Ding Dong, the Harpie’s Gone! March 14, 2008

I am in heaven (although, I confess I’m disappointed that heaven doesn’t seem to involve more men and chocolate)! First, Harpy #1 is retiring and today is her last day. This means that there are parties all day long, and no one really seems all that concerned that no one’s working. AND, it’s Friday. AND, it’s casual day (yay jeans!). AND (best of all), there’s a HUGE urn of coffee sitting on the corner of my desk!! Honestly, it’s like I’ve died and gone to heaven. What’s funny is that only Johnny Co-op realized how happy I was to have a whole urn of coffee on my desk - the Harpies have somehow not noticed my extremely blatant coffee addiction. Strange.

Speaking of Johnny Co-op, I felt bad for the boy today. He was stuck in an office with the Harpies, and all of Harpy #1’s former co-workers, all coming to say goodbye and chat for a while. WAY too much estrogen for him there, I think. In fact, whenI was traded to the other office in the afternoon, he pretty much spent the whole afternoon sitting in there with me, to get away from the women! Every once in a while he would get jumpy about someone noticing that he wasn’t really working (honestly, NO ONE would notice. I don’t think ANY work has been done since Bossman went AWOL), so I gave him a piece of paper and told him to walk around quickly with it. That’s right, look busy and no one will bother you. Ah, I’m such a good mentor.

What exactly are the Ides of March ? Do I need to be concerned about them? Because, really, so far the second week of March isn’t turning out all that well (okay, I Wiki’d it. Apparently the ‘ides’ is the 15th day of March. This is the 14th, but it’s already the 15th somewhere in the world… so does that count? And why does ‘ides’ sound plural, if it’s only one day? Yeesh.). Monday, all the printers went down. Like, ALL. All across the Service. That’s HUNDREDS of printers that wouldn’t speak to their servers. It was SO frustrating! But, it gave me an excellent excuse to slack off, so I’m not complaining.

Tuesday, all the COMPUTERS went down! No joke! No one could get anything done all day long because our HR program went down. The program that we all use, all day long, gone. EXCELLENT! I could slack off and the Boss couldn’t give me crap for it, because HE couldn’t get any work done, either. It started to get old, though, when I realized that even though OUR most important program was fubar’d, other units didn’t have that problem, and their finished work was still coming in to our office for filing. So, I filed. All day. Eight hours. I decided to look at it as exercise, and gave myself an excuse to eat pizza at lunch.

Wednesday, my boss disappeared. Then there was the frantic search of his office (which was conducted twice, because the Harpies ransacked it right away just to be nosy, then the actual official search, to see what work might be outstanding), and the meetings. Totally useless and redundant meetings. Two days AFTER Bossman went AWOL, they called a floor meeting and told us all to keep it hush-hush. Uh. Have you MET the Harpies?! Hush-hush was too late about 10 minutes after Bossman called in sick! The Harpies spent ALL DAY and all of the NEXT day on the phone, spreading it around, speculating as to the problem, forming their own conclusions and claiming them as the ‘truth’! What was really rich was that the Manager that was asking us to keep it quiet was the one that had been feeding the Harpies ‘confidential’ information. Wha-haa?!

Thursday was almost normal, except for the frantic look that some people had. One of the Managers in particular (famous for micro-managing EVERYTHING, and now our Acting Manager while Bossman’s out of action) was running between offices like a ping-pong ball, trying to arrange things for Harpy #1’s retirement ‘do on Friday, as well as trying to figure out what work Bossman had left undone. She’s a really nice lady, but she’s really rather scary when she’s in panic mode. Yikes! At least on Thursday all the computers and printers were working and everyone was accounted for, so that meant we actually had to work (well, the Harpies ‘worked’ in between gossipy phone calls). I filed all damn day. Again. Grrr.

And that brings us to today - Harpy #1’s retirement party. She walked around the building all morning, being falsely modest, protesting that people were making a fuss over ’such a little thing’ (meanwhile, SHE’S the one that made her own retirement posters, insisted that we have an at-work function because otherwise people wouldn’t come out and posed for about a million retirement photos and picked the most flattering). At the party, she was presented with probably about $300 worth of stuff, two cakes, flowers AND a cheque - and didn’t even have the grace to say thank you. After people made speeches about her career (deftly avoiding mentioning that she’s known company-wide as one of the two biggest gossips here), she got up and basically said, “I’ll miss SOME people… I won’t miss the job.” No ‘thank you’s, nothing. Do you see now why she’s a Harpy? Good effing CHRIST.

After the party, she and Harpy #3 sat together and read her massive retirement card, picking apart the comments that people had written and damning people for not having signed it - or worse! Asking, “WHY would that person have signed my card?! I can’t stand them!” Ugh. It was all I could do to NOT stab my letter opener into my ears so I wouldn’t have to listen to her anymore. So here I sit, at my desk which is currently housing a coffee urn (there IS a God and She loves me!), working. Okay, well… maybe not at this precise MOMENT, because I’m blogging, but you get the idea.

Tomorrow is my “All-Purpose Party” - part late birthday party (I put it off as long as I could), part housewarming party (about seven months late) and mostly a St. Patrick’s Day party. Yay! I’m making corned beef (no cabbage - gross!) and veggies (of course, spuds) and soda bread (which I’ll likely eat before anyone even gets here). I also spent a bunch of money at the dollar store on decorations and my place has green foil shamrocks hanging from every surface, not to mention the shamrock-tablecloth and the gold coin chocolates. I’m going full camp this year, boy! Originally, it looked like no one was planning on coming except for two friends and my sister, but the day AFTER I bought the meat I got a bunch of replies and now I’m worried that I won’t have ENOUGH meat. Ack! No worries, I figure I’ll just feed everyone alcohol and maybe they won’t notice they’re still hungry… I hope.