Man oh man am I glad it's Friday night.  For some reason my antennas were tuned into some weird vibes today.  They made me paranoid about my "place". 

So I thought about it a little bit, ok a lot.  Do I have anything to feel paranoid about?  Did I do something wrong?  I don't think I did, but then again I'm misunderstood all the time so it's possible. 

Confessions time: 

OK, so last week Monday we had an outing that I planned, the company at the Brewers game, tailgating and the whole shits.  It was a great thing and I had the following day off, just because I need to take my time and I figured a late night...you know, getting up would suck more than usual.  Some who remember my "Lemon Drop" antics from the Christmas party assumed that I was planning on getting too shit faced to work the next day but that wasn't true.  I mean I guess I was giving myself the out for that, but getting shit faced at company functions is NEVER in my plans.

Anyway...so it's a blazing hot day, I never stopped sweating from setting up the tailgate so I felt like a scum bag, my hair pulled back because it was just so HOT!  Sitting in the sun drinking Mike's Hards and beer casually...had sushi for lunch and I was just too hot to eat at the tailgate, I got buzzed quick and so did Mav.  Not DRUNK..buzzed...which some might think is worse...because we're jovial.  We're happy...and fuck the people who stress me out.

I know Mav asked me if "she" was the one who I didn't like and I know I said yes without thinking about our volume or proximity.  Whoops.  I dont know if anyone heard us.  Someone who I trust told me I shouldn't care.  I don't think I did or said anything bad but I know I tend to pick on people for fun when I'm buzzed...maybe I hurt someone's feelings. 

I know I asked someone's husband buy me a $7.50 beer at the game and then I didn't turn over the cash immediately.  I remedied that the next day I was at work, and they wanted the money.  No assumptions allowed...

So there's that.  I haven't heard anything, no one has made fun of my behavior at the game, so...maybe I'm ok there?  Who knows.

And then...there's the double agent.

The double agent is a person that I spend a lot of time with who is really irritating me lately and not for the same reasons he irritates everyone else.  The reason he irritates me lately is because he has become VERY self involved.  VERY self important, attention starved and martyr like and people like that piss me off.  He wasn't always like that.

Last year myself and my former supervisor told this fledgling to the IT industry that based on his stories, he had not yet understood what it meant to hold a high demand, high stress IT position and that he should be thankful for that.  Well, as it turns out, his job has become pretty demanding lately and let's just say he's not handling it very gracefully.  The company has made some adjustments to his salary to make the burden a little easier to swallow, but it seems like when they did that, they opened a flood gate for the guy to act like his quite substantial ass is made of gold.  Since the raise, he hasn't really gotten all the pats on the back that I guess he needs because now he's just fucking irritating, he's very negative about everything and his judgement has left the building. 

Proof once again that money doesn't cure every ill and despite the fact that WE KNOW we're doing a good job and working our asses off, we need to hear it every once in a while.  Some of us hold it in and maybe get a little bitter about it, some of us become attention starved annoyances. 

It so happens that this one has become the latter.  So far he has decided that every single client is an ignorant asshole, even the nice ones, and he vocalizes these things loudly at the most inappropriate times, even when we're on the phone with clients.  Truth is all of our clients AREN'T ignorant assholes, but he's so tuned into this one client that they're all the same to him now.  He has become a glory hog and when he's in the office he invites himself to conversations that he's not needed in and then he takes over the conversation, headed in the direction OPPOSITE of the solution, just showing off his vast knowledge (which no one can deny him, he's TECHNICALLY smart as shit, but he's not very good at listening so he gets swept off in his own ideas).  The problem is that he does it when our technically in-knowledgable supervisor has no idea that what he's talking about is irrelivant just to act like he solving "yet ANOTHER problem!" and so he's being viewed as the "hero" as if we need one.  He injects his help when his help is not needed and then bitches about how he's too busy for this shit.  No one ASKED for his help.  He's started undermining the direction the team takes, assuming I'm sure that we too are all ignorant assholes and can't even figure out how to blink without his direction.  He's tossing team members under the bus to make himself look good.   He out talks people to make management think that he's the only one working around the joint.  He crosses boundries that embarass people who he doesn't really know that well**.  He makes sure that everyone in the company knows it everytime he fixes a problem (which is his JOB) and he has started to suggest that the vendor of the products that we deliver is staffed by a bunch of ignorant asswipes.  He is the DEFINITION of a Prima Donna and he is my friend.

You guys know me.  There's catergories for everyone in my life....I'll review for the late comers:

People I love and trust
People I love
People I like and trust
People I like and kinda trust
People I like
People I don't trust
People I don't like
People I tolerate
People I hate

This dude...my friend...over the course of the past few months has gone from people I like and kinda trust to People I don't trust.  It's all on him too.  Me Obiwan, he Darth Vader.  At this point I see him as so self serving that he'd shit right on my forehead if it meant it would make things better for him...and that's not just a girl's feelings, it has happened.  And yet habit is what it is...  I'm in the habit of going to lunch with my friend when he's in town and I'm in the habit of being "myself" around him.  And this week I revealed an injustice in the workplace that I'm the victim of, an unjustice that made my supervisor stutter and half step when he found himself explaining how there are "the rules" and then there are "the rules that apply to Meka", and "my friend" justified the indisgression by suggesting that my position was of less value to the company than his own.  And I didn't say a word, but ever since then I've been looking for him to be wrong, and I kinda want to rub his face in it and I hate that part of me.  He's done it...TECHNICALLY wrong but able to provide a reasonable workaround and he's advertised it and then gotten his fucking cookie for it.  Gah.  It's not a fair playing field, his knowledge is specialized and I don't compete there, but when he comes to MY playing field he gets real humble. 

This "friend" of mine has insulted me and hurt my feelings a few times before, and when confronted with it he back peddled like nobody's business.  It seems my "friend" doesn't HAVE too many friends and wants to keep the ones he has, but he seems to hold an opinion of yours truly that he needs to hide from me to keep me as a friend.  Some "friend".  This time I knew it was his out of control ego at work again and so I decided to let it go.  And lunch with his wife revealed what a martyr this guy is really making himself out to be at home. 

The fact is yours truly has skills and value that my friend doesn't realize because yours truly is happy just DOING good and not advertising it to the world, not that he could handle anyone else getting the lime light now.  OK, so I DO advertise it to the world occasionally but it has to be REALLY good... Anyway, in the "big picture" MY skills are much more diverse and much more marketable in a general sense, where our Prima Donna has really type cast his specialty into a limited number of opportunities.   Jokes on him I guess...I've seen it happen before.

OK, so back to him being my friend.  Over the course of the past few months I've really been TRYING to bring this dude down to earth and he won't come.  It seems that the harder I try the further he gets from the rest of us and so now I'm just tolerating him.  And I wonder to myself why I allow habit to dictate the amount of time I spend with the guy when I have better days when he's out of town.  I stopped sorta trusting him this week and now I'm starting to wonder if my ass is on the line for the things I've shared with him. 

The math adds up:  Me say "Let me tell you some injustice and my opinion of how they dealt with it" and then there's the closed doors conversations with the mid-boss during the week and when the boss and bosses boss come back into the office the vibe is not so friendly to me.  Add that to the obvious self promotion and the ladder climbing...looks like I mighta got tossed under the bus by a double agent.  Good bye sorta trust.  Move down to like and that's pushing it.

And then there's the politics.  Damn the office politics.  Somehow there is an assumption in technical groups.... either you acknowledge a person for being an expert in their field and their way is the highway or you have an experience based contradiction to their ideas.  It seems it's impossible to respect a person's knowledge AND disagree with their approach.  Somewhere along the line a person's experience and knowledge makes them immune to others ideas if they push that idea enough, the contradictors become the enemies of the chosen one. Basically what it boils down to is that the egotistical ones are pissed that someone else came up with an idea they didn't think of so they seek to discredit the idea person.  It sucks and it makes you a target for future discreditation.  The only way to the top is to sink the ones that contradict you and then convince the powers that be that you are always right.  The fact is there is NO ONE who is ALWAYS right and that's why there are teams of people thinking out the future of IT...our IT, your IT...it's all the same.  In the meantime there are those who don't want or NEED to be at the top, those who just want to do what they love and do it WELL, get a reasonable amount of credit for it and go onto the next problem that needs solving.

I was almost desperate for the day to end today.  I went out of my way to have pleasant engagements with people who should have no beef with me and I felt shunned.  I felt tolerated, I felt temporary...and I didn't like it.  I reflected on my suspicions...yeah it makes sense...highly specialized talent revealing the lunchtime revelations of someone who is already being treated unfairly for some unknown reason...the disliked, the hated, the thorn (who? ME???????).  Am I being over sensitive again, am I being paranoid?  Love and hate is so easy in our clicky little office, maybe it has nothing to do with Prima Donna Double Agent, maybe it's just not my day, and if it's not my day then just let it end.

At 5:00 I drove home almost in a panic.  My destination: HOME WITH MAV, the place I needed to be, where I get unconditional love.  The place where I can be moody and irrational, and stupid, maybe even an asshole and just let loose and despite that I'm still wanted there.  Truth is I get moody and irrational and stupid and I become an asshole because of the "other" people on my list, he knows that and he tolerates it until I calm down. 

When the panic slowed down a bit I realized that I AM a valuable "resource" and if I lost my job due to some personality conflict with the stupid Golden Child type shit, or if it was for some other bullshit that I wasn't expecting, I can rebound pretty quick and it would be life as usual for the important ones:  Me and Mav.  If BULLSHIT + CONFUSION = OK for me and Mav then so what?  Not worth worrying about.  In other words... FUCK IT.

Here's MY math:  Me + Mav = Home.  Me + Career = Awesome.   Me + (current) Job = Good.  Home + Career = Awesome.  Home + Career - Job = Find another.  No sweat.  No room for feeling like a red headed step child, even though TECHNICALLY, I AM a red headed step child!  LOL

Fuck it, the weekend is here and maybe my antenna was tuned into a channel that wasn't even being broadcast.  Maybe everyone was just tired of the week and thinking about not dealing with work for the next few days and I was just paranoid.  Either way it doesn't really matter anyway, as long as I learned a lesson.  Didn't Darth Vader kill Obiwan?  Not THIS time!

Yeah, that's Chad Kroger, yeah, that's Nickelback...I was a Nickleback fan way before they hit the top 40 and the rest of y'all tuned in.

And for what it's worth...I'm starting to realize that the leader of men may be the right role for me since I can't figure out whether the way to deal with injustice is passive acceptance or furious resistance.  Maybe the best way is to make your own rules?