Last week (yes, I'm recycling a story from last week. What's your problem?) this woman I work with walked over to my cubicle and leaned on my three foot wall to talk to me.
She's a nice person, and I like talking to her, usually, but last week I was preparing for the two days I took off (Friday, and yesterday), knowing that if I didn't get moving, I'd have a four foot tall stack of papers and shit on my desk today (I did, anyway. Oh, well). So she's standing there, talking to me, complaining about how cheap our department is, because her friends at other departments have color business cards, and she only has black and white business cards.
(When I pointed out that I have no business cards at all and never will while I remain in my current classification, she paused, looked at me pityingly, and continued with her ranting.)
Her points, I think, were as follows (I could be wrong. I was not-so-discreetly checking my email and filing stuff while she stood there; I may have missed something):
1. It makes our department look "cheap."
2. When she's out "networking," and she "has" to trade business cards with other people with color business cards, it makes our department look "cheap."
3. It looks cheap.
When I told her that as civil servants, the people who pay our salaries and for our supplies might prefer that we spend more money on protecting them and providing services than worrying about possibly hurting her reputation as a stylish woman with cheap looking business cards, she still didn't get it.
When I told her that some of the higher level classifications do get color business cards, she went off on some crazy idea that someone had told her that there's actually a hierarchy: certain level executives get bi-color cards, and the higher execs get tri-color cards. When I asked her who would know, except those within the deaprtment, which is bi- and which is tri-colored and just what that represents, she looked at me like I couldn't tell an authentic Louis Vuitton bag from a fake (just for the record: I could, thanks to my friend Missy, who has more LV bags than she has arms and legs. And fingers and toes. I know because I've gone with her to purchase some of them and watched her fork over the money).
When I told her, fine, you don't like your cheap business cards, I guess you just have to quit working here and go get a job at BMW [it was the only place I could think of. Where else do they have fancy business cards? How the fuck should I know?] or something, because it's the way it is, now would you please get off my fucking cubicle and go to work?
Wait, no I didn't say that last part. I think what I actually said was, well, now you have something to aspire to, don't you? (Now would you please get off my fucking cubicle and go to work?)
...
Also up for me, as you may have noticed on the sidebar thing over there, I'm going to be in the booth again at City Garage. I may be the only person to work the lights/sound at City Garage to announce it as if I've actually been cast in the show and will be on stage rather than behind the scenes, but whatever, it's exciting to me. I still haven't finished reading the script for the new show and can only tell you (because I read something on Wikipedia and the author's notes on the front page; and a review of some other production in NY) that it's sort of, in some way, related to ''Les Liaisons Dangereuses," which I, um, also did not read. Apparently there's some connection to terrorism... But I could be pulling that one out of my ass. I don't know, actually. Either I'll read it before Sunday (when I show up for the cue to cue, where they set all the lighting cues), or I'll figure it out from watching it 900 times during the run. For sure I won't be able to tell anything from the cue to cue, because historically, the cue to cue is crazy-time, with lots of starting and stopping (and not always everybody at the same place) and lots of whispered conversations between me in the booth and Charles out in the house, on our super secret agent headphones. Oh! That reminds me. I gotta buy new little foam-y things for the headphones, because that plastic stuff was hurting my ears last time.
...
Pandora is playing for me, "With or Without You," by U2, a song that instantly, and I mean, in a fucking MOMENT, takes me back to the 9th grade, walking into the band room feeling like a huge geek, totally alone and stupid and 15.
The joke is on me, though, because I think that song is really about Jesus.
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