that fucking bitch

[Originally posted on September 24, 2014, at 12:50AM.]

I spent most of my time going up the mountain tonight muttering, "That fucking bitch."

I had originally thought this woman—one of our department's office assistants—was cute and kind and classy. Now I see she's snippy, defensive, and often unhelpful—in short, a fucking bitch (I'm not alone in thinking this, by the way). Let's call her FB for short, and if latecomers don't know what FB stands for, I won't care if they think it means "Facebook."

What prompted this angry meditation was my goddamn ID card, which also doubles as a security card. My ID from my previous job was able to get me into any building on campus, but my new Dongguk ID can only open the door to my particular faculty office at the ass-end of the fifth floor of the Hyehwa Building. The other problem is that, soon after I received the ID, I discovered that it didn't fucking work. I was unable to unlock my office door, and once someone else had let me inside, I was then unable to lock the door on my way out.

I tried to get the ID card fixed. Four fucking times. Yesterday, Tuesday the 23rd, was the fourth time. I would give the card back to FB, she'd look at it and hand it back to me, then say, "I'll call the office and they can recode it remotely." Each time, I would nod stupidly, trusting that FB actually knew what she was talking about... and then the card would fail to work as promised, which made me feel like a sucker who'd just gotten tricked into an assfucking.

By the fourth time I was visiting the office to get my card fixed, I was fairly pissed off. I left the card with FB and said, "Please don't give it back to me until it's perfect," then stalked out of the office without saying my usual cheerful goodbyes. I was, frankly, sick of wasting my time going back and forth, testing the card whenever FB would say the card had been fixed. Why the fuck was I doing the testing, anyway, eh? That's FB's goddamn responsibility, not mine.

FB texted me an hour later to say the card was fine and that I had been closing the door wrong the whole time. This sounded like bullshit to me—another attempt by FB to dodge responsibility and lay blame elsewhere. I had used the card over the weekend: after the third attempt to fix it, the card could get me into the office, but I still couldn't use it to lock up. This past Saturday, I tried locking up the office seven fucking times, to no avail. I tried jiggering the door; I tried applying both sides of the ID card to the sensor plate; I tried tapping the sensor plate quickly and slowly. Nothing worked. And now FB was telling me that the problem was all my fault. Fucking bitch.

I went to the department office and FB, all huffy, came out to meet me. We walked together to my faculty office to test my card out because no one was in the office at the time.

"Is there something special that I need to do when closing the door?" I asked.

"No," said FB. "It's not difficult."

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Yes," she said tersely.

FB then jiggered the door and triumphantly slapped the card onto the sensor plate, successfully locking the room up. I tried the procedure after she had done it, and it worked for me as well. I thanked FB through my teeth and we went our separate ways.

So my quandary was this: either I had been doing something wrong or I hadn't. According to FB, there was nothing special that needed to be done to the door when closing it: just close it normally, press the "arm" button on the sensor, then tap the card on the sensor plate and everything should lock up automatically. Trouble was, that's exactly what I had done several dozen times before: let the door close naturally, then try to use my card. This past Saturday, I had done the "close naturally" thing as well as attempt to jigger the door this way and that to see if that might cause the lock to activate. All to no avail.

So something didn't add up, logically speaking. If FB was right, and nothing special needed to be done to the door, then I had done nothing wrong, and the reason why the card didn't work was essentially a mystery. If FB was wrong, though, then I had been doing something wrong, and FB had failed to explain what more I needed to do. Either way, this shit was all on FB, not on me. I'm not the one who issues and verifies the goddamn motherfucking cards.

I was in the office until a little past 8PM, and no one else was there, so when I made to leave, I had the chance to test the card once again. I turned off my computer, turned off the room's A/C and lights, and stepped outside, once again facing the dreaded sensor plate. I pressed the "arm" button and tapped the card on the plate.

Didn't work. An unpleasant alarm klaxon sounded from the sensor, and a computer voice told me, for the umpteenth time, that my card wasn't registered and that I needed to get it checked. I waited a few minutes and, remembering the way FB had pushed and pulled at the door even while she was telling me that nothing special needed to be done, I pushed the door as fully closed as possible before retrying the lockdown procedure.

And this time it worked.

So, two theories: (1) FB was wrong and there is something special that needs to be done—namely, you need to push the door that extra inch or so to make sure it's fully closed—or, (2) my card's success was a random fluke, given that I had tried similar door-jiggering tricks over the weekend.

I have very little trust in FB at this point. Her office sends out an annoying number of emails every day, but when I send emails with questions and requests, they get ignored. I'm also not informed when important things happen: for instance, a color printout of my student roster was placed inside my faculty locker, but no one told me it was there. I was also never told, on Monday, whether I had to do a session of English Clinic yesterday (Tuesday). Normally, we teachers are informed by text message and/or email as to if/when we have Clinic duty. No message came for me, one way or the other, thus forcing me to visit the Clinic.

So I have no clue whether anyone in FB's office even reads my emails. An email came from KMA (my other side job) for both FB and me; it was addressed to FB but was cc'ed to me. I texted FB to ask her whether she had received it; she bitchily replied, "Yes, and you did, too." Cunt. She had obviously missed that I was checking to see whether she was actually receiving my (and others') emails at all, but I decided not to pursue the matter for now. I'm building a history of unanswered emails that I can dump on her head sometime close to Christmas—a litany of irresponsibility and incompetence that merely confirms what a fucking bitch this woman is. I can't believe I ever found her cute.

Anyway, yeah, that's just me venting. I'm going to try to avoid being snide, sarcastic, and bitter in the days to come, but it taxes my patience when the exact same fuckup happens several times in a row. And I'm no saint. If that fucking bitch simply did her fucking job, life would be a lot simpler and way more blissful.

The only high point on Tuesday was my advanced reading/writing students. Team 2 was teaching, and the girls did a fantastic job of motivating the students to answer questions from the textbook by turning the entire class into a huge game. I thought it was a magnificent lesson, although I did quibble with the girls about the leftover dead time at the end: they stopped their lesson almost ten minutes before the actual cutoff time. Aside from that, though, I thought the girls had hit upon a winning formula, and they made the class even more interesting than I could have made it. And those girls are all still so young and innocent... not a single fucking bitch among them.


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