Still Just a Rat in a Cage

I’m now fully moved to my new home at work, and if I close my door I feel like I’m in one of those underground control centers. Let me lay it out for you, so you know what I’m dealing with:

<>I have to walk through one locked door (unless the tech support guy “Jose” is in there, in which case I just walk through the open door and past him) into the tech support room. My room is in the very back of this room, behind another locked door. When you walk through that second door, you will be in a 12x14 foot room with wooden shelves about a foot deep along the right wall and the back wall. On the ground along the right wall are filing cabinets with tabletops on them. These masquerade as desks. From the front of the room to the back, the desks are filled with equipment. In order: Tech support computer (not mine), a monitor, a dot-matrix printer (mine), a laser printer (mine), a WYSE terminal (my connection to the my work’s system), another monitor (for my regular computer), and a fax machine. In between the “desk” and the back wall shelves lies the computer I am using to compose this, which is standing ghetto on an upside-down garbage can. Even more ghetto is the clock-radio, which is on that computer itself since there is no more room on the desk. This right side is the part that looks like some sort of control center, and makes me feel like I’m at NASA or something. I reckon I’d be getting paid a bit more at NASA, though.

Above the “desk” are the wooden shelves, which have all the supplies I use on a day-to-day basis, including my “The Onion” desk calendar, which currently shows the headline “New Grill to Revive Foreman-Ali Rivalry”. There is a picture of a Muhammad Ali Grill on it, dubbed “The Greatest Grill of All Time.” I love The Onion. This headline replaced this previous one, which I had up for about 6 months: “Evil Genius Puts Windows 98 in Water Supply”. Apropos for a computer store, no?

On top of those shelves are huge cardboard boxes stacked all the way to the ceiling. I hope they don’t fall on me. I’m going to have nightmares about that now.

Moving to the back wall, you see a ton of little cardboard boxes on shelves that stretch from the floor 7 feet up the wall. You also see other misc. parts, and the overall effect is that of a bunch of computer crap. It’s very valuable to us, though, which is why I’m at such a secure location, behind 2 locked doors and out of the way of everything but the dust mites and paper shreds that literally litter my floor.

If you look to the left now you’ll see two huge wooden doors that open from the middle out. These doors have to remain clear, so I cannot stack the stuff against this (my only open) wall that I need to survive. So in the center of the room are two huge boxes – one with packing peanuts in it and the other with cardboard boxes. I improvise because I have to. I’d do just fine in the ghetto.

They tell me I’ll probably be moving right back to where I was in a month or so, which will be nice. I feel like a rat in a cage in here, despite all my rage. That line never did make sense. Anyway, most people around here feel the problem with this place of work is they never plan anything out properly, and don’t keep associates informed when they do something that will affect them. Another case in point: last Friday I lost internet access at work, with no warning to me or anyone else. I told my supervisor, and he told me that they just decided to get rid of all internet access for “departments” and go to the more easily-trackable “individual humans”, which is all well and good, but I NEED INTERNET ACCESS TO DO MY JOB. Apparently an e-mail was sent by home office to all the stores on December 21st, informing them of the change that would happen “sometime in January”,and it never got as far as even my supervisor. Of course, sending an e-mail like that in the middle of Christmas rush is mind-blowingly stupid as well. All these people share blame equally. I am now using my supervisor’s e-mail “account” until I get my own.

Here’s a word of advice: If you don’t have to get a job, don’t. These people are just maniacs out here.