Listening
"Third Eye," Tool
Opiate, Tool

Today I woke up feeling fairly neutral. The prospect of work today didn't really do anything to me which I directly attribute to having three days off where I drove very little, drank quite a bit and chilled with some really excellent friends.

Then I actually got to work. Today has been pretty good considering the past few weeks, when it comes to personal accomplishments. I'm an hour away from clocking out and I'm already done. I should be working on Mage stuff, but this entry was burning at my head and my hands, mostly because I feel like of been neglecting my journal.

Late this morning, maybe an hour prior to lunch, thing started to slide down. My mood started dipping from okey-on-a-pretend-Monday to slightly dark to sour and somewhat tremulous. At lunch I grabbed a book and headed to the gym for a good elliptical work out, but it was hard to get my heart and head into it - though it was a good work out, over 325 nasty little calories dead and gone. But I was thinking about people I know and how I wish some aspect of our relationship feels...lacking somehow. Like we're not good enough friends and I feel like it's my fault for not seeing to it that our friendships have grown tighter over the time we've known each other.

This was just a teensy bit of guilt because I never managed to call home this weekend and talk to my sister. (q: What the heck would I say? a: What does it bloody matter?) But I also feel down cause Faith and Sergei are moving away and darn it, I like them. Then I started thinking about other people. How I miss hanging out with Squire and Jupiter on the weekends and I can't really do that unless either it's at a game or without Molasses.

That makes me sad, but it also starts to piss me off and that's how I was feeling when I got back to my computer after lunch. But it soon went away again under feelings slight depression. It's a nameless weight that settles in over my horizon and makes it so stuffy and gloomy inside that I just want to steal Daisy's blanket and go huddle in one of the giant window sills and stare out at the Verdugo hills.

So I wasn't doing too hot when my manager sent my team with our productivity numbers for earlier in the month with our names right there, highlighted, Green for those who exceed their goals, Yellow for those who meet them, and Red for those who are failing. I know who's failing on our team. That makes me a little sick to my stomach, and just thinking what they must be feeling makes me grind my teeth.

I tried in a friendly way to nudge the editor to give us codes, like our social securty numbers in college, to associate with our "grades." He wrote back talking about how it improves the competition on our team, how that's just like sales and it works great for sales, and people will fight to catch up to their teammates, especially if they want to keep their jobs. "Numbers don't lie" and other crap like that. I had to take a walk before considering how I would respond.

I joke about with friends about how I'm running out of proffesional ways to tell management that some knew idea or rule is...well...shit. It doesn't really matter because as I look around there are more people ready to go along with it than wanting to keep the bs out. So that leads me with only one conclusion. I am not wired for the corporate culture.

I understand that those dot-coms that still exist are going through intense growing pains the likes of which haven't been seen since probably the forties and fifties when telephone, running water and electricity made their ways into every home in this great land. But even then that's nothing compared to the first days of the Industral Age. It's maybe too much to compare this to the days of child labor, 20-hour work days and no minimum pay, but until then the workplace really had *NO* incentive to care about the worker who produced the actual freaking product that management was falling all over itself to promote.

Here they definately take care of us in terms of creature comforts, but when it comes to tackling the product, we're just mindless drones with a handbook over 150 pages' worth of orders to fulfill. Heck if the powers that be could just puppet (or better yet, automate) us they'd cry tears of joy.

I don't think it's inherently bad for business if the manager publishes the track record of each teammember to the entire team. I just think it's stupid and a little bit cruel. And I really wish that this weren't the only corner of the world that I could rant about it and actually be heard.

*sighs* oh well. I started a lot of paragraphs with "I". yeach. Maybe if I ever caught up on my reading in NEWSWEEK I'd post some of my thoughts on current events here.... But that's for later.