one of my youthful co-workers made this new avatar for me for our oh-so-annoyingly-distracting interoffice IM app. I hate the whole IM thing. Our boss thinks it keeps us connected and therefore much more engaged with one another and team-oriented. Yay team. Go team go. I don't want to be on IM all damn day long (I'm WORKING for chrissake), I don't care what music my colleagues are listening to, nor do I care when they log on and off, but I am notified of this whether I want to be or not which is really obnoxious and the fault of our hyper-paranoid head of IT dood who set everyone's PCs to time out after 10 minutes of idleness so goddess-forbid you get into a meaningful conversation with an actual human being who is standing in the same room with you, or go grab a cup of joe in the next room -- everyone knows you were slacking off because the damnable IM thingie sets off little bells and whistles every time one logs back on. So basically it looks like all I do all day long is log back on. I resorted to setting my status to "busy"in order to avoid pop-ups from my chatty co-workers and to dodge my boss who sends me dumbass IMs such as "you there?" That's worked for about two weeks. No one seems to have noticed. My strategy is to work my way down the list of status options as needed. Next radio button on the list is "on a call" and the way I see it, no one is going to challenge me on that one, because, you know, I'm on a call. It would be uncool to interrupt.

And what of my absence of low these 7 months or so? Several reasons. One is the fact that a creepy stalker who resides in Tampa hits my blog pretty much every 24 hours which is beyond sad for that person and just plain annoying to me. To that Tampon (and you know who you are): Get a fucking life. The other explanations for my absence: too unpleasant to discuss.