Forgotten Memories Of The Future.

Boundaries and Sovereignty seem to be all the rage.  If it weren't for Glenn Martens I doubt I would even focus on overheard conversation unrelated to baseball, but there it is and it appears to be everywhere one steps.

Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, India And Kashmir or is it Pakistan and Kashmir? Anyway.  I have come to accept in some real way that boundaries are largely invisible. If it isn't an actual mountain or river or wall then the boundary must necessarily be understood using some kind of force and that force is often violence.

Often, but not always.  Since working from home one of the most discreet boundaries I find that must be vigorously defended from near daily assault is that boundary separating the personal from the professional.

There is a woman I suspect she is GenZ or some kind of misplaced barbarian.  She texts my personal phone whenever she has some eruption in her schedule that she thinks I might be available to solve.  I admit I may have encouraged this behavior. I don't mean expanding NATO to the borders of Russia encouragement, but I may have responded to one or perhaps two of these texts and now it would seem that this one foolish concession on my part has led her to the belief that she can conduct all of her work through an unsecured and unencrypted Android phone.

A stony icy silence has in the past solved such indiscretions in others and I thought that would work in this case.  Friday afternoon came and there was a call from this person.  The call was ignored not just because it was Friday afternoon, but because it was an actual physical call from a human being not being my parents.  This was followed a few hours later with a text saying basically ' Hey I called, but don't worry I don't need anything anymore....' To say waves of relief flooded over me at the sight of this news would seriously misrepresent the nature and depth of my relationship with this person.

My weekend passed as they usually do and then Monday morning came with a text from this imp entirely unrelated to anything I had successfully ignored on Friday. Well, I thought, this poor sad creature with some obvious form of unspecified soft-tissue brain trauma was capable of learning from example on Friday, let's hope she hasn't lost that capacity.

I continued to do what any reasonable person would do in that situation. I ignored it. 

It was demented. Like America losing its tenuous grip on geopolitical dominance, this thing started responding to texts and menaces that weren't even there.  I suspect she may have been overworked, but I have always put being overworked down to irresponsibility and poor choices so I was not about to show a shred of sympathy for this relic of a bygone era.

The bygone era I refer to is the era of  her employment because I have found that if you ignore people like this enough they will eventually be replaced by some anodyne element.  If someone at work is irritating you then they are most likely irritating someone far more important and all one has to do is once again make friends with that oft ignored yet frequently helpful and soothing companion  - time.