Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Pop is Too Hard

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I am very carefully learning how to type the right way.

It involves a lot of auto-correct.

Apparently, those little nubs on the F and J keys are to let me know where my index fingers should be positioned at all times. They are “home keys.” And, get this, I should be using all five fingers on each hand to type, including my pinkies, because they all have a role.

Now, this concept at once annoys and intrigues me – the former because I already type more than 80 WPM without all this high-fallutin’ home key nonsense, the latter because I could obviously be typing faster if I would use more that four of my fingers at a time. My current method involves a sort of halfway touch-typing with my dexterous right hand while my left effectively hunts and pecks with a single finger. As a result, not only am I noticeably slower on left-hand-heavy words, but almost all of my mistakes are on the left.

Some concepts of proper typing, however, are eluding me. For example, am I to believe “pop” is really pinky-ring-pinky? Are those tiny, secondary fingers really expected to do all that heavy lifting so quickly? Pop, pop-culture, popular, populist, pop-up …

I suppose typing is just one more thing to add to the “Shoulda learned to do it right in the first place list,” along with guitar playing, singing, sit-ups, and tying a tie.

But, hey, I did just touch-type that whole paragraph with no errors and my eyes closed, so maybe I’m on to something. Or, at least I can do more daydreaming on the job.

Alert: Communications Overload

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I know, I know. Don’t get married to the content. This is our mantra. You are not writing the next great American Novel. You are not Dave Eggers. It’s a letter about medical routing codes. Don’t get married to it.

I have invoked the phrase under my breath enough times that I now recall it unconsciously anytime my elegant sentences are ginsued, by associates and program directors alike. I do not flinch, because I am not married to the content.

Disconcertingly, what I have become inextricably betrothed to is the procedure. All the approval emails, final signatures, pre-flight revews – the OCDness of the whole process just turns me on. When completed in the correct order, it provides an unassailable, errorless communication. Yet, a single misstep can turn you from communications-do-gooder to a despicable piece of liability.

I do not enjoy incurring liability, so I make it a point not to miss steps. However, life is not a procedure, and sometimes things happen out of order. And, this morning, I got a little confused and let an email fly that wasn’t completely informed, and got very succinctly shredded into tiny cheddary pieces by a co-worker. Not because she doesn’t like me, not because I am a bad person, but because she didn’t like the liability I represented. I would have done the same thing to her.

And, and, would you believe that, upon reading her cool clinical rebuttal of my 9:58 am email, I felt as though I was about cry? In the past this sensation has been attributed to lack of sleep, or inadvertant overdosing on allergy medication, but today all I have to pin the blame on is my strawberry smoothie, and I drink that every day. Like a little kid who just got reprimanded by his favorite teacher, the one person I trust implicitly on the team does the same thing to me that I expect – nay, require – her to do to everyone else, and I have to go sit alone in a toilet stall and take a few deep breaths.

On one hand, oh my god, I am such a freak, no one should be a little communications perfection-monkey to the point of inducing tears for a tiny, completely repairable error. On the other hand, I like that I am emotionally invested in my otherwise somewhat clinical occupation, that I can get tied up in language edits and approval processes, and actually feel proud when I do something right (and, conversely, feel utterly crushed when I do it wrong).

Where’s that balance? I do not want to be the automatons that I stand on the elevators with, who do what they’re told as best as they can right up until 4:49, and then go home to do something completely else without a thought of what they left behind. But, I don’t want to be here until seven o’clock for the rest of my life for a myriad of reasons, including that I don’t want to be here for the rest of my life, and that staying two extra hours a day effectively lowers my wage by nearly a third.

Am I just too detail-obsessed to work somewhere where detail obsession is an encouraged trait, sending me into a spiral of minutia-examining doubt on every email I send? Or, is that I am supposed to be doing something that I am truly in love with, rather than something I just geek out about?

Or do I maybe just need to leave the building during my lunch-break a little more often?

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I just got back a midterm marked: No complaints – a solid effort. The comment is nice enough, but it doesn’t seem to match up with a 48/50 grade. Maybe if he had used an exclamation point…

As i walked from class, preoccupied with mentally arguing over the .4 i had lost on an earlier question on Security Dilemma, i stopped for a moment to consider who i would say that to. Certainly not someone who did a nearly perfect job, that’s for sure. It’s the sort of thing i would say to an anonymous member of upper management who managed to make conversation about Drexel or the Eagles or my guitar or some other nonsense with me for an entire elevator ride up to my department on 35 … “No complaints, sir, that was a solid effort.” It’s the kind of thing i say about decent lasagna made by non-Italians, or about opening acts who i have no intention of hearing again. It usually does not accompany a 96% approval rating — more like a 88%, or maybe even a 79%. I would have been perfectly happy with “solid effort” and an 88%, or with my 96% and “Outstanding job – you should expand upon this topic in your paper.” But what i’ve got leaves me feeling … eh.

What the hell am i going to be a stark raving perfectionism about after i’m done with this nonsense in (checks watch) seven and a half months?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/10/106736429862474693/

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There are eight elevators in our elevator bay, each dutifully shuttling us corporate lemmings up and down between floors twenty-three and forty-four all the day long. I learned quickly to orient myself to their ding as they reach my floor, one for up and two for down. Four months of this, and it was only this morning that i realized that the dings are out of tune to each other; some ever so slightly but some a sour quarter step. I stood for a minute, humming one ding while waiting for the next, only to be greeted by two simultaneous elevators arriving to prove my point.

Afterwards, i found myself in the empty elevator wondering, Does anyone else realize that they’re out of tune? Is there someone we could call to have that fixed? Could they tune them to a chromatic chord? Is there someone out there whose knows all about this thing, this tiny detail that i have suddenly become so transfixed by as an escape from my dreary morning?

It’s either this, or sniffing markers.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105819465762646589/

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Every time I attempt to sketch some odd facet of my corporate life for you I find an equally strange element of it inside myself. Today I sat down to regale you with a story of in-building encounters with the socially inept, but as I described each character in punishingly amusing detail, I began to make myself queasy. Who am I to observe perceived shortcomings of innocent co-working bystanders only to reveal them to the internet at large when the whim overtakes me, rendering real people into surreally abnormal characters like Neckless and Clenching Lady? Would I be able to award myself with a new moniker as easily? I wonder.

I am not the most socially healthy person on the planet. My compulsion to wash my hands after I touch anything to be found in public borders on obsession. My fear that I will not reach the doors of the bus before it closes up again to carry me far far away from my intended stop is overwhelming. But, foremost among all of these, are my elevator issues.

It’s not the claustrophobia so much, though sometimes I find myself in the back row of a sixteen-person deep load gasping for breath behind a blissfully unaware suit yapping about first quarter losses or decreasing corporate spending. That comes with the territory. No, instead it is the conversations — the simple, witless conversations of nicety that are grudgingly targeted at any rider who looks even vaguely familiar.

I live in abject terror of those conversations. Weather. Sports. Television. As one creeps up on me I feel as though all of my internal organs are slowly sliding into the crevices behind my knees, leaving only a the hollow thump of my heart, captive to its highway of veins and arteries, to hold court in the preternatural vacuum of my chest. Rain. The Phillies. Survivor. Each topic can leave me in a dead sweat, especially when initiated on a relatively early floor.

I don’t know what it is, really. The utter casualness, I guess, that people attempt to tune in to the channel to which they are homogenized on. With glee, they discover similarities that they share with tens of millions of other Americans. It is the conversational form of Walmart, and I am not sure if I am more horrified by how alien the topics generally seem to me or by the few with which I have intimate familiarity.

I occasionally attempt to play along. Last week someone asked me what I had in my discman, and I replied: “The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They’re sort of a post-post-post-punk (so much so that they’re actually punk again) three piece lead by a woman who strikes me as a messy reincarnation of the, yes, entirely still alive Chrissie Hynde, which is not to say that the sound like the Pretenders at all, because they don’t, but sometimes you just get a vibe, huh?”

My rambling monologue took us from 22 down to 4, at which point the questioner returned a glassy stare. I smiled back. We rode down the last three floors in silence.

Funny how i am terrified of overwhelming homogeneity and they are petrified by anything heterogeneous. In a way I guess they are more afraid of me than I am of them, but it doesn’t make the ride any easier.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200312092/