Chapter 143: Pay No Attention to The Man Behind the Curtain

We have an IQ test we give people when they come in for an interview here at work, so I happen to know that most of the individuals we hire are pretty intelligent people, and yet, they are always trying to prove otherwise to me. Yes, it again relates to the move, though it’s not punch lists however – self permitted digression here - I’m still trying to figure out why I get novels when a half sentence will say the same thing. One lady gave me her punch list and it went on and on about the air conditioning. Well, it had the AC part in the useful half sentence and the rest was really about how it is causing her arthritis to act up and how she now has trouble with certain activities in her daily life or something like that. It’s almost as though these people talk about their issues outside of work because they are expecting some kind of monetary compensation for the pain we have caused them by giving them a nice workstation with a flow of fresh air.

I can’t even change the temperature for you, every time you get hot or cold I have to send an e-mail to our building person (who doesn’t want phone calls, fine by me – I hate the phone) and then about 15 or so minutes later she lets me know that she’s passed the message on and then this guy, Tom, will call and I’ll miss it, but I’ll call him back on his so called “direct line” and I end up talking to some guy named Phil, or something similar to it, or maybe even not similar, this guy sounded permadrunk.. He takes a message because he doesn’t know what I’m talking about and he tells me he’ll have Tom call me back. Has anyone heard from Tom? Because I haven’t! That was all yesterday.
So then I’m talking to Boss Lady about it and one of the nosey managers walks by and says, “This thing,” and taps the thermostat, “this will change the temperature.” I just sat there thinking, “are you serious?” He didn’t think we knew the purpose of a thermostat? Are you freaking kidding me? So Boss Lady shakes her head slightly and he says, “They’re fake?” and she said, “I’m not saying that.” My personal interpretation of the head shake was, “I know that you moron but I won’t let any incriminating words escape my lips at the moment.”

But it turns out that the thermostats aren’t exactly fake but they aren’t exactly real either. People can change the thermostat but it caps three degrees cooler or three degrees hotter. Thank goodness too because I was walking around today and saw a lot of thermostats set to the hottest setting, but the room felt okay. I asked Boss Lady if there was some room in another building where they control our temperatures from afar, she wouldn’t really explain it, probably because she’s not too sure herself how it works. Then I asked her if it was something she had set up, because seriously, that’s diabolical genius. She has everyone in the office believing they are in control of their own thermostat, when really there is a faceless person somewhere actually in control.

Oh crap! I forgot I was in digression mode and have completely left behind my whole point. My whole point being, at the time of hire these people appeared to posses the element of intelligence, but for some reason or another that element dissolves in a work environment. The reason I say this, with the move we used stackable crates. When the crates are empty you leave them open and you can hold a lot of crates on one dolly. We had pictured instructions on how to handle the crates and while moving no one could seem to follow pictures and now while unpacking people can’t seem to do it either. They are pictures people! And not Japanese picture instructions, like the ones that wordlessly tell you to place part A56 to part E27 and part F35 to Part H765 and presto, you have a slanted bookshelf because you probably didn’t realize that A was actually F because the picture instructions weren’t drawn to scale. These were simple pictures, with a few English words in complete sentences thrown in too, you had the instructions and then you had visuals in case the words were too difficult! Yet, as I went downstairs to our crate return most of them were not stacked the right was, so I spent half an hour fixing their mistakes!
I’m hungry, and it’s making me agitated, so I’d better go.