Materialistic Magnets

Googling "I love my job" gives:

You this. Pretty good poem but too bad the poet is unknown. Here goes:

I Love My Job!

The Lost Dr Seuss Poem I love my job, I love the pay!  I love it more and more each day. I love my boss, she is the best!  I love her boss and all the rest. I love my office and its location,  I hate to have to go on vacation. I love my furniture, drab and gray,  And piles of paper that grow each day! I think my job is really swell,  There's nothing else I love so well. I love to work among my peers,  I love their leers, and jeers, and sneers. I love my computer and its software; I hug it often though it won't care. I love each program and every file.  I'd love them more if they worked a while. I'm happy to be here.  I am.  I am.  I'm the happiest slave of the Firm, I am. I love this work, I love these chores.  I love the meetings with deadly bores. I love my job - I'll say it again -  I even love those friendly men. Those friendly men who've come today,  In clean white coats to take me away!

Finally

Yes. Finally. It's the weekend.

I can't believe I got through it really; this week the company was really quite the circus with just the 15 minutes tea snuck out at our secret lair (it's secret... so I'm not going to share with you where it is. No it's not the cafeteria) keeping you sane.

Spent most of the week doing stuff that needs to be done - that took up about 40% of my time. There is really no other direction in my line of work so most of it is self-motivated. Usually I would stare at textbooks and try to get the knowledge within to percolate into my brains for the remaining 60% of the time. This week, for some reason, the knowledge within decided that they were better off stuck on the products of dead trees.

They've got a point I guess.

I'm at this point which my boss describes as the "the mediocrity nirvana". The moment, when your realize, that no actually you're not going to even remotely be near winning the Nobel prize after all. Oh but before that, I need to introduce my characters.

Presenting: immediate Boss #1

T2000.001 (+/- 0.0005) Affiliation: None/allies
Powers: sort of a reverse-andriod, T2000.001 recently adopted humanity, just to "try it out". Nevertheless, this trial-period means that T2000.001 has severely limited emotional vocabulary, currently consisting only of cynicism, sarcasm and whimsy. Has stealth capabilities; forearms capable of transforming into a myriad of computational and mechanical tools and weapons. Severely territorial: you've been warned.

Level of confidence to allies (1 being most trustworthy, 5 being least trustworthy, allies automatically getting a 1): 3

I do like T2000.001 by the way. But anyway, it struck me that "this is it" and "i'm stuck in the company unless I do something about it." And then the whole barrage of questions hit.

Am I really into this whole R&D thing? Do I really want to do this job? Does this job pay off? Will this job pay off if I invest more of my life in it? Would Science be better off left to the * real * experts?

The last question worries me cause I look at the Saints and Demigods that dictate the direction in the company and if they are considered the real experts, then sign me up as a heretic.

AgentOrange screams at me: GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!

I don't know. I guess there's the weekend to mull over it and figure out stuff. And hopefully when the weekend blows over, there will be dowsing rods and magnets and sunshine.

Stay Home Scientist

Today:

Woke up, washed up, brushed my teeth, walked downstairs, had breakfast, stared at the news, washed the dishes, iced my shoulder, walked back up, stared at my unmade bed, stared out of the window, made the call, went back to bed.

woke up had lunch went back to bed.

woke up again and wow it's 4pm.

It's unbelievable cause everything that went wrong seemed to have went wrong: D-day last week, the seminar shock (more of that to come), that I could've been in San Francisco NOW (oh my, a lot more of that to come) and then pulling my shoulder at gym on Monday. The latter sucks really bad because bad shoulder = no working out for a week or so = from (0_0) to (     O _ O     ).

We'll see I guess.

The serial napping today helped the despondency a bit. Put my position in perspective and made some plans with regards to my life. Yes all this is done in the few hours in between the naps. I'm so proud of myself. I always told my teams that my working pace is sort of a "punctuated equilibrium."

The tragic thing is that more than half of my colleagues would not understand that, or even know where it's from. The other worrying thing is of those who do understand that, a handful of them would go crazy and start a "I hate Charles Darwin" tirade. One which I respond usually with "Honestly I don't think Charlie would care."

But the napping and day off did help though. The shoulder's feeling slightly better - maybe I could head back for some cardio and legs tomorrow. And great plans are afoot.

Like dinner plans. And the "roll back into bed plan."

(                 O _ O                  )

Lunch

Got an SOS call today from AgentOrange who resides in a related lab office. 

I need lunch... horrible day she said.

So we went. Like all jobs, the people of the company are split up, to me at least ,into groups: allies, enemies, by-standers, innocent sufferers, stuffed toys etc. 

If the company was a Comic book, this is what people at lunch today would look like:

AgentOrange. Affiliation: allies

Age at the company: 4 years

Powers: Practitioner of Alchemy; many failed experiments has led to her being slightly eccentric. It's the vapors and fumes. Lone ranger of vanishing alchemy sect that actually believes in niceness. Possesses the ability to exhume vapors of truth, either causing flailing il-logic, or sad bitter grudging whimsical acceptance.

RadioHead. Affiliation: allies

Age at the company: 1 year

Powers: A profound understanding of the system combined with consistent bitterness results in the ability to shapeshift at will. Shapeshifing ability slightly volatile and occasionally uncontrollable, resulting in hilarious yet slightly embarassing moments. An attunement to the environment of the company results in the ability to tap into information from electromagnetic fluctuations in the air.

And of course, there's me.

EigenGetHappyIfEitri. Affiliation: allies

Age at the company: 1 year

Powers: None. Once immensely powerful with abilities to control space-time at will; depowered since entry into the company. Novel and new feelings of complete powerlessness has left him to be the only one capable of human emotions.

Lunch involved claypot rice, which was surprisingly yummy. Mmm mmm. And conversations revolved around the recent D-day (read: performance review) and what people got out of it.

Two of my projects got a 'D'. And yeah it's like college quality grades, so that gives you a grade point of 1.0. Amazing. 

So in total, my grade point average for my projects amount to about 1.666/4.0

Which is alright, since most projects get rated C. But the deal is this:

Project "haha you got a D" Apple started April 2009. The review was for last FY. The reason I got for the abyssmal review was: "Oh... you didn't opt out of the review and the review was done in June."

Fine. We did nothing for the project last FY cause it started this FY and we forgot to remove it from the list. Alright. We therefore get a D for that. I can accept that.

Except that Project "buwahaha another D you suck" Bananas which started yonks ago involved me working my ass off for the past one year. Adapting myself to become an engineer (the depths I've sunk), sourcing out clue-ful collaborators from under the rocks, vendors blah blah.

So it really doesn't matter if I work on the project or not.

AgentOrange brought up the image of the Demigods and Saints that determine your grades... scratching their armpits and deciding your grade on random whims.

I thought I liked that quite a bit, and contemplated it with sad bitter grudging whimsical acceptance. 

It, this is.

So it's ONE YEAR since I started my job at the company, and it's official.

I hate my job. 

Well I don't hate it 100%. I'd say I do like 30% of it. It pays reasonably well, though not well enough you could roll around in caviar but hey. It pays reasonably well. It's *really* cushy. Which is good and bad.

But the rest of the 70% is sooo disturbing on so many levels... it makes me become angsty again, with all the pent up rage against the machine. And I hate that it makes me become that. But that's what I've become.

So here it is. Angst. Rage. Frustration. Bleagh.

*shrugs*

I'm trying. But it's Sunday evening, 30 minutes away from Monday. And I'm sure you've felt that feeling before.

I saw a bunch of national slavery army recruits at the train station awaiting their transports to the basic-hell-camp. The emotion: shuddering nostalgia tinged with a slight sadistic glee and a smattering of relief, made the Sunday blues slightly better.