The Aerie
I really can't complain about my cubemate. He's very, very quiet. He's very polite. He doesn't smell. I have nothing to complain about.
So of course I'm going to complain.
Actually, I'm not complaining about him. I'm really complaining about my client. You know, the client who is paying me huge bucks to twiddle my thumbs and blog from my desk? Yeah, so really I just about want to stop writing at this point, because there are still people homeless nearly six months after Hurricane Katrina, and here I am whinging about my life.
But never mind all that. The problem is, my cubemate has a cold.
Now, it's certainly not his fault that he has a cold - these things happen. It's not like I've witnessed him licking doorknobs trying to pick up a cold or something. But now he has one, and he does something that drives me crazy.
He snorts his boogers.
You know what I'm talking about. When he gets a stuffy nose, he doesn't blow his nose. He sits in place and inhales really hard, and then glups loudly. >SNiiifffffff< *gurgle* -gulp-
Shudder.
To be fair, my problem with this is not his fault. My problem is that he's giving me flashbacks... flashbacks to 1990...
[cue harp music]
One of my many "in-between" jobs, I took this software development position with a crummy little firm called Eltrax. They were in the business of putting medical information onto credit-style cards, so one could walk into any hospital, pull out the card, and get proper medical treatment.
The owner was a nice guy, good to work for. My boss was a fruity nerd, a nervous overcontrolling fussbudget, the wunderkind programmer who wrote the software. My double-bound job - fix bugs in his software without actually making any changes to the code. But there was another guy in the office - a very nice quiet fellow who was some kind of engineer. The only problem? The quiet engineering fellow had some kind of sinus problem.
This wasn't a cold - this must have been some kind of low-level allergy or something, I don't know. All I know is that for the eight months I worked with him, I was subject to what I called the Phlegm Percolator, eight hours a day, five days a week. *SNIIFF* -gurgle- >gulp< pause *SNIIFF* -gurgle- >gulp< pause.
All. Day. Long.
So my cubemate's current troubles are not so irritating in and of themselves, but they are taking me back to that horrible time in my life, when I was working at a stressful, dead-end job, with a 24-hour snot percolator.
So it's not his fault. And I'm certainly not going to say anything, much less cill my cubemate.
On the other hand, if he doesn't get over this cold soon, I may leap shrieking out of my chair and run off to hide in the supply closet...
Posted by Albatross at February 15, 2006 12:09 PM | TrackBack