Ruined day: A dissection.

What does it take to ruin one’s day? Not much. Think about it. Come up to a coworker and tell her that she looks like she gained weight. Spit out a snide remark about how the food in a wedding you’re attending sucks and make sure either the bride or groom hears it. Tell a friend how his boyfriend reminds you of that kid with a severely deformed face from the movie Mask. A few seconds, a few words. That’s all it takes to make that person fume over your yam bag remark all fucking day.

Now, what do you think it takes to ruin my day? Well, not much. Just a computer and about 4 minutes.

Allow me to explain: Part of my job is to make sure that our ad-serving platform is properly serving paid, 3rd party banner ads across several of the company’s web properties. Now, in order for me to look at our websites from the perspective of someone in the United States (the country most of the ads we serve are geotargeted to), I need to log on to something called Citrix.

For all of you non-techie types, citrix is sort of like a virtual machine that is hosted remotely and has a US-based IP address.

I usually get on the damn thing at night and the problem with it is that every time I hit a key on my keyboard, there is like a 2-second delay before the character appears on the screen. This results in me typing way faster than the shit actually appearing on screen which can be really confusing not to mention annoying. For instance, when I’m not on a virtual machine, I can type the sentences below in three seconds flat:

“Your Gazongas look delicious. I want to lick them. I will pay you in sex dollars!”

But because I’m in a virtual machine environment and because of the 2-second delay I mentioned earlier, with the same amount of time, I can only produce:

“Yousr gaonas look deslicous I wanat tis lick sthtem”

Thanks to this stupid fucking delay, everything web form I fill up within the Citrix environment is full of typographical errors. The result is that I am taking at least five times longer to do really simple tasks I need to do like bypassing the company firewall to check out new party photos from my hot FaceBook contacts, or logging on to my personal web-based email to forward funny videos of kids hitting their balls on railings after falling off their skateboards to my brother. So frustrating, really.

Now, I am a very angry, easily aggravated person who has a temper shorter than his bird (which, like I’ve said numerous times, is about the size of a Hershey Kiss).  I often find myself seething with anger over the most mundane things at which point, I invariably curse like an old prostitute being stuffed by a drunken sailor and throwing shit around but I’m usually able to hold it in and, eventually, smother it. But this virtual machine thinger is pushing me to the edge.

You probably think that after using the damn thing for at least a few hours everyday, that I will get used to it but really, the opposite is true: The virtual machine gets incrementally slower as my day progresses and the aggravation I feel burns stronger and stronger deep inside. It doesn’t help that I clocked in for work 5 hours early today because I wanted to get some shit done and have like a gallon of caffeine and a pound of sugar coursing my veins right now.

Now, all the caffeine and sugar I have in my body right now,  the slowness of the virtual machine  I’m working with and my temper which is already lit only means one thing: In about 45 minutes, I am going to rip somebody’s arm off and DESTROY my computer with it. Most likely while screaming and/or crying.

Fucking day, I swear to God.

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