Hurting Someone Else’s Fillings

April 26, 2007 at 12:13 pm · Filed under Banging My Head Against A Wall, Random Musings, Work

About a week ago, a supervisor was visiting my little  reception area, showing me some new mind-numbing task she wanted me to perform twice daily.  I asked her a question about it.  I get this response: “Why are you yelling?”

I told her I wasn’t yelling.  Like I’ve said before, I don’t have an exactly perfect receptionist voice.  I’m not perky or very feminine when it comes to how I get words out.  My talking tendencies are always a fair amount deeper, and for some reason, I’ve been ‘blessed’ with one of those voices that naturally broadcasts.  IE-it IS kind of loud, but it’s not yelling.

“Well, can you please do something about it?  God, I can feel it in my fillings.”

In the workplace, there are a lot of things which I will freely admit to that aren’t exactly great and could be changed.  I could have a better attitude towards the time I put in here.  I could be working instead of reading other people’s blogs.  I could subjugate myself further and actually go around to other people and ASK if they had any more useless busywork for me to do.  I could do these things, and I would probably be a better employee for it.

But my voice?  That’s who I AM.  Mind you, this is not the first time this has happened.  I mentioned earlier that when I interviewed for this job, I was not told that it was a receptionist position.  In fact, when I interviewed, I told them that my poor reception skills were kind of what ended my last temp job (I wasn’t perky enough).  Once my boss in this job transferred to a different location, I got called in to this very same supervisor’s office, and I was officially reprimanded for ‘not being perky enough’ when answering the phones, and being the first person an outsider talks to, I was potentially costing the company valuable clients. 

So I’m trapped.  If I were to be reprimanded for something I did or did not do, that I could understand.  But to be told that who you (or a part of you) are is WRONG, that doesn’t make things unpleasant or uncomfortable.  It makes things AWFUL.

Now I answer the phone in a near whisper.  Maybe some people should consider that being a manager does not make them a deity, and perhaps then there would be no need to make people below them feel bad for being different…

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Who Cares As Long As I’m Famous (at least to Google’s search engine)?

April 18, 2007 at 10:06 am · Filed under Outside Facts of Interest, Random Musings, Uncategorized

People talk about how addicted they are to their MySpace sites and similar places-MyBlogLog, Twitter, etc.,  I do have a MySpace place somewhere out there, and it is cool because I found a lot of people from the days of yore whom I haven’t seen or heard from in years.  It was nice to know they were alive.  A lot of people spend a lot of time doing a lot of graphic stuff on their sites, and I’m still pretty new to a lot of this, especially when it comes to graphic design related stuff.

However, I have found a pastime just as addictive and perhaps a little more useful or at least informative which is my beloved Google reader.  I’ve spent hours on Technorati typing random words, finding random blogs, pressing random ESS buttons.  There are usually 100+ postings within the reader on a daily basis.  Many of the topics seem to have to do with personal finance or talk about how to blog, but it’s a pretty mixed bag overall.  I like to read them with Google reader because you can scroll through it sort of half paying attention as each post goes by, or you can stop and go directly to that person’s site to see it in real living color if you so desire, and since it pops up in a new window, you do’t lose your place of where you were.

I was sort of skimming one article; I don’t fully remember what it was about.  It had to do with your site’s name’s positioning and using that for maximum effect or something-effective positioning for highest traffic or SEO somethingof that nature.  A lot of blogs seem to be about how to make money blogging.  For some reason, I’m pretty wary of them.  While I’m sure there are blogs out there who have made money through blogging or their affiliate marketing, I’m generally  uninterested in it right now.  I have 250 books listed somewhere on this site to be an Amazon affiliate. Recently, we joked about what ads would be selected to put on a site like mine were I to sign up for AdSense or whatever sort of company that places ads relevant to your content on your site.  At any rate, I don’t remember much of what the article I was reading said, but it started talking about entering your site’s name on different search engines to check how visible you are.   All I really remember of the article was this line:  ’or god forbid, Dogpile,’ which brought back a nice feeling of nostalgia because I remember using Dogpile about decade ago; it was one of the first search engines I ever used.  So I thought I’d give this thing a try-see if this site exists.

If you ‘Google’ me personally, one or two things might come up.  One was that in the late 90s, a friend wanted to start a magazine, and I told him I would help him as long as I got to have the title ‘Editor in Chief’ with business cards.  90% of the time, you’ll find me as Editor in Chief for this joke of a magazine that only did 4 issues in 1999.  There is another girl who shares my first, middle, and last name, and apparantely she’s doing tons of great things out in Chicago.  If you really, really look, there’s an article in The Denver Post about the band Phish coming to town.  My friend was working for The Denver Post and he ‘interviewed’ me (ie-put in a bunch of quotes of things I never said).  Needless to say, I’m not much in the online world.

But DAMN, this site is!  I’ve had about what? 6? maybe 8 or 9?  Let’s say there have been 12 people total who’ve taken the time to stop by and see what this little site is about.  When I entered ’genxposterchild’ on Dogpile, I filled the page!  I was someone!  I existed!  I was number 1!  Hell yeah!

I then decided how I would fare with the big boys at Google (even though yes, Dogpile does say it covers Google).  Again-2 FULL PAGES OF NOTHING  BUT MY SITE!  Here’s this little blog that doesn’t have much of a purpose other than to give me a space to unload my thoughts and hopefully come up with new ones, something that I didn’t think would amount to anything, and I MATTER!  No one knows about it, my Technorati rank is 1,386,522, I have 3 links from 3 other blogs (two of them are from my boyfriend), and yet I ROCK!  This site is like a club that is SO cool and SO selective that it has very few members, but everyone (if they wanted to-if they had the sudden desire to type in ‘genxposterchild’ on a search engine) knows about (potentially)!!!  To find this out definitely gave my ego a boost.

So now I have nothing to worry about, I don’t have to be afraid if my readership is less than 10 people, and I don’t have to concern myself with who my ‘audience’ is or that I should be writing about different things to maximize my readership or advertisability, because all is going well in the first place because THIS SITE’s name is in FIRST PLACE.  If you happen to be a reader of these humble words, congratulate yourself:  you managed to find this site, you decided to read theses words, you perhaps decided to link here, and might understand and be interested in the disillusionments, problems, experiences and uniqueness of this particular demographic.  You also have a lot else about which to be proud because you are one of the elite, the ones within the velvet rope, the ‘in’ crowd.  MY ‘in’ crowd.  Only a few may be present at this party, but all of the major players know it’s going on, and I thought that was pretty cool.

I just KNEW that picking GenXPosterChild as a name would be way cooler over SearchEngineOptimizationBlahBlahBlah…

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A Bad Day With Some Philosophical Musings Thrown In

April 12, 2007 at 5:06 pm · Filed under Banging My Head Against A Wall, Random Musings, Work

Today has not been the greatest of days.  That’s nothing new, we all have them, some say every work day is not a great day.  However, this has been one of those times when things particularly suck.  My cheerful nemesis (who I now call Chippie) hit early this morning with one of her “Thanks for doing this, now can you file them?” power trips.  I told her that isn’t really possible because filing ceased about four months ago due to lack of space.  I culled the great metal cabinets for closed files to hopefully make some room in which to file all of these new projects a couple months ago to try to alleviate this pressure.  Find numbers on a list, pull all files with that number, put all those files into a box, put all the file numbers on a spreadsheet, and put a sticker on the box.  They’re supposed to go to an offsite box holding place.  Instead, they’re giving the cubicle next to me a nice ‘building a fort’ feeling.  It’d be perfect if it were topped with a blanket.  However, it did little to further the progression of getting the living files in order.

Anyways, upon telling Chippie this, she was not happy.  This is something that needs to be done, she tells me.  I tell her I agree, however we only have two people who are capable of answering the phones (we actually have three-she’s one of them, but stooping to do that NOW is far below the reach of her job description.), and the files are on the other side of the office, and the other girl isn’t too keen on having to consolidate everything or answer the phones (I guess doing that during my lunches is enough).  Chippie is friends with the girl, and overall, I’ve never had much of a problem with her either.  So Chippie asks if I had REALLY asked the friend about the filing, and I told her, “Yes Chippie, as a matter of fact, I have” (ok I didn’t call her that to her face). 

Time goes on, and the day goes by.  A bit later, I notice I have an email from the friend.  It is not a friendly email.  It was a very authoritative thing, detailing unrelated things I must not do and things I am doing wrong and a bunch of really redundant stuff from well over a month ago.  And then she starts talking about the filing.  She’s giving ’suggestions’ that I’m sure would certainly suit her, but are definitely not ‘team’ oriented (and dealing with the filing AND answering the phones does require a team, I’m afraid).  So I emailed her back with my ’suggestions’ and went to lunch.

Ah the blissful mall.  So much to see or do.  Usually, when I’m eating alone, I like to take the rest of the time and walk around and read.  Unfortunately, it was raining, which makes not for good reading weather.  I meander among the shops, still feeling pretty pissed off at all of this, so I go to deposit my tax refund.  In the middle of the transaction, the slot where you’re supposed to put your money in-it starts spewing that long thin receipt paper, the screen goes black, and my card is stuck in there.  I run inside, pull a ‘Dorothy’ on the security guys (like Dorothy on the Wizard of Oz-something like “Help! Help! The ATM machine has my card and we’re all going to die!” kind of thing).  They come out, my card comes out, I use a different machine, problem solved (hopefully).

By now my lunch time is waning, it’s still sort of raining, so I decide to walk back very slowly and deliberately.  I think about where I am.  I think about where I was a year ago, getting ready to move here and stressing about my dog getting on the plane.  I think I knew something was going to happen with Rufus Palmer, not just the flight part, because he died only three months later.  I look at the trees and I think about what the weather in Idaho is probably like.  I look at the skyscrapers and I think about how quiet my hometown is right now-ski resorts have a period known as ’slack’ when the mountain is closed but the summer tourists haven’t arrived.  I think about where I am and I try to imagine what I’d be doing if I stayed, the person I’d be.  Now that it’s been almost a year since I moved here, I realize how many things-geographic, experiences, hell EVERYTHING that’s outside that affects you, that changes who you are inside.  You can’t compare it to what you didn’t do, because that would have come with it’s whole set of curve balls.  But it did get my mind away from what was a frustratingly annoying and awful day…

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Riding The Little Bus Of Blogging

April 10, 2007 at 1:07 pm · Filed under Banging My Head Against A Wall, Random Musings, Uncategorized, Work

Wow.  In the wide wide world of blogging, I’m quite a ways behind.  My latest attempt to be more on top of things has been to subscribe to other people’s blogs, which is mindnumbingly easy to do if you have Google Reader, and once I commence to read them, it’s like gaining new blogging experience all together.   A spin of the wheel moves the topics by.  Some are useful, some are humorous, and sadly, I admit to subscribing to People’s blog (but they only give you a sentence teaser in order to get you go drag open a new bright blue window with the whole story, and I usually just don’t care that much to do that). 

But the fact is, there’s SO much out there that I wonder if reading it all is doing any good for any of my writing.  Because you can cruise through this stuff in this sort of zoned out state, how much I’m retaining isn’t as much as if I were sitting and deliberately reading a book.  However, this is solving a very looming problem of ‘If my job REALLY IS to sit in this chair in the event that someone might come here or the phone might ring, I might as well have something mildly entertaining to do to keep from going postal,’ and this really fits the bill.  I can’t read books at work, but via this method I almost find it more to an advantage:  I’m not entirely 100% ultra super focused on what I’m reading, so when the occasional person enters or the more likely phone rings, it’s easier to leave where I was and return to it moments later, and all the time, I carry on the appearance that I AM working. 

Through much of this, I feel I’ve been existing in a cave-much of it is far beyond me.  Even many of the the ‘I’m just a beginner,’ or ‘I’m new at this’ blogs I come across, I feel like I just got dropped off by the little bus.  The fact that I have no real ongoing theme or topic other than what’s in my brain I fear could be a detriment.  I was told that content is key, but I’m a dilettante-I know SOMETHING about just about everything, but not enough to write a book or maintain a blog about it.

All in all, it’s just a big ego trip.  I want to be the one thousands of people link to and check to see if I’ve uttered anything in the last 24 hours.  I want to be the one with the content people check to see if it’s been updated time and again every day.  But how can I become queen of my own universe when I’m so bogged in others’ blogs?  When I get through everything at first, sifting through the hundreds of thousands of opinions, pointers, and ongoings of other people’s lives, will I be caught up, and will enough information have soaked in as to make me a fabulous writer in the ‘blogosphere?’

At the very least, when I do become the illustrious blogger with all of the witty yet brilliant things to say, I’ll be so prepared and it’ll all look so cool people will be thinking ‘damn, I wish MY site looked as good as hers.  She’s probably been here for a really long time….’  Until next time…

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