Copy Function

10.12.08

Right before leaving the office for the day, a coworker of mine said that life was like a copy function, in particular a BPS copy function which we use for configuration in SAP. He said you copy yourself from L.A. to Chicago each week. We have the same meetings each week. We have lunch at the same time each day and get to work by a certain hour each morning. You run every day and he takes the same train back and forth each morning and evening. He said all this to create some laughter, which we all smiled and agreed with nods, but little did he know these things torment me all the time. I end up with another year that has passed without knowing where all my days went. The only time I’m not copying myself in daily routines is when I travel, and only when I travel for fun. Each day is different from the next and what I eat and see varies tremendously. There are no routines when traveling and everything is made up as you go.

When I first started out from college looking for my first job, I interviewed with a lot of companies, but only a handful did I actually do an office visit. I had an interview with a company called Morton-Thiokol, the company that makes propulsions and missiles, the company that blew up the Challenger with their faulty O-rings. While there, I interviewed a lot of employees, and they were very knowledgably and seemed extremely shrewd. They were also in their fifties. While sitting having lunch in their cafeteria, I felt like I was in a senior citizen’s housing center. I was drinking chocolate milk and they were all drinking coffee with their meals. I grew very alarmed and very troubled as I saw myself sitting there one day just the same.

So here I am today doing my mini-copy functions each day but my career hasn’t always been the same copy functions. I feel like I had a good run and my work locations have been more like Ben & Jerry’s flavors. Even though I have been working with the same application since the very beginning, I have grown into an expert in my field and extended my original skills to beyond what I started out as. Even still, what is really mundane is really at the micro level. There are too many daily copy functions and I do feel the drag sometimes. I have the questioning thoughts of my existence, my purpose, and the question of: have I given it all that I have to my life or have I just wasted most of it. What exactly is there to give anyway? The only way to get rid of these copy functions is to travel and see the world. It’s the only time in my life I feel really free and alive. There are new things to see, other cultures to experience and learn from, other types of food to taste, and different terrain to unearth. Your stress level should be around whether or not you’ll make the next train or bus schedule or where you will have your next possible shower or next possible place to sleep, do you have enough toilet paper, or where you can find the next public bathroom. It shouldn’t be about getting an excel document out before the deadline to leadership who can’t even bother to open it up, and if they did, they couldn’t understand the damn thing anyway. Your stress shouldn’t be centered on people seeing you walking in late in the mornings or worrying about if people will question your time entry when you take long lunch breaks. Not sure how things should change or could change, but the mini-copy functions are everywhere, and I wonder if my coworker knows how depressing and dreary his statement really is. It’s not something I can change either by sprucing up my days, but I do lose sight of the copies because it is a routine we all do and get comfortable with, having each day merge together, having each day just roll onto the next day, and unfortunately, having every cell in my body age with time and many are dying and falling off, their spunk lost forever. A different coworker wrote ‘There’s just not enough hours in a day to do everything’ in an apologizing email sent out to people fearing that he sent something out too late that he thought was vitally needed. It was neither too late, important, nor was it desired to begin with, and his comment about not having enough time in a day to do more work than he could possibly do, just shows you how focused people are with this useless crap. I find that there’s not enough time in the day to go for my long ass runs or to surf the net or read books or do music or eat out with friends or just do the basics, living! How I would like to practice cooking or improve my French or pick up my art again or workout for 3hrs straight! Ahhh, how nice that would be to workout for 3hrs straight! ....sigh.... They all do copy functions and extend beyond their normal schedules and routinely work overtime, which are super copy functions. It’s a disease, which I am staying far away from, and I can only look longingly towards my next traveling vacation.

Accident

10.06.08

I got into a car accident a couple weeks back. I was running on four hours of sleep and about ten hours of direct interaction with the business users pissing on practically everything they could think of, and in a place where every corner looks like every other corner. Even with the never lost navigation system, I lost myself every time. The place is plagued with divided highways shrouded by trees on both sides, and there’s me, lost in thought and not gone for my run with pent up frustrations and endless anxiety and stress. When I got hit, taking my entire car front completely off, I was moving only 1 mph. I just let my foot off the brake and looking stupidly to my right when there was only one way the cars could possibly come from. Flying straight down a curving hill going about fifty or sixty was a SUV driver. I was on unfamiliar roads and was only fifty yards from my hotel which sat right in front of me. Right when I got hit, I shut my eyes not believing my stupidity. I didn’t think about my safety, of damages to myself or to the car, nor about the laborious paper processing that would take place soon after. I thought about how I’ve made such a lame mistake. On any given other day, my alertness and my sense of reasoning would have been clearer. I sat there for about fifteen seconds with my eyes closed thinking what a dumb fuck. During the filing and police incident reporting process, I was still in a daze. I admit that it was my fault but from any third person’s point of view, one would have thought it was the other person’s. Someone watching would have seen my unmoving car being hit, ripped open as I sat at a stop sign. Little did they know I had my nose out too far and was slowly inching forward. I had to apologize to the woman who had just come out of work still wearing her nursing pajamas and on her way home. I felt really terrible and as if someone foreign and very unlike me took over the wheel and did what was unheard of by Anny. I asked her if she was okay, she nodded, and we both looked at her car. She only had a flat tire and small foot long horizontal slash on the bottom side of her car door. She was driving some old SUV that was very boxy, old school style. She said to herself out loud, too loud, that thank god she didn’t have her children with her. I thought I made it clear that it was my fault and begged for her forgiveness already by apologizing endlessly when I got out to go see if she was okay. Well at that point, I felt like I should have told the police that it was her fault. There was also a witness sitting across the way at the hotel, the hotel I was trying to get my ass to, who would have backed me up 100 percent. He came up to me before the policeman came and asked if I was okay and needed a witness to the event, and when the policeman arrived, he made the same comment again to the police. I so could have closed the lady out. In reality, it’s not like I did what I did on purpose and certainly I didn’t act defensive about the whole thing when being questioned.

Well it took a long time for the cop to do all the paper work and she was trying to change her tire. She was having problems getting the tire off of her back, where some jeeps have their spare sitting on the back outside exposed for everyone to see while driving. I could have helped her but after her comment and after such a defeating day, I couldn’t lift my soul up. I sat there thinking what I needed to do next, which was to find another Hertz rental place and change out the car. The light was dangling and some sort of liquid was leaking. I didn’t want a tow truck to come either. I could only think of all the cost and time that would come with it, especially when I declined the insurance waver during the initial rental agreement to begin with. Finally the whole thing was over, and I tucked the wires into the car so they were not going to drag on the floors as I drive, and the cop pushed the dangling light back into the car and nothing else was on the front on the bottom, no grille, no nothing. It was naked. The bumper and the entire front were on the side of the road. The lady all of the sudden turned extra friendly and looked at me all concerned and told me to drive safely and that the roads here are very dangerous and hoped I'd make it to the airport okay. She helped me with directions to the airport. The cop also along with the lady gave instructions making sure I knew how to get where I needed to go. I drove at most 30mph on the interstate highway with my hazards on. I was getting nowhere at this speed and going any faster could make the car explode, especially when I didn’t know what liquid was coming out of it. It made terrible sounds the whole way and if I tried to go faster it would only rattle louder telling me to chill out with the pedal. I made it there alright and had to do a left hand exit on the interstate. I was thinking ohhh shit as I was crossing the whole highway going around 25mph for that left hand exit. At least it was around 9pm at night so that was my only benefit.

It took over an hour to get another car, and believe it or not, all they had left were vans! How low could my day possibly get. They then found a suv that I could rent, so I took that and that was a monster when I finally got in. It was so big, I could have fit Willy in it. It also had a never lost navigational system in it, which I used for the next five days, and each time getting lost still the same. I was too embarrassed over the whole incident that the next day at work, I didn’t mention it to anyone but one other person. The other people were all new people I just met, but soon enough gossip spreads, and they all found out. The whole thing was embarrassing because it was after a long discussion about my failure to find the Kensico Dam, the place where I wanted to go to for my run. I had already mention how I couldn't find the dam, which they thought was too funny since it was just down the street. I went up the street. So I couldn’t possibly bring up the car accident after that. They would think I’m a ditzy driver. A local woman there said that the 9A road was a terrible, dangerous road, and I’m like “Hell YES, let me tell you about it!” They all knew before the day was over what happened that previous evening and categorized me as a ditzy driver.

After the accident, I don’t think I went above 40mph anywhere I went. I was driving like a paranoid old person, a soccer mom, and always taking the far, right-side lane and going super slow. Traumatized, yes, but this time I got the full insurance package and everything I could think of adding to the damn car just to make sure that I was covered even if I drove the car off a bridge.