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lizard

The Company's Pet Weirdo

by lizard at 12:35 AM on September 27, 2001

I've always done best in jobs where I could become the company's beloved & generally tolerated pet weirdo. The only time I succeded outside of that capacity was the three years I worked for a nonprofit mental health agency, in which fully 60% of the managing staff had a diagnosed disorder of some sort but was on medication and much better now, thank you. There, no matter how flaky I got, it could never measure up to a member of management having a psychotic break and needing several months off to get their dosages adjusted in a lockdown facility.

But anyway. Where I work now, a hotbed of kneejerk redneck sensibilities, with the redneck viewpoint heavily represented in the owners and their siblings and progeny who are a large percentage of the workforce, I stick out like a sore thumb with a nose ring. I'm the only techie chick there. The office chicks wear office chick garb & well, they're office chicks. I show up in bellbottom jeans and a hooded sweatshirt I got from my daughter's friend which features a bunch of stoned mushrooms with little red eyes, smoking a hookah. Well that's what I wore today, anyway. It pisses off the accountant, who is an owner, but she's outnumbered by the others who put up with me.

And as it is with any flaky small-business workplace, shit happens. Email jokes that are in *extremely* poor taste and would offend an ex-sailor truck driver, get sent out regularly, by management. My own boss has made no bones about the fact that he is in love with me. His word, ‘love’. He runs himself down conversationally but never misses the opportunity to make tool-time manly grunting sounds, in his phlegmy old man voice, every time he accomplishes the smallest geek-task. I could go further into this ickyness but I won't -- you may thank me now.

I love my job but I hate my company. I finally got full time and decent money and benefits. Yet I am monumentally unproductive, because I am ever so distracted by the hostility of the workplace. At least that's my excuse. It sucks. I actually envy the unemployed, because their future consists of possibilities. Much in the same way that I envy the single, and all the while the single and/or unemployed, wish they had what I do.

I guess it's not so bad, really, it has been so much worse - you all have no idea. I'm really quite glad I have a job to hate and a relationship to bitch about. Really, I am.

comments (7)

Remember how much I bitched about my job a few months ago? Well, just look at me now. I'm just as unproductive in my last couple days of work, only now I'm not getting paid for it. At this point if I had to choose between being miserable and paid and slighty less miserable and poor, guess which one i'd take?

by mg at September 27, 2001 9:01 AM


"Your Pain is My Pain". I worked in a hospital environment for 18 years. Left several years ago. Still have flashbacks. Worked hard. Now no one remembers me. I have become "Dust in the Wind". I'll get over it. Eventually.

by Toxiclabrat at September 27, 2001 10:50 AM


Kd I think (really) we need to come up with slightly "evil" solution...I am telling you I have LOTS of things we could do (mauahhhhhaaaahh)!

They have web sites that we can copy shit from and you could post these little cool things all over your office incognito....

Btw, I tried to post this last night..err this morning after I got flung into the wall space in the chat room....hahah funny thing...ummm I couldnt get it to work....wonder why?

HEHE SMILE KD we are with you girl! :-)

by Pristine at September 27, 2001 12:07 PM


you're our beloved pet weirdo, too. and you can be as flaky as you like

by suey at September 27, 2001 12:17 PM


I like your clothing choices, kd, and I think I like even more that the accountant hates it, and you do it anyway.

I drank in college, and although I was not the only student working in the office that drank, I was apparently the only one that would admit it (also, when I was hungover. But I warned them not to schedule me at 8 am!) So somehow I became the office "party girl". Which is odd, I don't think I'm particularly wild.

by SwingCheese at September 27, 2001 1:00 PM


Yeah, every Thursday night people here start to give me "Going to the bars, Gordon, eh? Eh?" comments. They think I have some sort of wondrously tawdry social life. I don't. But then, they're all thirty years older than I am. I can't imagine what they'd do if I wore a stoned mushrooms sweatshirt to work.

SwingCheese, you're not half as wild as you used to be, dear. None of us are, I'm afraid.

by space at September 27, 2001 5:13 PM


I've had that stoned mushroom sweatshirt for a couple years - recently I was at my daughter's and a few of her friends were there, and the one whose sweatshirt it is/was, said something like, oh my shirt! I just cringed, but it turned out to be somebody else wearing some other shirt. I felt guilty not saying anything, but I am so attached to that sweatshirt, there was nothing I could do. It's so cool, even the label on the inside is a pot leaf. Just the greatest sweatshirt.

by kd at September 27, 2001 11:25 PM