Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Oct 02 2001

People are walking around the office putting stick…

People are walking around the office putting stickers with numbers on all the cubicle walls and chairs, in preparation for the move, which won’t take place for at least another three months. The building we are going to move into hasn’t even been completed yet. That 12-story structure is still under construction. Most of these stickers will not last for three months in this office. It seems that our company is planning to take advantage of the office move to give our corporate image some sort of facelift. I’d predict some downsizing if we weren’t moving into a huge building with more office space than we have now. It would be stupid to create even more empty desks, especially with the crazy rents that are prevalent in the Xinyi district, where we’re moving. Then again, the fact that a particular plan is stupid has never stopped our company from doing anything before.

We’ve entered autumn now, both officially and sensually. The first dry, cool breeze of fall never fails to turn my thoughts to travel, to getting things done that I had planned to do over the summer, before winter has us firmly in its grasp. I dislike winters in Taiwan with a passion, but fall here is remarkable stable and pleasant most years. I still don’t see why Taiwan couldn’t solve the so-called “energy problem” by just keeping offices and stores at normal temperatures rather than a few degrees above freezing. But no, they have to build a fourth nuclear power plant on an island plagued by earthquakes and typhoons at a time when every other developed nation in the world is trying to get rid of their existing nuclear plants.

Harry has an annoying habit. Well, he has several actually, but one that really confuses me is his insistance on replying “Yes, that’s right” even when no one has asked him a question. He’s always saying something like “Yeah, I’m going to the temple in Guandu to worship….yes, that’s right, I am.” I almost feel like asking “Really? You’re going to the temple?” out of sympathy for this idiosyncrasy of his. He does this in both mandarin and Taiwanese, so it’s not a matter of language. It’s probably a result of the fact that he works in a small, loud factory in Sanchung, where everything said bears repeating on the assumption that the listener didn’t catch it the first time around.

Luke has comments set up on his website, courtesy of reblogger. I’m toying with the idea of trying to install comments on here, but I’m not sure if I could keep up with the torrent of debate I no doubt stir up with each shockingly eloquent utterance.

(Translation for the sarcasm-impaired: I’m not sure if I could handle the emotional challenge of continuous, physical confirmation of the fact that nobody reads my webshite)

After all of the wonderful appraisals of the blogging phenomenon, I wonder if it is all just a symptom of how boring and useless our day jobs have become? What I mean is, how could blogging be so popular if we didn’t have loads of extra time to read dozens of blogs each day, not to mention writing our own? I know I wouldn’t be able to keep it up myself if I were doing something more interesting than looking for Elvis-like patterns in mold growth.

posted by Poagao at 7:28 am  

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment