Scentsy’s back on. Some hideous approximation of vanilla-ish coffee, I take it. If Satan drank a whole pot of hospital waiting room coffee and then took a giant dump next to a cheap vanilla votive, is what it really smells like. We have a new team member and, via IM, the following simul-convo happened:
purplehorseshoe: what is that STENCH? is the you-know-what turned back on?
NiceSweetCoworker: dunno, I hadn’t noticed a thi — oh.
NewPerson: mmmmm … what smells so good?
:smack:
Big boss ripped our sweet, elderly maintenance guy a new one today because he didn’t salt the employee parking lot. Apparently about the same time last year, big boss ripped into maintenance guy for wasting the salt on the employee lot. Big boss was steamed up about it most of the day today. Stomping around pouting and generally being an ass to everyone. Well, until he took a three-hour lunch. Then it was all smiles like nothing ever happened.
You all remember me saying that there was something off-putting about him that I couldn’t quite put a finger on? I’m guessing this bad memory/short fuse combination might just be part of it. I’ve already learned to e-mail everything to him so I have a paper trail.
One of my precious boxes got shot! The horror!!! The poor defensless thing was just being a good box, sitting on its pallet when someone shot through the door and left a .22 bullet in the middle of the paper.
OUTRAGE!!! My poor precious box!!! Falls to the floor and sobs. (Mostly I’m crying because I’m wanted to be around for the bibliocropsy.)
There are no quaries out here, so people go out and shoot road signs and abonandomed houses/storage units.
Idiots all. My poor box 
It’s too bad you can’t get them to shoot the rats. It’d be like shooting rats at the dump, except it’ll be all civic duty like and all.
You know, I’m oh-so-glad Bill is doing well, and that you are both taking steps to improve your health, but it sounds to me like you’re going to still be in TX when the retirement party happens, and maybe even the “Hurray! He’s gone! Can we get the lady in HR drunk enough to tell us what happened” party afterwards.
This won’t do. We require a first-hand report from at least one of those parties, and preferably both! Do you have anyone you can trust to get you all the dirty, dirty gossip? 'cause otherwise, you know you’re going to have to pack Bill up and head back to AZ so that you don’t miss these events.
I kid.
Mostly.
Wait… does this mean the rats may now be armed?
Do you have proof that the bullet came from a human? Someone needs to search the storage unit for guns now. While wearing kevlar and riot gear, of course…
I’m not missing the point at all. I’m saying that it’s BULLSHIT that Amazon is allowed to insert themselves into that portion of the transaction.
Let’s presume the mood change can be attributed to the lunch. Do you think he DRANK the lunch, or is it more likely that he’s got blood sugar issues?
It also sounds to me like he’s self-medicating. Maybe he’s a high-functioning alcoholic like my ex-husband; an asshole when he’s sober, but super nice after having a couple.
I have to confess that this is a major issue in my life at the moment. I *need *to be at the Hurray, SG is gone party. Second hand gossip isn’t nearly as fun as witnessing the drama in person. Bill has a big suv, I’m pretty sure I can put the seats down and make him a nice bed. If it comes to that, we will take one for the SD team. 
OK…now I’m worried. Rats breed fast and they adapt. It would so not surprise me that the RatKing was able to breed for opposible thumbs.
Thinking of altered-states people…
Background info:
Years ago I spent a very short time in a project which was so horrible it’s become a legend in Spain. People who didn’t go through it do not believe it. This is a small company which produces made-to-order stuff designed by their customers; they can’t have a product catalog because their only product is “whatever the customer wants so long as our machines can make it”.
They’d had a first attempt at implementing the Big Blue Database (henceforth BBD) which was abandoned by the consulting firm after two years; five years later the suits were still ongoing. They hired a second consulting firm (SCF from now). The people from SCF thought “hah, all we need to do is copy what the other guys did and wrap it up, what morons!” - apparently without thinking that maybe, just maybe, that wouldn’t work.
The customer has a reputation of being notoriously difficult, but for me they weren’t; it’s a matter of cultural compatibility. They’re in Euskadi, where it is very common to test people before you decide to trust them; the consultants were from Madrid and their reaction to being put to the test was folding like lawnchairs, which led to the customers getting angrier and angrier, because how can you believe that this person is really offering you what he thinks is the best option, when he can’t defend anything, he won’t even try to defend anything? My own reaction was “correct” (hey, I’m from next door, that testing-people thing is standard here too) so our relationship went swimmingly.
I joined the team 3 years after SCF took the project; my focus was preparing the Quality parts. The first guy who’d been in charge of those, and who’d said “yes” to everything, was from Finance. OK. His replacement, the dude I replaced, was from Purchasing. Re-OK. What they knew about quality could be fitted many, many times on the head of a pin; how many times exactly is something I’ll leave for theologians to discuss.
The team’s manager would rarely come before 10am, always looking like he’d been run over by a truck. He’d enter the bathroom and come out a few minutes later thinking he’d turned into whichever of the Corleones did that “I’m watching you” gesture (it was one of the Corleones, wasn’t it?); he would end every single conversation with it, even those which consisted of a teammember telling him “dude, clean your lip, you’ve got a white 'stache” “oooh you so coool gesture”
One Friday I was so tired (his fault, he’d made us stay until after 3am for nothing) that I couldn’t read the computer screen. I told him so and that I was leaving. He yelled at me “if you leave don’t come back!” I went to my place and, with my junior’s help, wrote out my renunciation, then left. Dude came after me to make sure the rentacop didn’t call me a taxi. While I was sitting in my car, trying to remember the number for Phone Information, I got a call which turned into a job offer, wheeee!
Corleone-wannabe and his boss (who didn’t usually come) spent the next week and a half trying to convince me to sign back up. Eventually it ended in a tantrum in which they told me “you’re not leaving, we’re firing you!” (you mean if I didn’t have another job already lined up I’d be able to draw benefits? Coolio)
I had lunch with the customer’s IT guy a week after I’d left. He arrived laughing. That Monday the consultants had simply not shown up; when the customers called asking “are you guys ok?” they were informed that from then on the work would all be done remotely from Madrid. They were not amused.
OK, so ffwd to last week. I had an interview in Madrid; dude from hereabouts who’d be my manager if I get in, lady with HR. At one point, dude asked about that project, had I had any personal trouble there? Yeah, I did. Horrid customer, I hear? Oh no, the customer wasn’t a problem; it’s a cultural incompatibility that I’m sure you’ll have seen. When the customer barked, the consultants went bellyup, which just led to the customer biting; me, I barked back semipolitely, and of course I only had to do it once. The consultants couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw that the customers were always polite in my presence. No, it was with the team and specially the manager.
Ah, what was the manager’s name? Oh God, I don’t remember, I’m horrible at names… think think think
VS? Yes!
Dude writes down “had problems with VS” and puts a string of stars besides that.
I don’t have a job from that interview because it was an “exploratory interview”, they’re still figuring out exactly what kinds of expertise do they need for their new contracts, but it was nice being with someone who understood the whole “cultural shock” thing and seeing that string of stars. I’d like to get the job just to see if I can get dude’s own stories from that particular war…
“Dude writes down “had problems with VS” and puts a string of stars besides that”.
Here in the states that’s rather an ominous notation (apologies to certain named SDMB posters) to make in an interview…
Not here, not that kind of stars. Setting general usage aside, he’d used those same stars to mark relevant positive points in the CV.
For some reason liquid lunch never occurred to me. But it’s no secret there’s booze in the break room. A bottle of wine just showed up the other day. I’ve never smelled booze on him, but who knows?
He’s pleasant to be around probably 95% of the time. It’s just that other 5% where he throws tantrums my 3-year-old niece would be proud of.
purplehorseshoe I can now say I sort of feel your pain in regards to funky aromas in the workplace. I have a co-worker who thinks that modern medicine is evil and doctors are just pill-pushing quacks. (She also thinks that sugar and meat are EVIL as well but that’s beside the point.) This woman is probably the least healthy person I’ve met. She’s nearly bed-ridden with rheumatoid arthritis, among other things.
This woman treats all of her many health issues by dousing herself in essential oils. Some of them on their own don’t smell bad at all. One she uses is minty, one is kind of green-smelling, and so on. It’s when she starts layering the oils that the fun starts. The combination of the various oils starts to smell like Satan’s salad bar after a while.
It gives me a headache if I have to spend any amount of time with her. And the smell lingers, even after she’s gone. She wasn’t in Friday, and I had to go back to her office to get something and I could still smell the oils. I think they’ve permeated the carpet by now.
I’m thinking of bringing in a bottle of Febreze and spraying down her office the next time she’s out. Think it will help?
You mean, she’s gone the snake oil route? :eek:
I suspect that nothing short of ripping out the carpet, burning the furniture, and repainting the room will help. Besides, do you *really *want to add another layer to the ones already there?
Ick. If I had to be around that at work all day, you can bet your sweet ass that bottle of wine :eek: wouldn’t last long.
I’d give the Febreze a try. You could also stock up on air sponges and put them in surreptitious places (or, hell, put them right out and tell her straight out if she asks about them - “Yeah, they’re for YOU, because all those oils layered on you REEK!”).
The Lunch Bandit is up to his old tricks again. In the past 10 days, I have had my lunch taken out of the freezer twice (including today), plus they took a whole container of cream cheese and two bottles of flavored creamer. I think I know who the culprit is, and I wish he would just come out and say that he’s short on cash instead of taking my food. I’m on a diet and I can’t get anywhere to replace my Lean Cuisines on my lunch break, and the little café across the way doesn’t usually have “light” lunch options.
Seriously, dude: I’ll let you borrow $20 until payday so you can go to the store. I’d even GIVE you the money. But you have to SAY something. And taking people’s stuff is NOT COOL. (He should know, since he’s always reminding us that office supplies are for office use only and threatening to report people who use so much as a Post-It note for “personal purposes.”)
If you’re taking a frozen entree and your work doesn’t have a rule against it, just keep it at your desk. As a bonus , it will take less time to heat up in the microwave.
I do keep the lunches with me when I can, but I am one of those crazies who is afraid of “food poisoning” from spoiled Lean Cuisines. (Even though I’ve never actually heard of anyone ever getting sick from that sort of thing, and anyway there is enough salt in that stuff to make jerky.)
Get a little insulated bag, and the frozen lunch will stay cold enough to be safe for several hours. Or get a little spycam.
