Working for the weekend

I got to work this morning fairly hung over, and my boss was pissed off about something that happened elsewhere in the shop. I know this because NOTHING about what he started yelling at me about could be enough to warrant the amount of anger he was throwing at me. He started ripping into me and I stopped him almost immediately, saying "Do you mind if I clock in before you start berating me like this?"

I clock in and let him continue. You see, when I'm on the clock it's much easier to stomach this kind of treatment. Legally, it's the difference between a hostile work environment and terroristic threatening. I could tell his ranting was running out of steam fast when he segued into the fact that I can't give him a simple answer to any of his questions. Because in the context of how my job works, it's never that simple. Our plate processor was crapping out on us. No, we couldn't run out plates at that moment, but I could if I tried a couple of things to fix it. There was a job that the client was still looking at. No, we're not ready to send it to press yet, but We will in about two hours.

My boss is the kind of guy who believes that if one thing is out of whack, then EVERYTHING must be screwed up. And while he and I have similar negative attributes (short fused temper, easily stressed, low tolerance for stupidity, etc.) our approaches are worlds apart. He's big on blind rage...taking things out on everyone who crosses his path, rather than the person who actually pissed him off. My rage is much more focused and quite measured when compared to his. And when he gets in one of his moods, I kick into one of two gears: 1) I tell him what he wants to hear so he'll leave me alone, or 2) I match his rage and hopefully he'll see what an ass he's making of himself.

Today, I got to do a little of both. But one thing I've learned above anything else in this life is that the best remedy is never give them anything to complain about at the end of the day. My boss may have tried to insinuate that I was an incompetant slacker, but it was me who came into HIS office at 2:30 to say I was caught up on my work and iask if there was anything I could do to help him out. With a heavy sigh, he looked at all of the jobs on his desk and told me that he still had to do a lot more before they needed me to work on them. If this was a MasterCard ad, this is where the voiceover guy would say, "Priceless".

I clocked out at 5:00 on the dot. I shut down my computers and went home. I made a nice dinner, scrubbed the bathroom and hit the GameCube for a while. I talked to my buddy Scott for about an hour. He told me of his first Mardi Gras. He prefaced the story with "...and I didn't see a single bare breast." Sometimes I worry about that boy. That's like saying that you went to Paris and spent the whole time at the airport gift shop. I should probably send my step-uncle down there to give him the tour he gave me when I first visited the French Quarter: "Yeah, I puked on that corner, passed out in that alley, made out with a stripper in that club, got arrested just down the street here, kicked a guy's ass over there..."

The main problem with my friend Scott is that he doesn't really stop to think about the poetry in the experiences he's had in life. When he was in college, he was on a school trip to Moscow and had a one night stand on a train from St. Petersburg. He lived in Baltimore for a while hanging out with several people who worked on some of John Waters' movies. Now, he lives in the French Quarter, he is a painter, and will soon be selling his art there. Some of these things, if viewed properly, would be the makings of a modern-day Hemmingway. But to hear him describe these things, he'd tell you that the sex wasn't all that good, those people were just extras, and that his new apartment has no shower. I'd say he's the glass-half-empty type, but you'd have to convince him that there's actually water in the glass.

I guess, in that respect, he and I are similar. I look at my life and could make the same no-big-deal kind of statements. I share the same bithday as my brother, my father died in a hang-gliding accident, my mother built stained-glass windows out of our den growing up, My ex-finacee and her husband are two of my closest friends, and I work at a company that employs every cliche sitcom character you could think of. In the right hands, this could be a story that'd fit in nicely between the Royal Tenenbaums and any Coen Brothers movie. To me, it's just my life.