My morning at work is filled with activities. It's a lot like pre-school. First, I have to print off a bunch of sheets, then I have to go through them to pick out the things I actually need to use for my reports. That, my friends, is a happy moment. I open the second desk drawer on the right and pull out my blue and pink highlighters and I have a nice time coloring. Honestly, I'm continuously shocked at how happy my highlighting makes me. First, I just make one line over the top of the first word in the block I need, and then when I'm finished with the report for that record, I get to color in the whole block! I always try to make neat, perfectly sized lines. I've found that if I highlight from the bottom up, I get a much more consistent bottom line. I do reports through the morning, and there's lots of new-aged copying and pasting. On a normal day, I'm done with all that by noon or so.
After that, I launch into the tedious side work of updating comparable records. It's definitely not hard, and sometimes it can be really interesting. I love houses, so I mentally 'Ooo' and 'Ahhh' over the big Victorians in Madison County, Ill. or I daydream about how nice it would be to have a good sized studio apartment with a tile floor and a western picture window...until something happens that's like nails on a chalkboard to me.
The guy that sits behind me in the afternoon is a nice guy. He really is. He's in the Master's program in psychology at the university down the street, and I've got friends who are his friends. I've socialized with him a bit outside of work. There's something about walking into that building that alters him on a molecular level, though. First, his volume knob gets broken off on level ten, so every thing he says is SUPER LOUD.
He also loses his inner monologue, and feels the need to share every detail of everything he does. For example, today, he was assigned the simple task of calling landlords in Chicago and asking them if they were going to accept the asking rent on properties. It's really easy to do. The problem is that occasionally, you run into a landlord that wants to battle on every detail about the rent. Most of the time, there's nothing they can do, and they know it. They want to argue anyway. My boss informed him that some of these lovely people might pop up during his inner-office, telephonic travels to the Windy City. He managed to stammer through his first call, and the landlord accepted the rent and went about her merry way. He hung up the phone, typed in the info, and stopped dead.
"Hey! She accepted it. She didn't ask questions. She just went with it!" My boss responded, "Oh good." He continued, "I was expecting this to be a problem. She didn't argue at all. I'm very shocked. I'm quite pleased. This is excellent."
I twitch around in my seat and turn up the volume on Radiolab, I've reached an interesting part and I'm afraid if I miss something, I'll miss the point of the whole thing. I push on my earbuds a little, but it's impossible. His voice is penetrating my skull and reverberating within my brain.
"Wow! I'm excited now! I should do another one! I'm sure this is going to go well!"
By now, I'm pondering going to look to see if anybody has a gun in the building when I hear, "(Guy's name), can I see you a minute? No...never mind. I misread the report." With a possibly not-so-internal groan, I brace for the inevitable.
"Oh..you need me? Did I do something? I'm so sorry!"
"No...I misread. It's fine."
"I'm sorry!"
"It's ok, you didn't do anything."
"Ok. I'm sorry!"
I'm sure this went on for a bit more, but I'd really trained myself on the report on the chemical effects of love on the brain that I was listening to, because really, it's entertaining and interesting. I sort of drifted into a haze dopamine and other chemicals, but as I lose mental acuity, I hear, "Wow...my second call wasn't bad at all! I don't think she understood me though...."
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