22 Year Old Dies From Work-Related Stroke

So all day yesterday, and most of the day before, I just sat in front of my computer and played on the internet. It was pretty fun actually. I checked my bank balance. I ordered some books I wanted. I set up my phone bill to be automatically paid online, and I somehow accidentally navigated to a few porn sites which I quickly closed and prayed that none of my company’s IT guys decide to research my internet history. I started to feel a little guilty about this when I left at 5 and saw my co-workers madly working. I knew they’d be staying till about 7. But they all like me, so they don’t mind.

Now, you might be wondering why I’m not super busy and also staying until 7. Well, I’m still the new kid. After the projects I’m given to work fizzle out after a few hours, I spend the rest of the day trying to find something to do. I’ve figured out that when my supervisor doesn’t have work for me to do, it’s because he thinks our boss already gave me something. So basically I’m like that guy in Office Space who no one notices has already been fired. My boss thinks my supervisor’s keeping me busy and he thinks my boss is keeping me busy! Hooray for falling through the corporate cracks!

But I have been a little worried that doing nothing and then going home is a little bad and that I might get in trouble for it. Whenever anyone walks by my cubicle, I madly scramble around, trying to minimize the screens with the google search results about where to find the best ribs in southern California or what local salon Suzie Message-Board recommends. I’ve honestly tried to find work, but I think I’m just too damned efficient. When I get some task, I get all excited and I finish it. There in lies the mistake.

I now know that no ones expects a deadline out of me and that’s probably the only task I’m gonna have all day today, maybe all week. So unless I stretch it out and do some web-surfing (and possibly blogging) in between working, there will always be the awkward moment when I hand the finished work to my boss too early and she says “you’re done already?” And then there’s the uncomfortable few minutes of her not knowing what else to give me and me just standing there, shifting from one foot to the other, waiting, and secretly wondering if I’ll make it back to my desk in time for the end of my Ebay auction.

So I’ve continued in my merry ways of just doing what I’m told and nothing more. (That’s the American way!) So, today I was fairly shocked when my manager came over and told me we were having a “surprise” staff meeting. Really? And you want me there? I still think you’d be better off including the mail boy in that meeting than me. But I reluctantly close my instant messenger conversations, grab a pen and pad of paper to make me look official, and go to the conference room.

My department has been pretty empty lately. There’s always someone out sick. And there’s only about 7 of us. Every day I’ve been here at least one person has been out sick. And unfortunately, it’s never been me. Either there’s a crazy corporate accounting bug going around, which I’ll inevitably get, or people have begun realize that this job sucks and need one day a week to stay home and scream into their pillows.

So today happens to be a very poor turnout day. Probably because it’s Friday and because…well, because it’s Friday! That’s a great reason to stay home! I, for one, don’t have the luxury to take sick days every time a Friday rolls around, like the rest of my department seems to. I have officially accrued 2 vacation days. That’s right. Two days. Until next year, that’s all I get. But I really think that I might be able to just sneak in in the morning and put an inflatable doll at my desk, and no one would know the difference. And maybe a tape recording of me that plays every few hours that says things like “I don’t know.” Or “I’m new.” Or “Is that something I should know?”

This “surprise” staff meeting was poorly attended. I plopped down on a chair next to the one office-mate I can stand, and our boss walks in and shuts the door. That’s funny, she doesn’t usually shut the door. Everyone else looks very serious and I begin to wonder if I’m missing something.

“I have a very big announcement,” my boss said. I look up from my doodle of my boss on a surf board to listen. “Heather is going to be leaving us.”

WHAT?! I nearly fell off my chair! I’m sure I turned the shade of a beet and began to have a heart attack! Are you kidding me?!? This is how you fucking fire me?! What the…

But I realize that no one’s looking at me. Everyone’s looking down the conference table at… the other Heather! (Refer to my first blog for details) Oh my god.. abort self-destruct.. abort. We’re OK…. Resume normal breathing and heart rate. What’s that ringing in my ears? Does anyone else notice the room is spinning?

I have no idea why the other Heather is leaving because I spent the rest of the meeting trying to regain my composure. I fanned myself with my pad of paper and tried to make my heart beat not feel like an African drum. It’s ok.. It’s ok.. you’re not fired…

There was a lot of sighing and near tears between the other Heather and my boss, but the jist I got was that the other Heather wanted out. And rightly so! This means I’m officially the only Heather in the office! Hooray!

As we all file back out of the conference room, there are some very down faces. Mostly because everyone knows this means the workload has now increased for the rest of us. But I don’t care. Maybe that means my work load will increase from non-existant to barely filling an hour. Woohoo! One girl is kind of weeping, probably because the other Heather is her only other office friend and she’s sad to see her go. As I leave (I would have skipped out, but my heartbeat hadn’t returned to normal) the other Heather stopped me. She said “I noticed you getting a little chocked up in there when you heard. Thank you for caring so much, Heather!” And gave me a hug.. “Yeah,” I said, wiping a bead of sweat from my brow, passing it off as a tear, “You’ll be missed.”

An Office Chair Wheeled Straight From Heaven

There are few excitements in life when you work in an office. A big one is new office supplies. Today I came back from lunch (very late by the way, so in fact, I snuck back in from lunch) and I found a brand new, state of the art, Aeron Posture-Fit adjustable office chair in my cubicle!

At first I thought there’d been a mistake. I wanted to find some maintenance person in the halls and be like “Wait, you don’t seem to understand. My cubicle has come to be known as the place where office equipment goes to die. This can’t possibly be right. I want my old chair back before I start getting a big head. You’ll know which one it is. It has ripped upholstery and one wheel is sort of cock-a-mamie. And if you sit on it and wheel it to the right too fast, it makes a sound like a dying cat. And if you lean back too far, a spring pops loose that makes you freeze in your recline and wonder if that sound was the chair or your back giving out. Kindly fetch my chair from the dumpster, where it most assuredly is. I know my place in this office and I won’t have it any other way.”

Honestly, my cubicle is filled with old equipment. My computer is old and grainy and when you want it to do something complicated, like open an excel file, it crunches and cranks like it’s using a cheese grader to produce results. I think there’s a hamster running on a wheel that makes my computer run. Also, all of my office supplies seem to be the office rejects. I have rusty scissors that look like they were left over from when the company began, and if I want any kind of “new technology”, like, for example, a 3-hole punch, it takes 6 weeks to order it.

When I first got here, the assistant told me to make a list of everything I needed in my cube. I was so excited by this prospect. I was gonna make my cube the picture of modern office living. So I spent an entire work day picking out the kind of calendar I wanted. One with a tree of the month on it? One with inspirational quotes? One with a dry erase option? The possibilities were endless and I was so excited. After flipping through pages and pages of calendars, I realized I’d been looking for a few hours, and that was verging on just plain crazy. So I picked one and then moved on to mouse pads.

So after ordering all sorts of things to make my cubicle livable, I sent my order in and sat back to await all my supplies. After all, who can work without an ergonomic floating-gel-cushioned wrist guarded mouse pad? I sure can’t. So I refused to do anything too complicated until everything came. Then I got the sad news from our assistant. Almost everything I wanted was on back order. But there were a few nice Bic ball point pens I could have. Great. I guess it’s understandable. I mean, you can’t get those very unique and hard to find bright yellow post-it notes just anywhere, right?

Then the next day, there’s a voicemail telling me that my calendar is in! Hooray! At least now I have something to hang up on my cube wall besides the black and white photocopied announcement of the office luau which is in 6 months. I rip off the saran wrap and look at my brand new calendar… for 2005. What kind of numbskull orders a calendar in July for the next year? Obviously I’m not thinking ahead that far! “Um, yes I know it’s a bit odd to want next year calendar already, but I’m a very busy and organized person and I’m actually currently booking well in February.” I have trouble even planning what I’m doing this weekend, much less in 2005! So that’s what I have at my desk so far. A calendar I can’t use and some Bic pens that have the ends chewed off, which was probably done by the person I replaced who was impatiently waiting the arrival of their own office supplies!

Plus, my desk is set at the height of a midget. I keep having to remind the assistant that I want it raised and each time I have to re-convince her that it’s necessary. “Are you sure, Heather?” “Yeah, I know. But call my crazy, I like my knees to fit under the desk.” “It’s just that I think this is the standard height.” “Well, the bruises on my knees and the curse words coming from cubicle every now and then beg to differ. Are you saying I’m abnormally tall?” A lot of people in the office have mentioned that they think I’m tall. This is weird to me, because I’m only 5’8’’. There’s an intern here from the same school as me and he’s 6’6’’. So one girl came up to me and said, “Is everyone from your school really tall?” Yes. Because THAT’S what our school’s really known for. Tall people. Yes, in fact, we take classes from about 9 till 3, and then we all gather on the football field for stretching exercises to grow taller. That’s one of the reasons I picked that school… for the excellent tallness professors and the nationally recognized tallness program.

So, I finally got this new, ergonomic chair. I’m very excited by it. But, there seems to be one think wrong with it. It has a weird smell. When I first walked up to my cubicle and saw it, I got so excited. But as I ran up to it, I got this whiff of old Chinese food. Great, I thought, the lordy lordy girl in the cube next to me must be having Chinese food for lunch while she reads her Bible today. (That girl is a whole other blog post waiting to happen.) But now, each time I leave and come back, I smell the smell again! I’m convinced it’s now my chair. All I ask is that the smell doesn’t stick to me so that I have old Chinese food chair smell on me all day. So while I take great joy in wheeling around the halls in it and adjusting it up and down and up and down until it starts to make groaning noises, I can’t help but notice it’s a stinky little chair. But that’s ok. Nobody’s perfect. Not even free office chairs.

U.S. Savings & Distrust

Sometimes I think the people around here trust me with too much. Part of my job is to take checks to the bank every couple days. This sounds fairly normal.. but it’s really not. This isn’t just some mom and pop shop with two checks a week to deposit, with both checks having kitten watermarks and quotes from the Bible on them. (I can’t believe I just wrote about the Bible in my blog) These are serious, hard core checks. My company is big… it’s 20 floors crammed full of people doing boring jobs and creating boring transactions which require boring checks to be deposited.

But, on my first trip to the bank, I noticed that these checks are not so boring. On average, these checks add up to half a million dollars! And they want me, ME, a little girl to walk them to the bank? I don’t think they realize, I’m still pretty little at heart. I mean, I get scared if someone claps loudly in my vicinity. If a car backfires near me, I’m usually the one cowering in the bushes. If someone even slightly scary came up to me and said "Give me those", I'd hand the checks over in the blink of an eye. I ain't fuckin around with street people.

And here I am, skipping through sketchy downtown with a Fortune 500 company’s bread and butter. And I have been known to swing my security badge above my head like a helicopter to pass the time. So you can just imagine the sight of me doing this twice a week. If you saw me, you’d probably think “Where’s that loon going?” Well, I happen to be going to deposit millions of dollars, mister!

And you’d think, when I got to the bank, I’d be really cool, because we were such a big company. I thought I’d have to get security clearance and be able to use my thumb print on a scanner to get into the back room, where they do the ultra cool transactions. Then I thought, maybe they’ll invite me in for a tour of the vault and let me help myself to any safe deposit boxes. But no. My Fortune 500 company, with its zillions of employees and millions of dollar in checks every day, banks at Dink Bank of the US. Seriously, it’s like the smallest bank known to man. I find it hard to believe that my company’s massive checks are put in the same vault as Johnny McBoring’s $15 dollar pay check from his paper route.

The only cool part is that I get to stand in a special line called the “Merchant Line”. We have our very own teller, who knows my name now and is always quick to tell me her thoughts on the weather every day. But I’m quite happy to talk to her for many reasons: 1. She never uses a sentence with the word “accounting” in it. And 2. She has bangs that defy gravity. I am mezmerized every day by them. She somehow gets her bangs to stick straight up in the air, and then swoop back into an 80’s wave. It’s crazy.

But the last time I went, my hair-sprayed friend wasn’t there, and instead I was waved over to a special part of the bank. Oh, I thought, here’s my chance to go in the vault! But instead, a woman in a little room called me over. It was this weird little booth with a locked door that she had to buzz to let me in. When I opened the door, it was like a little apartment in the bank, with a comfy chair and mahogany walls. So I settled into the chair and gave everyone else in the bank a mean look, like "I'm in the little room and you're not!" When the teller was done, she had to ask me to leave. I guess I got too comfy. I haven't been buzzed back into that little room since.

The walk to the bank is also pretty interesting. I take a different route each time, mostly to avoid noticing that the homeless person sleeping on the corner of 3rd and Ash hasn't moved since I started working here. I always walk by this sad little hot dog stand. It always looks so out of place, as though the guy running it doesn't realize this isn't New York City and that people from around here don't eat questionable meat products sold on the street. Sometimes I think about stopping to get a hot dog, though. I could kick back and enjoy a hot dog and take in the sights. But I'd probably put the stack of million dollar checks down beside me and then forget them. How would I explain that one to my boss? It also might look a little suspicious if the deposit slip had ketchup on it. ("Oh, the bank said that's part of their new security policy. You haven't heard of it?! Well, maybe you should brush up on your bank security...")

Once I forgot to make the deposit when I was supposed to. I just left the checks locked up in my desk drawer overnight, underneath my stash of bubble gum, Hershey kisses, and chapstick. I'm sure my boss would love to hear that. After that, I think I lost my depositing privliges for a few days. But don't worry, I'm back in the game now. I think I'm gonna put on my resume "Responsible for bi-weekly secure deposit of corporate funds with three star security clearance." Hey, you think anyone's gonna call me on that? 80's-hair teller girl will back me up, I'm sure...

The Last Train to Ghettoville

I had an interesting experience on the trolley today. Did I mention I take the trolley? Well, normally it’s a nice, leisurely ride to work, but lately, it’s been getting weirder and weirder. I mean, I’ve gotten used to the odd, public transport smell by now, and the fact that the trolley drivers can be really mean and vindictive, but now the other passengers are starting to push the envelope.

Apparently this morning I caught the 7:44 Ghetto Express – “Direct service to anything and everything ghetto.”

When I got on, I purposely sat near this little old man who was asleep. Mostly because the seats face each other and I hate waging a silent war over whose knees get to go where. With a sleeping guy, I always win. So I started to give him the once over, trying to figure out his deal, and why the fuck he was on a train at this hour of the morning. Shouldn’t he be at home clipping coupons or something? Or talking to his cat about ‘the good old days’? If I were that age I would be curled up in bed and not on a trolley headed to downtown. Heck, if I were ANY age, I’d be curled in bed right now if I could be.

In fact, there are a lot of people on trolley that puzzle me. More than once I’ve been tempted to go sit down by someone I’ve been staring at and be like “So, what’s your story?” I mean, who goes on the trolley to downtown before 8? The only people I can think of are people going to work. But every morning there’s a handful of people who really don’t fit into the morning commute crowd. Often there are kids younger then me in jeans… all by themselves, just staring out the window… probably wondering what the hell they’re doing on the trolley!

So I began to forget about the little old man across from me. Mainly because I suddenly became immersed in my own battle over what color my pants were. I was wearing a black patterned shirt, and suddenly I realized my pants were brown! What the hell.. I totally clashed! Or maybe it was just a faded black that didn’t match my shirt… So, most of the trolley ride was me thinking “They’re brown… no wait, the way the light just hit them, they’re black. Yeah, they’re totally black. But what if they’re brown and someone at work thinks I have a drinking problem who can’t even match an outfit? I have come in to work hung over twice in the last two weeks. This could be the clincher… “

When suddenly, while the trolley was stopped at some station, probably the corner of Murderville and Rape Street, this scary cop leapt on board! I was sure he was there to check our tickets, and suddenly I realized I didn’t have one! I’ve been buying monthly passes and totally haven’t gotten my latest one! Well, in all honesty I haven’t even bothered yet because I’ve never, ever had my ticket checked! So, of course, I’m thinking, today’s my lucky day.

I start thinking up an excuse to tell this rather large police man about why I still have July’s pass. And just as I’m thinking of a way to make myself cry, I notice that he’s not checking tickets at all. Everyone in the trolley car is suddenly looking over at where I’m sitting. The cop was after my little old man friend!
The cop starts poking my sleeping friend! I guess they have to wake people up who are on the trolley so they don’t miss their stop or something. Then he starts shaking him. Suddenly I realize, I haven’t really seen this guy move since I got on the trolley. The trolley’s still stopped and now people are standing up and coming over to see what’s happening, all the while the cop keeps shaking the little old man!

People near me start gasping and looking at me, and I’m like “what’s all the fuss about?” When suddenly it hits me: “OH MY GOD, I’m sitting across from a dead man on the trolley. I’m sitting across from a dead man on the trolley!”

But, don’t worry guys, he wasn’t dead. He woke up with a start and thought someone was trying to fight him. (I guess when you ride the trolley at weird times, you’re on edge) The cop just pulled him up and dragged him off the train! It was so weird! I think someone must have called and said he’d been there a long time… he was mumbling something about where he was headed. Probably Jupiter or something. In which case, that’s the next train over.

I can only imagine he’d been sitting there, riding the trolley back and forth all night long! In either case I quickly settled back my self-absorbed state. If I’m late to work, they’ll never believe why! And my pants are definitely black. I think.

The auditors are coming!

So one of the big decisions upon graduation from college with a degree in accounting was whether to become an auditor or go into industry. You hear years of debate about it, and every fellow nerdy accounting major gives you his or her two cents. Most people go into auditing because those big four firms like to suck up new, happy, confident accounting grads and suck the life out of them, help them get their CPA, and then dump them back on the street. Are you beginning to tell what path I chose? Industry is a private company that is more like a normal office environment where you work normal hours and work up the corporate ladder. All our professors would say “it’s a decision you have to make for yourself.” Well, I prefer another phrase, which I coined myself, which is: “it all depends on what sucker will hire you.”

So I chose industry, while many of my friends are auditors. Now that I’m at a big company, there are external auditors permanently in our building, slowly making the rounds and checking departments.

The big buzz in our department is that … wait for it… the auditors are coming! Rumor has it they’re gonna pounce on us in the dead of night, feed on our flesh, and steal our children. They’re ruthless and mean. They carry laptops and have pocket protectors. They ask things like “Where’s the back-up for this?” and “What do you do here?” (To which my reply is a shrug and I whisper to them ‘Hell if I know.’) And don’t even think of throwing around words like “Enron” around here. That’s like saying "bomb" at an airport. People act like it’s Armageddon. Every time someone says “auditor” they say it with such fear that I always follow it up with a scary noise in my head… dun dun dun!!

But really people, it’s just your office. What could they really do to you? The worst they could do to me is take my Hershey kisses from my bottom drawer. Actually, that would make me pretty mad. Chocolate is what gets me through the day. But there is a guy a few cubicles over with a plant on his desk that I’ve been eying. He’d better lock that up safe.

So, all of our work now is focused on getting ready for the auditors. I’ve been working on putting together this huge binder of stuff. I could tell you what’s in it, but I really think you might fall asleep and never log back into my blog. After a few words like “reconciliation” and “quarter-end” most people are nodding off onto their keyboards. So anyway, this binder is becoming the size on my cubicle. I’m going to need a dolly to deliver the final product to my manager. And, I’ve been flipping through so many pages while working on it, that I actually had to go get some of that “tacky fingers” crap that you used to see on your teacher desk in high school. It’s basically and tub of Vaseline that’s relabeled “tacky fingers” so you think it’s professional and for office use. So after seeing this stuff sitting on my desk, I officially feel like an office nerd. Could I be any more stereotypical? Next I’m gonna be carrying my calculator on a string around my neck.

So I finally finished the binder and my manager said “So if the auditors (dun dun dun) come, is this going to be what they want? There are no mistakes? You did it right?” And how am I supposed to reply to this? “OOOh, you wanted NO mistakes?! Well, you’d better give that back because I was under the impression you just wanted a half-assed job. In fact, most of the papers in here are just printouts of funny pictures I found on the internet.”

I think my co-workers have spent too much time cooped up in an office and too little time at the local bar, getting drunk with soon to be auditors, like I do. Many of my college friends are about to be some of these “scary” auditors, and trust me, they’re as cool as the rest of us. First of all, they mostly don’t know what their talking about. Second, they spend most of their time IMing their friends. (I know this because at the moment I am IMing my friend at an auditing firm who’s supposed to be working... she says hi)

Actually, I heard that one rogue auditor has actually been spotted on our floor, trying to camouflage herself by pretending to be one of us. But she’s been spotted. So now the word’s out. Actually, I think I’ve seen her. She’s been asking this one lady for all sorts of files and I keep seeing her walk her over to this file cabinet which is behind me. The auditor is about 4 foot 11 and is one of the most unintimidating people you’ve ever met. I think I tripped over her just now on the way to the bathroom in fact. But my co-worker has a different attitude. She walks the auditor girl over to the filing cabinet, hands shaking, fumbling her words, and drops the keys a few times. I sure hope she’s doing this for effect. Later today, we were gossiping about the auditor girl at the water cooler (I swear, this office is straight out of Dilbert!) and someone said he thinks her name is Dolphin! I laughed so hard I had to prop myself up by the copier. Let me tell you, if a girl named Dolphin comes a knockin, she’ll be getting the files herself.

So after I cleared up the binder mess with my manager, she also told me to tell people that the auditors are coming. What, am I supposed to run up and down the cubicles ringing a bell? I feel like friekin Paul Revere.