This Geek

Our department at work is getting ever smaller. There are now exactly 2 permanent staff members left. One of our team resigned awhile back and has been contracting for the past few months, and that’s due to expire at the end of may.

Anyway, sometime last year, management hired a Dutch contractor as technical manager for our department. After about 6 months, he learned the error of his ways, and after making some changes to our infrastructure that made our admin lives more difficult, he left.

Another foreign contractor was hired to replace him. He seemed nice enough, friendly, etc, until one day last week he decided that he just had to exert his power and completely alienate and piss off the entire department.

It seems he’s one of these sociable creatures that just cannot handle being left out of things, so to make himself feel better, he set about to completely rearrange our offices and desks to suite his completely fucked up view of things. We were very happy in our little individual cubicles, with our blinds closed etc. Now this fuckwit has removed ALL the partitioning in the office, and is insisting that we have to sit in clusters, facing each other This brilliant decision was most likely arrived at without one modicum of thought towards us and our feelings, nor for the practicalities of sharing office space.

Since I sit at the bottom of the passage leading in to our offices, I can now see and be seen by everyone that enters the area. I can clearly hear other people’s conversations on the other side of the office, and noises from machines that never used to bother me are much louder too… Never mind the fact that I can no longer have a private telephone conversation.

His arguments? There is no privacy in the office! He was quite adamant about that. He even went so far as to relate a story about how he gleefully listened in to a personal conversation some woman was having at one of his previous jobs, and then butted in and offered her advice etc. Obviously the woman was peeved. And he was proud of that example! I mean, what kind of cunt must you be to do something like that? Sure, you may not have much privacy in the work place, but any decent human being would at least pretend not to hear a private conversation, and would at least feign ignorance… That at least would afford one the semblance of privacy. And the fuck you say! The south african constitution says that everyone has the right to privacy, and in the workplace, one can expect a reasonable right to privacy! So fuck your “there is no privacy in the work place” bullshit.

I’m a regular on the MyBroadband forums, and while browsing around, I came across a post from a person that I’ve seen on the forums before (obviously also a regular, but we tend to frequent different areas) that was quite bizarre. She has a link to her blog in her sig, so I decided to take a look.

What can I say other than it appears to be a largely incoherent diary written from the point of view of someone surrounded by conspiracies and other sinister goings on. It might make more sense if one could understand who or what the various characters are that she refers to. Real or imagined, it is interesting nevertheless.