oh, this isn’t annoying at all

I had such a nice, quiet, restful three-day weekend. That’s certainly come to a screeching halt. One of my coworkers is having a phone installed in her new office (which used to be the teeny tiny copier room and if she hadn’t been so prone to spending all her time chatting online and texting her friends and playing on Myspace she could have stayed where she was in the nice big isolated office in back instead of getting moved into the copy room between me and D, but whatever!), so there is an unbelievable amount of line installation noise going on. Hammering, banging, crashing, more hammering! The phone guy also keeps going out to his truck and leaving the outside door standing open, and I’m FREEZING. Not that half the students who come in don’t do that as well. Obviously everyone but me was raised in a barn.

Oh, good, now there are two phone installation guys, and one keeps walking through my office. Which really can’t be helped since there’s no other way to go if L’s new office is blocked off (it’s a maze of little cubbyholes which have been turned into offices since this used to be a house where the Interior Design students lived) but it makes me nervous to have people suddenly appear behind me. Nervous and annoyed. Oh, good, here comes a student from D’s office cutting behind me and through mine to get out! This is why I’m writing in my journal instead of doing the considerable number of grad audits I  have piled up. Hey, at least I’m not on Myspace!

Well, I need to be grateful that this IS an unusual day. It’s not ALWAYS like this. It’s kind of starting to get on my nerves, though, all this noise and activity and people walking through my office.  This is making my head hurt. I know – I’m SUCH a princess.

And the receptionist keeps letting phone ring and ring and ring.  Right now someone is on hold and it’s been going brrrrrrrrrr BUR BUR BUR / brrrrrrrrr BUR BUR BUR/ brrrrrrrrrrrrrr BUR BUR BUR for what seems like three weeks. I stay annoyed at the receptionist because most of the phone calls she gets are her kids or her husband, and she talks to them all day and lets the other calls keep ringing hoping someone else will pick them up.  She also is incapable of having a conversation with me that doesn’t involve all the awful things going on in her life, either healthwise or with her kids or other family members  or the cable company or whatever is currently a disaster. And if her kids aren’t talking to her on the phone, they’re in here. One is in here right now – I can hear them chatting from here. On Friday there were two daughters, a boyfriend, and a daughter’s very noisy toddler here all afternoon. The little boy is very cute but I have a low tolerance for children racing around and screaming when I’m trying to work. Just call me an old codger.  Cause duuuuuuuude, I am.

And on top of that, New Office / Immature Perpetual Drama Disaster-in-the-Making coworker is mooning around and making scads of personal calls herself because her baby’s daddy is getting out of jail today. Her baby’s daddy who already has seven other kids with seven other baby mommies. Or maybe it’s six other baby mommies. I think one has two kids with him. There are eight kids total. He went to jail for dealing drugs, not for producing a small town’s worth of kids he can’t support. It reminds me very much of Trailer Park Boys, but it’s not as funny.

Ok, I’m getting back to work. The pounding has ceased so I think the phone guys are done.