Author: koalie

Work chronicles – The meeting room

Our office space is shared between us and them. It’s complicated…

The Others have different work habits and behaviours, they operate under unfamiliar work conditions.

I sit in an office right next to the meeting room, and I hate when the Others meet, because the walls are as thin as paper. Some of the Others joke that I may as well be in the meeting room with them.

I filter out most of the activity, except when the Others slam the doors and run in the corridors. And at a subconscious level, I become aware when they ramble or digress instead of adjourning, and that becomes annoying.

They’ve just adjourned.

In all fairness

In all fairness, unfairness sucks.

This is really pushing my buttons. I think I was raised that way, being a twin. During childhood, the master word at home always was ‘equity’. I became highly sensitive to unfairness, yet my twin brother seemingly didn’t.

Years after years of being a grown-up and living in the real life, I’ve softened, but only by a fraction. Unfairness affects me far more than I wish it would, in my personal life and to a lesser degree in my professional life.

Because I don’t do well with confrontations, I reason a lot with myself, in pursuit of the right balance between an unfortunate situation and the bright side I can hold on to. For the greater good, or out of cowardice, I yield, hoping I can keep up with the choice I made, and hoping the effort is acknowledged. But too much unfairness, I can’t cope with ; there is just so much I can take. Sometimes I burst and the balance is broken.

Practices become habits, or systematic reactions start creeping into my everyday life, shaping an uncomfortable order. To avoid this, and preserve the balance, I try as much as possible to give hints or warnings that a situation is not ideal for me and that the balance is in jeopardy. But what is a significant effort or concession from me, is not necessarily reciprocated and my hints are ineffective. The value –or cost– of the status-quo is hardly ever the same for the involved parties.

Fortunately, it doesn’t happen frequently. Unfortunately, it’s distressing and overwhelming when it happens.

Tip of the day: setting clock while irssi runs

I choose GMT/UTC for things such as my digital camera clock and IRC timestamp. I screw up the order of words when I last started irssi from the Terminal of my iPhone, because it’s something I do once a year on average (it was already something to remember the timezone command, it would have been a prowess to type the whole command in the right order ;)).

Here’s how to set the irssi clock without having to quit:

/script exec $ENV{'TZ'}='UTC';