I guess I am kinda doing NaNoWriMo this year, but I’m not keeping track of my word count. There’s not really a point. I started late, since I was outlining for the first week. But I am in the middle of writing a novel in this November. I’m not really feeling it yet, but I’m hoping that’s because the personalities aren’t established yet. Or the main characters aren’t supposed to have chemistry in this first act.
Been feeling real low lately. Lots of down-spiraling things in my life just making it crappy. Most of all is work. Now there’s nothing wrong with my work, it’s just stuck in a rut. It’s boring, it’s repetitive, and I hate the people I work with. That’s the thing they didn’t teach me in Software Engineering class, that all your co-workers would be Indians, either living here on a Visa or still in India.
I’m working with people for whom English is a second language, not the first. So I can’t identify with them. I can’t make jokes because they never make jokes. They can’t risk saying anything controversial or they’ll get deported. They’re contractors, they’re slaves. They’re all real quiet or mumbly, have accents, have a “quicker over quality” attitude, because deliverables get them paid. I can’t imagine how many wrong things they get taught about Americans in “contractor school”.
They moved me to a different team, so now half my team is offshore. And the half that is here are these tiny soft-spoken girls. They must grow them like carrots in India, because they all behave the same. I wonder how they got their men to even let them go to school in the first place, they’re so submissive. They probably get told that we Americans are big and loud and full of bluster and to ignore when they have any intense emotions.
I spend so much time doing nothing. It’s like all chance of work stops at 8 AM because that’s when all the offshore people go home. And if I have a question I have to wait until the next day to get it answered. So yay for progress. This is why nothing’s on time, because everyone blows the whistle at times. You’d think you could coordinate the teams better. I can’t look at Reddit or any image sites because they block those (they keep YouTube and Twitter open though, not sure why. Go figure big corporate proxy software).
And I see all these nice people at the elevators and the lobby, important people having important conversations and laughing and I wonder why that isn’t me. Why am I stuck in a sort of cubicle prison with co-workers without an ounce of charisma and they sit from on high and get to manage it all. They don’t do actual work, they have meetings, they make friends, they go to happy hours. I went to my kids’ parent-teacher conferences and all those teachers have such energy and likability. I have no one like that at my work. We’re all dead inside.
