Tuesday, July 19, 2005

A Long day and some guy named Dude

I’ve been at work for thirteen hours. My brain has turned to mush and I can no longer comprehend common grammar and simple mathematics. I feel like somebody went into one of the tech closets on my floor and turned up the gravity a notch or two, and when I stand up everything slips and slides like when you’ve taken way too much acid.

Not that I know anything about that or anything. I’ve read enough Hunter S. Thompson to understand the concept.

I hate working late. But it’s not the fact that I’ve had to work late that has me in such a state. It’s the fact that my boss is a moron. Here’s how it all breaks down. I got a request this morning o review an airport in some farr off place nobody would ever want to go, because for some reason somebody wanted to go there and they wanted to go there right now! The problem was that the airport my boss asked me to review doesn’t exist. It just isn’t there. It would be like trying to find Lyonesse. It may have existed at one point, but it ain’t there now so good luck finding it!

So I spent a good hour and a half this morning looking for references to this airport in all different types of trade magazines in Indonesia (because that’s where the airport supposedly is…right next to Atlantis), when I cam across a different airport in the same city. I was intrigued. So I checked out the stats of this new airport and became increasingly more convinced that it was this airport our valued customers wanted to go, not the one that sank into the sea a thousand years ago.

So I e-mailed my boss and informed him of my find. In this e-mail I informed my boss and his team that I would await their response to do an official review. Two minutes later somebody from a separate department copied my e-mail word for word and e-mailed my boss again. I don’t know why. This was around 10:00 am.

Lunch came and went. At 2:15pm, I received an e-mail from one of my bosses minions, asking me how things were going with that airport review.

“They’re not,” I said. “Because (*edited to protect the innocent*) hasn’t told me which airport to review.”

“Oh, he didn’t? Well we knew that a long time ago,” he said.

“Why didn’t anybody tell me?” I asked.

“Why didn’t you ask,” he said.

“I did,” I responded as I gripped the phone with white knuckles. “Here, let me forward the e-mail I sent this morning at 9:30.”

He received the e-mail and was surprised. “(*expletive deleted*)! I’ll have (*BOSS*) e-mail you back with the correct name in a minute.”

“Why don’t you just,” I began, but it was too late. He’d hung up. I was going to ask him why he didn’t just tell me which airport to review, because that would have made sense. Alas, logic is a state of mind to which few aspire.

Thirty minutes later I got an e-mail from my boss asking me how the review was going. I told him that I hadn’t done anything because I still had not been told which airport to review. He asked me why I hadn’t been told. Let me repeat that. He asked me why I hadn’t been told. For those of you who also cannot grasp the simplicities of normal human conversation, this means that my boss just asked me to tell him why he hadn’t done something. That is like asking your mother why you haven’t cleaned your room and expecting her not to smack you across the face for your stupidity.

Unfortunately, I would be fired if I attacked my boss. So I couldn’t do that.

The good news is that we got it all worked out and I was able to determine which airport to review a full 6 hours after they had sent the request. I called the airport. It was closed. This makes sense since it’s in Middleofnowhere, Indonesia and nobody ever wants to go there.

So I called my boss again and informed him of the latest developments.

“Why are they closed?” he asked me.

I wanted to tell him that if I knew the answer to that, I’d probably make a lot more money than I do now, and I wouldn’t have to work for him. Instead, I said, “I don’t know, but the open again at 0100 Zulu Time.” Zulu time is Greenwhich mean time, which means that they open at 10:00pm our time.

“Well that’s great,” he said. “You can stay late and call them back then.”

The sad part of this whole endeavor is that, if he had responded to my e-mail when I first asked him, I would have completed the airport review hours ago and everybody would be happy. Instead, I had to stay four hours late (after already having worked 10) just to ask some random Dude if we could park out plane on his lot.
Incidentally, the guy with whom I have to speak is named Dude. Seriously. His name is Dude. Weird, huh?

To add even more woe to the situation, I am not allowed to do more than three airport reviews in a day because the person who reviews my work can’t keep up. I finished the other two around noon. So I’ve been sitting here for 9 hours pretending to work while waiting for Dude to call me back.

Where the hell did I go wrong in life?

2 comments:

Jim said...

You spoke with The Dude! Sweet.

As for your boss, "this will not stand, this aggression will not stand, man."
Drink some oat soda and you will feel better.


Arsehole Nitpick- If the fictitious airport was in Indonesia, it wouldn't be near Atlantis (Atlantic Ocean).
It would more likely be near Mu, the Pacific equivalent lost city.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28lost_continent%29

The Sasquatch said...

Unless, of course, Atlantis is like Brigadoon and appears wherever and whenever it wants to.

Wait...Brigadoon doesn't do that. Still, you get my point. And that point is Atlantis can do whatever it wants, man. You're not its mom.

The Dude abides.