Later today we’re getting together with Steve to see “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with Steve… and boy, this website is truly bizarre, because it looks and sounds so “normal.” What else can you expect, with the same writer as “Being John Malkovich?”

It hasn’t been a particularly productive day – I had a case of the mopes earlier and just stayed in bed out of protest. It turns out that one day last week I had a particularly bad day at work – the day I was wearing the “anti-grump” outfit, in fact. And I finally got around to being grumpy about it today — naturally, the day before returning to work and my wonderful co-workers. Most of whom aren’t bad people, but one person (who is very popular with some people, disliked by others) really got up my nose. I sent a ticketing record back to her from the error queue for correction; granted, I was being a stickler and I wanted it done right. She didn’t see it that way, so she pointed it out to several people around her and bad-mouthed me in a pointedly audible voice about how “stupid” it was for me to send it back, so she refused to fix it. I tried fixing it myself just so it would go through the ticketing software without throwing another error, but there was more wrong with it (as I suspected there might be)and it still wouldn’t pass. In the end, I did have to issue it manually (which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place). If I had let it sit on the error queue and never touched it, my cow-orker (sic) would have had to fix it and there would have been no mutterings of “stupid” and snickering from her corner. Thing is, one of the many, many little things I’m supposed to do is keep the error queue cleared out, and send things to people for correction if it appears they’re letting it sit uncorrected (the agents are supposed to keep an eye on their own records and fix them if they don’t pass the auto-ticketing editor, so my watching the queue is supposed to back them up in case they don’t notice it).

So this morning I moped in bed and felt grumpy about things in general. Later this week, I have a meeting with my team leader, and one of the things she’ll counsel against is excessive Internet use. Yes, well, yes, quite. So I’m not looking forward to that one. And I have to bite my tongue about the stuff that really sticks in my craw about work when we get to the part where I’m supposed to talk about things that bother me at work. Well, it bothers me that some of the people won’t look me in the eye when we approach each other and won’t smile at me. Mind you, I’m not a “look in the eye and smile” kind of person, so it takes a LOT of effort for me to do it, and it’s not easy to do something that doesn’t come naturally when you don’t get a positive response. It bothers me that I’m not particularly well liked at work, except by the folks I’ve described before as the “my blinky is stuck” contingent. The people I consider my peers (the “non-blinky” sort that don’t need a lot of help to do their jobs) sometimes look at me as if I have two heads if I attempt to have a friendly conversation with them. Sometimes it gets better, but only after weeks of determined smiling eye-contact… and then it’s all screwed up by one “stupid” incident with the wrong, influential person, and I’m back down to pariah status. I’m not management, and I’m not one of the regular agents – I’m in between, and there’s resentment because I don’t come under the same “phone stats, call times” constraints. Plus, my job is always changing, and no matter what it is that’s taking the primary focus of my time, the agents apparently grumble about how I don’t work as hard as they do. Well, I just work differently – mostly on behind-the-scenes stuff or on nasty, time-consuming stuff so they don’t have to deal with things like hotel groups or fixing problems.

There are a couple of people who are always pleasant and friendly, there are a large number of people who are sort of neutral, and there are a couple of people who resent it if I send a record back for correction, and always take the opportunity to vent to their neighbors and the team leader about it and completely ignore me. It’s those few people that make my job… interesting.

It might be even more interesting to make an appointment at Lacuna, Inc., and forget their existence, but apparently this would probably cause me to forget everything I ever knew that was even remotely connected with them. Including my job, my SABRE skills, and quite possibly everything I’ve done since the fateful day I decided to become a travel agent, back in 1985.

And we can’t have that.

Anyway, the movie will likely be as oddly funny and disturbing as “Being John Malkovich,” and I have no idea if I will feel better after seeing it. But I will probably feel different, which after being a grump all day is acceptable.