That or explain how the Supreme Courts of the United States aren’t buying those excuses for hate speech.
It took me forever to break my dentist of the habit. Now he’s retiring, and the new guy wants to play the same game. I’m leaned back in the chair, bib around my neck, light in my eyes, mouth wide open; the little suction tube hanging out the corner of my mouth, he’s got the mirror and the drill in there, and suddenly he wants to have a conversation.
“So, how long has it been since your last set of x-rays? Been flossing regularly? I see some staining here-- tea or coffee? Any sensitivity to cold? Be sure to let me know if you feel any pain, okay?”
No, I’ll be concealing my discomfort so I won’t be culled from the herd by predators, moron. By the way, how the fuck am I supposed to respond to your inane questioning? In dentist school, did you not learn the role the mouth plays in speaking? I can not answer you when you are working in there. Why the hell do you even bother? I can’t nod or move my head while you’re drilling away. My only other alternative is an inarticulate, gape-mouthed grunt while spraying drool as if catastrophically retarded, which I can only assume is the effect you’re hoping for.
Obviously you cherish your little routine-- no doubt it is the smirkingest, giggliest, most precious tradition from dental college, except for the ritual where you touch various parts of your own body with your cleaning instruments. But it’s time to grow the fuck up. The bit is beyond hackneyed. It’s stale like airline food. It’s a tedious standup comedy cliche. Stop trying to get me to participate, because I will continue to decline.
You make a decent living from what I hear-- my previous dentist spent much of our last appointment bitching about what a pain it was to sell his second house in this depressed market so that he could move back to his summer place on Lake Whatever; my heart bleeds for you, bald motherfucker-- so there’s no reason to lash out at your patients like this anymore. Somehow, dentistry has become a respected institution; you’re no longer driven from villages with your leeches and bloodletting knives as you so richly deserve. You’ve got it all: money, prestige, easy access to drugs, freedom to indulge the perverted mouth-fetishism that attracted you to dentistry in the first place.
It’s time to set aside childish things and look for newer, subtler ways of humiliating your victims. The recent practice of draping every available surface of your office with plastic biohazard bags was a nice understated innovation, visually emphasizing the filthy contagion of your contemptible patients. Maybe you thought no one noticed? I assure you these creative efforts are not unappreciated.
If you absolutely must converse during a procedure, I beg you to get your collective shit together at the next International Dentistry Convention, and come up with a simple system of hand gestures that patients can use. Otherwise I must continue to rely on my own single-gesture reply system.
To the Orange Hair Queen of the World,
We have all been waiting in line for the FREE tickets to the tennis tournament for 10 minutes. Bullying your way to the front and berating the people to move it along only makes you look like a clown.
Seriously. You’re all fucking retards.
If you go to turn the PC on at work and it says that the keyboard is missing, perhaps you might want to see if the keyboard is plugged in. It says right on the screen that the keyboard isn’t connected. Right there. In black and white.
When I walk up to the computer, don’t bleat and flap your hands about “This one’s broken!”. Plug the purple knobby thing into the stray cord that’s hanging around right fucking next to it* and look! It works!
And I’m not even doing tech support here. I’m just a fucking data monkey.
*(we have extension cords on our keyboards and mice due to desk space issues)
I thought the ham was all right. It looked all right. It smelled all right. The use-by date on it is tomorrow. It should have been all right when I made a sandwich with it yesterday and took it to work. It wasn’t. Two hours after lunch, things started go wrong. Shortly after that, I realized I’d probably given myself a case of food poisoning. It was a fun afternoon and it’s going to be a fun day! :rolleyes:
I want to go on vacation. You know, to relax. Lie in the sun. See some exotic sights. Donate a boatload of money to a foreign economy. Why do I have to make such a big fucking deal out of it? I’ve been agonizing over destinations now for three weeks and haven’t done anything but build my stress to dangerous levels. Sort of the opposite of what vacations are about. Now it’s getting to the point where even if I decide to go, all the places will probably be booked.
I suck.
Update from the OP: no, my students have not stopped lying. Today I asked my fifth graders if they thought I was an idiot. They said no, but I swear to god, that’s the only explanation, if they think I’m going to fall for these RIDICULOUS lies. “I wasn’t talking! It was Ani!” HELLO, I saw your mouth moving and I heard your voice!
In general, my kids are kind of making me crazy right now. I don’t think I was cut out to be a teacher. Four more months.
God damn you, Florida. Your nice, sunny, warm oceans and beaches that I had for my week vacation make me hate Kentucky and not want to be cold again for the rest of my life.
Dear Engineer Dude.
We’re sorry for messing up your life with our glorious weather.
Florida
high-fives TroubleAgain
Yeah, but don’t they have bugs as big as your head in every nook and cranny of everything? As well as gators lying in wait in every grassy area with a bit of water. And probably malaria.
THE SWITCH FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL BROADCASTING IS NOT THE SWITCH FROM STANDARD TO HI-DEF. DIGITAL IS NOT HI-DEF. Repeat x1000000 for the next year
I am tired of being punished because I’m smart.
Wait. Let me re-phrase. I’m tired of being punished because I have a modicum of professionalism and a touch of smarts.
To the lot of you (especially my boss): Stop fucking flinging things at me because you don’t want to take the time to figure out what to do/how to fill it out/where it goes/etc. “Oh, just give it to niblet_head. She’ll figure it out.” Lazy fuckers. You know, I have to take the time to read the document/research the procedure/chase down the info you need. ALL things YOU can do.
And bossman? STOP enabling this behavior because you’re afraid to piss people off/you think I’m a genius/you are too lazy to deal with whatever your underling is saying.
Most of all, I pit myself for putting up with this shit. And for making all this possible, because, in fact, I WILL do whatever the rest of you are unwilling to do. I take it as a personal point of pride that I don’t dump something on someone if I can do it myself, but that’s because I have ethics.
More than anything, I need to grow some balls and stop allowing myself to be taken advantage of. (Don’t even start me on how little I am paid for all the stuff I am asked to do. And why am I asked? Because my boss knows I’m smart and can do project X, and that way he doesn’t have to hire an accountant or an HR administrator. I am such an asshole for putting up with this.)
Two and a half more hours til gin & tonic, god help us all.
I’ve been listening to “I Hate Everyone” by Get Set Go on a continuous loop. I’m starting to feel better.
Web guy:
Thanks for appreciating the difficulties I was experiencing with the last piece of shit content management application you got for me, and providing this new one for me to look at on your test site. Thanks especially for providing me with login information so I can go in and look around and post content and stuff.
I see that you put the same thing on OUR test site, but I also note that you didn’t mention it, or give me login information, or anything.
So when it came time to add content, I put two and two together and went to your test site (n.b. the one I had login information for) and spent several hours working there. (This was this past Wednesday, for those keeping score.)
OH! you tell me by e-mail (on Thursday). I should have been putting stuff on OUR test site, not yours, you say. Since all my work was in one single section, it will be easy for you to move it all over, you say. Okay, say I, and head over there to carry on my work, in a different section.
Only to find that my login information from the other site doesn’t work, so I am locked out of the site I am supposed to be editing (but not the one I am not supposed to be editing) until such time as you can get around to responding to my e-mail on Friday. But it turns out that the login info doesn’t work because, as per the e-mail I received late Tuesday, you forgot to include a critical “f” in the password you sent me.
And then I find (yesterday) that you haven’t in fact moved the SECTION over, you have moved the pages that you thought I had made changes to, and ignored the rest. So I had to go through, page by page, and make a list of pages I had changed on the old site that needed to be updated on the new site. Oh and then I had to go through AGAIN and compare the menus on the old site and the new site to make sure you got them all, because it appears that this task (which involved flipping between two browser windows and comparing what I saw) is beyond your ability. In the end it would have been faster to do it myself (if I had the login information, that is).
And thanks finally for leaving me to clean up the mess (today) that resulted from all the internal links that got broken when you moved it over. I’m sure you had no idea that was going to happen, and that it was clearly my job to fix and not yours.
So today I am back where I was last Wednesday. Thanks web guy!
And the worst part is, I can’t stay mad at him, because he’s by far the most helpful and proactive web guy I’ve dealt with at this company.
And the ironic part is, the current project is a switch from a traditional website (which required me to send every single website change to the web company; you can imagine how much I enjoyed that!) to a content management system (where, once it’s set up properly, I can (in theory at least) do everything myself). So far the project has taken about eight months for the web guys to give me what I asked for from the beginning (i.e. a suitable content management application, with functional login information, which in the end is one I could have selected and downloaded myself) and two working days for me to completely populate it.
sigh at least it’s nearly finished.
I’m running out of ways to procrastinate!
Whaddya talkin’ about?!?! I can see from here that your spice rack needs alphabetizing!
niblet_head, I have a fridge magnet that says, “The better you do, the more they’ll expect.” I look at it and nod my head internally every day before going to work. I too have pride in my work, and it is a crime that that should be a negative in today’s world, but there it is, and we have to find ways to deal with it.
feather, baby, I knew you’d understand.
Fuck you to the idiot reporting company that sent me this transcript to work on last weekend, marking it as due in 10 business days, and then only bothering to mention to me Wednesday – two days ago – that oh, by the way, the job is due this Friday. I could have had it all done by now if you’d given me the right information in the first place!
And fuck you sideways with a rusty pry bar for so totally, utterly and completely underestimating the amount of work involved that it’s taking me at least twice as long to get it done as it should have because THERE’S TWICE AS FUCKING MUCH AS YOU SAID THERE WOULD BE! Jesus, even a beginner in this fucking business knows that you estimate transcripts based on an average 50 pages produced per hour on the record – so why did you manage to come up with an estimate of 200 pages for the first day of this three-day job that’s already 325 pages and I’m not even done with it yet?
And then fuck you even harder for asking ME to email the completed files as soon as I get them done to the attorney who’s riding YOUR ass (as she should), leaving me in a quandary – do I apologize for the files not being done on time? If so, how can I do it without (a) looking like a lazy whiner or (b) properly and correctly blaming the idiots at the office for failing to provide me with the correct delivery schedule?
And finally, FUCK YOU to this idiot witness. You work for a company that operates huge kilns. Why on EARTH can’t you learn to pronounce the word “kiln” correctly? Why do you INSIST on saying it “KILL”?? All it does is make me want to kill YOU!