Fed Up Friday

I don’t bother checking Facebook on Fridays anymore. I know what I’m going to see. Ten billion pictures, videos and posts all with the same message: TGIF.

Yeah, no. I’m not fucking thanking anybody that it’s Friday. Friday can kiss my ass.

I think there’s some kind of contest I don’t know about, some sort of unofficial challenge for every customer, vendor and coworker to find as many things to come and stress me out with on Fridays so that I’m a nervous shaking wreck by the time I head out that door to start my weekend.

Fridays are the customary day on which the guy in the sales department finally decides to quit procrastinating and closes fifty-five sales orders in the system for me to bill out immediately.

Fridays are the obvious choice for the creepy IT guy to come over to my desk and stage a tell-all one man show about antivirus prices and who’s unhappy with their monitor setup and what medical tests he’s been sent for recently by his urologist. If I’m really lucky he’ll even offer to show me the progress of his incision scars from when they did that laparoscopic procedure that one time.

Fridays are the day when customers who apparently never check their credit card statements call me frantically demanding that I rummage through boxes of half-decade-old receipts and fax them proof of a single all-important Visa transaction for $44.80, and a half hour, 274 papercuts and zero luck later they call back and say, “Whoops, sorry, I just realized I told you 2009, but it was actually from 2008! Haha, my bad!”

Fridays are the universal preference for vendors sending me emails with excessive question marks, red flags and “URGENT” stamped all over them demanding information about things that aren’t actually my problem, and – after the initial heart attack of wondering if it somehow is my problem – when I reply to let them know it’s not my problem, they go, “Oh yeah, we figured that out .23 seconds after we sent that original email, sorry we didn’t write back to say as much, we just figured that you’d figure out that we’d figured out that it wasn’t your problem.”

The current leader in the “Who Can Drive The Nut The Nuttiest?” Tournament of Twatwaffles is the dimwit rep we got saddled with at one of our most important vendors, a Derpina of a woman who couldn’t get a clue if she had a staff of ten thousand Sherlock Holmes clones advising her. My manager and I actually got her successfully taken off our account for a short period last year, but she was reinstated after a period of “not fucking up as badly as usual”, or words to that effect. Other annoyances come and go, but it seems Derpina is forever.

And she’s determined to win the Nuttiest Nut sweepstakes by sheer volume of entries. I would rather spend my day tugging slowly on the massive hangnail I’m currently nursing on my index finger than deal with this woman.

Here is our standard Friday routine:

Step 1: Receive email from Derpina at Flakes R Us that appears to have the sole intention of proving that yes, there is indeed such a thing as a stupid question.

Step 2: Activate Super Duper Nut Facepalm. Repeat as necessary and transfer all Facepalm Energy generated to Coping Mechanism Fuel Reserves. If Super Duper Nut Facepalm fails to generate sufficient energy on its own, escalate to Repeat Headdesk Protocol until Coping Mechanism Fuel Reserves are replenished, or concussion occurs.

Step 3: Compose scathing reply to Derpina explaining why everything she says is stupid. Fantasize about pressing “Send” before heaving a sigh and rewriting email several times, pausing occasionally for meditation and espresso, until a civil tone can be achieved.

Step 4: Receive reply back from Derpina which clearly indicates she has understood nothing.

Step 5: Check to see if coworker is watching. If no, strangle monitor. If yes, pretend to clean monitor but think really hard about punching it.

Step 6: Compose yet another email to Derpina using whatever charts, statistics, peer reviewed studies and/or lolcats might finally get the point across.  Copy her supervisor in on the email as if to say, “Do you see what I have to put up with? If I have to suffer, so do you.”

Step 7: Derpina has sudden miraculous epiphany now that her derpiness is under the managerial magnifying glass, and writes flowery email saying that all is now understood. Supervisor writes congratulatory reply to us both praising our efficiency and professionalism. Supervisor writes additional separate reply to me thanking me for my patience.

Step 8: Ten minutes before end of work day, receive urgent email from Derpina riddled with Unnecessary Capital letters and exclamation points!!!?!!! asking Original Stupid Question only worded slightly differently. Email includes implied new personal slogan, “NOW WITH EXTRA SNARK!”

Step 9: Throw elaborately choreographed mental tantrum. Close email and ignore Derpina, who will never follow up and most likely forget that she asked anything in the first place. Stew over the prevalence of idiots in the business world for the rest of the day.

Step 10: Rinse, repeat, regurgitate.

This kind of B.S. is what Mondays were made for, people. Quit turning Fridays into Hell Simulator 2.0.14 and let me hate the day I’m SUPPOSED to hate!

But obviously that’s never going to happen. So fuck Fridays, and fuck the TGIF-ers. To them, I say FIGT: Fuck, I’m Goddamn Tired. And you can keep your Throwback Thursdays and your Selfie Sundays, too. It’s all about Fed Up Friday over here.