Lifestyles of the poor and nameless

That's right folks. I know we played Survivor recently, but I feel the need to play again. Before I get into it, here's the language you know and love:

Survivor here is the same as the TV show, except I "vote off" people from my life on the basis of the stuff they do...and there's no prize for winning. (Check the archives for more info). And now, without further ado...

In Round 1 of Work edition survivor, I eliminated my incessantly-smoking co-worker. Even then, I resisted the urge to eliminate today's contestant, but I can't fight it anymore. Goodbye Marina, hit the road!

Marina is the secretary at my office. She reminds me of Mimi from The Drew Carey show (a little thinner and minus the mumu outfits). She is middle-aged with very pale skin, and she insists on wearing this funky-colored eye shadow all the time (blue, sea green, even yellow). Combined with her wispy, platinum blonde hair, you can only imagine the sight. However, good people come in all packages, so I did not hold this against her.

After working at my job for about a month, it became apparent that the rest of the staff was not too fond of her. I could tell she wasn't the brightest person, but she seemed nice enough so I didn't understand why they were all trashing her at the office lunch. Our boss is constantly yelling (yes, yelling....at levels that can be heard down the hall) at her for something or other, and generally the boss treats her like crap. I know that secretaries are there to copy your papers and fax stuff for you, but it always seemed obnoxious for our boss to say: don't copy those papers. Let Marina do it tomorrow. So even when I have big jobs, I'd just copy the stuff myself.

Maybe I was wrong to expect a little gratitude for believing in Marina, or at least not berating her the way most others did. Or maybe she misinterpreted my niceness. Either way, an alarming trend began to develop. It started with her asking me to cover the department phones for her when she was away from the desk for extended periods of time. Since my cubicle is adjacent to hers and our boss', I'm pretty much the only person who will hear the phone when it rings. Except that it ain't my job. Dammit. There is a voicemail service on that line. If she doesn't pick up, voicemail will get it. Apparently the boss hates for there to be voicemail during the day, but oh well. I'm not getting paid extra to cover the phones, so I ain't doing it. Once in a while, maybe. But don't start trying to coordinate your lunch schedule with mine so that I'm covering the daggone phone while you're out everyday. Not wanting a confrontation, I decided to start having meetings with other people on other floors and taking random lunch breaks. Then I started bringing my MP3 player to work with me. That way I could hide out in the headphones and "oops, what do you know...I couldn't hear the phone ringing."

But it wasn't enough. People are always calling our office asking questions. These people are scientists, concerned citizens, other government folks, etc. Needless to say, being the most junior person on staff and not technically inclined at all, I will not be able to answer about 90% of these questions. If it's legal or related to some project I've been assigned to, bring it my way. Otherwise, send it to someone else (usually our boss). Apparently Marina didn't get the memo (or she's using me as a buffer between her and the boss). Either way, she did it again today... even though I've explained to her that I usually don't know what's going on with these technical projects and I'm not the person to ask.

And to make matters worse, if I'm not available to answer the call, she'll take a message and give the caller my name saying "Panhandler is on another line, but she'll call you back." So it's not like I can have someone else do it. Ugh.

I can't wait to get to another job. But until then....GOODBYE MARINA!