Susceptible to bullets, death rays, and alligators

Well, it's time to start yet another day of fixing things that other people have broken.

I don't know how Superman does it. If I have to drive more than five minutes to unjam a printer I get furious. Why can't these people unjam the printer themselves? Can they not read the error message that pops up? Come on, you idiots.

I don't think my attitude would change if I was saving people, either. I'd swoop down from the heavens and punch a bank robber in the face, then fly away muttering, 'stupid citizens can't even deflect bullets with their feeble human ribcages...'

So I'm off fixing stuff, while you continue being susceptible to bullets, death rays, and alligators.

(work.)

...because fixing printers all day makes you immune to bullets, death rays, and alligators.

Looks like this is the second entry in a row in which I'm documenting my slow descent into delusions of grandeur.

Printer-related knowledge is exciting

It may be Fall Study Break for you Michigan students, but for me it's The Extended Weekend With Less Paper Jams.

Sometimes when users are waiting for me to fill or unjam a printer, they get impatient and ask 'will the printer work if I print?' I want to explain and say, 'Yes, I'm loading tray 4,which is on the bottom, but the printer moves paper upward, so it'll just print from trays 2 and 3 while tray 4 is open.'

But I know they won't listen, just like you probably stopped reading as soon as I offered more than four words on whether or not the printer worked, none of them being 'yes' or 'no.'

I live an exciting life.

(work for another 4 hours, because the first 9 hours today weren't enough.)

When I'm at the doctor and something's wrong with me, the doctor always tries to explain what's happening, even if it's too complicated for my stupid non-doctor brain. When I'm fixing a printer and somebody's waiting for their lecture notes, I tell them what's happening and they look at me like I'm speaking Portuguese. Backwards. Out of my butt.

If your lecture notes matter that much to you, then do us both a favor and treat the printer like your kidneys are inside it and I'm the only person who can save your kidneys (or at least get them out of the printer).

I know what I'm doing here, much like a doctor, and while this may not affect you in the long term the way a doctor finding a tumor in your scrotum would, it's affecting the next five minutes of your life. Long story short: Please listen to me, because until you realize that most printer jams can be fixed without me, you need my help.

Tune in next post, when I go on a vicious rant about how it bugs me when people jam the stapler and then borrow pens and don't return them! Man, I hate that!

Exciting Facebook pictures and your boring life

With social networking sites like Facebook, your friends can share pictures of themselves doing exciting things to make you hate your own life.

Your friends can log on and upload photos of themselves touring London or camping in South America so that people across the globe can see how shitty their lives are in comparison.

To compete with these pictures, I'm going to photograph what I've been doing. I'll post page after page of me surfing the web at work, getting free black and white printing, and doing other awesome work stuff.

Screw your epic backpacking photos, Facebook friends. Do you get free coffee singles in the break room?

(dinner with Dad.)

The other day I saw that my buddy Drew had gone to Honduras. He'd grown a wicked beard and appeared to be having the time of his life. Meanwhile, I looked at YouTube for a few hours, checked my email several dozen times, and told a guy where the stapler is.

On the other hand, Drew is probably pooping in a hole while I can use a toilet whenever I want. Nobody said life-changing experiences would have indoor plumbing.

Early morning amputation story

Sometimes I wake up and the skin around my right eye is puffy. I don't know if it's an allergy or a hex or what, but the swelling goes down by lunchtime, so I don't sweat it.

Last week, Roy the Custodian saw my eye and asked me if I'd seen a doctor.
'It might be a spider bite.'
'Nah, I'm ok. It'll be better in no time.'
'The other day a freshman was in here and he had a mark on his leg. I says to him, 'You should see a doctor.' He asks why and I says I knew a guy who had a spider bite and he didn't see a doctor.'
'No, seriously, I'll be ok.'
'He got gangrene. They amputated his leg.'
'...'
'See you later.'

Maybe he just thought I looked tired and I'd wake up if he scared me. 'Hey, your eye's swollen. I know a guy with one leg.'

Thanks, buddy.

(bed.)

I have a feeling that Roy's one of those parents that loves scaring their kids into behaving.

"Eat these oranges! I met a guy who never ate oranges and he got scurvy. He bled out of his gums, then they got infected and the doctors had to remove his head to stop the infection. Then he died. He didn't have a head. Eat the oranges!"
"Turn off that Xbox and go outside! I knew a guy who didn't exercise and his windpipe collapsed under the weight of his chins. He didn't have an Xbox or anything, but you get the idea."

I looked up the symptoms of scurvy to make fun of the friendly custodian at work. That's a combination of dedication and being a dick.

Sub shifts and dog parts up for grabs

Today my fellow consultants received the following email:

"Hey consultants!

Who likes money? Assuming Sites doesn't hire communists, I assume that everybody reading this likes money (even you!).

Tomorrow (Thursday) from 3:30pm to 7:30pm, fortune awaits thee, as I will bequeath unto you four - count 'em - FOUR Angell consulting hours. Imagine all the stuff you can buy with the money you'll make at this sub shift. Candy, hats, office supplies, and...

Oh! Do you like puppies? Well...um...they're really expensive, so you could spend your 30+ sub shift dollars on...part of one. A leg, maybe.

Do you want a puppy leg? Take my sub shift and find yourself one step closer to part of a dog!

-Henry"

(bed.)

Sometimes I'll think about taking off work, but then I'll stop because I don't have the creative energies necessary to tell my coworkers that certain hours are available for the taking. Most people send out emails that say "Hey! Angell shift open next Tuesday at 1:30. -Scott"

I'm pretty sure I just sold detached dog appendages to my coworkers.

Dear coworkers, take my shifts, wear my shirts

I sent this email to my coworkers in an attempt to get them to pick up sub shifts for me:

Hey consultants and rovers,

I'm going to Colorado from July 5th to July 12 to win a breakdancing competition, which will help save an orphanage, a bird sanctuary, and a retirement center from being bulldozed and turned into a strip mall by a major corporation (read: "going to a family reunion"). That leads me to this pitch:

Need extra money this summer? Yearning to work for the greater computing good? Enjoy answering software and stapler-related questions and/or driving a sweet white van with AM/FM radio? I have the solution for you!

C 1 A L I S T A B L E T S!


Er, I mean, Angell and Roving sub shifts! Who wants 'em? (The answer is "awesome people")

(list of available shifts)

All awesome people who pick up my Angell shifts get to wear my Henry/Hack nametag (even if you're a girl!). Rovers typically don't wear nametags, so if you want to wear some of my stuff during my sub shifts, come over to my house and you can borrow a shirt or something.

Big thanks to those of you who can help out.

Henry Birdseye
Begging at your feet

(work.)

Nobody's picked up any shifts yet, but on the upside I sold three boxes of Cialis tablets and a few replica wristwatches. If you don't get that joke, you probably have a good spam filter set up. Good for you.

The printer is frisky, needs sex

Yesterday a printer in the dental school was acting up hardcore so I had to put a call in to get it fixed remotely. While I was waiting for things to get fixed, a service employee walked toward the printer, looked at it like it was a combination of calculus and magic, furrowed his brow, and walked back to his computer.

The guy was older and obviously didn't 'get' computers, so I tried to explain to him what was happening. When I talk to non-computer people, I end up saying stupid things. Case in point:
'We're having some problems. The printer's being frisky right now.'

Frisky was not the right word. That is not how the word 'frisky' is used. Frisky does not mean 'not working.'

I pretty much said, 'The printer is horny right now. It would print your documents, but it wants me to have sex with it. It'll be working soon. You know, after the sex.

(Angell for 16 hours. seriously.)

During my 16-hour workday, I:
Ruined a Facebook group so that it said "Happy Birthday" to a friend (I will post this later)
Helped a platonic lady friend pick out the right man on Craigslist
Lent out the dinosaur pen multiple times, even if it doesn't have a swastika on it
Forgot everything else I did during 16 hours of "work"

If your boss has the address to your blog, you probably shouldn't refer to what you do as "working." The quotation marks, though accurate sometimes, aren't helping.

Sunlight worms on your shoulder

When we sub out shifts for work we send emails to our coworkers to give them a heads up. Here's one I wrote tonight:
Did you know that at 7:30 every Friday morning all the birds are singing? And the squirrels will come up to you and eat food right out of your hand. Beams of golden sunlight trickle down from the heavens and lay eggs in your hair, then little sunlight worms hatch from the eggs and perch on your shoulder and sing you happy songs.

"It's Friday morning and everyone's glad /
Nobody's angry or miffed! /
Sunlight worms on your shoulder and that is rad /
So pick up Henry's sub shift!"

I have an Angell shift open this Friday from 7:30am to 9:30am. Hopefully just now you read that message and got so confused that you accidentally took that shift and gave me a foot massage.

...Please?

(bed.)

Nothing drives a point home like an ABAB rhyme scheme.

The Teat of Ignorance

I work at a job that exists solely because people are ignorant. If people started googling their questions instead of blaming all their computer problems on ghosts then I would be out of a job.

Every morning I can wake up and ask myself, 'Hey, do people still suck at computers? Yes? Then I shall continue to suckle from the Teat of Ignorance.' And as long as the teat of ignorance secretes paychecks, count me in.

Whenever I answer questions for people, I know that little by little I'm making the IT department less important. That's why from now on I'm lying to users. 'Oh, you want to scan a document? Here, let me call my wizard friend and he'll tell me which spell to use. You go off and open Photoshop and I'll get back to you. By the way, do you have any holy water? There's a ghost in your computer that only I can get rid of.'

(bed.)

Check out this article:
"97 percent of IT professionals feel traumatized by their daily work. Indeed, 80 percent of them get tense just thinking about going to the office."

I wouldn't say my situation's that bad, but then again, I'm not an IT professional. However, I'm still working in the IT department, so I'm still dealing with people who shouldn't be using computers: women, old people, uh...um....actually, I think that covers it.

Then again, I use the internet. If you're a regular internet user there's a good chance that you look down on people dumber than you. Coincidentally, this is also what happens when you work IT.

Work IT, baby, yeah.

IT work made me hate psychology, humanity

If someone is pursuing a concentration in psychology, this is sometimes indicative of him or her wishing to understand the human mind so that it can be repaired (for a nominal fee, of course). I studied psychology, and at one point I wanted to fix mankind by diving into its brain and charging an hourly rate. I wanted to help the world with my mastery of the human mind.

Then I got a job in the IT department.

I hate mankind now. You people are stupid assholes. It's not that hard to open an email attachment, people, so stop asking me. Have you ever heard of Google? Fucking use it before asking me dumb shit. And for the love of each and every one of your different gods (I'm addressing all stupid cultures here), trying helping yourselves. And for the last time, look around before you ask me if we have a stapler. Dickheads.

(at work, hating humanity as a whole a little bit more, I'm sure.)

Don't think I hate my job, either. My job, which is both addressing hardware issues and answering software questions, is fine when it goes smoothly, and most of the time it does and all is well. However, when most of my time spent with users is spent answering questions about office supplies, sometimes I just want to rip off someone's head and pee down his or her neck.

I was gender-neutral there. I'd pee down his or her neck. I'm doing my best to avoid being ungrammatical or sexist, though I'm pretty sure there aren't feminists making signs that say things like "I demand that you pee down my neck, too."

I take that back. I'm sure there's a feminist somewhere making that very sign, but it's for entirely different reasons.

Second alarm versus vomiting

I was sitting here, wondering what I write my away message about, when I got to thinking about what would happen if I turned off my alarm at 6am, set another alarm for a little later (but set it for pm instead of am), then slept in and didn't get to work at 8am.

I figured I'd call into work and say I was throwing up all morning, but I don't like to lie, so I thought about making myself vomit into the toilet upstairs so that when I called in sick and talked about throwing up I could do it honestly.

Then I started gagging in my chair just thinking about the scenario, getting ready for tomorrow morning's hypothetical vomit party, when I figured:
Maybe I'll just set a second alarm right now.

If I can take a mental detour that ends with me throwing up early (as opposed to on time, which is somehow much better), it's not worth it. Second alarm it is.

(Bed.)

This happens almost every morning. I set an alarm that's overambitious, giving myself two hours to get ready for work. Ideally, I'd wake up, eat breakfast, do some situps, take a shower, then leave for work early.

To date, I've never done this.

Instead, I wake up, set an alarm giving me another 30 minutes of sleep, then I wake up, set another alarm, then finally wake up an hour before work, shower, put pants on, and go to work hungry and running a little bit late.

This would, of course, be fixed if I would just get fired.

Racial unity and cracker snatches

Two friends decided to visit me at 3am in the computer lab while I was working. Oh, and they were drunk.

So I tried to maintain balance between Professionalism and Not Telling Your Friends to Fuck Off, then we went to Bell's for pizza. However, the highlight of the evening was this:

My buddy Aaron Brown, who, coincidentally, is brown, wanted to see if some white girls would move if he walked down the sidewalk on their side, swinging his arms like a jackass.

He did so, they moved, and he called them racist. 'No, Aaron, it's not racist because you were in their way. It would be racist if you swung your elbows around and yelled 'gonna hit me some cracker snatch.'

So he laughed. Then he actually walked down the sidewalk singing, 'gonna hit me some cracker snatch.'

That's racial unity, right there: two people of different backgrounds walking down the street, joking about hitting one race in the vagina (with their elbows, somehow).

(Bed at 5am.)

Well that scared away any female readers I may have had. Or black readers. Or readers.

Though in cracker snatch's defense, cracker snatch sounds like a tasty after school treat.