monkeymom's Diaryland Diary
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In which I work in a hostile environment.
Last night at work I was changing the back up tapes in the server room, and at the same time looking at a new piece of equipment in the next server rack, and marveling that I even noticed the new equipment, because usually I don't. All that equipment looks the same to me!
So I was looking at the new whatever, and taking out old tapes with one hand and putting the new ones in with the other and I accidently put a green tape into a slot meant for a black tape, and I felt it click! and looked down to see that oops! I had put the wrong tape in, and it wasn't so much in as it was just stuck!
I pulled it, I jiggled it, I pressed the eject button and fiddled with the handle, but the tape would. not. come. out. Damn!
I went back to my office and pondered for a few minutes (and said a little prayer!) and then, butter knife in hand, I went back to the server room. I compared a green tape and a black tape, to see where they were different, because I thought if I could see what part was hung up in the machine, I would know where to stick the butter knife, to maybe ease it out! Well, the tapes looked identical to my untrained eye, and in the morning when I was telling Carol what happened, she said that one of the other techs who worked on them thought they were identical too, but she insisted that they are different, so fine, if you think so, but they look alike to me!
Then I took my life in my hands and tried to pry the tape out with the butter knife, hoping that I didn't accidently put the knife into anything with a lot of voltage that might stop my heart because how embarrassing would that be? The security guard would come by and I would not be in the office, but he would assume that I was in the ladies, not knowing that I cannot leave the operations area unattended, and then in the morning one of the techs would find my lifeless body on the floor in front of the server rack, clutching the blackened butter knife. I could weep just thinking about it.
Finally I had to give up. That tape was stuck and would not come out! I wrote an email to Billy No-Mates, asking him to take a look at it in the morning, and also, could he please fix it without making a big fuss and calling me an idiot in front of people? Because that's the kind of person he is - he'll fix things but he does it with the maximum level of bitching allowable in the workplace. (In this workplace, that's a pretty high level.)
In the morning, Carol came in and threw herself down in the chair in my office to gripe about coming in to work ("Listen honey, there's got to be a better way to make a living!" she says, between gulps of Coke. Every day.) So I told her about the jammed tape, and she asked me if I had tried pushing the eject button. Um, yeah, that's the first thing I tried! I didn't tell her about the butter knife, but I told her I tried everything, and she drank some more of her Coke in the classic red can, and said if I had done everything, she wasn't going to bother with it, it could wait until Billy No-Mates came in and he could fix it.
So I went home and slept the sleep of the Damned, the sleep of people who have an evil, scheming, hatin' Sheep Dog, who pees on the rug when her daddy goes out of town, even if he is only gone for one day and comes home in the evening. Meaning that I had to get up at 11:30 because the phone kept ringing and when I got up I found that Buffy had peed on the floor and it wasn't even noon yet, the time when she normally goes out for a walk! Hateful hound.
In the afternoon I called Carol at work to see if the jammed tape was fixed and she passed the call to Billy No-mates, who had the raw nerve to say that yes he had fixed it but it took half an hour to take the machine apart, half an hour when he could have been doing something else (internet porn? getting a Mountain Dew?) and when I told him it was his fault that I wasn't paying attention because I was looking at the shiny new appliance he'd installed in the rack next door, he went off on a rant about someone else in the office who had pissed him off and threatened to hang up on me! I told him to go ahead and hang up, but of course he didn't, because he only has two friends and the other one doesn't really like him either. I also assured him that he was a genius for fixing that tape, and he is such an idiot that he doesn't realize that when I say he's a genius what I really mean is that he's an asshole. Because in his head he believes that he really is a genius and everyone around him can barely function.
3:05 a.m. - 2007-03-15
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
other diaries: |
