April 23, 2008 at 10:42 am · Filed under Banging My Head Against A Wall, Random Musings, Work
“Could you do this project for me?” she asked as she headed to the elevator. It was something trivial, but something with which I had no familarity regardless. I visited many a website, made tons of calls, all to no avail. In Hawaii, there exists the phenomena known as “Hawaii Time,” which yes, means that EVERYTHING, ranging from having a call returned to laying a foundation for a house, it all takes at LEAST twice as long as it would anywhere else in the country.
Having run into a brick wall of unanswered voicemails, I asked her in passing a single question for further clarification. I was told “Let me tell you about managers. When they give someone a project to work on, they expect to not have to think about it until it is completed. I don’t have any time (she was socializing when I asked her) to give you further information. You’re just going to figure it out yourself. Or if you can’t, then you can’t.” O…K… that was helpful. I just made myself feel even MORE like a chump. Fortunately, I was ultimately able to get a hold of someone who had the information I was seeking.
I give this information to the manager, and from it, I was given a new assignment. It was similar in nature, and I lucked out to find the information I needed plus more on one of my first calls. I complete this task and give it to her. It was odd because there was this element of simple busywork to these ‘projects.’
Then the truth comes out. “We’re giving you these projects to see what you can handle.” She asked me of my other responsibilities in this job, which generally aren’t of much importance, but they do count as work. “We are seeing whether it’s even necessary to have this position at all, or whether it could be replaced by the phone. You need to show us that your position is justified in keeping.”
Eh? I always thought that even if it got down to 10 people in the office, they’d ALWAYS need a receptionist. Alas, how wrong I was.
I get stuck with all the work no one else wants to do. I am REQUIRED to possess a friendly demeanor-on the phone and to people coming in. I have to get permission to go to the BATHROOM for God’s sake in case the phone rings, I do all the low work no one else will, and in these hard times of recession, I’m the one you want to eliminate? What about all of your project workers who’ve been sitting at their cubicles doing nothing? If you’re going to save some money, why axe the lowest paid person? Doesn’t make sense to me.
So who knows? My days here may be limited. That’s all right; collecting unemployment for a while sounds kind of fun too.
April 16, 2008 at 12:56 pm · Filed under Random Musings, Uncategorized
I got into an interesting conversation with a friend recently, he’s very ‘conversive’ when talking about Tibet, a topic of which I know little. I wrote back, talking about the near impossibility of finding any sort of truly objective information, for the simple fact is we are all incluenced in one way or another by our surroundings; hence, no single interpretation of what whatever event is going on can be truly objective.
But then that led me down an interesting lane…
Really, there’s little objectivity in anyone’s life. Every day we are alive, every thing we do in that day-from the most mundane of tasks to important decisions-has an effect, perhaps one ever so slight, on us-who we are, what our beliefs are, how we see and respond to the world around us. The only way another person could even come close to understanding your view for that particular day would be if s/he were around you for that entire time, and even then, your interpretations would be likely to differ.
I think that this is why the number of friends a person has tends to dwindle over time. The people you thought would be with you forever turn out not to be because you (or they) have taken a different trajectory, and when your paths again cross, all you share are those moments from the past. Of course, it’s fun to reminisce about the ‘good ole’ days,’ but realistically, how long is that going to last? A few minutes? An hour?
That’s when I thought about the possibility of being able to test whether or not a friendship is a real and lasting one, or just a passing whim. I have two childhood friends with whom I grew up. One lives in Seattle, and one lives in Hawaii, but in Maui. Last year, we visited my friend in Seattle. I had not seen her in 3 years. Our lives now are completely different, and they have been for about the last 20 years. The experiences that we do we share are only about things that happened when we were little. However, when meeting with this person, it is if 20 years were only 20 minutes ago. Only a little attention is paid to the goofy things we used to do when we were growing up. The rest starts where it does and takes off. It’s always been that way. I know that years may pass before our paths cross again, but when they do, it will seem like nothing. It’s like that with my friend on Maui as well. Our friendship stands time’s testing.
I think about all of the people I’ve met and all the people who I really thought I would be friends with forever and ever, and how much it hurt when they went away and I felt abandoned. Yet in this light, I can understand that was meant to be that way. Though there was a group with whom I spent years of traveling and new them all extremely well, those days are long gone. It would be cool to see them in a reunion type gathering for a day, but really, all we share is a specified amount of time in our past. For a friendship to survive, there has to be more; it can’t be described, it’s a sort of substance of timelessness. Ive realized that though my handfuls of friends have whittled down to one hand (with room), these are the people who will always be there for me. No, though they probably probably don’t understand me, and it’s likely we have very different tastes in everything from food to books, I know that these are the ones who are there for me, and I for them, until the very end. It’s like we share a spiritual bond rather than a superficial one, something that is greater than can be understood, and to know and feel that brings great comfort to me.
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