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Saturday, October 15, 2011

It's almost like she wants something

This is a story about a typically passive-aggressive temp, her attempt to improve her own situation while trying to appear concerned about others, and my effort to give her a big Eff You without actually mouthing the words. All things considered, I believe I have been more successful in achieving my goals than has she.

 Is that grammatically correct, or does it just sound pretentious while not actually following any rules of grammar? And would that sentence have sounded less pretentious had I simply added "so fuck her."?
Whatevs. The project I am on is in a review space divided among several rooms, most of them not large, one of them big. I don't care about the other rooms, of course, so this is about my room. But you should have expected that by now. If not, please refer to the title of the blog.

So, the room I am in is set up for 12 people. The desks are all facing the walls, so the seats are arrayed according to the length of each wall. It's not evenly distributed for a variety of reasons, but the four walls are set up like this: the room is a rectangle, with the door at the bottom left corner. When you enter the door, hard on your left is a short wall with two stations set up. Directly in front of you is a long wall, but also with two stations. Windows, pillars and shit play into this arrangement. To your far right is a short wall with four stations, and along the wall in which the door is set, to your hard right, is the other long wall with four stations. Got it? Good. I was afraid you weren't visual-spatial.

The walls that concern us are the 4-station short wall to the right which forms an L-shape with the four-station long wall to the hard right. I am seated at the joint of the L facing the long wall on the hard right, the wall in which the door is set. To my right are three more stations, then the door. To my left is the short wall that forms the lower leg of the L, with its four stations all behind me to my left. Got it? Good. I was afraid you weren't visual-spatial and that I would have to smack the shit out of you.

The woman who sits immediately behind me/to my left, at the L-joint on the short wall, is starting to piss me off. The station to her left is not occupied, and she and her short-wall cohorts have gotten rid of that chair and spread out some, giving themselves more room. This is what temps do.

Not content with that, however, she has taken to working the room in an effort to gain even more space for herself. Yeah, she probably could use it. Just sayin'. But that's not what we're talking about.

What we are talking about is the fact that one of the four stations on my row is empty, so this old goat keeps saying things like, " Oh, you should get rid of that chair, then you'd have more room." She's already said a variation of that three times in four days, making it clear that she's not saying we could have more room, but that if only we would take advantage of that empty space and scoot down, she could have more room.

Classic temp behavior, of course. Should I kill her, or simply take comfort in not moving and knowing that she so desperately wants me to move? It's been difficlut, but so far I have pretended to have no clue what she's driving at.
 Needless to say, it has been difficult to suppress the audible "eff you" that she so richly deserves. Perhaps next time she makes the suggestion.

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