an absolute must have

For every IT department in every company there needs to be a room. Preferably in the lowest level of the building, but any floor will do, so long as the room is appropriately soundproofed so that not the slightest hint of sound escapes.

There would be an occupied/unoccupied slider tag to either side of the entrance, along with a hook mounted key which would lock and unlock the doorway to said entrance. From the inside only (although an alternate method of entry, used only in emergencies, could be allowed)

Ideally this room would be sized to comfortably accommodate the tallest/largest employee and the following items:

1. a full sized hanging punching bag
2. boxing gloves and requisite tape
   
3. a regulation sized baseball bat
4. a box of regulation baseballs
5. a box and/or drawer of china and/or glass plates
6. safety goggles.

Such a room would be for the sole purpose of allowing the IT personnel* to let off steam when the workload, support calls, insane requests, malfunctioning hardware and/or software have affected them to the point of apoplexy. At said point, the IT person would be allowed to leave his or her desk, without explanation, retreat to the room and beat, break, smash, pound, punch, pummel, kick, stomp and hit, with all the accompanying yelling, screaming, sobbing, foaming, until the anger and stress has been released.**

I'm convinced this would significantly reduce the amount of stress in the workplace.

Unfortunately, it would not cover the morning and/or evening commute.

*Other departments need not be excluded. For every other department needing to reduce stress and/or anger levels, an additional room would be added.

**If the reason for this post wasn't clear, here it is: I really, really, really, really, REALLY could use such a room. I could have made good use of such a room this week. Why? That's another post, when I actually have time and am not pilfering it from my (non-existent) lunch.

the joys of being a female techhead

I work with Active Directory and Windows Servers. Which means, nine times out of ten, I'm working in a department in which I am the sole female employee.

There are days that I wonder if ERA and all that ever happened or if it was some odd historical fiction that somehow got recorded as Actually Happened for the books

In the past four hours I've had two, borderline three exchanges with fellow and interdepartmental co-workers that were the epitome of misogynistic and patronizing. And before you say, 'might I be overreacting', stop. It's true! I have email proof, although I can't post them here for security and identification reasons. You'll have to trust me.

What I want to know is, who do these guys think they are and why on earth would they think that I would put up with this type of crap? That and where exactly do they get off? Don't bother answering, they're anger-releasing questions so that I don't go completely berserk and start screaming at the top of my lungs. I've already sent the pointedly polite, barbed responses and I swear I'm getting Urban Terror to work on Vista this afternoon if it's the last thing I do before exploding.

I'm already grappling with anxiety and all of its physical manifestations...it's one of the lovely side effects of the chemical cocktail I take to keep the black dog at bay. Stuff like this only makes it that much harder not to jump out of my skin.

This rant has been brought to you by the colors red, and orange, and the words enraged and infuriated.

the more things change...

You know the rest.

I haven't posted in a long while, for various reasons (to hopefully become clear later), but mostly because my depression is in remission.

Which is not the same as cancer-related remission: depression never really goes away. I still have to take the pharmaceutical cocktails, eat the mood enhancing foods in the right amounts (to avoid the pound-packing side effects of the aforementioned cocktails). I still have to be careful of what you watch, listen to or read: Seinfeld good, Tori Amos not-so-good, The Godfather forget it. Which is sad because Tori Amos has some truly wonderful music. I've consoled myself by reading and re-reading and re-re-reading her book, which reassures me that there are others out there that march to the beat of the drums they've made, and have done quite well.

But I digress. Long story short: my energies have gone from daily digging myself up out of my depression to dealing with the day to day craziness of keeping it at bay while getting on with life and all of its associated insanity. And as that goes, so goes the focus of this blog. I no longer need a place to put everything I'm doing to pull myself out of the pit, I need a place to put the craziness that happens in my thoughts and in my life so that I don't fall back in. Hence the title, link and description changes for this blog. Maybe, if I ever have the time, I'll throw some design changes in as well.

Hopefully, I won’t need to change it back any time soon. If this blog works for me the way it should, I shouldn’t.