Boring Day Entry

Yesterday the company held one of its “beer bashes” here.
This one was special, though, because it was the last one, or at least the last one here.
That’s because the building I work in has been sold, and everyone is being relocated from Reston to Dulles. Dulles has plenty of room due to the massive layoffs that have taken place over the last couple of years.
A lot of people have already made the move – Scott was trying to see if there had been any noticeable change in dress code when we were in Dulles on Monday, as the Reston people tend to take the companywide casual dress code to the extreme end of casual compared to the people in Dulles – but there are quite a few who still haven’t.
Even though yesterday was the official “goodbye,” we’re still very far from having everyone relocated, and it looks like that won’t be happening until last week.
The process has been going on for quite some time, and it led me to say to Scott yesterday that, “It’s starting to seem like the end of Return of the King; every time you think it’s over, it starts up again.”
Those of us working in the NOC, though, aren’t going anywhere until September, as they have yet to actually build a space for us in Dulles.
That means that for a few months we’ll be the only people in the building. Although this means losing the cafeteria, I’m still kind of looking forward to every day being like Saturday here in terms of empty hallways, break rooms, and bathrooms.
It also means that I’ll probably never again see the pretty girl who smiles at me that I sometimes see, though I haven’t seen her in a long time anyway.
Of course, there is one person from the NOC who will be heading to Dulles before September; next weekend is Scott’s last, as he will be moving into a new 9 to 5 job.
I’m going to come right out and say that I’ll miss him; he and I hit it off almost immediately when I started in this job almost five years ago. He’s been a very good friend to me all along and has done a lot to make this job more bearable.
Okay, that’s all the schmaltz you’re going to get out of me.
Speaking of friends, the other day after I got off the phone with Brian I thought, “You know, I should probably try to acquire at least one more friend. One who can actually go to R-rated movies.”
Then again, if I’m going to go through the effort of acquiring friends I might as well go a step further and give finding someone who could be more than a friend, and I just don’t have the energy – or unfounded and baseless optimism – to try to do that.
So screw it.
(Hey kids! Remember, trying is hard, and you’ll probably fail! So let “screw it” be your watchword. And that’s today’s Threshold Edutainment for Kids Life Lesson!)
Yesterday I burned my way through yet another comics-related blog, having gone through all of the archives and read everything of interest.
This leaves me little to do on my weekday workdays, as I can’t really bust out the comics (in hard or soft copy form) when there are management types skulking about.
Blogging is considerably less obtrusive and thus easier to get away with.
Of course, when I do that, Clueless the Wonder Intern gets curious and wants to see what I’m doing. As soon as he hears the clacking of keys his head pivots and he tries to puzzle out what I’m doing, thinking that maybe this is some opportunity to learn some important new skill, little realizing that I’m not doing anything worthwhile and that he isn’t actually capable of learning anyway.
Lately, now that it’s just he and I on the desk, he’s been sitting as close to me as possible, which annoys me. After all, as I’ve mentioned, at one time there were six of us working on this desk, so there’s plenty of room, and no reason for two people to be sitting right next each other.
The layout of the desk goes Windows PC, Linux PC, Windows PC, etc. To do my job, I take up four stations using one of each, sitting in front of a Windows box, and using the Linux and Windows boxes to my left. There’s Linux box to my right, which I’m using, and a Windows box next to that which I’m not using. He typically sits at that Windows box, which is too close, especially when I do something on the Linux box and he has to lean in close to try to see what I’m doing.
If he were a normal person, I would just say, “Hey, back the hell up off me,” but he’s not. It would take too much time and effort (Hey kids, what did I say about trying?) to explain the concept of personal space to him.
So if direct, blunt, tactless confrontation won’t work, that leaves only deception and trickery.
Towards that end, yesterday morning I turned off all of the computers immediately to my right and made sure that the fourth computer over was prominently on. Further, I moved all seats away from the desk except for one, which I placed in front of said computer.
This didn’t even give him pause; he moved the chair over and parked his ass right next to me.
This morning, however, I was smarter. I logged on to the computer he usually sits at, loaded up some graphs, and when he came in I told him that I needed to monitor them and required an unobstructed view.
(It wasn’t entirely a lie.)
Even so, he sat in that spot for several minutes just staring at the graphs as if he could somehow, through some magical process, figure out what they mean.
Eventually, after I’d said, multiple times, “Just use that computer down there,” he moved.
I will use this tactic from now on, since, as mentioned, he can’t learn, and will therefore never see through it.
In any case, I have a conference call that I should probably pay attention to, so I guess I’ll wrap this up.