Worky, Worky, Busy Bee!

(I know "corporate" is misspelled. I think it adds to the charm.)

I’ve touched on my day-to-day work situation previously, but again, to sum up: I spend most of my time at the office killing time, and if I choose to do some busywork related to the project I’m nominally assigned to, so be it, and if I putz around all day and never do any real work, nobody notices and nobody cares. Which might sound like a slice of heaven but is, for me at least, unsettling. I’ve had crappier jobs but at least a well-defined crappy job is something my brain can adapt to, find the bright side in, use as motivation, whathaveyou. The current arrangement is a void and gives me nothing to do anything with.

Yesterday, then, was pretty exceptional because I had two legitimate work-related items come up. One involved providing some feedback for a statement of work my company is bidding on – it’s not clear if I would end up working on the team that gets assigned the work if we win the contract, or if I was just being asked for input on the bid, but still, it was something to do. The second was a conversation with a member of my current team to discuss getting me a new badge and a new access card – I have a company badge but I need a completely different badge to get into government facilities, and I need an access card to log in to government computer systems. The conversation itself didn’t really accomplish much but it made me feel like my team hadn’t forgotten that I exist. (Yes, sometimes that thought gnaws at my brainstem.)

Of course as of this morning I still haven’t gotten any response from the person I provided bid feedback to, not even a “great, thanks” acknowledgement. And the badge conversation ended with my teammate saying “maybe I’ll come to your location tomorrow and we’ll get all this finished” but there’s been no follow-up on that today, either. So I’m back in limbo, but that’s the way things seem to work around here – looooooooong stretches of dormancy, occasional bursts of activity, and eventually you end up at Point B and you can look back at how you proceeded from Point A in tiny steps but the transit seems endless when you’re in the middle of it.

Also of note yesterday was a crazy person on the bus on the way home. This happens a lot less often than you might think, I suppose, if you think of “crazy people on the bus” in the more traditional context of local buses operating inside a big American city. 99% of the people on my bus route (myself included) are suburbanites heading to and from work who just zone out for the ride with their iPod or their commuter newspaper (or both). But every once in a while …

So the bus I ride is a pretty popular one because it connects more-or-less the end of the Metro train line with a parking garage even further out in the ‘burbs. The buses run every five or six minutes during rush hour and, even so, people will get on a full bus and stand in the aisle (not me, though, I can always spare five more minutes to wait for a seat on the next bus). But at the same time there are some undesirable seats on the bus, especially the ones at the very rear, where you basically have your back up against the engine, your butt right over the rear wheels, no leg room, etc. Also, if you sit in that very rearmost row, you’re probably going to be one of the last people off the bus when it pulls into the bay. So some people choose to stand in the aisle rather than sit in those seats, to avoid discomfort, get off the bus faster, whatever.

The bus pulled away from the Metro station yesterday afternoon and a guy – let’s call him Captain Cuckoo – was sitting in the rearmost row with an empty seat beside him. And he starts to go OFF about how no one wants to sit next to him because he has long hair and looks like an unsavory character. As I tried to enumerate above, there are plenty of reasons why people wouldn’t have wanted to sit there that have nothing to do with whom they’d be sitting beside. But Captain Cuckoo knew the real score and he was sharing it loudly (you have to be pretty loud to be heard over the bus engine back there) – I couldn’t quite tell if he was just talking to himself of if he had somehow snared a fellow commuter into at least simulating a conversation by smiling and nodding, it really could have gone either way. Captain Cuckoo just had that not-quite-right quality to his voice.

The good Captain then proceeded to soliloquize much of his life story, including the following (swear to Thunaraz, I am not embellishing any of this):

• He was an admiral’s son so he’s not some loser, he comes from MONEY, dammit
  
• He likes this area but the people are assholes
  
• He just got out of jail that very afternoon, after serving two weeks for assaulting a police officer who is always riding his ass about something
  
• He believes in the Holy Trinity of Father-Son-Holy Spirit and he also believes the Devil’s Trinity is Politics-Science-Religion (I had actually managed to start tuning him out right before that so I have NO idea what the lead-in was, but some cocktail-party-phenomenon got my attention towards the end, which honestly makes me worry about myself)
  
• His ex-wife is relocating, with no notice, to Carolina (North or South seemed unclear)

The part about the ex-wife was not soliloquy but rather part of a cellphone conversation … I think. All I know for sure is that a cellphone rang somewhere on the bus and then Captain Cuckoo was telling his ex-wife he can’t believe she’s moving. For all I know someone else’s cellphone rang and was ignored, and Captain Cuckoo started talking into an empty crayon box that he carries around as a personal communication device. I wanted to peek over at him and confirm one way or the other, but I’m not gonna lie to you, I was also afraid that if I glanced at him and accidentally made eye contact I would get stabbed with something blunt and rusty.

The bus ride ended without incident for anyone, and that really should come as no surprise. My imagination tends to run down some crazy back alleys sometimes and I was probably blowing Captain Cuckoo’s differentness from the other bus-zombies out of proportion. His monologue was a wackadoo tour-de-force, but (assuming he was telling the truth about just getting out of jail, and the cop being bound and determined to fuck with him) understandable under the circumstances, and probably not that different from things most people think but don’t give voice to.

Except that part about the Devil’s Trinity, man. That was crazy comedy gold.