Today at work…

Dec 15, 1999

I came terribly close to being fired today. Due to a breakdown in communications, terribly rude people, and my own temper. During the course of the day, I was continuously called upon to act as a liason between two departments that only have a cursory relation to what I do at work. I started out polite, but slowly was worn down to just civil. (I’d say I was at about five out of ten, tolerance-wise.) After doing some data clean-up and minor programming, (my actual job) I get a message from K. "Just checking to make sure this file was done properly, I couldn’t give D an answer, mainly because I didn’t know." No problem, I’ll call up D and clarify, and get information on other data in the meantime, killing two birds with one stone. She responds with nonsensical questions, and general venom. It boiled down to her angrily stating "Why Don’t you answer my questions?" and my reply of "Ask one, and I’ll give you an Answer…" She responded with some sort of epithet and hung up on me. (One of my buttons is "Don’t hang up, Don’t turn your back on me while we’re conversing. I need good closure to any talk.)At that point, I saw red, and trotted over there at top speed and proceeded to Bellow, along the lines of "Don’t you dare hang up on me…" to which she responded with "How dare you talk to me like that?" and it proceeded to snowball into a volley of verbal noise. After a moment or two of yelling, I basically told her to shut up if she couldn’t say anything intelligible, and she told me to get out. So I got out, with a parting remark of "Do all of us a favor, Eat $#!+ and die." She promptly calls the boss, and he bounces to an impartial third party. Long story short, I get a reprieve due to D’s long history of poor social intercourse, and mine of being more possessed of my senses (save for this current adventure.) So, I don’t get fired, but it looks like the raise (of which i’ve been due since June) is no longer going to be considered for a while. Bah.