There's been a disturbing trend this week. It hasn't been a particularly good week, work-wise. Friday it peaked, and I considered sending an email to everyone across Australia throughout all our brands... 'When Lynne sends an email with a report and suggests you let her know if you have any questions or if you spot any errors... that does NOT mean that she wants you to call and scream at her for fifteen minutes.' No Sir.', 'Yeah. So, after this week it's no longer such a rare thing for me to escape and huddle outside for a cigarette. The strange (and disturbing) trend, though, has been for other smokers to strike up conversation with me. They seem to wait until it's just two of us there. And they seem to be mostly guys in the forty years bracket... must be the smokers' demographic.

I've been dispensing sage advice about teenagers ("... dying their hair red isn't bad. Hell - I had blue dreadlocks, and now I have business cards and everything" ;). Michael from level sixteen has told me about his engineering projects and shown me his thermal underwear. Some other less memorable chats. And one amusing episode where one guy sidled over from his group of buddies to ask exactly what it was that I was smoking. And as I showed him the pack, I could see his friends trying to peek, so I went over and did a proper show-and-tell for them.

They should all bugger off, dammit. I'm out there smoking because I want to bloody well kill someone.

And the other times I was out there, turned into mushy 'God, I love my workmates' episodes . These being workmates that I'm physically with (who I love), as opposed to the ones in other offices (who I sometimes would like to bloody well kill). It's too surreal to love your fellow employees (and your bosses), so I'm not even going there. :)

Off on a tangent... one of our execs related an interesting thing to me the other day. We've had a recent change in CEOs, and the outgoing guy was someone who impressed me no end. I had known that he was ex US military, but I thought he was a sergeant, and during his goodbye speech I found out he was a general of some kind. Hell of a guy, and I'd go a long way for him. Used to walk around singing, riding scooters, and playing a bit of golf between the desks. He never shot the bearer of bad news, either.

Anyways. I was told that when this ex CEO was new, an exec asked him about war. She had just seen 'Saving Private Ryan' and the question was, why do they do it? All the soldiers with a high chance of dying a terrible death... do they do it for their country, or their leaders, or God, or what? And she wanted to know because she couldn't think of a reason good enough to do it at all. And the answer is - they do it for each other.

That's the kind of answer you can think about for a long time.

During the one fairly normal smoko, I had a chat with a girl who sits across a partition from me. Even though she wouldn't normally be someone I get on with, she falls into the 'workmates I love' category. It's common for her to burst out with 'Oh my God... I'm so excited!!', and it's all a bit too cheerleader for me. :) She's always struck me as the type of girl who would have fit in really very well at high school. She was talking about a girly shopping outing she has on for the weekend (and she's excited!! about that, too ;)

I must have mentioned that I didn't really understand the girly shopping phenomena, because she said it was a bit new to her too... most of her friends are guys. And in high school she preferred to hang out with guys because she knew where she stood without trying to keep up with who was friends with who in any given week and all the bitchiness of high school girls.

Surprises like that are good. They keep me on my toes.

In other news - this week I really stuffed up my reasonably good run of not spending too much on CDs. But I'm doing okay with books still... just reading through my backlog and wondering where I can fit another bookcase. :)

Three or four times this week I had nocturnal poetry attacks. Those are when I wake up in the small hours for no apparent reason, and maybe ten minutes later a poem starts. So I get up and try not to freeze to death while I find a way to write it down. I'm up for maybe ten minutes and haven't properly woken up before it's finished. Days later I remember doing it... and can never find the buggers. It'll be on the back of some junk-mail, or on the electricity bill. Or on a sheet towards the back of a writing pad, so that I get to it months later. I think one of these ones was okay, and I have no idea where it is :(

Someone at work noticed the new accounts database doing something disturbing. She thought it was about to let her do something really stupid. I thought it would either be that... or it would surprise everyone by handling it masterfully. I reckon this is the best time to see what breaks.... early days, it's not fully rolled out yet, best time to fix things, or you might find something cool. But she was too chicken to test it out.

I might try it while she's on leave. Ever since I noticed out loud that it uses cobol - the developers have been acknowledging my existence... that has to mean I can get away with stuff. ;)

[Music: Skinny Puppy - Addiction (Opium)]
[Mood: depressed]