A broken record

It’s been a bit hard to concentrate today, because of my excruciatingly petulant officemate, Mr. Running Commentary. He still is not fully integrated, in that he now has all the physical apparatus and accessories he needs but his account is not fully registered on the network, thus his login requests are denied. And he will not shut up about it, which is tiresome in and of itself. But even more ridiculous is the tone he strikes while yammering on and on, coming across as overly entitled and gratingly passive-aggressive and woundedly martyred and all number of other things which hit my ear like a fork scraping a chalkboard.

My other new officemate has become the most entertaining aspect of the whole situation. She was the last one of the three of us to arrive this morning, and when she walked into our area it was fairly clear she was in a hurry and just looking to set her stuff down on her desk before proceeding somewhere else. Still, I said good morning to her (don’t cost nothing to be polite). Mr. RC, for his part, also said good morning. She didn’t answer either one of us, which I chalked up half to her obvious unsettled haste and half to the fact that she’s been quite cool to Mr. RC as his talking-to-hear-himself-talk has escalated into ever more off-putting areas (e.g. late last week he was talking about how he and his wife were potentially going to be hosting a foreign exchange student in the near future, a 16 year old boy, “although of course I would have preferred an 18 year old Swedish girl or something like that.” CLAZZY!) Of course, Mr. RC didn’t even pause long enough to let her reply to the morning greetings anyway, before he launched into “My computer still doesn’t work this morning! I just tried logging in but I’m getting this message about how my credentials couldn’t be verified …”

I’m honestly a little stunned that anyone could be so full of themselves that they think the first thing people want to know when they get to work in the morning is how the narcissist’s day is going in minute detail. I would expect the maximum amount of interest another party would have in my technical problems with the network would be paltry and passing at best. And that would be for someone I got on well with, not someone who barely tolerated my proximity. Ms. Cool is not someone I would have pegged as giving half a crap about Mr. RC’s status with regards to network access. There is in fact no way she could possibly care less.

So the fantastic thing was, while Mr. RC was segueing abruptly from a greeting to a recitation of his professional woes of the moment, Ms. Cool was crossing to her desk, setting her things down, turning around and heading back to the door. She never acknowledged Mr. RC, never even looked at him as far as I could tell, and walked out while he was in mid-sentence. And I swear he kind of kept talking after she was gone, albeit in a trailing-off kind of way, as he slowly rotated his desk chair back around and returned his attention to some reading material or other. I gather from this that he is the kind of boor that is completely unprepared for people to ignore him. I somehow managed to take this whole scene in without dying laughing, but it was by no means easy. Fortunately the incident was never spoken of again.

But those kind of bright spots are few and far between, and mostly it’s just Mr. RC whining loudly about how frustrating it is not to be able to get on the network and wondering aloud when someone’s finally going to fix it for him. Seriously? Nobody cares, because it doesn’t affect anybody. And when you talk about it so aggrievedly, like you expect it should actually affect everyone within earshot, it makes everyone that much less sympathetic. I mean, come on.

I’ll try to blog about something more substantial and/or interesting early tomorrow morning, before Mr. RC arrives and the lamentations begin anew.