The GeekHiker

November, so far at least, is proving to be, shall we say, horrible.

But at least I can’t blame it on L.A.

Where to begin?

Work has descended into hell.  One would think, given the amount of time I’ve spent on the job, that I would have engendered some respect.  You’d be wrong.  Everyone is pressuring me to get the new computers out, even though no one actually knows anything about computers.  It’s funny, as I never presume to tell others how to do their jobs, but somehow everyone feels free to tell me how to do mine.

I want to just leave, so badly I can taste it.  But I know the timing isn’t right right now.

[I really should have listened to that instinct years prior.  But one can’t change the past…]

I suppose as well, that I’m feeling a bit less confident of late.  You see, I took the second certification exam a week ago.

I bombed it.

Spectacularly.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t studied.  I studied the material over three months.  The whole nature of the questions, though, was markedly different from anything I’d been led to expect.

[The third exam, which was also difficult, at least tested me on the materials it said it was going to test me on.  Which makes the second exam even more annoying…]

So I will begin studying again tomorrow.  It still makes me wonder if all this is the right path.  Try as I might, I just don’t care that much about the material.

Or is it that the combination of the test failure combined with being treated like shit at work has sucked by eagerness for the job out of me altogether?

I wish I knew, but until I finally get up the guts to leave the job, I suspect it’ll remain a mystery.

[Trying to figure whether it was the particular job or the whole career I disliked/dislike is immensely difficult.  The question is, do I have to get another job in computers just to find out?]

* * *

Oh, but wait, it gets better.

The girl dumped me.

Well, she didn’t actively dump me.  She did it passively.

You see, she updated her FaceBook status to indicate that she was in a relationship.  With someone else.

Interestingly, she replied to an email of mine the same day, but didn’t include anything in there about it.

Must’a slipped her mind.

Hard not to wonder if I should have felt a little less happy for her when she got the job back at Labor day.

I can’t entirely say I didn’t see it coming.  Our communication had slackened, to be sure, and often I was the only one to initiate emails.  This, I have learned through brutal experience, is a sure sign of trouble.

Still, as part of my whole “taking it easy” approach to the situation, I figured things were just moving slowly.  Looking back, I figure she probably hooked up with the guy sometime at the end of September.

[Not so much…]

Damn me and my willingness to be faithful.

The real irony is that, in any other context, I would have been perfectly willing to pursue a friendship going forward.  She was both interesting and fun to hang out with, and loved hiking.

Given the crassness with which she called it quits, I’m not so eager.  After all, it shows pretty little respect for me as a person.  Given that context, is that a trait I really want in a friend?

[Turns out it was even worse than all that.  She would later update her status to indicate that their anniversary date was mid-August, right around the weekend she came to a birthday picnic with all my friends, and fully two weeks before we had last met for lunch around Labor Day.  Awesome.

Still, while the delivery sucked, I wasn’t that mad about the situation.  If it wasn’t going to work out, it wasn’t going to work out.  It just would’a been nice to find out from her rather than an anonymous social networking site.  But maybe that’s the way of the future, handling our break-ups on line with the simple click of a button?]

* * *

So, here we are, mid November and yet again I’m… well, not hating life exactly, but not particularly loving it either.

What I do know is that the factors are mostly external.  Work sucks, but I can’t change an incompetent management.  All I can do is continue to study.  And the girl, well, I can’t beat myself up too badly when someone pulls a douchebag move like that on me.

Gee, can’t wait to see what the rest of the month brings…

[Maybe I should just start avoiding winter altogether…]