THE MADNESS! THE MADNESS!
Yes, I'm in love. And she's not my wife.
Ours is a love that dare not speak its name. Oh, sure, some of you will be disgusted. Some will be ashamed. Some will disown me altogether and reevaluate everything they know about me. I don't care.
You see, I'm in love with a person in Marketing.
Yes, I know. I didn't think it would happen to me. But maybe I should set the stage so the world might understand:
*sigh*.
-- SCENE 1 --
The setting: boring office conference room.
The scene: meeting about what website items are to go live that evening.
Dramatis Personae
Sneaky Manipulative VP
Nice Product Person
Nice but Cocky Product VP
Chris the Bitter Engineer
Extremely Nice & Flighty Marketing Person
Yours Truly
Negative behavioral conditioning has caused me to prepare for these meetings by shoving paper into people's hands. Ostensibly these pieces of paper are abstracts of test cases that I've run on the QA site and will run again once the site is pushed live.
Sneaky Manipulative VP, in his sneaky manipulative way, starts making sneaky cryptic notes in the margins of what I've handed out while everyone else approves.
The meeting lasts around a half hour, and then something wonderful and magical happens.
Nice & Flighty Marketing Person: "Before we leave, I just want to say that Brian has been doing an amazing job on the website. He's been catching all sorts of heinosity that we've put in there and he's just been great."
Sneaky Manipulative VP is shocked by this. He looks up from the notes he's been making, and his voice betrays no emotion at all, but it's too late. The damage is done. Two things betray him: 1) his sudden look up, slightly too sudden to feign being unconcerned; 2) the content of what he says, even if the way he said it was artfully practiced.
SMVP: "Really?"
Marketing Person: "Yes! And I just wanted to say -- thank you, Brian."
Yours Truly (with extreme gratitude and barely-suppressed amusement): "You're very welcome."
Chris the Bitter Engineer suppresses his poorly-contained snark at another corner of the table.
-- SCENE 2, BRIAN'S WALTER MITTY FANTASY --
SMVP: "Really?"
Yours Truly (jumping on the conference room table, flipping SMVP the bird with both hands)
"YES, REALLY, FUCKFACE!
In... your... FACE!
INYOURMOTHERFUCKINGFACE!
(under his breath, with thinly veiled contempt) Jerkoff."
Finis
Soon afterwards, SMVP pulls my mgr (who was not at this meeting) aside and into the same conference room. Now, I'm not egotistical enough to think that Marketing Person's thanks caused them to think again about me and maybe made their lives just a little more difficult, hence the quick closed-door session.
But wouldn't it be great if it did?
(I briefly thought of giving Nice Marketing Person a bottle of wine with a nice note. Although she gave both me and Bitter Chris chocolate Easter bunnies out of gratitude for putting up a promotion she had going at the last minute, I reconsidered giving the wine becuase it would just be bribery at that point. Or at least look like bribery. The nice note, however, will definitely be sent.)
I'll leave you with these lovely pieces of bile: how wrong is it when someone from another *department* has to tell me how good of a job I'm doing? How stupid is it that we are led by people who simply don't get it? Why is simply thanking someone so amazingly difficult, while taking them for granted and treating people like children comes so ridiculously easy?
I think my Elizabethan choler and melancholy are at a fever pitch these days. Still, I'm definitely not as melancholy as the good Renaissance doctor quoted in the paper defines the term:
The melancholike man... is out of heart... fearfull and trembling... he is afraid of everything... a terror unto himselfe... he would runne away and cannot goe, he goeth always fighting, troubled with... an unseperable sadnesse which turneth into dispayre... disquieted in both body and spirit... subject ot watchfullness, which doth consume him... dreadful dreams... he is become as a savadge creature haunting the shadowed places, suspicious, solitarie, enemie to the sunne, and one whom nothing can please, but only discontentment, which forgeth unto inselfe a thouand false and vain imaginations.
Cures would usually include lots of bloodletting and enemas. Yes, you *can* be too rich or too thin.
A plague on their houses, indeed.