Amber Night

Had a lot of bills to pay.
I'd give the shirt right off of my back,
If I had the guts to say.

Welcome aboard, I think you're going to like it here.  But before you start, there's something you need to know.  You won't find any of this in your orientation materials, but it's probably more important than all of them put together.  Unless you want her to think you into the cornfield, you're going to need to know how to get along with Amber.  This should get you started.

1: Understand Amber's biorhythms.  She is not a morning person, she will flying body kick you for interrupting her lunch, she is sleepy post-lunch, and afternoons are her "surf time."  You have a roughly 12 minute window in the late morning to interact with her.  Make it count.

2: Amber does not give a flying fuck how brilliant your freckly-faced little whelp is.  She will nod and smile as you regale her with stories about how your spawn can pick up any goddamned musical instrument and start playing it as if God Herself were guiding your child's hand, but internally she will be trying to telekinetically melt your brain.  Unless your last name is Ma, and your child's name is Yo-Yo, Amber does not fucking believe you anyway.

3:  When you begin a sentence with "I'm not a racist, but…" then Amber stops listening and tries to imagine what you would look like if you were riddled with thousands of papercuts and being savaged by dogs.  While on fire.  Sometimes she laughs, and you don't know why.

4: Amber's office is much closer to the break room than she would like.  So don't act surprised or offended if, after you burn your fifth bag of popcorn into a lump of coal, she kills you.

5: If you work in a technical support capacity, please understand that Amber is not a fucking retard.  She has been to college.  She knows her way around a Linux command line.  She knows what a umask is, and she has even, on occasion, written a Perl script.  She has already rebooted her goddamned computer by the time she calls you, and knows that your advice to "reboot it again" is just a way to hope she talks to someone else when she calls back.  On the other hand, she has no idea how many cores her processor has, the width of any of her buses, or the number or depth of any caches that may reside on her processor, video card, or power supply.  But don't be such a smug asshole when you can rattle this shit off like it's your social security number.

6: When composing an email to Amber, do not write the contents of your email in the Subject line, and leave the body of the email blank.  That's just plain goddamned stupid.  And while on the subject of email, not every single email you send needs to have Priority: Ludicrous.

7: Don't come in to Amber's office and start touching and picking her shit up.  She's attached to some of that shit, and knows goddamned well that you don't wash your grubby little food tentacles after using the restroom.  After you leave she has to destroy–by fire–everything you touched.  This makes her vengeful.

8: Do not yell from your office, expecting Amber to yell back from her office, unless your legs are broken, the phones are out, and the network is down.  Unless you want your legs broken.

9: If you are Amber's boss, and you really feel like you must prioritize her task list, then get this concept through the soft spot in your Precambrian skull: there can be, by definition, only 1 "biggest priority."  Do not bug the shit out of her regarding when "less than the biggest priority" is going to be done if you are already bugging the shit out of her for status on the "biggest priority."  Better yet, let Amber manage her own schedule.  You will be happier.

10: If you take credit for something Amber did, then that something had better be taking the fall for a murder rap.  Because if she worked her ass off on a project, and it winds up as an uncredited bullet point on your whatever-the-fuck report, then your ass is going down like the kid with the leg-brace in dodge ball.

Appendix A: If you provide vending machine services in a facility where Amber Night works:

1: The ice cream bars are not supposed to have mold on them.

2: It's been 2 months.  By now it should be obvious that nobody is going to eat the last Chocolate Twizzlers that have been blocking access to the Snickers bars.  Pull it out and move on with your life.  Amber would probably be willing to just spend the $0.65 to open up the "Snickers quest," but it's a slippery slope.  If she buys the Chocolate Twizzlers today, she'll have to buy the Cool Menthol Doritos next month.  She's on to your ass, and it aint gonna happen.

Appendix B: If you provide security in a facility where Amber Night works:

1: Amber respects that you are a professional.  But don't be gettin' all up in her grill like you're some kind of real cop or something.  You're not.  So don't be a dick about the non-vision-interfering divot on the passenger side of her windscreen.  Don't you have some important non-real-cop stuff to do anyway?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 1:02 pm and is filed under It's all about me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.