Having a Craptacular Time! Wish You Were Here!

How come people who are on vacation are expected to send picture postcards to their friends, innocently going about their daily routine at work? This only serves to foster envy and resentment, don't you think? Why don't people at work send postcards to their vacationing friends? I think this would make a lot more sense. At least, that's a thought that was occurring to me right as I was racing down the stairs to morning break, and came very near tripping and being killed in a freak stairwell accident.

The rubber treads in the east stairwell are cracked and peeling, and chunks of them are missing. Several months ago, everyone in our building received an email notification that they would be replaced. (The stair treads, I mean, not everyone in the building, though that's also a rather intriguing idea.) This hasn't happened. But today some workmen came and ripped out a perfectly good wall on the south stairwell, taking care to turn off the adjacent elevator first. I don't know how the smokers made it to their cigarette breaks. They might have had to dive out the window, which I think is slightly more probable than their walking all the way to the opposite end of the building to use the other elevators.

We, the break group, suspect these were the workmen who were supposed to replace the stair treads, but that the project is being overseen by the infamous director of the administrative section: he who coordinated our division's move with such staggering incompetence that what should have taken two weeks, at the outside, ended up taking almost two years; he who opens and reads all division employees' mail; he whose brainchild our Big Broth^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Scotland Yard software is, which pretty much everybody except our (new) manager's group seems to find some excuse to get out of using; he who was supposed to order Bitching Smoker a replacement ergonomic keyboard for her new computer, but whose underlings finally informed our boss, non-apologetically, after sitting on the request for five months, that the paperwork appeared to have been misplaced and would need to be resubmitted; he who sends out urgent, division-wide emails telling people not to burn microwave popcorn or take paper towels from the bathroom to use in the kitchen (they are purchased from a different budget, so this is a huge deal, you know) but will never respond to repeated emails asking for actual information pertaining to his actual job function; he whose name has become so universally synonymous with the term "great vast blithering idiot" that if you so much as mention him to anybody in our division - I am not exaggerating, this is totally true - they will immediately say "ugh" and roll their eyes. Seriously. They can't help it, it's reflex.

In our staff meeting yesterday, our supervisor had apparently been instructed by someone - senior to herself - to stress to us all that we have to, have to, have to be sure to keep our Scotland Yard updated. We've been told over and over and over again that it's only a tool to let anyone looking for us know where to find us. It is not a time clock. But in our meeting yesterday, our supervisor once more stated that, while it is definitely not a time clock, and she is definitely not trying to micromanage us, we really need to be sure to keep it updated for our own good. You know, so that when the people who are snooping around on us come to her to tell her that we're a bunch of lazy, no-good, do-nothing slackers who come in late all the time, she'll be able to pull up reports from Scotland Yard to demonstrate that we in fact have signed in right on time every single day, and therefore defend us. To whoever it is that's attacking us. She didn't say.

We took extra-long breaks yesterday, and I spit on my resume a few times, and shined it up a little bit with my sleeve. The thing is, the one thing this rather silly job has going for it is that it's been entirely stress-free. I'm a little cheesed at the attempts to address this and only this aspect of working for the state.

Want to see the picture on my postcard?