Grumpies

I am used to graduate school. I'm actually pretty good at the challenges it throws my way; write a paper? Sure. Teach this class? Mmm. No problem. Read this book and discuss it intelligently with other students, making references to other books and articles and theories? Piece of cake. It's a good thing, too, because I've been doing it a damn long time and am eventually going to make my living doing it from the "teacher" side of the classroom. It's the reason I've spent so damn long at it; without much real reward (monetarily). I can't go out and buy an expensive pair of hot shoes without feeling bad cause it's Andrew's money. I still don't have my money for those kinds of things.

When I have to do something that has the sort of challenges you folks who work in the office world, computers, etc, I get seriously grumpy. I can do these things just fine. Probably better than most. I am a bit of a perfectionist, though, and that is where the grumpies come in.

I have this project I'm helping Andrew's dad do. It falls into the "technical writer" zone. I am making a brochure. Sounds pretty easy-- and in some ways it is. But Jim has all these graphics-- maps, plats, etc, that need to go into the document. Half of the copies I have are too big to scan. The ones that aren't too big have been photocopied on a dirty copy machine with a speckled platen. Clean the dust off of the platen for God's sake, wouldya!? I have to, because of previously mentioned perfectionist traits, go in and take all the damn black specks that are the photocopied ghosts of dust on a platen.

Specks. Demonspawn agents of evil in the universe. Must. Be. Obliterated.

And my mouse is dying, so the work is frustrating.

And the printer is really broken. This little black plastic bit came out while I was changing the part I paid 200 bucks for that I thought would fix the previous problem. It sits there, making fan-whirring noises and smelling funny, like some sort of odd solvent (it never used to smell like that).

And today the cat decides that she doesn't want to go outside and play quietly like she does EVERY FRICKIN' DAY normally. No. Today she wants something that requires lots of meowing, and running away from me when I try to pick her up to quiet the infernal racket. That racket is interfering with my speck-destruction because it makes me wiggle the mouse wrong and then all Hell breaks loose in Photoshop and there are lines everywhere.

Please. Someone. Don't you have a 20 page Foucauldian epistemological analysis of a feminist post-modernist text you'd like me to do? I can handle that. THAT doesn't make me grumpy at all. As long as the damn cat shuts up.