I’m not the type of person that grouses about their job all that much. That is mostly because I enjoy my job and I have only a modicum of responsibility. Plus for the most part, very few people can screw me over in my job. So the co-workers that I find annoying I can still view at a comical level because they rarely actually interfere with my job. They just annoy me on occasion.
Yesterday was May Day. It is a holiday that I thought only school children were forced to celebrate because it came near the end of the school year and most teachers were ready for summer vacation and had given up on teaching the current lot of savages in their classrooms.

When I opened up Outlook when I got to work there were already two e-mails wishing me a Happy May Day and a third e-mail wishing me a Happy Beltane. I’m not a grouch. I don’t get mad on certain holidays. Particularly when I get free food because of the holiday, but it did make me wonder why there was no love for International Worker’s Day.

International Worker’s Day is the holiday I celebrate on the First of May every year. I think next year I’m going to beat the other holidays to the punch. I’m going to show up with some communist themed food right at 7 am and have the first Happy International Worker’s Day e-mail out by 7:02. It will be a victory for the workers of the world.

I discussed this plan briefly with Lowell. By the time I got back to my desk there was a third Happy May Day e-mail waiting for me. It is this e-mail that actually kind of annoys me. Not because somebody had sent me a generic “Everyone” e-mail wishing me a Happy Holiday that I’m sure if I questioned the sender they couldn’t tell me the first thing about the origins of that holiday.

It was the style of the e-mail. I really should have done a screen capture of this e-mail, but I’m sure that would have been a violation of some kind of proprietary information agreement I might have signed at the beginning of my employment at The Computer Mine.

The person that sent the e-mail is no Hemingway. They aren’t even a Faulkner or a Kerouac. They aren’t even a Dan Brown. When the President of the Mine sent out an e-mail requesting that people in the company make their e-mail signature more professional, she changed her signature so that her phone extension is not listed next to the company phone number, but by her e-mail address. Last time I checked, e-mails don’t have extensions.

I know that she tries. The Computer Mine publishes a company newsletter that is just rife with the type of quality journalism that you would expect to see in such a publication. I have no doubt that some day this newsletter will bring home a Pulitzer. Last quarter there was an enlightening article revealing that this person had recently completed a class in Business Writing.

After reading just a handful of her e-mails on International Worker’s Day, I now want to meet the teacher that taught her that it is completely ACCEPTABLE to substitute smilies for punctuation, because you know what? It isn’t acceptable. Not even in non-professional e-mails. In fact, smilies are never acceptable in any situation or any circumstance.

On Another Note

I spotted Steve. However, I wasn’t able to get a picture of him. Well, I got this really lousy picture of him that looks like the type of picture that people crack out when they are trying to prove the existence of some cryptozoological creature like Bigfoot or Nessie.

Steve the Groundhog

I’m sorry it is such a terrible picture, but it was I could do. Steve is quicker than he looks and he made a mad dash for his hole when he saw me standing outside. I hope to get a better picture of Steve sometime this year. It will be a personal mission.