Attitude

“ A positive ATTITUDE is a powerful force for good, giving life to everything it touches.”

This is the poster that hangs above my new desk. It leans against the cubicle due to lack of walls. Next comes Dr. Tinkelman. How I can work in an office setting in where the most respected and feared client is name Doctor Tinkelman is a cruel conundrum.

Casey, with who I share my new career, reminds me so much of Danny DeVito that every time I watch the man struggle to lower his rollee chair closer to the floor I bite my lip until it hurts. True to form, he is short, balding and in a Havana pink shirt. The man has a perpetual need to streamline, employing phrases like, “the idea behind the concept is…” Does this get us anywhere? I have no idea.
He twirls his finger in the air to signify volume control on the conference caller. Cory is on the tripod contraption for our daily 9AM meeting. The meeting’s dialect is unintelligible. We pass Cory around like a beach ball iterating foreign phrases about TFS, the “back end,” and Backlog Items. I am a long way my organic fair trade fresh-roasted home.
Let’s talk about John. To me he appears as an adorable half-Latin panda. Down to reflection in his dark brown eyes, everything about him seems to be nice and considerate. His meticulous coffee routine and tendency to eat dry oatmeal, white bread and cherry tomatoes are the highlight of my cube space. Love of food, I can find it anywhere. Having said that, let’s avoid any discussion about the semantic similarities between “cube space” and “pube space.”

MEETING 8/22
This is ludicrous. I am sitting within a meeting for a product launch. Thousands of dollars, people and expectations involved and I don’t understand a word of what’s going on. I’ve never encountered so many interpretations at one time upon one subject. I am an observer, but why is my name up on that screen?
I have met the alleged Dr. Tinkelman and he is surprisingly efficient. He appears to respect my father and I wonder if this has to do with their similarities – older, male, father-figures with a cut-the-crap attitude. Or, perhaps the camaraderie is on account of their most overt similarity: irony. There must be some bond between a man named Doctor Tinkelman and a man named Dick Bush. It goes unrecognized and again, I bite my lip until it hurts.

As far as I can tell this dance that I am supposed to do is all about waylaying commitment and due dates. It seems that my college classmates might be better suited for this career. A client asks when and the answer is what and how. The program is to be released to test, released to production, refined or unrefined, rereleased to test and finally released to training. Eventually, the question gets asked again and the answer remains nebulous. I’ve never spent so long talking about what concludes as nothing.

This is how I come to love Dr. Tinkelman. He is “dismayed;” this is “unacceptable;” this has been an “embarrassment” for him. Have I been contracted to the wrong side of this war?