Oversharing is Not Caring

While we were deciding on how to keep the blog afloat during our vacation, we spent quite a bit of time hemming and hawing over posts to write for the posts scheduled while we were gone, including those leading up to the big day. Since we have SO MANY dedicated readers, we knew we couldn’t let you wonder what happened to us while we enjoyed overpriced tropical drinks and salsa dancing! (Or whatever it is we’re actually going to do on vacation). We eventually elected to write a post about Facebook, its uses and misuses, a subject that weighs on us almost daily. Unfortunately, that post has been preempted by this one, a musing on the latest addition to our office and the problems coming along with... her.

The Troubled Temp.

We’ve discovered that real world temps have little in common with Ryan.

As Anya put it: We should write this one about oversharing now, since I have a white hot burning rage toward this day and the Troubled Temp, and it is leaving me a hollow shell ready to collapse in on itself and I’m not sure how long the vengeful creativity energy from that can last until I’m left with nothing but an ulcer.

As you may have guessed from her title and description, Spent Supervisor is rather averse to anything that requires actual work for her (unless it also serves the purpose of making life harder for one of her office enemies).  Our company has a rather lengthy hiring process, which she loathes, and to put off actually dealing with current gaps in the office, she convinced our HR department to contract a couple of temps for the next month.  This allows Spent Supervisor to feel like she’s doing something to solve our current office issues, while not actually doing any additional work, while making our jobs exponentially more difficult for... a couple of reasons.

We were both ready to basically ignore these temps, and put as little effort as possible into actually training them since they can’t fulfill all of our real job functions AND they’re only going to be here for a month. Not. Worth. Our. Time. What we were NOT prepared for was basically being forced to play host to someone who, not unlike a mosquito, just sits around whining in our ears literally non-stop all day and sucking the blood (energy) out of us. Another thing she has in common with mosquitos? Anya wants to slap the shit out of her everytime she sees her. (Luckily for her, I won’t. Maybe.)

Another person who brings about intense slapping urges.

Troubled Temp, like a disturbingly high number of people in this world, labors under the impression that people would really love to hear about every single aspect of her life in great detail. From accent confusion to baby daddies, cause of death to divorce, we have a veritable alphabet of anecdotes from the Troubled Temp, none of it solicited. For seven hours of the day, three days a week, we endure a ceaseless and unrelenting stream of bullshit about Troubled Temp’s family issues, feelings about her life/job/the weather, questions about what we’re typing/who that phone call was from/is that Facebook on your phone.

Anya’s mother makes a habit of complaining about technology today, and how it is leading to the downfall of civilized society. As much as we hate to admit it, she has a point here. We all know people who are hell bent on sharing too much information with too many people, far too often. We shit you not, Anya has a Facebook friend who uploaded a picture of herself at the grocery store captioned “waiting for prescriptions at the pharmacy, ugh!”. REALLY!? At that point, you might as well be posting all of your medical information and heavily filters pics of the prescription bottles on your goddamn Instagram.

WHAT’S YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, WHILE WE’RE AT IT?!

Lock it up!

We’re not saying we should all be ascribing to Victorian ideals of etiquette, but we cannot be alone here when we implore everyone to draw a few fucking lines of propriety.  We obviously share essentially everything with each other, but that is due to our numerous years of platonic life partnership.  We would never repeat some of the things that come up in our very private kikis to our co-workers, dental hygienists, or fellow members of our online apiary forum.  You should only be sharing certain things with certain people, although it’s not exactly a top-down hierarchy.

To illustrate our point, let’s use your father and one of your friends (this is just a regular friend, between “close friend” and “frenemy” on the friendship scale).  These are both people who are important to you, who you (probably) trust, but the things you share with each of them should be totally different.  You are not going to tell the same embarrassing sexual situation story to your father that you laughed about with your friend.  However, that same friend is not privy to the state of your student loan payments or what’s going on with that weird mole on your shoulder, like your father is.

People you should only be sharing basic standard pleasantries with?  Strangers you meet in a professional setting.  We understand that, in general, we have high standards and expectations, and that there are many different (wrong) ways to go about life.  We’re sure that Troubled Temp thinks that she is a friendly bubble of openness and honesty, but everything she does comes off as nosy, invasive, and far too frank for our taste.  To make everything worse, she’s also pretty damn terrible at the actual work portion of her job.  Really looking forward to the next four weeks.

“Oh, the humanity.”

[Office tattoo illustration by Andrew Joyner]

Things That Should Bump in the Night: We Continue to Defy Logic

Last week, we talked about some of the strange things we (mostly Paul) are afraid of. Catch up here!

Spoiler! This adorable creature makes him shudder

Now we’ll have to get back to Anya, whose fear of being attacked by one the perps of SVU only kicks in when she is alone, in the dark, trying to get to her car. Not so crazy, in this day and age. However. She has a few other deep seated phobias that make much less sense. You can guess from our twenty somethings tagline, that we are children of the 1990s. Great. (Someday that will fucking shock people. “You were born BEFORE the year 2000?!!??!” No time for that crisis right now, but damn.) So we all saw Free Willy, right? The inspirational tale of a troubled young white kid who starts hanging out with an orca that lives in a sad, dirty park and the mysterious old tribal dude who trains him.

When Anya first saw that movie (as a small child), she was totally on board with the whole “abandoned kid living on the streets resists his foster parents until a spiritual connection with a whale helps him become a functioning human and connect with other people” thing. Not so on board with the part where said kid is cleaning graffiti from under the tank (why?!) and the fucking orca POPS UP OUT OF GODDAMN NOWHERE! It probably doesn’t even happen that way, but as a child she did NOT see that coming. To this day, she hates that noise of deep water that you hear in movies. You know that weird gurgle that always happens when submarines/marine life/etc. is submerged? Hates it. Can’t watch the beginning of Titanic, she hates it so much. Can’t deal with Flipper, Jaws, or anything that involves people diving. That part in Skyfall where they were under the ice? UGH.

Conducting the Google search for this picture was physically uncomfortable, that’s how much I hate it.

We’ll wrap it up with what is perhaps the most far fetched fear of all. We all watched The Magic School Bus, right? Remember that episode where Arnold’s stupid cousin comes with them and Ms. Frizzle takes everyone through the solar system and he takes off his helmet on Pluto and comes back with a bad head cold? That might have started this one. Anya is deeply horrified by outer space. This is possibly (probably) also stemming from that time she watched Armageddon in fifth grade and Bruce Willis fucking got left on that goddamn asteroid. No amount of Xenon: Girl of the 21st Century could assuage her concerns, and she has stated more than once that if the world gets into a Wall-E type situation, she will just stay on Earth with the landfills and the sad robot. Not fucking flying into outer space. Ever. Something about the idea that you could just float away...forever. And suffocate on your own air. People do not fucking belong up there!

Except no. Not impressed.

So we’ve both got some questionable hang ups, fine, great, moving on. What is probably worse and more telling than the things we are afraid of, is the things we aren’t afraid of.

We love the wacky people we call “those Victorians” in our best wistful/condescending voice. The Victorian era was a time of some truly terrifying shit, but we’re strangely okay with the vast majority of it. If you’re unfamiliar with trends in Victorian era photography, google that RIGHT NOW PLEASE. Maybe you’re sufficiently horrified by the fact that they made a habit of things like hiding mothers in the background under tapestries, taking pictures of dead people (especially kids), and playing around with exposure times to make themselves look headless. Aren’t they hilarious? We’re not even close to horrified enough.

Anya was spending some quality time browsing collections of these photographs and playing “which kid in this picture is dead?” while at the Libertarian’s house the other day:

Anya: Oh my GOD, they opened its eyes back up, how CRAZY!

Silence.

Anya: Are you seeing this? How many candles are in this picture?? (counts 21) That coffin is going to catch on fire!

Silence.

Anya: Seriously are both of these kids dead? I love this. Oh my god the headless ones! Look how funny they think they are! It’s like old timey memes! Look at this grouchy old lady holding her head under her own arm!

The Libertarian: I don’t know if I can look at the headless ones, it’s kind of making me sick.

Anya: Just a few more! Or you can go over there. Sorry!

Not fooling anyone wearing that, girlfriend

(If you’re interested in looking at the exact pictures this conversation was centered around, they’re here).

Alright, so we’re pretty down with all of those creepy pictures of stern looking women you see in horror movies. One thing we can’t handle from the Victorian era? Fucking hair wreaths. No joke, that shit is not ok.

You’ve already read about Anya’s unfortunate affection for feral animals, and you know Paul hates raccoons as much as she loves them. Some people might say she lacks a healthy fear of the various critters that wander the forest (or city) at night. You should have seen her cackling with fiendish delight at this scene from the hit television series, Bunheads:

You might be shuddering with horror when you see that opossum hissing at good old Sutton, but Anya was honest to god all “awwwwwwwww look how precious!” (which is also how we assume Spacey Secretary would react, speculating on whether or not Sutton had ham in her bed). It’s a problem. Especially a problem when you live someplace that they could be hanging out in your backyard at any given time. Especially when seeing them squished on the road makes you sincerely sad for the rest of your drive, and this occurs probably every three miles on the highway. That’s some misplaced motherfucking empathy.

We’ll leave you with this gem: while brainstorming for this post, Anya asked Paul to add anything to the lists of fears and should be fears that he thought was missing. Without even looking at the draft he immediately responded “things we should be afraid of but aren’t: dying alone”. Little did he know, the first and only thing Anya had added to that list was...dying alone.

Minds. Melding.