that I got the exact wording correct. Instead of getting verification, damned if I didn’t get these:
If you have any interest in the history of language and phrases, you might get a kick out of these sites. If not, suffice to say that this isn’t a Chinese curse, and it probably isn’t even particularly ancient. I do like the addendum to it: “and attract the attention of important people”. It’s a sort of “twist the knife with a flourish” ending to an already eloquent insult.
None of which has any direct bearing to me living in interesting times.
I’m still deferring my update on Washington DC. I’ve pictures to go with it, and I haven’t attended to editing the shots so they’re diary-appropriate. I’ll get to it one of these days. Let it suffice for me to say that we had a good time, that I got my ride on the merry-go-round (while my cohorts heckled me the entire time), I ate well, and I was ready to strangle our house guest by the time he left, although he’s a joy to be with and I look forward to meeting up with him again. Hopefully, not at our place.
As for my illness of Tuesday and Wednesday, it was of a fleeting nature, and seems to be mostly over, though I have a mild headache even now that may or may not be related. I returned to work today to news that there’s a 24-hour stomach bug going around. I have no idea if I had another migraine, or if I caught the stomach virus. I prefer to think virus, although I am extremely lucky if that is really what it was. With the immunosuppressants, it could have been far worse.
Perhaps it was neither migraine nor virus, but sheer providence. This provides a nice segue into the working title of this entry, “Interesting Times”.
It appears that while I was at home in bed feeling miserable yesterday, my coworkers were in their offices at their desks feeling miserable. We had a major breakdown in one section of our building that forced an early shutdown of that half of the company. The workers, who I understand were overjoyed to be leaving at 2:30, are singing a different tune today, for today and tomorrow we’re working overtime to catch up on time lost. And I, who missed the complete day, will be making up the time the hard way. I anticipate the earliest I’ll be home today and tomorrow will be 8:OO.
Not only did we have a breakdown of major proportions, but we also incurred some incredible losses because of it. There had been some talk of attempting to process manually, since the automatic systems were not at our disposal, but saner heads prevailed. Yes, we took a loss, but we managed to cut our losses by admitting it in time to save on manpower and not take any chances with the final results. That will stand our company in good stead, and it gives me renewed reason for taking pride in being affiliated with this place.
Unfortunately, concurrently and independently to this, elsewhere in the building the unthinkable was happening. It wasn’t exactly our company’s worst nightmare, but it was bad enough. For the first time in our corporation’s 100+ year history, one thing we never wanted to have happen did happen. I don’t know full details myself, but I do know that an error occurred early in the week that is going to cost us big time. The financial loss is one thing, but the hit to our reputation is going to be worse. It was simple human error, and easily fixed, but we will never again be able to stand alone and claim that we are free from this blemish on the company record. I’m just glad that it didn’t happen anywhere that had anything to do with the part of things I’m responsible for overseeing.
For those of you who don’t recall my “moral dilemma” of last month, you may wish to go to 21 Sep 2003 – “The Heart at Conflict with Itself” and review the fifth section of that day’s entry (damn, I was a writing fool that day, wasn’t I?). For those of you with better memories or less patience, there is a poster with the new company logo on it in each department, with lines underneath the logo. There is the expectation that we would all sign the poster as a gesture of company spirit.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I happen to like the company I work for a lot, and I admire their commitment to do the right thing. Having said that, I cannot fully place my support behind this new ad campaign of theirs. I personally feel it emphasizes the wrong thing, and while I can understand the benefits of using it as a company jingle, I have been hired to make other things my priority, and I take that seriously. It isn’t that I don’t think that what we’re promoting isn’t worthy, I just think that it falls to about fifth or sixth on my list of personal priorities, and I am very uncomfortable with affixing my signature to it. It makes me feel like this is taking precedence over other things, when there are other things far more important than this.
I had believed we were going to be asked to put our names on stickies, and then these stickies would be affixed to the poster. This was fine by me; I was going to take the weasel’s way out of my conundrum by telling myself that all I was doing was signing a blank piece of plastic, and what they stuck that plastic to was none of my concern.
It turns out that, in our department at least, we are expected to sign the damned poster directly. As luck would turn out, nobody told me the poster was there, and nobody asked me to sign it. So I’ve been ignoring it for weeks. I thought I was actually home free, that I’d been forgotten.
My luck dissipated today, probably because everybody was in a bad mood because of all the other evil goings on in our corner of the universe. It had apparently not gone unnoticed that I hadn’t signed the poster; it had just gone unvoiced. Today, while I was in the main office picking up my mail, two of my cohorts asked if I’d signed the poster yet. I felt threatened, but not yet cornered. I knew these two felt as I did. Perhaps there would be some mercy.
“No I haven’t,” I said. “No one told me it was there, and nobody’s said I had to sign it yet. So I’m just laying low.” This lead to a discussion, where it was inevitably pointed out to me that this wasn’t like I was signing a contract or anything, I was just putting my name under the slogan. There was no sympathy when I said that I considered putting my name to that the moral equivalent of signing a contract. In a last ditch effort to squiggle out, I said that I was just going to let it go until someone in authority told me I had to sign it. I was hoping that the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” attitude that has pervaded the office since the kick-off of this campaign would prevail, and they’d tire of making sport of me and let me off the hook this time. Alas, this was not to be.
One of the two I was speaking to is slightly above me in the corporate scale. “Well, I guess I’m telling you to sign it then,” she informed me. “We all had to suck it up, and you do too.” OK, maybe I paraphrased a bit there, but that was the gist.
OK, this was a major “Oh Shit” moment. Do I stick to my guns and make a mountain out of a molehill? Or do I “suck it up” and do the politically correct and morally uncomfortable thing?
I compromised. I signed it, but I misspelled my name.
My last name is difficult to spell. It is very ethnic, and carries with it all the idiosyncrasities of its country of origin. Most people unfamiliar with the name misspell it all the time, and that was the way I signed. In short, no one is likely to notice my little act of defiance. And I, while feeling like I caved under pressure, at least have the satisfaction of knowing that I still haven’t agreed to this in my heart.
Epilogue: One of the few people I work with who I fully trust came in to witness the act of me signing. On our way out of the office she noted, “So they got to you too.” I acknowledge that they finally cornered me. In an act of camaraderie she confided, “You know, they never got JS to sign it either.” She looked expectantly at me.
Nope, not going to do it. There’s no way I’m going to fink out a confederate. If the corporate cheerleading squad wants to go after her too, that’s one thing, but I’m not going to be of any assistance. I may try to give JS a call later and warn her to duck the two who nailed me. Might as well give one of us a fighting chance.
Ah. Just got a call from Dr. Liver’s office. They have a cancellation and an opening for me to see him on November 11th at 2:45. I don’t know what else I have going on that day, but if there’s anything, I’ll cancel it. I’m not going to lose this appointment.
I had no idea that life post-transplant was going to be this complicated. I think I have more appointments for doctors and bloodwork and specialists than I did before the surgery.