Jungle Fever

“There I was, in the Congo.”

Sorry folks, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been stupid busy at work. I’m transitioning from my current position of “one guy doing three jobs” down to a one job guy and it’s becoming painfully obvious that I’m the only bastard that wants that to happen.

Seriously, I’m so bogged down with other crap that the owners of my company are saying, “Kyu…dude, we need to get you some help.” I appreciate that, but everyone else around me has lost their damn minds. It’s like they all suddenly realized that they weren’t going to have me around anymore so they’ve all upped the dosage of “Quick Questions”.

Little background:

I’m a quasi IT guy. I run our warehouse management system, but I come from the operations side of the fence. Which means I can program it so it works in the real world. Mostly, I’m stuck in the office all day, answering emails, monitoring file transfers, and writing endless reports. (Yeah, TPS reports in triplicate.)

The problem is that I work in an office full of people who know just enough about Windows™ to be dangerously inept.

I swear to the God of Cast Iron Piping that if I hear a phrase that starts with: “Quick question…” again, someone will have their spleen removed with a pickle plucker.

Example A –
Inept Coworker: “Quick question…how do I save a document?”
Me: “Uh…select file and save.”
IC: “Where does it go?”
Me: “Where did you put it? Stick it in your ‘My Documents’, off your desktop.”
IC: (blink-blink) “But, how do I attach it to an email?”
Me: (sigh) “Use a stamp.”

Example B –
Inept Coworker: “Quick Question…My system is locked up.”
Me: “Call IT.”
IC: “Are you locked?”
Me: “No.”
IC: “Can you get your inner-net to work?”
Me: (Sigh…check IE) “Yeah.”
IC: “This stupid system. I can’t get anything done.”
Me: “I know the feeling.”

Some of the other inane things that I got stuck with:

Tours. I give tours of the warehouse. Part of our “business development” process to have our prospective clients come through our facility and meet our SME’s (Subject Matter Experts). I’m the SME for the warehouse. However, not one of the other 12 to 15 SME’s has to give talk for 20 minutes as they walk through a 300,000 sq ft building. Nope, that’s me…was me.

Rate Quotes. I’d give quotes on new warehouse business. How I got this one, I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure it started when I had to figure out how to pull invoices out of the system and I saw how much we WEREN’T making on accounts…then freaked out about it to the owners. Dumb…first rule is to not show that you care about your job.

Newsletter. Oh, this was the best. I wrote an internal newsletter for the company. It’s amazing how impressed people can be if they’ve never used MS Publisher™. “You made this? Nice work, I like the design.” (Bubble Newsletter Design…works every time.) As you can tell, I like to write, but it got to be hard to etch out an hour of time to write some drivel about cooperation, communication, teamwork, or something else business related. “We want to see something more about the Strategic Plan…but, in language the guys in the warehouse will understand.” (Do this shit and you won’t get fired…don’t do it and you’re fired.)

Well…you get the idea. Now I’m moving into strictly the IT side of world so I can concentrate on upgrading and maximizing our system’s functionality. Basically, cruise the internet all day and download porn…occasionally tell Sales “NO” and ask people to submit support requests each time they have a question. Nice, huh.

Before I can start living the good life, however, I have to shift my work load to someone else…three to four other people, actually. I hope to be able to get back into my normal pissing and moaning about bad drivers, muslim zealots, people who say “IDEAL” when they mean “IDEA”, and the world in general soon.

Wow…that really sounds like I’m taking off for a few weeks or quitting blogging. Nope, you’ll probably get an update sooner than that.