Last week I accidently pulled out someone’s UPS, so of course that annoying beep ensued and took me by surprise in this emotionless corner of our building, but I was comforted by the thought that I hadn’t lost any of this guys work. So later on in the day a women comes by my cube, not the man who’s UPS I unintentionally disconnected, but his neighbor, and she tells me I lost all his work. I immediately stood up and walked to the man’s cube to apologize; he took it with a slight fuck-off face, but I was curious: “don’t you have a UPS, it was clearly working”. To this it was as though he thought I sabotaged him or something. I replied to his introverted look of distain: “well than it’s clearly broken, you should get a new one before the power goes out, it happens a lot here”. I wasn’t being sneer or sarcastic, I was simply looking beyond what had happened as the irreversible past and looking toward what could help a similar situation from occurring in the future. “It’s not broken; I’ve only had it for 3 months”. Clearly this was a stubborn man.
So this morning I had to go back to this man’s cube to have a VPN port activated. I didn’t mention that I’m actually piggybacking off his intranet connection, but anyway, IT was supposed to have done this last week. Needless to say I was egger to have it live this morning, so I recorded the information to bring to IT (it’s still not done(I suppose I write more when left without the world wide web at my finger tips)). What I found was when recording the information was something of bewilderment; the man plugged his two units into the “surge protector” outlets, not the “backup power” ones. Hey, whatever, you know, people make mistakes, hell I did when I accidently ripped his plugs out, that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is this woman who initially confronted me about the issue; I walked past her this morning and she wouldn’t give me the time of day; except for her shallow, condescending, walk-past-without-looking-you-in-the-eye face.
But the guy seems cool; I just talked to him and let him know about the issue; he seems… apologetic, maybe even a little embarrassed. While I wish I could say I don’t make judgments about people, I do. And it doesn’t take much. Simply the way you carry yourself, the way you look at people, etc… but I question this woman’s opinion of me. I’ll never understand why people look down at others the way they do.
