Updates

Today didn’t start very well, I just yelled at a coworker which imposes his (bad) musical tastes on the rest of us working in the same office.

I’m in a really bad place right now, and have been there for the past couple of weeks. I’m really confused and frustrated with life in general, and mine in particular.

I won’t pretend I will ever be able to find the meaning of life since so many other better thinkers before me have come out empty handed. It’s just that it seems more and more pointless each day…

I work very hard almost each and every day (today seems unexpectedly quiet so far, I hope I don’t jinx it), maybe because my boss keeps swinging everything my way. The first few months, when he wasn’t sure what I’m capable of, the workload was fine. Now that I’ve proven myself, you can barely see him set foot in the office, and even when he does, he usually spends his time playing FIFA 2007.

On Tuesday, for example, I set up 5 new computers for existing users. It might not sound too bad, but the sheer volume of files that needed to be transferred between the old and the new computers was huge. So instead of transferring data through the network as usual, I chose to take out the old hard drives and connect them to the new computers to get the best transfer speed possible. But as you can imagine when it comes to really old computers, this was a very dirty operation. And I inhaled shitloads of dust in the process…

Yesterday, continuing the computer shifting operation, I have reinstalled an old computer (a Fujitsu-Siemens Scenic P300, there’s another rant about them here). It was working fine, but somehow it slipped my mind and I forgot to install the sound card driver. The girl asked me to fix it so she can listen to music at work, so I pulled the driver from my USB stick that I had used for a previous installation and surprise! The driver refused to install, giving a cryptic error number as the only feedback. I was in a hurry because it was closing hours and I was very tired and bored and nervous, so I tried installing the Windows 2000 driver (on an XP installation). Bad idea! The computer just wouldn’t start afterwards, not even in safe mode! Fuck it. I managed to uninstall the damned driver, but I left the exercise for another occasion…

It’s really incredible, but little things like that, when facing dozens of them every day, tend to get very frustrating. And when I’m frustrated, I’m grumpy. And if I’m grumpy, I don’t usually want to talk to anyone, but I’m forced to by the nature of my work. So I get even more grumpier. And start losing my patience. And end up shouting at people, most of the times people that don’t deserve it, like my wife. Which I immediately regret, adding a touch of guilt to the deadly mix of grumpiness, frustration, impatience and sadness.

I’m getting really tired of all this. The routine of this life where each day is almost identical to the previous one is killing me. And maybe not so much the routine, but the lack of perspective is what really kills me bit by bit.

I work hard but I’m underpaid. I always was, I have no reason to believe things will change radically in the near future. So if I’m underpaid, and Crengutza is still on the (laughable) pension fee, it means we have to struggle to make ends meet. We can pay for the utilities and food, but that’s pretty much all. Even a t-shirt has to be planned in advance, money saved for it for a period of time, or we have to borrow the money from Crengutza’s sister. Which is not nice and we try to avoid it as much as possible.

So if the money are not enough for anything, it means we don’t do anything. Except work our asses off all the time. We don’t have anybody visiting us. We don’t visit anybody, except for very rare occasions when we meet with my cousins and my aunt. We don’t go to movies. We don’t go to theaters. We never leave this fucking town, although sometimes it suffocates me, literally. I’m now even trying to avoid driving to work as much as possible, because it usually takes 3 to 4 times longer than by subway.

You can understand why I instantly freak out when somebody asks me if I visited or plan to visit SIAB. Why should I? I’m quite sure I won’t be changing my car anytime soon… Someone even told me this means I’m satisfied with my current car… well, maybe I am. It definitely gets me from A to B. Of course I’d love a Jeep or any other SUV for that matter. But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to waste time and gray cells staring at cars I could never afford. Especially since all the news bulletins on TV these days keep telling me that all the cars in the show have been sold! I wonder — where the fuck do they get that kind of money? I’m pretty sure not from decent work… Which of course makes me wonder if all that moral stuff I’ve accepted as my personal guide of conduct is not all just bullshit…

Which now brings me to the whole religion idea. I never was a religious person. I mean I want to believe, but I always felt that present day churches have nothing to do with the idea of God. A true almighty all-knowing God could never be fully understood by our limited human minds, so the God of the Bible makes me laugh — it’s just a cartoon. Unfortunately a political cartoon, which wants to control my life. So thanks, but no thanks. This whole perception was recently reinforced by a series of documentaries on Discovery and National Geographic channels about the history of Christianity and the Bible in particular. They claim the Bible was “edited” several times during it’s history, most of the times leaving out of subsequent transcriptions or translations the parts considered harmful by religious or political rulers of the time. Which I suspect were nothing more or less than present day clerics and politicians: mere mortals, greedy, with stupid ambitions and little (second to none) minds. There is an abundance of examples in nowadays Romania, but about that maybe some other time.

When I first started writing this post, I settled for the title “Quick Updates”, which obviously isn’t the case anymore. I need to stop now, although I still didn’t let it all out of my system…