Living The Dream
You know how when you see people in the hallway or the washroom at work and they ask, "How's it going?" Are you honest when you answer? I'm not so much.
Sure, most of the time I can give a sincere "Great!" or "Good." But, if it's not so good or great, I resort to "Swell." Because with swell, you can add tone to indicate the true level of suckiness you want to express but it doesn't make the other person feel compelled to come back with "Oh, what's wrong?" Because, mostly they're just being polite and they don't care and mostly I don't really want to get into the details. So, a "Swell." can just be responded to with a little laugh and you both move on.
The past few, oy vey I think it's been five, weeks at work have been hellish. We had a lot of problems with our production system that are now (knock on wood, throw salt over your shoulder, sacrifice a virgin) in check. But, right on the heels of that, we lost our development system with tons of data for some major corporate projects.
I haven't been hit the hardest by all this but I've had to be the interface between the non-techies and the techies and the voice to the company on what's going on. That's meant a lot of long days waiting to be able to send updates and after hours work testing and responding to the folks directly working on the issue. Again, I'm not in the center circle of hell but it's still really, really wearing.
So, I was walking out of the office today and a co-worker asked, "How's it going?" and I responded with a pathetic "Swell, how's it going with you?" He said, "Living the dream."
Brilliant!
"Living the dream" is perfect in that it doesn't matter what tone you use. It's completely understood that your life sucks but you're surviving while not demanding pity. It's the lazy man's version of "Swell" because you just throw it out there in any fashion and it's understood.
Yep, that's my life right now. Just living the dream.
Sigh.
Sure, most of the time I can give a sincere "Great!" or "Good." But, if it's not so good or great, I resort to "Swell." Because with swell, you can add tone to indicate the true level of suckiness you want to express but it doesn't make the other person feel compelled to come back with "Oh, what's wrong?" Because, mostly they're just being polite and they don't care and mostly I don't really want to get into the details. So, a "Swell." can just be responded to with a little laugh and you both move on.
The past few, oy vey I think it's been five, weeks at work have been hellish. We had a lot of problems with our production system that are now (knock on wood, throw salt over your shoulder, sacrifice a virgin) in check. But, right on the heels of that, we lost our development system with tons of data for some major corporate projects.
I haven't been hit the hardest by all this but I've had to be the interface between the non-techies and the techies and the voice to the company on what's going on. That's meant a lot of long days waiting to be able to send updates and after hours work testing and responding to the folks directly working on the issue. Again, I'm not in the center circle of hell but it's still really, really wearing.
So, I was walking out of the office today and a co-worker asked, "How's it going?" and I responded with a pathetic "Swell, how's it going with you?" He said, "Living the dream."
Brilliant!
"Living the dream" is perfect in that it doesn't matter what tone you use. It's completely understood that your life sucks but you're surviving while not demanding pity. It's the lazy man's version of "Swell" because you just throw it out there in any fashion and it's understood.
Yep, that's my life right now. Just living the dream.
Sigh.
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