Hell

I am soooo sick!
I have this cold - it makes me lazy, bored, weak.
I cannot write( not unusual).
I cannot work(very unusual).
I cough like a camel. I sneeze like a monkey. I am a zoo.
I have teary eyes like a continuously sulking baby.
My nostrils are two taps.
Aaaaarghhhh!!

About SmallTalk in 3000 Words

http://www.flickr.com/photos/roamin/19381750/

I don’t think I react well to disappointments. When it comes to people, that is.
I give everyone a chance from the start, usually. Any person can be nice until it turns out not to be. Sometimes it happens.

I work with this older lady that everybody seem to like at the office. That is rather unusual because they are not a loving bunch entirely, the same way they are not all lovable. Some don’t want to be, some cannot and others do not know how. Amongst these last ones, some do not know because they haven’t been taught/shown that while others have learned how, but they cannot be bothered to make the effort.

Anyway, this lady (let’s call her Rhonda for the sake of discretion) seems to be generally accepted and loved. I liked her too.
Still, the other day I felt something that other people might not feel like I do. I questioned her niceness, but kept that to myself. I never shared that impression with anyone at work and never will.

The lady in question is the type that smiles to everyone and nods and approves of you when passing by. She seems to be equally friendly to all. She also apologizes a lot for the most insignificant things,like she wants to show you that if she did something wrong she’s aware of it. That, I think, might be the secret of her popularity.
She also seems to listen intently to everyone when they talk to her. Unless, of course, she interrupts. Then she starts talking very fast for about a minute, pointing out that she understood it all. Then, she sort of wakes up from that little "trance" of fast-fast-talking and apologizes 4-5 times in a row for interrupting you. It’s hard to describe it, but this is how she is.

My ‘disappointment’ was when I discovered something that other people did not seem to notice about her.
Once that happened, instead of feeling disappointed by her, I felt disappointed in myself, because I was such a bad person. I behaved badly towards a nice co-worker, right? How could I be disappointed in someone when everybody likes that person? How could I go against the general consent/opinion/approval/trend?And this is what makes me say that I do not react well to disappointment. The guilt. My bloody conscience. I must be bad somewhere at the core. And so on.

Rhonda spends much time on the phone. It’s the nature of her job. Whenever you have to ask her a question or interact with her – work-related – she is busy, very-very busy. She is on the phone with a customer and she really goes apparently out of her way to help them. This is the general consensus in the office. Up till here, it is fine by me.

Being a customer myself everywhere in this world, whenever I have a problem to sort out, or a public service to go to, or simply organize a trip or buy a fridge or god-knows-what-else, I believe that I have a good understanding of what a customer wants. I know their needs and how they should be dealt with.
I think I’m a professional customer by birth.
When I call somewhere and they put me on hold and keep me on for a very long time I, the customer, become angry with “them”. But if, let’s say somebody – a human and not a machine – tells me to hang on a minute, because they have someone else on the other line, or somebody showed up at the counter, I understand.
Why should I not? I'm not the only one in this world and I’m quite sure that other people have things to sort out just like me. Chances are that someone called 1 minute before me. Understandable. Not 100% pleasant, but understandable.

Maybe this is why after a while, having a couple of experiences with Rhonda, I started doubting her just a tad.
Sometimes I must talk with her, not necessarily to socialize, but to resolve work related problems. After few months working here,I begun to grow tired of standing for 5 minutes around Rhonda's desk, waiting for her to notice me discreetly. It goes like this: she looks at me and she continues to talk on the phone like I wasn’t there. At the beginning I thought that in between two calls, she’d have a second for me too. But, the sooner she finishes with a customer, she is taking another call or she shuffles some papers on her desk or takes some notes or checks the fax-machine. Until eventually the phone rings again.
If I try to get her attention during that shuffling and notes taking, she just lifts her arm, showing me the palm of her hand, a well-known sign of “be quiet”.
She never says to a caller 'Excuse me one single moment please, I have a co-worker here with a work related problem, won’t take more than a second.' She could, and I'm quite sure, most people would understand the same way I understand when I am a customer myself.

After a while, I started to believe that this was a bit of a habit: look at me, I am the most customer-service oriented person; I am dedicated; I am zealous; I am brave; I am perfect; I am busy; I am here for them; I work hard; I dunno-what-this-office-would-do-without-me. kind of thing.

I have work to do too. I work hard as well. I have things to finish too, and although I do not have to spend time on the phone as much as she does, I still feel compelled to finish my share daily. Waiting and waiting for somebody else to get off the phone just for 5 seconds, so I can go on with my job, would be greatly appreciated.

Having to deal with Rhonda, became for me after a while, a very unpleasant task – like having to call my telephone company or my Internet provider and then having to wait for thirty minutes, listening to music that I would not listen to, otherwise.

I tried all sorts of methods. I tried phoning her first – but that did not work because her extension was always busy. When it wasn’t, she told me she had another call coming right then.
I wrote her e-mails – but that was not practical, because the amount of time wasted on explaining what I needed from her, took almost as long as waiting behind her chair for my presence to be noticed.
In the end I decided to leave on her computer monitor post-it while she was on the phone or shuffling things. The same way I do with other people when they are not at their desks and I want to contact them on their return.
The only downside of it is that the answer or document or information or whatever I needed from her, comes back to me half day too late, at least.

I did not say anything to anyone because people would have hated me for that. Or they would probably have misunderstood the whole thing.
I put up with it the same way you put up with public transport going bad – you hate what it's happening, but is nothing you can do.

Everybody likes her. Fine by me.
I suspect they all love Rhonda because she hardly has to interact with anyone directly. She works only part-time. Her workplace is isolated from ours and out-of-the-way so to speak.
To compensate for that, she feeds us: she bakes an incredibly sweet loaf of a kind or another every now and then.
Then every now and then, she brings some stuff like crackers or other sorts of nibbles and leaves them in a bowl in the kitchen with a note: ‘Help yourself, I bought too many and have no place where to keep them at home’ or something like that.
I fell for that several times when I was new in this job. After a while I discovered that the stuff she brings in it’s always very stale. It was either expired when she bought it on some sale, or she kept it in the pantry for a year. Whatever the reason, it’s never fresh or less hard than granite.

Anyway, everybody seems to appreciate ‘the gesture’ enormously. Fine by me. I’m happy to appreciate it too, just by looking at the nibbles, and when my turn comes to tidy a bit the kitchen based on the roster, I’m rather happy to throw those things in the bin. The cleaning lady does not know what to do with them. She must be as surprised as I was if she tasted them. But I don’t think she ever gathered enough courage or initiative to discard them. She might be a Nesblandian too ( aren't all the cleaning ladies Nesblandian everywhere?) and might think we are some strange officers with exotic/strange tastes.

Sometimes I meet Rhonda in the bus, going to or coming from work.
Sometimes if there’s room, we sit next to each other and do the small talk. Some other times, there’s no room at all.
There were few occasions when I was under the impression that she pretended not to notice me, although there was a seat next to her or next to me, we did not sit together. Which by the way, for me was not too bad – I always carry something to read in the bus and I prefer to do that at any rate; the ‘small talk' never does much for me. I'm not coming from a ‘small talk’ culture. Where I come from, we discuss politics, religion and other ‘taboos’ quite passionately, and nobody really knows what small talk means. I think we gave up on conversational taboos about 1000 years ago. Nesblandians, as everybody knows, are quite uncivilized, right?

When we did the small talk, Rhonda and I, we went with the usual:
‘How was your weekend?’ ‘Fine, how was yours?’ ‘Good. I did-this-and-that-or-the-other. It was great’.
Another popular topic was ‘ How is your family?’ ‘Good, thank you for asking. How is yours?’ ‘Excellent.’

Now don’t take me wrong.
I know the rules. When she asked me for example how my mother was, I told her she was great. Even if I spent the weekend at the emergency room in some hospital because let’s say, my mom broke a thumb. I still said she was great. I think if my mother would have died suddenly, I might have still told Rhonda that I had a ‘great week-end’ because she was a Local Inhabitant by Birthright ( I could call them Libs, for short ) and the importance of her personal disposition was more relevant to the fate of the World than my eventual ‘lack of positive thinking’ would ever be.

I know the rules so well that I hardly go into trivial details telling when something really happens, how it happened. Most of the Natives ( or Libs ) here do not want to know such things. That’s why they invented small talk. Light informal conversation for social occasions, the dictionary says, light meaning in fact meaningless/boring/with no substance/irrelevant/insincere/time wasting/hypocritical exchange of words and not ideas.

The purpose of small talk is not to coerce people (God forbid!) to show concern or compassion for a problem, or a person, or a country, or even a continent they don’t want really to know about, because it's your problem and not theirs.
The
Non-Nesblandians ( or Libs) are very proud of the fact that civilization and history brought them to a level high enough to master the intricacy of small-talk to the most refined level – the driest of all times.
Since the problem is yours and they are not getting any material advantage from it, that might ruin their day, shadow their mood, or simply force them to pretend to have compassion. That would be an effort involving perhaps some acting, and nobody wants to go into showbiz for free.
People that live outside Nesblandia hate such things.
To fill in the hole that the small talk embeds in their beings, no wonder so many need yoga classes or the Zodiac to put them in touch again with some spirituality, light, balance and compassion. For the sake of The Planet and the Universe-Outthere.

In Nesblandia for example telling a story would be fine – even a very personal one. They would really want to know and even advise you on what to do. There would be follow-ups over a coffee or even a meal. And that would not involve just the situations where some girl-friends-have-some-man-troubles, no.
But we do not live in Nesblandia here, so we should play by the rules of the place.

Time came for me to go in holiday one day. I had so many things to do, I was so stressed with preparation and travel agents and fluff like that. I must have looked very tired, even to the strangers that did not know me from Adam and Eve.
Finding myself in the bus after work, my Rhonda having an empty seat next to her, and finding herself in a mood good enough to notice me, I was invited to sit next to her. We did our small dosage of chitchat as usual.
Me, knowing the rules, I hardly break them. When I do, it's due only to lack of enough selfcontrol, (like right now, right here on this very blog ) and for her part, Rhonda belonging to the culture that invented the rules, never breaks them.
That day I broke some because I was so stressed out, my mind was all over the place, so I told her about my holiday preparations. Amongst other things, I told her that I had to double my expenses and errands because I had to take my mother with us to Europe, and I had to sort out things for her as well. That, was adding to the cost and the amount of travel arrangements to be made.
Rhonda seemed sympathetic and very understanding. I was almost happy that I broke the rules this time. It felt sort of good and nice to share my concerns with another human being.

Anyways, two days later, in the bus again, we were siting together on our way to work. This time she sat next to me because there were no other free seats around.
A thing lead to another in our regular chitchat, and she asked if all the arrangements were made for our trip. Then suddenly she offered to visit my mother in my absence.
Because – she said – she understood how worried I must be thinking of leaving her by herself for a whole month, while holidaying. She could go to my mother’s home and check on her twice a week if I agreed to.

I was flabbergasted. But then I recollected myself instantly and looked at the bright side of the picture: how nice of her to offer such a thing! No wonder everybody liked her at work, she was so nice.
She is quite a bit older than I am, so she must have forgotten – understandably - that I told her we were taking my mother with us. (Although somewhere in my sarcastic little mind I thought that she was too young still to forget like that, from a day to the next – but then I brushed aside that nasty thought).

She doesn’t know my mother, she must assume that she is a wreck, a totally senile creature that also does not speak English very well like all Nesblandians must be in their old age. She wanted to help.
I must have been a bitch – I thought – to ever suspect that her niceness was a façade, a phony thing, some well disguised ‘I-don’t-really-care but-I-know-how-to-pretend-that-I-do’ kinda thing.
I was very angry with myself for being such a terrible, terrible person. For thinking such terrible, terrible things about some people, instead of going with the flow and appreciate them to their right value. Like the rest of the crowd did.

So, I thanked her effusively and explained once again that we were taking my mother with us. for the very reason that she was old enough (although alert and perfectly sane) to worry us, if we left her behind for one month.

Another couple of days passed, and then one other morning in the bus we had another chat. I suspected that finally, Rhonda was trying to take some interest in me after all. The people at work must have been right all along – she was nice and selfless. I, on the other hand, must be a judgemental bitch who cannot tell a genuine person from a phony.

She is a widow, and she likes to mention that, very often. In every conversation. Even those about nothing. Like for example when she asks about my weekend she always adds that hers are not that good as they used to be when her husband was alive, although they are still fabulous weekends she adds. Because she has children and in laws. She doesn’t go into details much, andI did not try to invade her privacy with too many questions that she might find too nosy. The rules would not allow me to.

That morning I was in for a new surprise when she brushed by about her dearly departed husband again. While I showed my understanding somehow, mentioning knowledge about that sort of thing because my father is dead as well, she asked me how long ago my mother died.
I refreshed her memory with the mention that my mother was packing her suitcases for Europe right then. Dear Rhonda apologized profusely and continuously for about 3 full minutes, talking very fast and concerned, as she does.
After which we went to the more neutral season-and-weather-analysis and pretended both that nothing happened. We were very good at that too.

One of these days in the kitchen at work, during the lunch-break I was busy making a sandwich when Rhonda came in. She started the routine with the weather because there were another two persons as busy as I, fussing around the grill and the microwave and we had to talk about something in order to show that we are civil people.
God knows what I did in my hurry to quench my hunger, but opening a drawer to get a knife, I broke a nail. That is a "neutral" subject and gross as it is, it’s better to mention it within the chitchat frame even at lunch time in a kitchen (!) than other things. Like let’s say the fact that the Catholic Church was again in the news due to some paedophilia cases; or the fact that some illegal immigrants were arrested in a boat by the coast-guard; or the last flood in China, or whatever other more dangerous subjects there might be.

It slipped, as simple as that: 'Damn, I broke a nail!' I said, contributing to the degradation of silence in between two breaths, and the monotony of sunset-overcast-sunshine-clouds-cold-warm-rain litany.

Needless to say that our Rhonda interrupted her weather analysis with a warm, appreciative, deeply heart-felt:
‘That’s nice, dear!? Excellent.”

An Ordinate Delirium

They say that if you want to accomplish yourself, you must plant a tree, have a child, and write a book.
I don’t remember who said that, some classic for sure. I don’t remember where and when I heard this first, I’ve read it in a book or somebody told me when I was a child, but I never forgot it, nevertheless, although I must have heard it for the first time when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I do remember the age because I recall that the idea of having to have a child terrified me. At the age of 9 the last thing I wanted was to have children. I wasn’t into it not even at 19, let alone at 9 years of age.

Trees I planted, if I add them up, there are enough to make a small forest.
Children I had as well, the second one more to help the first, so they won’t be too lonely in the world.
The book though I did not write, but I started it a little bit every time I wrote a longer letter to someone. My letters always look like a small chapter of something bigger, without an introduction or an end.
Perhaps "the bigger thing" it’s called Life.
To put life into words it’s a pretty simple thing when you have mastered the words. If you are lost for words or they are out of your control, it’s much harder.

The critics talk too much about literary styles not to make one feel uneasy and incompetent when it comes to words – although what else should writing be but a chit-chat with the other, like when one has a cuppa with a friend.
My favorite authors are those that write with ease, with the same spontaneity they use probably when they talk.
Writing has been for me a small passion, as long as I could feel free to express myself without having to take into account the obligation of being extremely pretentious and literary in style.
To put my life or the fiction inspired by it ‘on paper’ so to speak, and be at ease at the same time,I must renounce first to calculating my words; give up on counting my repetitions and abbreviations; forget about poetical license, stylistic embroideries and even the extraction from the subconscious of the exact day or minute when facts happened.
Without having to bother too much about that, the thought comes into words easier, words turn into sentences and phrases more spontaneously and that way the phrase illustrates more easily ideas, memories, personal philosophies, reflections. Even some metaphors can come into existence with more simplicity. Free from the labor and pain of a birth.
I guess in all the above I am describing a storyteller rather than a writer.
To be a storyteller is fine by me. It’s unpretentious and honest. No claims to anything.

The truth is that I do not write for the purpose of giving literary lessons. Not even to myself. Grammar is something the academics should be concerned with and taking care of, I’m just a foreigner and English is not even my second language, but the third.
I have no literary aims; I’m just a chronicler of my own existence, and often my only reader.
I write the way I talk.
There were times when I felt that I had something to say. In public that is. Perhaps because the events I had witnessed and lived are too easily forgotten and what’s left after a while it’s submissive to oblivion. To fight this, I write a letter or a long e-mail to a friend.
It’s a form of self-therapy that helps to preserve mental health and sorts out the good from the bad.
The written word helps with the keeping of thoughts in the right order; it weighs the facts of life and balances them much better than the spoken word, even if you use the same spontaneous style.
Perhaps the script is only an ordinate delirium; a delirium that we all endure although not all of us feel compelled to put it in print.

After the first youth, one might feel the necessity to share some personal experience with the next generation. At least I feel that way, and from my previous trips through memorialistic literature, I have noticed that many had practiced ‘the sport’ ages before me, with an ability and talent far more apt than any attempts of making myself understood by a reader or two.
Bad luck I should say – I am definitely not an inventor of styles.

Having children means amongst other things that you spend your life as a parent trying to protect them against unpleasant outcomes. How else, but sharing with them some of your own ‘baggage’ until you see them rolling their eyes. Apparently, us, the parents, believe that this should be called upbringing; forgetting about the times when our own parents had served us the same cold dish to which we rolled our eyes just the same. Even if in those times we did that only after they had left the room.
That of course was called ‘lecturing’.
It doesn’t seem to me that today the habit has a different name. It does not bother me too much. I still remember quite clearly my teenage years like they were yesterday. This is the reason why we all know that no matter what, everyone learns only from own mistakes, regardless of how much we try to pass on any lessons learned.

Reality is that our own memories play us with an impertinent trepidation: time flies, things change more or less, people forget, only history repeats itself.

When I was 9, the last things I was longing to have in the future, were children. What I wanted then was to become a writer of science–fiction. I was passionate for Imaginary Worlds.
When I was 11, I had a great Maternal Language teacher, one of those extremely understanding ones, which knew how to deal with the shyness and sensibilities of children. A dedicated man.
Very young, fair, skinny, pale, with a suffering expression on his face like he was in pain most of the time, this teacher lived for his profession – as seldom happens. He taught us that as long as we won’t use cliché, recipes and formulae in our writing, whatever we’ll write, should become a small original literary creation.
I took his advice for granted at the time, and even years later, with the blessed naivety of the age.
That age has passed long ago, but some of that naivety still lingers.

Our language teacher used to initiate during his classes ‘The Liar’s Competition’ when we were encouraged to lie about a given happening of some sort as much as we could. It was a good game; it stimulated imagination and humor. We had great fun playing it. That way we could compare how much we could twist our own capabilities of presenting a story in different ways or from different standpoints. The winner always got a lolly or even a chocolate.
This wonderful teacher’s name was S T (pronounced more like Soreen Teatell). He died young, not before becoming one of the most promising writers that part of Nesblandia had. I still have his first book with dedication. ‘To impish Dee’ it says. In some Nesblandian cities, some streets carry his name.

If at the age of 11 I wished to write sci-fi, at 21 I was more into reading than writing, longing badly for books we could not accede to in Communist Nesblandia of those times.
A ferocious censorship of all printed material that entered the country was in place there, even for magazines or tabloids. There were thousands of titles and authors from all over the World that were forbidden. Typewriters were all registered with the Secret Police. Every typewriter in the country, the private ones or those used in institutions had to have a typed sample recorded and filed with the police. This was put in place for anyone who eventually dared to type anything against the communists. Based on that sample, the eventual culprit who typed a personal or general dissent or insubordination, could be easily identified and punished. The same way it is happening in China right now.

We had to learn French and English very well if we wanted to read good books that were illegally introduced in the country at great risk for those who could manage that.
It wasn’t quite like so few years before – in the Seventies we had a lot of translations from the great Universal Literature – although those great names were mostly old classics, from before the Russian Revolution when the Communism was enthroned in Europe. Very few neutral contemporaries – mainly of socialist orientation. ‘Socialist’ in the view of the Communists that is. But even those were censored all the times. In the Eighties though, things went from bad to worse.

One day, a friend I could trust lended me a book called ‘1984’. George Orwell’s book. The year was just right – it was 1984.
Since the end of 1983 this book was on peoples’ whispers; almost like some kind of Nostradamus prediction. I wanted to read it very much, but it wasn’t easy to find someone who could ask someone else to ask God-knows-who to lend it to a friend of a friend of a friend. Everybody was afraid to lend such thing to strangers; even to admit they had such forbidden books. One never knew who the other person could be really – there were plenty of informants everywhere. You could end up in jail for distributing ‘subversive material’. There was no difference according to the law between a paedophile distributing child pornography or a regular person lending blacklisted literature to a friend. Ironically, they were more tolerant eventually towards the paedophile. A regular person could end up in jail even for reading a ‘naughty’ magazine like Playboy.
There made no difference to the Communist Watchdog – they could declare subversive whatever they decided to be subversive – even poetry or travel accounts.
Sometimes some people were only suspected of having ‘subversive interests’ and that simple suspicion led– for example – to their typewriter being confiscated. Just in case their subversive interests turned into printed material talking about freedom or democracy.
While reading Orwell’s book I had a revelation of Uselessness, Unhappiness and Time Irreversibly Lost - revelation more acute than ever before. I felt like a Don Quixote fighting the windmills.
The language Soreen has taught us years before was long dead by then.
The spoken/written language in the Eighties was a wooden, heavy, inflexible one – a stiff language of cliche, pre-approved formulas, communist political correctness, false pride and phoney, sycophantic love for dictatorship.
It included compulsorily in every phrase, book or piece of artwork words like comrades, heroes, heroic peasants, working class, heroic proletarians, Leninism, righteous ideology, glory, victory, bright future, duty towards the party, the Motherland, absolute equality, love for the most dearly beloved sons of the Nation on one side, and imperialism, rotten, globalize, enemy, traitor, spy, exploitation, undermining, danger, sabotage, slavery, pit-hell, capitalism, on the other.
No one was allowed to get around these words. Those who tried were punished by those who were ‘more equal than others’.

In the Eighties, escaping from Communist Nesblandia to the Free World was a complicated matter for most and quite easy goes lucky for a very few. It was a daily occurrence though, and later the myth entered the Nesblandian folklore under the general name of ‘exodus’.
To want to run away leaving absolutely everything behind, one had to be very depressed, very disgusted, very scared or simply very hungry.
My immediate family and I were not hungry, but we were all the other things enlisted above.

An old schoolmate of mine discretely had given us hopes that he knew a way in which we could defect to the West without being caught. But his way was expensive because there was a group of ‘helpers’ involved.
Nothing new under the sun.
In the ‘perfectly egalitarian society’ in which we lived, NOTHING that we were entitled to was free as the Communist Scripture pretentiously called Constitution claimed.

Bureaucracy

Why do I have to work always with a couple of idiots?
I am so frustrated sometimes; I just want to scream.
Aaaarrrrgh!!

I was looking in a thick, big, old file for some irrelevant, dumb document that the bureaucracy found necessary to keep. They are collecting them endlessly in the form of wasted paper, although everything we process in an office has few copies electronically stored in a database.
This is one of my dilemmas. If the computers are here and they’ve been around for quite a while now – why do we have to waste forest after forest and keep a copy (and even copies of copies) in large, ugly, messy, boring files, which nobody really ever needs again. And when they do – ironically - all the trash it’s there, but the wanted piece of “evidence” so desperately needed is not, 8 times out of 10.
Usually a draft and an original PDF document is in the data base, but some dumb creature always needs to prove with a printed “original” document that the PDF was in fact printed in the past and filed. Therefore they print the PDF, and on that print it says, “copy of original”(sic!) and they also want the first ever-printed copy of that from a file…
How idiotic.

Looking for the stupid thing, I found an advertisement of some cosmetics brand, a glossy illustrated 5-6 years old piece of paper, filed by mistake by some mindless trainee or god knows who else. Because a trainee I can forgive, they must be new at it, usually young and bored out of their minds teenagers forced by mean adults to do filing. If one of the officers did that though, s/he’d better be drunk in order to have an excuse. Not that would be a valid excuse in anyone’s eyes, including mine.

Now the department where I work is a Department of Justice dealing with games licensing and has nothing to do with cosmetics of any kind. It’s not a place that would ever have to keep on file any pages from any glossy stupid magazines for women.

I sighed, feeling more bored than any trainee would and threw that piece of rubbish in the recycling bin.
Few hours later I had to look in another thick, ugly and boring file for another irrelevant document and this time I found amongst other things, a printer test! Filed there about 2 years ago. I laughed.
What else I would find that day, supposing I was to look again for something, I thought.

Because it was simply ridiculous, I showed it to one of my co-workers. Just because she was around. She is a young woman in her twenties, not too ugly not too pretty, who swears a lot and makes friends with some young people in the office. They go sometimes to pubs together and then at the beginning of the next week, they come to work with incredibly bland stories about their binges. Which they discuss loudly and laugh about a lot.
Them getting totally sloshed once a week, does not impresses anyone any more. You getting drunk and having somebody else to have to remind you what you said or did, gets boring for the listener after a while, week on, week off.

That girl perceives herself as some sort of a supervisor. She is not, but she prefers to see herself as such, because probably she hopes to become one in the future. She seem to enjoy practising it although she does not get paid to do so. Maybe she is deluding herself because she worked in that area a bit longer than some of us.
She insists that she is also a bit dyslexic and when she looks at a piece of paper, takes her a bit until she is able to decipher it, apparently. It’s not the kind of dyslexia that needs special glasses or some treatment and if I think properly, she might just pretend to be dyslexic, because that way she can come up with some excuse “just in case”, for the numerous mistakes she does in her line of work.

However, after looking at the piece of paper for about a whole minute, she said, as usual: "So what are you trying to show me here ‘cause you totally lost me?" She always says that whenever someone shows her some printed text. Meaning that she cannot concentrate in reading a paper at a glance “because of my dyslexia". A sentence that should be translated plainly rather like this: I cannot read without an effort because reading anything bores me to death, therefore I try to avoid reading as much as I can. And when I have to read to save my life, I really need to make a great effort to concentrate and make sense of the content of what I read.

However, this person is, and will be probably for the rest of her life, a public servant. Entailing that she has to serve the misfortunate public. Which she does in a rather careless and incompetent manner.

So, I explained her (meanwhile becoming mad at myself for wasting my time, a thing that I could have avoided if I only kept the bloody thing to myself, instead of trying to share a laugh with someone else) that it was a printer test that was inadvertently filed in that particular file.
I guess the term “inadvertently” was too big a word for her and irritated her instantly.
I could not tell at that particular point in time that she was irritated. All I saw was her rather vacant eyes opening wider and her forehead getting wrinkled in an effort to understand the meaning of such a strange fact.
Realising that I was anyway wasting too much time and perhaps there would be necessary to waste even more until she would finally comprehend the meaning of the word and the meaning of the meaningless paper, I said ‘Never mind, it’s nothing.’ I scrunched the useless piece of paper and recycled it on the spot.

The self appointed “supervisor” went berserk almost instantly: ‘ You are not allowed to extract documents from a file and trash them” she said, with a very sour tone.
I thought she was kidding, so I just went about my business pretending actually that I did not hear her. She insisted, getting louder: ‘ Someone probably put that piece of paper in that file with a purpose – she said’.
I could not believe my ears, but I suggested that if she felt that way about it, we perhaps should ask our management, to make sure.
She could not see anything wrong in that, I could sense that she hoped sincerely to get me “into trouble” although she did not even read the content of that paper to see if it was or not, a printer test or whatever it was.
To me, she is stupid enough to have all it takes to progress in the public service in the near future and she obviously hoped beyond any doubt, that discovering such an outrageous behaviour as I displayed, throwing away papers form a file, would further her career if she got in touch with our boss about that matter.

Commenting louder and louder on my recklessness, she went to the bin, picked up the paper straightening it. Her tone was heard in the next cubicle by one of her friends, the one that really acts for a bit as a supervisor, a gal about 4-5 years older than the one in question. That one came in but did not ask what the problem was because she probably heard from the very beginning what was all about.

However, she doesn’t seem to be smarter than her partying gal friend and although this one does not blame every mistake she makes on dyslexia, she cannot read one page from top to bottom either. It seems that reading is as tiring for her as it is for her friend, the self claimed dyslexic.
Luckily, most of the texts she has to work with are templates. If somehow any of the pre-formatted text gets a little bug and then the meaning, order or number of words changes somehow, she never-ever notices the changes.
So, the acting supervisor took the formerly scrunched piece of paper and went to the big boss “to tell” and probably to “clarify” such a disregard of the rules like the one I committed myself to.

There's no point here to extend this account of the story because as everyone’s guess would be, nothing nice for either of those two came out of the whole incident. Which in fact was not an incident, but another exam for the public service and its members.
Of course the boss got a bit upset (not with me though) and threw that printer test to the rubbish bin, right there in his office.
The briefly lived memento of both of those girls, had passed. With rather different consequences than expected, since their presence in the boss's office reminded him of their existence. The boss had to ruffle a bit their feathers actually for some mistake they committed together in regards of a different matter, that had nothing to do with files and printer tests miss filled there.
One hour later, the “dyslexic” gal improvised some story about a family problem of some sort and went home early.

Myself, I was left there to reflect, wonder, and ask myself – why do I always have to work with a couple of idiots?
Where do the normal people work?
What is the workplace of the nice people, the smart people, those with common sense?
I wish someone would sell some information about that, to me.

I’ll pay, honestly.

Mornings in the bus

Morning in the bus on the way to work, Monday.
Behind me, two high school girls in uniforms, conversing.

‘So you went Saturday’.
‘Yep’.
‘How was it?’
‘Ummmm…..’
‘Well?’
‘Okay I guess. F@*&$ boring. Gay’.
‘Was he there?’
‘Yep’.
‘What about her, was she there too?’
‘She was, the f@*&$ bitch.’
‘You’re kidding me, right?’
‘F@*&$ no’.
‘Wha’ did you do?’
‘Nothin’.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘A bit.’
‘Wha’ did ‘e say?’
‘Not f@*&$ much.’
‘Did you talk to ‘er?’
‘A little.’
‘Wha’ did she say?’
‘The f@*&$ knows. Some crap.’
‘Did ‘e saw you talking to ‘er?’
‘You bet your ass he did.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothin’.’
‘Did you stay long?’
‘Nope.’
‘How late?’
‘I dunno, 2 or 3 maybe.’
‘Did you get drunk?’
‘Nah, John’s f@*&$ parents were home.’
‘You’re kidding me, right?’
‘Nope.’
‘Are you gonna go to Mad Dog’s Friday?’
‘I guess.’
‘Is he gonna go too?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Wha’ about her?’
‘The f@*&$ knows. Hope not.’
‘You are sooo lucky. My stupid f@*&$ parents never lemme go anywhere.’
‘ I know. You poor thing.’
‘You’re always having so much fun. I hate my f@*&$ life!’
‘I know.’
.............................................................................

Morning in the bus on the way to work, Tuesday.
Two young women in business suits, with key cards hanging by the belts, seated opposite to me.

‘You had a sickie yesterday?’
‘Yep.’
‘Feeling better?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘How was your weekend?’
‘All right, I guess.’
‘Did you go to Greg’s bash Friday?’
‘I sure did.’
‘How was it?’
‘Not too bad.’
‘Who was there?’
‘Everyone. You should have come.’
‘I couldn’t. We’re f@*&$ broke.’
‘Nobody brought much, you should have told me to lend you a couple of bucks.’
‘Nah, Phil doesn’t like that. He’s funny when it comes to this sort of thing. Did you have fun?’
‘Not as much as I hoped to.’
‘What happened?’
‘Josh was there.’
‘You’re f@*&$ kidding me, right?’
‘Nope.’
‘Was he alone?’
‘No, he was not.’
‘Who was he with?’
‘Some f@*&$ slut.’
‘Do I know her?’
‘You might. She works in accounting on the third floor.’
‘Lisa?’
‘Nope’.
‘Jane.’
‘No, not Jane. She’s back with her ex now.’
‘Mariah?’
‘Are you nuts? Mariah got married a month ago.’
‘Then who?’
‘The new one, the red head.’
‘Shut up! Get outtahere! She seems sooo f@*&$ conservative, makes me wanna puke.’
‘Well, she makes me wanna puke too, but lemme tell you, she’no conservative at all.’
‘You’re f@*&$ kidding me! Some people! I thought she was f@*&$ Virgin Mary. Did you talk to them? ’
‘A bit.’
‘What about?’
‘You know, the usual crap.’
‘ Did you get drunk then?’
‘Yep. Later. After they left.’
‘Oh, you poor thing…So that’s why you didn’t come to work yesterday.’
Deep sigh.
‘Oh, dear, oh dear. What are you gonna do now?’
‘Wha’do you mean?’
‘Well, with Jane’s barbecue coming up and all…Do you think they’ll be invited?’
‘Maybe. I hope not, though. The f@*&$ knows. Perhaps I should not go to that one.’
‘Don’t be silly! You should bring someone hot with you. F@*&$ show them you don’t care.’
‘I should, shouldn’t I.’
‘Of course. Otherwise the party was okay?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Good food?’
‘Yep.’
‘Well, I’m glad to hear that at least you got sloshed. That’s not bad when you wanna cope with somethin’ like this. At least you had some fun.
Phil is driving me f@*&$ insane these days. He doesn’t wanna go anywhere any more. He always finds f@*&$ excuses.
I envy you. At least you are free to do what you want to do.’
‘I guess I am. True. You poor thing, I feel for you.’