jennings rampage

This is my 1001st post on the IRC.

These people are pissing me off. (Or, as I would insist my brother phrase it to teach him a little bit about taking accountablilty for one’s own feelings, “I feel pissed off around these people.” Either way, though, I’m pissed.)

I’ve been moved away from the best workstation in the building right into the middle of what I shall call the Yelling/Banging-On-Things Zone. I’m now surrounded on all sides by the lead practioners of the customer-as-enemy philosophy, and have to actively work to prevent this energy from invading and pervading my space. Perhaps a small plant would help.

Today during my lunch break, as I was doing my best to watch the news coverage of the Columbia disaster, my new loudmouthed neighbor William sat at the table next to me, and tried to tell me about a particularly frustrating call he had just taken. You see, William had just instructed his caller, an elderly woman, to unplug the VCR to further troubleshoot the problem. The woman said that she did not know how to do this. William then replied, in his unique tone of voice that keeps you perpetually prepared to slap the taste out of his mouth, and I only wish I were exaggerating this: “ma’am, do you mean to tell me that you do not know how to unplug a video cassette recorder?” At this point, for some reason that seems to honestly escape William, the woman became indignant and demanded to speak to his supervisor. And since I was completely indifferent to William’s plight and annoyed that I was being made to hear about it, I asked, “so, did you tell her how to unplug the VCR? It’s not tough.” My subtle point, however, was lost. None of this would have been so bad if William hadn’t made his grand entrance into the break room, and announced, “oh, is this shuttle thing still on? I’m sick of this already.” (I hate to make generalizations, but I have to note that this fellow is a very poor representative for the loudmouthed arrogant transsexual community.)

I grew up a nerd in Florida; I dreamed of being an astronaut. I wish I could place myself when the Challenger disaster happened, but I was in second grade at the time, and for some reason I’ve completely blocked it out. I remember watching the launch of Discovery three years later on a television in the auditorium then running outside to look to the northeast and see the shuttle climb into orbit. (I was so nervous for that launch that I drew blood scratching my face. I was a special child.) In seventh grade, I successfully lobbied for a class trip to Space Camp, where I got my first taste of astronaut ice cream. (Neopolitan.) But alas, it was fairly obvious from the start that I didn’t have the right cliche to make it in the moon-man business, perhaps a little too much of the non-astronaut ice cream in the formative years, it’s tough to say. But it was a childhood dream and it’ll always be a part of me — everytime I went home to visit my mom, I’d always go to the Kennedy Space Center, I was there for the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11, and here’s the kicker: basic cable in Cape Canaveral comes with NASA TV, twenty-four by seven. So cool.

So when I showed up at work today a few minutes before 10am and put my lunch in the fridge and saw the images of Columbia falling from the sky, I was hit pretty hard. And apparently, it was just me and Troy, one of the supervisors, who had any opinion at all about this tragedy. Two people in the building had an understanding of the history we were watching, two people were moved by what we were seeing. Troy and I both snuck away from our desks to watch the coverage as much as we could throughout the day, but everyone else was aggressively indifferent. “Can we change the channel already?” “Oh, honey, it’s on every channel, we’re stuck with it.”

I was reminded of my training program at this major undisclosed electronics manufacturer, when we were watching a video that was produced in-house about one of the phone systems. In the video, the display readout of the phone clearly read, “09-11-01.” Having already established myself as the wise-ass New York heel, I demanded everything be stopped right there. Was this video really shot on the same day as the worst attack every to take place on American soil? The instructor thought for a moment, took himself back to that day, where he was when he found out, and yes, he recalled, there wasn’t much else to do that day, so he took the chance to film this training video. Didn’t the call center close on fucking September 11th? Apparently not. Didn’t cross anyone’s mind. Completely different perspective. You could say that without a personal connection to an event like that it just wouldn’t make an impact, but I couldn’t help but see these as examples of how people don’t care about things.

(The really creepy thing for me is last night, I wrote the first few pages of a one-act set aboard the command module of the Apollo 11 , which was also called Columbia. It’s about how on the way back from the moon, Michael Collins discovers that he was passed over for a moonwalk because he was born in Italy, and tries to commit suicide. I probably wouldn’t have finished it in any event.)

But as Milt Heflin said, it was a bad day.