Tis The Season

I love my job.

Really - I do. Or rather, I love where my job is headed. It's hard to truly "love" being at the bottom of the food chain, but knowing you're probably on the right track is a pretty good feeling. A relatively new feeling for me, in fact.

But there are days - days like today - that make me feel like I'm living in Office Space and want nothing more than to gut a fish on my desk while playing Atari and stealing all of the holiday food from the back room, followed by a good solid pen-in-the-eye. Maybe throw a stapler or two. As I've mentioned before, I work at a private 4-year college, and all of the students are officially on break between semesters. Yet the staff and administration (not faculty, it should be noted) are here on campus... with nothing to do. The pointlessness of my meaningless existence becomes glaringly obvious on days like today. I feel like a typewriter. Typewriters are completely and utterly obsolete, yet they're still sitting around there somewhere. Doing nothing.

I also spend the majority of my time at work answering phones. Students ask a lot of questions. Parents ask even more. We all know that all people seem to come down with a case of the crazies (and crankies) around the holidays, which seems to make them significantly less pleasant to speak with than your average unpleasant phone-encounter. [Especially considering the fact that we're politely reminding them about their 13k tuition payments that will be due immediately after the New Year.] Another interesting phenomena I've noticed is that, when faced with the prospect of a weekend, vacation or holiday, the phone rings exponentially more immediately preceeding said time off. The mere concept that we will be unreachable for the better part of the next 48 (or, god forbid, 96) hours instill fear and loathing in the hearts of anxious college students and their parents, which leads to pure panic. As a result, the day before my paltry 2 days of vacation is never pleasant.

Scratch that. I have zero intention or desire to gut a fish on my desk. I don't gut things. It's not in my nature. I'm much more of a "cut the line and hope the hook works itself free" kind of girl.