A big part of my job is managing people. Not in terms of being their manager, but in terms of being their baby-sitter. I have to hold hands and reassure and wipe noses and generally ease the transition to a new way of doing business.

I’m surprisingly good at it, considering what a misanthrope I am and how much People annoy me. When I’m on the clock and thus motivated to help, I can be amazingly patient with someone I would normally drop-kick across the street just for the sheer entertainment of watching them bounce. I am as amazed as anyone at what a calming and reassuring influence I can be with people who are wigging out about a new way of doing things. I somehow tap into a previously-unknown reserve of extraordinary patience and sympathy and reassuringly soothing tone, and somehow I make it all “okay.”

But.

Here in Fairbanks, I may have met my match. This guy up here is the biggest friggin’ crybaby I’ve ever seen. He complains. And bitches. And complains. And bitches some more. And no matter what I show him, no matter what needs to be done, no matter what topic we’re discussing, he somehow manages to bring it back to the software he won’t be using anymore. He has an almost erotic attachment to it, and I’m getting pretty damned tired of hearing how great the old software was when he’s not going to be using anymore. Bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch.

It’s said that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I have found that I have more tools at my disposal than I thought and I can somehow finesse these situations. But this guy… This guy…

Where’s my fucking hammer?

I was tempted to title this entry M is for Motherfucking Fairbanks but this is a family website and I wanted to keep it clean for the kiddies.

So, yeah, fucking Fairbanks. It’s 7:35 pm local time and I’m still at the office. I’m the only person still at the office because all the local staff went home already, leaving me with a steaming pile of shit in my lap and leaving me to my own devices to fix it. Because, you know, I’m The Conversion Guy, so I must know how their shit works around here. But I don’t.

One of the computers here wouldn’t autoload tomorrow’s traffic logs like it’s supposed to so I called tech support (not my company’s support because it wasn’t our software locking up). He hemmed and hawed for awhile and finally proclaimed that everything was set up right and should be working. I brought him back to earth by pointing out that, in fact, it wasn’t, which was why I called him in the first fucking place. Moron. So he suggests that, hey, rebooting it will probably work. So I did.

Big fucking mistake.

What happens when you reboot a computer? It restarts, and then you have to log in to it. What happens if you don’t have the login information? You’re stuck. Guess who’s stuck.

But, hey Chuck, call the station’s IT guy, he can help you! He knows you’re doing a major software conversion to his station’s computers and that things are likely to go wrong, so he’s probably hanging by the phone, waiting eagerly for your call.

Wrong. Stupid is not waiting for my call. Stupid is on vacation somewhere in the Alaskan outback. Nobody knows where he is, nobody expects to hear from him for another 8 days, and he isn’t answering his satellite phone. Because, you know, he’s on vacation. During a major software conversion that’s been progressing for 3 months.

Fuck it, I don’t care. If you can’t be bothered to keep your own shit straight, then neither can I.

I’m getting laid off in three months and my company can’t afford to lose me, and even if they decide they really can afford to lose me all that means is that I’m out of a job 90 days early. Fuck it.

F isn’t for Fairbanks. It’s for Fuck You, Fairbanks.

10:00 pm. I’m still at the station and I’m now completely alone. Everyone else has gone home, leaving me, the stranger from out of town, alone in a building stuffed with millions of dollars worth of electronics, not to mention four radio studios to choose from in which I could barricade myself and begin broadcasting my insane manifesto.

But no, instead I’m just sitting here, surfing the web. And considering rifling through some drawers. I wouldn’t do that, but it’s fun to consider.

Why am I still here? We finally got into the locked account, booted up the overnight machine, and managed to get two logs to autoload. Unfortunately, we still have two more logs to load. The traffic manager who was working them at 6:00 abruptly stopped halfway through, announcing that he had to go bike riding and that he’d be back at 10 (or was it 10:30?) to finish.

So here I sit, hungry, tired and cranky, waiting for this lollygagging nipplehead to finish what should have only taken 15 minutes to do in the first place. Knowing him, though, it’s going to take him an hour to do it once he finally gets here, and he’ll be complaining the whole way and bitching about how much better his beloved old system would have done this.

I may actually give his old system a test drive if he starts up with that noise. The PC and monitor it ran on are still here, sitting on the floor next to his desk. I bet they’ll crush his skull nicely, much better than our system would.

He’ll die happy.

10:20. The biking traffic manager is back. He’s been in his chair for about five minutes and has spent most of it bitching about how much better his old traffic system was.

I’m going to kill him. After he loads his logs. I’ve been here long enough today.

11:15 pm. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

Logs are loaded, everything worked, I’m heading back to my hotel room.

I’m letting the TM live. I’m too tired for murder right now, and I don’t think even that would end his bleating complaints.

My friend and co-worker Kevin, recently married, just confided with me that he and his wife are having a baby. I congratulated him, of course, then asked:

“So, have you met the father?”

Ha. I kill me.

Today, I fulfilled a dream I didn’t even know I had: I’ve now eaten at the Denny’s at the top of the world.

I’m particularly pleased that I wore a Hawaiian shirt for this picture.

The guy I’m working with here — let’s call him “Doug” — is having problems pulling a report and he just complained to me for the umpteenth fucking time about it. Normally I would try to care deeply — deeply, I tell you! — about this problem he’s having, but this time around I just can’t. Because he’s not trying to pull the report out of my software, he’s pulling it out of someone else’s, software I don’t know a damned thing about, software he’s supposed to know how to use because he’s been using it for years. Not my problem, bro, handle it yourself.

So Doug came over to me just now, showed me the report, and bitched about how “what we need to do is figure out how to eliminate this column from the report.” And then he stared at me, expecting me to have the answer.

I gave him an answer: So you’ve got a goal now, Doug. It’s good to have goals.

For me, that’s tact.

Cue Corey Hart singing “I wear my sunglasses at night…” because it’s 6:30 pm, the sun is at high noon, and I … am … OUTTA HERE!!!!

My flight out isn’t until 10 am tomorrow, but there’s a flight at 12:40 tonight with 12 open seats and I’m going to be there to try to fly stand-by. If I get on that one it’ll get me to Seattle at 5:00 am, and there’s a 7:00 am flight from there to Burbank with 50 open seats which I’m just about guaranteed to get on. If everything lines up for me (which, dammit, I’m about due for, considering how nightmarish this trip has been), I should get home before I was supposed to leave Alaska.

Meanwhile Doug the Rain Man is talking to me even as I type — while I’m clearly NOT LISTENING TO HIM — still bitching about my software and mooning after the old system. Blah blah blah blah…

Ladies and gentlemen, the Elvis tattoo is getting the hell out of the building!

My flight home from Alaska leaves Fairbanks in exactly two hours. I won’t be on it, though, because I’m already home. I’ll spare you the convoluted details of everything I went through to get here. Instead I’ll give you the simple details.

I got to the Fairbanks airport last night (this morning?) to find that the 12:50 am flight with 12 open seats was actually completely full, but another flight was four hours late and leaving 4 minutes later and I was able to get on that one to Anchorage.

With a 15-minute connection window, I then caught a flight from Anchorage to Seattle (next to the wouldn’t-shut-the-fuck-up woman who at the end of the flight had the balls to complain that “Wow, 20 minutes’ sleep isn’t enough, it’s almost worse than staying awake.” No, it’s worse staying awake listening to you jabber at me for the entire flight.

There was no way I was going to make the 7 am connection in Seattle … until the flight from Anchorage got in early at 6:35. The connecting flight was two gates over and I made it with about 2 minutes to spare. Sweet.

And now I’m home. And now I’m going to sleep, probably to hear the incredible talking woman in my dreams.

But best of all, I’m not in Fairbanks anymore. Life is good.