pure hatred

The last week has been extremely difficult but also extremely rewarding. My business picked up a little too much a little too fast, which led to an impressive string of 14-hour days and the very weird sensation of feeling both self-pity and a sense of accomplishment at the same time. The good news is that I’ve made in a week what it took me a month to make at my office job, not that I have the time to deposit the checks, let alone spend it.

And even though I haven’t had the strength to update my blog for more than a few days, much has happened in our little world. I’ll start catching you up with an update from our freaking horrible neighbors - you remember, the Christian children’s performance artists who play a variety of instruments all day long very loudly and very badly?

On Friday night, our best friend Dan came over to hang out for the evening after a long week of work for all three of us. All we wanted to do was watch a movie and catch up. However, around 10 PM, the girl evil neighbor knocked on our door. I answered. I was told by the evil neighbor that we were being too loud. I nod and close the door.

For the next three days, I seethed and brooded (what I do best). How could three people be louder than a tuba? I could not, for the life of me, stop thinking of cooler scenarios than nodding and closing the door. It was as if God gave me this one chance to tell the evil neighbors off, and I let it slide by. I suffered deep, deep insult regret.

In one imagined scenario, she tells me that we are being too loud and I respond with, “Really? I’m surprised you can hear anything over that cello that you torture daily.”

Or I’d say, “Yes, we are being too loud. After almost two years, it’s our turn.”

Or, as soon as I opened the door and saw it was her, I would close it before she said anything.

Oh! Or I’d go the personal-but-unrelated attack route: “We’re being too loud? Well, to that I’d have to say that you are a simpering, mousy, tone-deaf troll whose hell will consist of eternally living next to an orchestra of monkeys attempting to play French horns.”

Then, on Sunday night, as both Ben and I were racing against any number of deadlines, the cello playing starts. Again, I’d like to remind everyone that when I say “playing the cello,” I don’t mean that she’s playing scales or songs. I mean that she is playing the cello in much the same way that I would play the cello if I were to go across the hall and try.

Now, while neither Ben nor I are the type of people to complain (we’d rather keep to ourselves) we are the kind of people that respond to an open attack. Ben walked over, knocked on the door, and told her to stop playing - they had been playing all day and it was ten at night. She agreed, but then, five minutes later, began playing again! I could tell that she was trying to play softly, but let me assure you that there is no way to play the cello badly and softly.

We have now openly declared war. And, since we are moving in about a month, we can alienate them even more than if we had a longer lease. What is our next step? I am open to your ideas. All I know is that I’m not going to just nod next time.

Me: Hi, my name is Sarah Aswell, and I’m trying to reach [generic lawyer name]. He contacted me this week about writing web content for his firm.
Assistant: Is he expecting your call, Barah?
Me: It’s actually Sarah. With an S. Yes, he told me to call at one.
Assistant: I don’t see your name in the appointment book.
Me: That’s strange, since he emailed me the meeting time yesterday and said he would put it in his Outlook calendar.
Assistant: Let me check with him. Hold on.

I hold. She returns.

Assistant: Hi, Barah?
Me: Hi. My name’s Sarah. Not Barah. I don’t really think Barah is even a name. I’m guessing that this ongoing issue might be why you can’t find my name in your appointment book.
Assistant: He’s in the middle of something. Can he call you back?
Me: Sure.
Assistant: Can I have your number, Barah?
Me: Are you serious?

…and then I gave her my number as slowly and clearly as I could, as if I were talking to an old person from the 1800s holding one of those huge gramophone horn hearing aids. I am sure this law firm will never call me back, although if a person named Barah actually exists on the planet (which I doubt) I wouldn’t be surprised if she got a call from the dumbest secretary that there has ever been.

I remember the first day I went into Manhattan. Ben and I emerged from Penn Station and were immediately overwhelmed by the crowded, churning beehive of activity that is midtown. It was rush hour and about a million worker drones were rushing back to New Jersey just as we emerged - two country bumpkins with no idea how to walk in a crowd of people.

Since then, I’ve learned well the rules of walking the streets and can navigate even the meanest lengths of sidewalk without bumping into a single businessman or stepping on a single tourist toe.

Tips:

Know your slow walkers. First and foremost, you have to target the slow and weak walkers so that you can “switch lanes” early and pass them without having to slow down - and slowing down is never a good idea. Slow walkers range from the obvious (old people or women with strollers) to the less obvious (hipsters texting while walking, loose women wearing uncomfortable stilettos, people talking to imaginary entities).

Watch for obstacles. There are all sorts of things to trip on - and I’m not just talking about cracks in the sidewalk. I’m talking about crack addicts on the sidewalk.

Know your unpredictable walkers. Unpredictable walkers are much worse and more dangerous than slow walkers because slow walkers proceed in a straight line, whereas you never know what an unpredictable walker will do next. Beware the gaggle of high school girls. Beware the tourist who will stop without warning in the middle of the sidewalk to take a picture of a building. And always beware the toddler, who, as we know, is not much more than a drunk.

Understand that businessmen don’t move an inch. Often in the city, you will be involved in a Showdown: the streets are crowded and there is someone walking towards you directly in your path - who will move? In most other places in the world, both of you would compromise and move a foot or so in either direction. In New York, however, you are given about ten seconds to sum up the other person’s personality and to decide whether they will move or whether you will be pushed unceremoniously into oncoming traffic. Businessmen don’t budge. Women who blowdry their hair don’t budge. Workers wearing reflective vests don’t budge. Big dogs don’t budge.

Watch for cars. In most places, cars will stop for pedestrians. This is not one of those places. In fact, I would recommend watching out for cars even when on the sidewalk. You never know.

Understand that the whole game changes when it is raining. Rain in New York means millions of people carrying around huge, sharp umbrellas. And having an umbrella open over your head seems to give people the right to not look where they are going and to ignore your personal space. Whereas a normal walk in the city would involve goals such as not running into anyone or getting really angry, a rainy day walk only has one goal: the keep your eyeballs from being poked out by the unnecessarily huge golf umbrella that that woman who obviously doesn’t play golf is carrying.

Many of you are familiar with cell phone guy, a douchebag (and I do not use that term lightly) at my gym who is constantly calling his guy friends and having inane conversations with them about a narrow spectrum of topics that range from the digital quality of the most recent celebrity sex tapes to whether or not cell phone guy could do a better job on the field than one Yankee player or another.

He seems to have a bad case of the short guy complex, an even worse case of facial hair, and an overall obnoxious demeanor. He’s got that thing going where he is constantly trying to convince everyone around him that he’s cool, and I hate that thing.

When I had a real job with real hours, cell phone guy and I used to go to the gym at the exact same time every day and, without fail, I would end up having to hear him talk to some buddy about riveting subjects such as how he was totally at the gym working out. It drove me mad - to the point at which I one day walked up to him and yelled, simply, “Cell phone!” He did not take it well, but he also did not stop his chatty behavior. In fact, I’m pretty sure that after the shouting incident, he started picking elliptical machines close to me and began calling more and more people.

Thankfully, at about this time, I quit my job - a move that not only improved my sanity career-wise but that also allowed me to go to the gym earlier in the day. Cell phone guy seemed to be in my past. However, as the weeks go by, I find myself missing our contentious relationship, to the point where I enjoy showing up at the gym so that our workouts overlap by only five minutes or so - long enough for me to get a good long glare in and long enough for me to have that mini day dream where I get to refer to him as “Chatty Cathy” (Ben’s name for him) to his face.

In fact, I have a few mini hateful daydreams about him. I picture him living his lame life, perhaps spending too much time each morning sculpting his utterly disgusting goatee-stache, perhaps lying about his height on an online dating site, perhaps wondering what it would be like to actually have sex with a girl. I revel in the fact that talking on the cell phone prevents him from going fast enough on his elliptical for him to see any results. I love assuming that the people he is calling are either all in prison or all in his role-playing club.

Here’s the point: I think I have an unhealthy, hate-filled relationship with this guy. And, more than that, he might not even give me a passing thought - an idea that makes me even angrier. Cell phone guy is a recurring character in my life and in my imagination, and he might not even be taking the time to hate me back.

Is this normal? Do you see people in your everyday lives that you have constructed entire lives and personalities for? More than that, do you ever hate these people? Or is it always the cute girl at the coffee shop who hands you your cinnamon bagel every morning, and are you just imagining how wistful and quirky and lonely she is all day?

I think I have a problem. I’m just not sure what that problem is. For the time being, I’m going to assume my problem is, plainly and simply, cell phone guy.

I’m very sensitive to noise, so one of the best parts of working from home, I thought, would be controlling my aural environment. I more or less need absolute silence to get anything done, which was impossible to come by in my former cubicle situation, complete with Chatty Cathy yaking away about her tacky wedding all day. Finally, I thought, I will be able to work in peace, with only the sounds of Ben typing from two rooms away and CEO Ripley purring quietly at my side on the couch.

However, I forgot to take into consideration that I live in New York City. In an apartment building. And that just like every other person in New York City, I manage to have the worst neighbors ever.

Before you relate to me some story about how bad your neighbors are, let me say this: our neighbors play the tuba.

And the cello.
And the synthesizer.
And the violin.
And the saxophone.

Oh, and they sing opera.

This might - might! - be acceptable if they had any talent at all, but they do not. They don’t practice actual pieces or even play scales. They just (excuse my language, but there is no better phrase for it) dick around on these instruments. For hours at a time.

When we first moved in, we invited them to our housewarming party. Within minutes, they had alienated everyone present, insulted our religious views and our way of life, and, when asked what they would like to drink, requested an “H2O on the rocks!”

I don’t have a problem with people who don’t drink or people who hate my friends or people who are evangelical Christians. But I do have a problem when you have a problem with me choosing a different path in life and tell me so while drinking out of one of my water glasses. Oh - and I can totally tell that you guys re-gifted us that Christmas present you left at our door. Nice try.

By now, I’m sure you can guess what they do for a living: they are Children’s Performance Artists. Yes, the performance artist - another way of saying that you own instruments but can’t play them. That you like art but aren’t talented enough to make any. It might even be worse than admitting that you’re a freelance writer.

And get this: they’ve complained about our noise level before, by leaving notes tacked to our door. It’s worse than the pot calling the kettle black, it’s like the pot calling the kettle a TUBA. AT EIGHT IN THE MORNING. I mean, sure, we listen to music from time to time, but our music involves tempos and melodies and choruses and is, for the most part, in tune.

And although Ben and I briefly discussed responding to their note with a note that said, simply, “TUBA!” we haven’t done much except not change our own way of life. But now that I’m in the apartment all day, trying to finish a project by five today but having trouble stringing two words together due to the noise pollution, we might have to act.

Once a month, my company sends out mass emails alerting professors about new texts in their fields. Part of my job is answering anyone who writes back with requests, questions, and concerns. Usually I can expect to reply to a few hundred emails in the days following a mailing. And while 99% of these emails are from considerate, helpful, understanding professors (who get helpful, considerate, understanding replies from me), every once and again someone is just plain mean.

This one, which I received today, concerned a professor whose name accidentally had a note written next to it in the email we sent him (Move To Hum means move to the humanities mailing list):

You can’t really believe that my name is “Professor Smith Move To Hum,” can you? If you want my response, address me correctly. TS

It was the afternoon, and I was probably on email 200 for the day. Why did this guy have to be so mean? Did he know a real person answered these emails, a real person who didn’t deserve such condescending treatment? As usual when I receive emails like this, I write a mean response back, erase it, and then write an overly-polite, cowering apologetic email that I begrudgingly send. But this time I sent the first one:

Hi Professor Smith Move to Hum

Sorry for the mix-up… as you might guess, this is a computer-generated email list. However, the data comes from somewhere and that somewhere is ME - a hardworking woman with a useless graduate degree who has a pretty sad and monotonous data-entry job. And, as a person who answers hundreds of these emails a day even though she wishes for better things in life, please give me a break when something goes a little wrong - at least be nice when alerting me to a problem. Or do you not ever make mistakes?

Anyway, I’m guessing from the note on your files that you’re a humanities professor and not a history professor. If that’s the case let me know and I’ll move you to the correct mailing list and, who knows, I might even correct your name.

After I pressed SEND I quietly waited to be fired. But nothing happened except that the guy (his name has been changed, of course) wrote back a few hours later.

I apologize. Thanks for your reply. Please keep me on the history list. TS

Then I guess I felt a little bad, too. Maybe I had caught in a bad moment or during a bad day. Maybe he, too, was in the middle of a thankless task that made him cranky. On the other hand, maybe he simply never really thought about how customer service people might want to be treated as people, too. That they might need even more humanity than people who don’t answer spam emails on a regular basis for their paycheck.

It’s like people who yell at telemarketers - why would you do that? Do these angry, yelling people think that it was that specific person’s idea to call people up all day one after another and bother them? No. No one likes being a telemarketer. They’re just trying to get by. And if the best they can do is be a telemarketer, let’s be extra nice to them, because things have probably not been going their way.

I read a lot of stuff about how to get ahead at work, about how to be a team player or get promoted. And that’s all well and good if you’re in the field you want to be in and generally happy about what you do. But I want to put something out there more along the lines of How to Eke By or How to Barely Keep Receiving a Paycheck. You know, advice for the many, many people out there who have jobs that they aren’t happy with, jobs that are condescending, jobs that feel like sitting in waiting room for eight hours a day, hoping for something better.

In a lot of ways, I like my job. It pays the rent, it doesn’t tire me out, and I have a wonderful manager who understands me. But in a lot of other ways my job is slowly killing my soul. I waste time and energy on things I don’t care about, I sit on my ass in a box all day, and I get an unhealthy, warped idea of what money is supposed to mean to me.

Over the year or so that I’ve worked this office job, though, I think I’ve picked up on a lot of great ways to slide by. It’s a pretty complicated formula involving keeping your boss content, avoiding social contact, and being utterly invisible to middle management. It’s a delicate mixture of passive-aggression and gold old regular aggression.

Today’s advice concerns the Evil Administrative Assistant in my office. As you can tell, we don’t really get along and never have. He brings passive aggressiveness to heights that even I find frightening and is also a bit anal retentive. He tends to pick favorites and hold grudges. He’s my manger’s manager’s assistant, which, in his warped mind, makes him one rung higher on the ladder, even though we are both assistants, also known as Doers of Menial Tasks.

He orders around the marketing assistants and I often get emails from him asking me to tidy my office or tidy my mangers office or the tidy marketing supply rooms (I am organized but certainly not tidy). He’s one of those people who will “suggest” you do a certain list of things and then get angry if you don’t act on his “suggestions.” Then he’ll “suggest” you take his suggestions. And so on.

He’s also the guy who is charge of ordering office supplies and filling out technology forms for the group, and he takes these lame responsibilities very seriously — in a Dwight-like manner. I once went weeks without packing tape, perhaps because I didn’t want to small talk with him about musicals.

(Aside: EAA isn’t as bad as I’m making him out to be. He’s just someone in my office who tells me to do things, which I hate. To tell the truth, I’m not exactly a joy to work with either, as one might imagine. He’s really mostly a normal guy with good intentions. His biggest trespass is simply having to work with me.)

Now, my goals in this situation are to A) avoid speaking with the Evil Administrative Assistant face to face at all costs and B) avoid tidying anything, ever, and, even more importantly C) avoid being asked to tidy things, even if they are only suggestions.

So. A few weeks ago I devised a plan based on simple stimulus/response conditioning. Every time I needed EAA to complete a task for me (order boxes, fill out a report, sign something) I held onto it, waiting patiently. Then, as soon as I received a ridiculous request from EAA to tidy something (or not wear ripped jeans or to be civil to the new person “for at least a week”), I would immediately barrage him with all of my saved up requests at once - just like ringing a little bell.

It’s really as simple as making a dog drool: I connected in EAA’s mind emailing a task to me with his having to do several tasks for me. I do the same thing to him when he drops by my cube with “suggestions.” He’ll suggest that I look for a new place to keep my supplements and I jump on him with a suggestion to clean out the marketing closet around the corner. It’s Psychology 101, and this time I’m not cutting to play video games.

Sure, I’m using punishment as a conditioning behavior instead of reward, which we learned in Psych 101 was a bad way to condition children. But this guy isn’t a child, he’s a gown (evil) man. And, dear reader, I haven’t had to tidy anything in weeks. Let’s just hope I don’t run out of packing tape.