Nightmares

There is a person at OBC who has the job of 'facilities manager.' I'm not going to come up with a name for her (I don't know her actual name anyway) and I'm not going to disguise her gender because, well, why? Anyway, the group of folks that I often eat lunch with and I think that she has a chair fetish.

There is a nice eating area upstairs on the top of three floors in the building. It's in the middle of the floor with high frosted glass 'windows' that would look out into cubeland, executive cubeland, I might add. There are lots of tables and a big flat panel TV. We never eat up there. We must be quiet lest we disturb the execs, it's enclosed and therefore not a very pleasant atmosphere, and I really don't want to eat and try to have conversations with my group while people are watching TV (something that I don't do much of anyway; watching TV).

There is a nice eating area here on the second floor right in front of the elevators. It's open to the lobby below and has huge windows that look out towards the nearby park, and on clear days, you can see the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance (how I love those mountains). There are tables and chairs and big soft comfy chairs and a leather couch here. This is where we like to eat. We have to mind what we talk about out here, but we can get rather loud without disturbing anyone. We all enjoy being able to see the world outside. It's just a nicer area.

Well, when the new facilities manager came to work here, the first thing she did was remove all the chairs from that open second floor area. She put a little note on one of the tables that said we cannot take chairs from conference rooms or cubicles and 'they' are re-evaluating the use of that space. The tables are still there, so we move the big soft comfy chairs up to the tables when we eat.

A few days later, she went through all the unoccupied cubes and took those chairs. WHAT THE HELL!!! Where are new employees supposed to sit, then? If there was a chair at the end of the rows of cubes (that we sometimes use when, say, the managers want to sit behind us while we show them something on the computer), she took those too. We have no idea where the chairs went, but this woman likes to take chairs. You'd better hope your cube looks occupied, or you may find yourself without a place to sit!

She also likes bright florescent unnatural light. The lights in here are too bright for some people with sensitive eyes. A few of us had spoken with the previous facilities manager and the maintenance director about those irritating lights and getting them to NOT put lights in them. The light directly above me, for example, is one of them. They marked those lights with little dots so when people come to change the lights, they know they should put none in the ones that are marked. We came back from a weekend to find every single bracket with a light in it. GAH! One of my wonderful coworkers started climbing on desks and pulling lights out of the fixtures at our requests. THANK YOU, GLENN!

Just to give you a picture of the light and chair Nazi.

Wow, this is shaping up to be quite a background intro! And it will probably be longer than the actual story I'm trying to set up!

I've mentioned that I used to work at a retail pharmacy. I was the AssMan (that's Assistant Manager). I hated so much about that job, but particularly when the company cared more about the products that were stolen then their employee (me) who was elbowed in the ribs by the shoplifter. That was actually what made me quit that job. I have a problem when the people are less important than the products, and they had their priorities way out of whack. Now that I've been out of retail for nearly four years, I think I would have to be really desperate or extremely invested to go back.

So, last night, I was sleeping deeply and getting much needed rest when I suddenly found myself in a nightmare. This was the worst kind of nightmare imaginable; I wasn't being chased, I wasn't getting killed, I was WORKING AT THE PHARMACY!! AND IT WAS TRUCK-DAY!! AND I HAD WILLINGLY AGREED TO DO IT! In this horrible dream, I was working part-time, stocking the shelves with the new shipment of merchandise. I stayed well away from the front of the store because I didn't want to be put on the register. And to make it on the boarder of a night-terror, the aforementioned light and chair Nazi was my manager! AHHHHHHHHH!!!!

It's times like this when you just want to hammer out your mind's eye once you wake up.

Wow. Reading over that, now I'm thinking "big overture, little show!" I suppose I could go into more detail about my dream; how I could see the price stickers and wanted to use my employee discount to buy a parting gift for the actual coworker who's last day is tomorrow. But I won't. Because I'd like to forget that that awful dream ever happened! Maybe I shouldn't have immortalized it in my blog, huh?