I don’t think of myself as someone ruled by anger, nor as a person who is particularly intolerant of the foibles of others. I don’t like eggs - especially the smell - but it’s not that big a deal. There are a few other things that I find irritating that I may have mentioned here, but it’s not like I go around muttering to myself about those damn kids or anythiing.
All of which would have been entirely true a month ago.
Lately, I’ve been acquiring pet peeves at a phenomenal rate. It would be kind of cool if each one wasn’t a poison-tipped toothpick lodged in the intestines of my soul (beat THAT metaphor, Donne!) I’m paying a lot more attention to other people than I have in the past, and it turns out that they tend to be pretty stupid. Some of these may be rather specific to my workplace. I don’t want to be one of those guys who criticizes his job online, then gets fired when his boss sees it, so I’ll simply say this: I work in a den of sin that murders what little innocence I have left in a million tiny ways every day.
MY job is pretty easy, or at least low-stress. I come in, I do my thing, I leave. Everybody else here has a job that, stress-wise, ranks somewhere between astronaut and polar bear wrangler, and they’re all neurotic as hell.
We have to start with the office obsession over the bathroom.
The average worker bee here uses the bathroom approximately 17 times a day - and keep in mind that a day here runs from around 7:30 to noon. The prevailing theory, based on conversations I’ve had with the few employees here who aren’t entirely insane, is that it’s the only place they can go to get away from the stygian sales floor. This is, of course, entirely false, since the building has operational doors, and ‘outside’ is always accessible.
If one of my co-workers (henceforth the McGlorps) should go to use the bathroom and find it occupied, the reaction is invariably confusion mixed with terrible rage. They take it personally, as though the occupier is peeing in their face. They get angry. I work much closer to the break area than is healthy, and the amount of swearing I hear relating only to the issue of occupied restrooms is astonishing.
I once witnessed an exchange wherein a male McGlorp returned to a restroom he had just vacated to wash his hands (we will, for the moment, ignore the fact that this should not require two trips.) A female McGlorp standing nearby said “You were just in there! What are you going back for?” If someone were to ask me such a question, I would instinctively punch them in the face at least three or four times before I consciously understood what they had said. Why not just stick your finger in my butt?
Honestly, when I watch the McGlorps complain about every damn thing, I feel like I’m watching them pencil in their preferred dates for fatal heart attacks.
