Life in the Veggie Patch
*thunk* Ow, that was my head.
I was listening to the radio this morning, and I heard all kinds of descriptions for the characters in our offices. I was particularly intrigued by “Teflon Man,” the guy who comes in three hours late, high-fives the CEO and isn’t held accountable for the projects he was supposed to finish a year ago. I have one of them, and I want to murder him. He brags how he flies under the radar and how he’s protected from the wrath of the rest of us. I hate people who brag when they have not a goddamned reason to be proud — I do my job and do it well, but do you see me strutting around like a horny peacock?
My stupid boss, who is out of town, called me today at 10 at our usual meeting time. I didn’t pick up the phone. She sounded absolutely confused and asked if I got the new camera for the newspaper. She’s as worthless to me when she’s hundreds of miles away as she is when she’s three doors down from me. Even if she were here, all she would be doing is wasting my time asking inane questions to which she will never comprehend the answers anyway. I put my phone on forward.
We have a new proofer this month for the paper, and all I did was ask him to read it with one eye open — I said look, all I want you to do is to read it and make sure we can’t get sued for anything. So he read the top story and just asked Angie to re-write it. I thought it was really a good story, and it was all based on quotes/facts she obtained from people he told us to interview. But he hated the lead (tough shit) and wanted us to shuffle something upward from the last half of the story. It wasn’t a lot of work, but we were stunned for a moment — we’re highly accustomed to people reading the paper and telling us to put commas in places we don’t want to put them. We’ve never gotten REAL feedback on the content before — it was kind of unnerving.
In fact, what my boss Pussy Demure!TM does in her edits is circles stuff and asks questions in writing. Then she’ll give me the proof and say, “Do you have any questions on what I wrote?” So I, of course, say no, I get it. So then she will proceed to go over Every. Little. Punctuation. Mark. in great detail until she is absolutely convinced that I know what she meant by putting, say, a dot where a period should go. *smack*