April 8, 2002
Sound Check
I don't know if this consultant work is right for me. I just spent the last four hours arguing about bugs in Microsoft Word that Microsoft has known about for years and hasn't done anything about. I am supposedly this Word guru, which is far from the truth. I think I'm an advanced user, yes, but there is a ton of shit I don't know about it. Anyway, so this client—who's not really a client of ours but a client of another consultant and it's all incestuous and twisted so I'm not going to draw a diagram—was trying to get me to make Word stop what it was doing. In essence, she wanted me to crack the code and fix the bugs. Yeah, uh huh. I'll give you a crack. It's hard enough to train people how to use this shit, but it's worse trying to defend an already buggy program to someone who thinks that it should make coffee and walk the dog, in addition to creating and messing up documents, that is. I was at my wits end. I have a problem controlling the volume of my voice, too, which certainly didn't make things any better.
For some reason, I have a tendancy to yell what I'm saying instead of just saying it. It doesn't matter where I am or to whom I'm talking. My voice is loud. I have to consciously make an effort to lower it to a more acceptable conversational tone. So, on the other end of my voice, it sounds like I'm either pissed off or chastising the other person when more often than not, I am not doing either. I don't know why I do this either. I remember my mother telling me when I was in high school that I mumbled and didn't speak clearly enough. I also remember when I was younger not being able to get a word in edgewise no matter where I was. Could it be that now, fifteen years later, I have finally made up for it all? Could it be that as I've grown up, my emotions have grown as well, and the sound of my voice is in direct relation to my emotions? I have admitted freely that I can be an emotional wreck and that being able to control my emotions like a Vulcan would be the best thing in the world. Dunno. I'm not losing my hearing in either ear, which is always a sign if one talks too loudly.
Anyway, I was so frustrated that I couldn't get my point across to this person, that I was raising my voice. I had to stop and restart in a lower, more calm voice, and it was just not good. It's getting to the point where I wish that I could just be an admin again. Life was so much more simple then. Desk job, office hours, few responsibilities that actually meant anything to me. Yeah, the pay sucked ass compared to what I'm making now, but I could learn to live with it again. But I am not a quitter.
