Forgetting The Anticipated.

 

Many things happened in the virtual office last week, but many more things could have happened and unpleasant and grotesque they would have surely been had I not kept my wits about me.  Act fast. Analyze later or not at all.

I had made arrangements to meet with some people and they sent me an almost belligerent amount of emails I had to triage them into categories of Definitely Ignore, Probably Ignore, and Probably Don't Ignore. This all happened before the, wait for it, morning of the meeting even arrived.

To say that I was irritated with these time vampires by the designated meeting time would give a far too generous characterization of my general disposition. I could have spat at them. Thankfully, the world of virtual officing doesn't allow for what would have otherwise been a shit-storm of incivility.

Luckily people in my profession do not rely on hackneyed terms of art and expression and since there is an unwritten code of near demented collegiality it doesn't take much in such an environment to express one's even remotest displeasure.   

In the virtual corridors in which I sleep most of the day and try not to get logged off silence is almost universally understood as You should go fuck yourself and not make a scene about it. 'Haven't we covered that before' is barely hidden code for 'Why are you scrambling to cover your ass and making it so obvious?' 'In the interest of time' can in almost every circumstances be understood as Oh for fuck sake will you please shut the fuck up already!

There are ways, subtle ways to bring a meeting to a close or better yet terminate one before it even has time to gestate in the mind of someone longing for the attention of the pre-pandemic days of a captive lunchroom. And whereas some people 'create boundaries' as a way of placing themselves in the center of their nurturing whatever the fuck I actually build motes, dig ditches, then erect walls with laser guided shit designed to intercept and destroy anything that may lead to me interacting with any one of my coworkers.