Must... Control... Fist... of Death...

[catsidhe]

Thomas: Mr Sparkles! Come here, I have a job for you.
(30 seconds later...)
Thomas: Mr Sparkles! I have a job for you.
(2 minutes later...)
Thomas: Mr Sparkles! I have a job for you. How is job[1] coming along?
Repeat another three or four times...


AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh! Fuck off for ten fucking minutes and let me finish just ONE of the jobs you have pre-emptively set me you motherfucking son-of-a-bitch!


Thomas asked if he had "stomped on me" too hard.

I refrained from swearing at him. I am proud of my self-control.

I replied that it was not the force of the "stomp" which was getting to me, but the repeated kicking while I was down.

Let's see if memory serves:
$job[0] = move boxes out of the fishbowl (where we set up new servers and such) so that they would be collected by the cleaners.
$job[1] = move a monitor down to a lab where one machine was missing its monitor because it was away on repair. Pity the monitor I had taken from the sixth floor to the first turned out to be faulty itself.
$job[2] = remove old servers and associated equipment from a rack into storage. Never mind that I was trying to help an academic at the time. Thomas takes precedence.
$job[3] = Log a service call on the faulty monitor. Detailed instructions on how I should log this in the inventory spreadsheet were supplied. Gee, it would have been nice if I could have mounted that network drive on the first try. I ended up having to screw around with /etc/fstab. While I was fighting this,
$job[4] = Oh, throw out the keyboards with the old chunky connectors. That involved sorting through an unstable pile of ~100 old keyboards, including PS2, serial, console, Sun and Mac keyboards.
$job[5] = Somewhere in this cupboard is a hard drive enclosure with an 18Gb drive. We would like to recycle it. Find it. (This involves opening up half a dozen various enclosures, some of which seem to have been designed by Mr Rubik.) By this time it was lunchtime.

Oh, and how was I going with $job[3]? Well, not good. I have been trying to open the spreadsheet so I could start. Well, says Thomas, if you would stop reading Slashdot, then...

I refused to dignify his "little joke".

Comments

[kitling.livejournal.com]

mr sparkles? :)

Mr Sparkles.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

It is his nickname for me. Heavily influenced by Misutaa Supaakuru dishwashing detergent (from the Simpsons). It is strongly irritating in its own right, but was a cup of tea to an ocean in this context. That's just background level irritation.

They really aren't paying me nearly enough for this shit.

I made the mistake at one point that I didn't mind the low pay/status when I started because 1) it got me in the door, and 2) it was like an apprenticeship to be doing sysadmin-type stuff in such a hallowed place. Typically, Thomas has treated me like an apprentice ever since.

What doesn't kill me makes me stronger, but at times I have to exercise heroic self control to avoid going postal at Thomas. He is not easy to work with, mainly because in his universe most people work for him.

Re: Mr Sparkles.

[kitling.livejournal.com]

oh - its not even self inflicted irony

you know what sounds really good - transferring to a different dept

i know geomatics wants a part time sysadmin