This Page Left Intentionally Blank

For the first time in all my seven months of screen-staring, I was given a task which involved leaving the office. Away I was sent on a shuttle, to help arrange for testing at the disaster recovery site. I could tell you where, but then I'd have to kill you. My manager approved my leaving by 3pm, yet was somehow still surprised to the max when I caught a return shuttle that got me back to the office at 2:45p. True, I left the dude I went with at the site, but I had to be back by 3 (in order to make my interview at 4) and that was that. Maybe she suspected an interview was in the works and decided to throw a wench in my plans? I mean it's not every day I wear my pearls to work. Regardless, she was looking for a way/reason to scream at me, and scream she did. Oh boy did she scream. I was told that everything I had been working on needed to be presented to her first thing in the morning, in its final format. And I was told so quite loudly.

Nevermind the fact that I had yet to receive any feedback or changes from three weeks ago when I was last yelled at and obediently submitted this documentation, somehow I was supposed to have clairvoyantly progressed since then. I stressed (and, natch, bitched) about it all night, then stumbled into work at 6:30a to start printing. Only to discover that my file, backup file, and backup backup files were all corrupt and unreadable.

Rarely is it a good sign when one is banging their head repeatedly upon their desk prior to 7am.














Two and a half hours later, the "help" desk guy showed up. He was able to open a document (not one of the problematic ones) and was quite proud of himself. Beaming, he pointed at the page of the document on the screen, which read:

"This page left intentionally blank"

and asked "is there supposed to be anything on this page"? I looked at him, blinked, and broke out into tears.

An hour later, having not progressed to the point of being able to read the file on which I have been working for the better part of a year, my boss came over and asked the "help" desk dude to run a virus scan. By now even the densely packed "help" desk dude had figured out that there was no point in arguing with her, so we had to stop what little progress we had made to run the scan. 45 minutes later, and much to my ever-loving manager's dismay, the summary showed my system to be virii free. I'm sure she would have loved nothing more than for my incessant Yahoo Mail checking to be blamed for a rampant virus.

I have posted the clean-and-clear scan results upon one of my (two) cube walls, as a tribute.


"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter". -- Martin Luther King Jr.