Two Evils

I am feeling a lot of anger today. Work is being super stressful, in spite of the beautiful weather that I am experiencing. I am currently thinking homicidal thoughts about two very specific people. One person deserves it and the other does not.

To begin, I will discuss the lesser of my two evils. The clients representative and site manager is a low tech, stamp collecting, long-winded story telling, lonely old man. Ordinarily, I could handle a person such as this. My patience with people is generally not too bad (while my patience with things… I will leave for another blog), but after dealing with this man for two months, my patience is nearing its limit. The computer the client gave him is slow and unwieldy. However, his lack of understanding of some basic computer functions makes it very difficult for me to work with him. If I send him an email with more than one attachment, he gets upset. This is because he cannot then forward the one important attachment from my email to his boss. The only way that he can forward attachments to other people is by forwarding the entire email. I did somewhat lose my temper with him today regarding that. I suggested that perhaps he should take a basic computer course. It might make his life easier. His response was “That’s not my job.” Yet, nowhere in my job description does it say Information Technologist. Still, I have difficulty condemning a person whose only crime is ignorance. Even if the ignorance is somewhat willful.

The greater evil is someone who did something very bad to my lady, when my lady was only a little girl. My lady has begun to remember these bad things slowly over the last three years or so. When she first told me she knew who it was who had done this to her, my reaction was immediate and visceral. My lady’s sister was there when the angry side of me envisioned, with crystal clarity, a wooden baseball bat with a railway spike driven through it. This was to be my weapon of vengeance. I have since gone through many other implements of destruction whenever the stress becomes too much for me to deal with. From axes, to picks, to an imitation katana of my brother’s, all have been tools in my mind to bring home the message that children should not be touched that way. I do not think I could ever plan to do anything to this man. However, if I ever meet him again, I do not know what I would do. I would hope I could keep my temper, but I do not know if I could. My current, slightly more rational, revenge fantasy, is to go into his workplace and ask, loudly, how he could do this to her. And then refuse to leave until the authorities were called. Again, I will not do this, but it is a thought that rolls into my head from time to time.

Unfortunately, stress causes anger in me. A t-shirt at a truck stop explained stress to be very well one time:

“Stress is the body’s confusion when the mind will not beat the shit out of someone who really deserves it.”

So, now I practice just letting everything go. It does not always work, but is works sometimes. I will find my peace, with my lady, in the lakes and the stars.