I hate July.
July is when I realized that I just don't have the right mind to be good at my job. July is when I started to hate seeing the same scenery everyday. July is when Mason became no longer my Mason. July is a big 'ol stupid, waste of time month. BUT, tomorrow is August and I have decided to come out of exile and put the horribleness that is July behind me.
How optimistic.
Turning points are never stupid. I only said that because I hate July. Turning points are good! They let us expand and move and keep from stagnating and I will take advantage of my terrible turning point and let it lead me somewhere I want to be. Yay optimism!
I have asked my English co-worker to help me get a job near London. I believe to have him as a contact and friend is the only reason God and the universe let me even get this web job in the first place. I hope everything works out with that because moving there has been something I have thought about everyday since seventh grade. I think it will. (there's that optimism again!)
July is also the month where I bought my Dear Motherbear Murphy, the cat. She woke up to a rattlesnake on her porch and I thought a cat would be able to protect her from vermin. He came from PetSmart and stood out with his one blue eye and one green eye and demonic looking face. Such a mean looking creature should be able to scare away vermin! And he had been found tramping around on Pamplico Highway so he obviously had the street skills to fight.
I told Dear Motherbear that I had found her the perfect farm cat and the next day we skipped down to PetSmart together and took Murphy the cat home. He crawled into the back window of the car and screamed bloody murder the whole way home. D'aw!
Murphy gets home and immediately acts like he has been living there his whole life and he is exactly where he is supposed to be. He is not acting like the street thug he is supposed to be at all. He doesn't even look mean anymore! He is perfectly white and fluffy with a bell collar who likes sleeping on pillows. There is nothing intimidating about that. Especially to a rattlesnake that is trying to kill my mother.
Anyway, that plan was a bust. She still hasn't taken the thing to the farm where it belongs so it can't really protect her when it is in Florence watching TV all day. At least she has someone to play with at home, I guess.
In the meantime, I am going to my new web-job. Each day is a surprise because I don't know if they are going to fire me for being incompetent or if they want to keep me around to laugh at. It really keeps me on my toes. I hope they decide to keep me for a while despite my incompetence because I enjoy working there (or trying my best to do the work they give me while I am there...). Its a nice little place when you try your best to see it that way... I have my own cubicle and my own double-screen computer and my own personal signature that goes on the end of my emails when I email my very own clients. It is just the big-girl job I need after I clean the floor mats and the trashcans at the fruit shop...because thats what getting a college degree gets you. Thanks Coker.
But yes, my new web job is a nice little gig. It is like getting paid to take a web class and the only thing I have to do in return is be humiliated by my incompetence and get made fun of because of how young I am. I am at the bottom of the web place chum bucket and I get the crappy machine that has trouble saving files and the "cubicle of doom".
I was told that it was called this because it was right across from the "men's loo", the English term for "men's crapper". I hear everything that goes on in the men's loo and it is not a healthy thing. I'll leave it at that. I'm just saying I will never forget my IPod ever, ever again ever. It's a pretty horrid thing, but the men's loo is the least of cubicle-related problems.
Since I have started this job, I am learning a lot more about why this cubicle is cursed. It sits right in the middle of a triangle of chaos. The men's loo is directly to my left. A registered sex-offender is directly to my right. ( good thing I'm twenty three and too old for him...yeah..he likes them young...real young.) Then there's Robbie, the farting man, who sits directly in front me. The man's aura is a methane cloud. He has so much gas that I wouldn't be surprised if his insides were shriveling up. It is vomit inducing. It's the rancid icing on the moldy cake when he scans me from head to toe when I walk past his desk. He is the reason I don't wear heels anymore. He made it very noticeable that he likes my legs in heels. So I wear my brown, ratty flip flops even if they don't match my outfit. They work well as farting-man repellant.
Regardless of the many charachters, the office lacks personality. It is a place where someone could easily snap and throw him or herself off the balcony or beat their head on the stairwell until they were a vegetable. I wouldn't be able to work there it if the English co-worker I mentioned earlier were not there. I will call him Winston Churchill.
I work for Winston Churchill. I was hired to help him with the overflow of work that he constantly has. Little did he know that I am mentally challenged. Everyday I ask him questions that I should already know the answers to and I take about 78 times longer on assignments that I should be able to do with my eyes closed. When I finish my piddly assignments, I make my way over to the Guru's (Winston Churchill's) cubicle and I have a computer lesson on junk that we both know I will never ever understand in my life. There would be no way that I would be able to listen to this junk if it was not being told to me in an English accent. I think God and the universe knew this, another reason why I am employed at this particular place.
Despite my handicap, I try like nothing else to do my work and they recognize that, so they deal with me. They also deal with me because they need someone to make fun of. Winston Churchill used to be the butt of all the jokes, but now it's me. It doesn't help that I can't control myself and say some dumbass things. I am the unintentional entertainer. I like to think of myself as the life-bringer to the personality vacuum that is the web place. It works out to be the one people laugh at even if it does sting. I don't think they realize I would purposely fall down the stairs and break my dang leg to keep the focus off how confused the work makes me. I am a joker because I am nervous and I often have a lump in my throat that I have to force down. You can laugh at me any day if I could trade in the place of my humiliation.
One of my very first assignments I was given totally blew my mind. I was so lost that I wanted to slither through the window and down the rain gutter all the way down to the underground sewer lines and live there.
I get very dramatic at the web place.
I didn't want to ask Winston ANYTHING because it would give away how much of a moron I was and I would lose my job and be embarrassed and not have any money and not be about to pay my credit card and have all sorts of expenses pile up and have my mother disappointed in me and be rejected by my family and never have friends and get matted up hair and furry teeth because I was a failure and I live in the sewer with all my broken dreams!!!!! I CAN"T ASK ANYONE ANYTHING! I WON'T!! No one will know that I don't belong here except me! ...ever......
I tried everything to get past what was stumping me as I pushed the lump in my throat down. Nothing. I wasn't getting anywhere and the time was going my so fast and I had nothing done! My mind's voice was whispering, "They are going to find out soon Samantha, maybe even sooner than soon because you haven't gotten ANY WORK DONE!!!"
I broke down. I sent Winston Churchill a chatbox message. I revealed my secret. I. am. stuck. I pictured him at his desk looking at my message and shaking his head in the most horrible disappointment that he has ever had in an assistant. I heard him walking over to the cubicle of doom and I knew he was going to ask me how I managed to even get hired. He was so close to my cubicle that there was no time to slither to the window. He was already here.
He was so nice about it. It turned out that my computer is a piece of crap and I didn't have access to something I needed or whatever. Well dang. I feel fine now. Whoa drama! I had no idea I was such a basket case...but alas. As he is explaining what is going on with whatever bug was in my computer, I am listening intently so I won't miss ANYTHING. I am not playing anymore. I will understand EVERYTHING.
In the middle of Winston's sentence, farting man farts a big'en one cubicle over. Winston stops ever so slightly, but continues explaining with a hope that I didn't just hear what everyone in the office just heard. I played like I didn't hear the bomb drop until the end of his explaination. When he stops talking I look at him with the most serious face I could fake and said ,"I'm sorry, what? I didn't catch that last part."
Winston Churchill looked at me for a second with an equally-as-serious face. When he figured out I was joking because farting mans fart was so huge, he wheezed from laughing and walked back to his desk shaking his head in embarrassment for his co-worker still cracking up. From that point on going I was no longer scared or embarrassed to let him know that I was incompetent. I started getting chatbox messages full of jokes and friendly conversations. I made my first friend at work, and most importantly he probably knows some contacts in London!
While all this is happening, Dear Motherbear manages to lose Murphy the cat.
