Note: This is satirical.  I am not actually encouraging you get coworkers to hate you.  Unless, you know, you want them to…

Every office seems to have one.  The one person that drives everyone nuts.  It could be their attitude, their habits, their sense of humor (or lack thereof), their laugh, or perhaps their strange fascination with getting involved in absolutely everything possible at work.  Well, you too can be that person – or rather, dethrone the current most-hated-candidate.

1. Sing and drum with your fingers randomly.  A lot.  The more off-beat, the better.
2. Answer questions directed at other people.  If the question was lead with another person’s name and you cut in with the answer, extra points.  If the answer is incorrect, double the points.  If your answer insights a useless argument… you don’t need this guide.
3. Come up with an obnoxious sign-off or signature for your emails.  Use it all the time.
4. Nag other people.  Often.  If you’re a manager or somehow able to direct other people, stand over them until they get their work done.  Then, get them to explain everything they did.  Make it clear that you don’t believe they did it right.  If you’re an overachiever, solve the problem yourself.  Badly.
5. If you’re losing an argument, walk away.  As fast as you can.  Bonus points for throwing your hands up in frustration.  Gold star for making a girly frustrated noise.
6. Your coworkers are not people, they are tools.
7. This one is important .  It’s a real winner.  Ready?  Okay.  Do. Not. Follow. Process.  If a policy exists, it’s meant to be broken.  You know a better, faster and more efficient way to do it, so get to it.

On a serious note, I do believe that it’s often to remind ourselves of office etiquette.   While you shouldn’t necessarily be striving to be the most liked person at work, you should be showing respect to everyone that you interact with.  When you have a large team working towards a big project, cooperation is tantamount to success.  In order to encourage cooperation and, most importantly, collaboration, those that you work with have to respect you and want to actually help you.  That way when you need a favor, they’ll be more than happy to help you out of a tough spot.

This is most important for those in a managerial position.  While you can get results by being abrasive, rude and demanding, the quick results won’t last long.  This doesn’t foster any kind of loyalty nor even a desire to continue to do well.   Stephen F. Covey explained the way relationships work best (I find this particularly pertinent when it comes to work relationships).  You have to view relationships with people like you would view a bank account.  Unlike its financial equivalent, relationships do not come with credit cards.  If you keep withdrawing (asking for favors) from another person, they will eventually run dry.  You have to give in order to keep that positive relationship, even if it’s just positive encouragement or guidance in solving a rough problem.

You would think that a lot of these concepts (be nice to people, follow the rules) would be common sense.  You would think that people would do unto others as they would have done to them.  Though I don’t want to sound like I’m preaching, I do think that we need to start encouraging these best-practices a lot more.  This can help work become a more positive environment.

And to close this out, on the topic of etiquette: High Five Etiquette

Anyone that knows me knows I have an almost ungodly amount of shoes (okay, not as bad as Confessions of a Shopaholic, but still ) as well as clothes.  Also, while picky, I do enjoy my purses.  So, my challenge for the month of March was to get through all 31 days without buying a single pair thing for myself to “wear”.  No shoes.  No clothes.  No purses.  Nada.

Good news: Challenge conquered.  I am extending this challenge for another month, as I clearly do not need anything.  So that’s just a repetition of #1.  This will continue and become a good habit, I will it!

Challenge #2: Making lunch for work.  I’ve actually noticed other people at work making this effort more, which is encouraging.  My options for enjoying a home-made lunch are actually quite numerous, I just never chose to look at them and instead opted for the easy follow-the-crowd option.  I can:

1. Read a book while eating.  This can also be done outdoors as it starts to get warmer and warmer (and then too freaking warm, Texas.)
2. Play TF2 or something similar online with coworkers
3. Play cards or something similar with the other people who brought their lunches.
4. Etc.

I actually quite like each of these options and they have so far already led to savings.  Many of us (myself included until recently) didn’t really think about how much we were spending.  However, when you really break the costs down, eating out is far from the same as buying groceries – unless, of course, you’re just buying ridiculously expensive groceries.  True, you may be able to eat out cheaply, but who wants the McDonald’s dollar menu every day?  My ass certainly doesn’t.

Ideally this challenge will be met daily, but I am realistic and will allow for a cheap lunch once a week.  Here we go, Challenge #2!

Challenge #3: Not buying a new game until I make a significant dent in my game backlog.

I find it a little sad that this is my first gaming-related post since my site revamp, but I’m also encouraged by it.  I’ve got a lot of great games I either haven’t really started, or left hanging and should really pick up again.  Mass Effect 2 was the last game I bought myself and I managed to beat it right away.  I actually essentially started this challenge around then, but I’m now making it a conscious effort.  These games include:

1. Dragon Age (Shameful, I know)
2. Velvet Assassin (many would argue that this is not a good game, but I was enjoying it [despite its save system] and would like to finish it)
3. Assassin’s Creed 2 (I’m actually playing this now-ish)
4. Ghostbusters (I got stuck in this one really annoying level.  Perhaps a difficulty change could fix it…)
5. Amped 3
6. The Witcher
7. Saboteur
8. Batman Arkham Asylum
9. Brutal Legend
10. GTAIV (Pathetic, I know)
11. Mercenaries 2

Wow.  That list is actually kind of embarrassing.  In fact, it could also include countless old games I got close to finishing but just didn’t wrap up (Kameo).  Unfortunately part of the reason many of them were shelved before completion was that I’d run into these crazy bugs that totally messed up my save file and I wasn’t willing to start from scratch right away.  Funnily enough, this started my habit of always maintaining two save files and alternative overwriting them – some people think I’m crazy, other people know it’s because I do crazy things to software!

But, that was an unnecessary tangent.  These challenges are to accomplish two very important goals: self-improvement and debt reduction.  A philosophy we espouse at work is one I like to think I can embody and practice – continuous improvement.  I moved away to a new job and got a home.  That home brought extra responsibilities.  Through continuous improvement of myself and my life, I will be able to meet those extra responsibilities and work towards a better future for myself.

I’ve read friends’ blogs and their own financial struggles always struck a chord in me, a chord that I now find myself tuning.

Over time, I found and purchased a home here in Houston, a lovely condo with a great layout that suits what I was looking for.  A great kitchen, living room, cozy bed and convenient bathroom.  The layout and the new furniture didn’t make the place feel quite right.  It was home, to be sure, but it lacked a certain warmth.  Personality.  A hint of memory.  Granted, the memories would come slowly, but I wanted my own to occupy the space.

I must say, however, that building most of the furniture in this place has made it feel more like mine.  I look at the entertainment center, coffee table, book cases, kitchen table, chairs and I can say, “I put that together.  This is the result of my hard work.”  As much as I really love to hate on Ikea and the bruises and cuts I’ve accumulated after assembling furniture from there, it’s actually helped me appreciate the space I occupy a little more.  Trusting my furniture is trusting my work, and (to be really cheesy) it’s a matter of trusting myself.

That extra warmth is building up, however, and though it makes me feel mostly happy, there’s that hint of nostalgia as well.  The friends left behind and the memories (both good and bad) that you’re suddenly able to relive.  So many people try to start with a fresh, blank slate.  They want to leave the past behind.  And I admit that that was my attitude as well.  But now, more than ever, as I make this “house” a home, I realize that those memories, that dirty, scratched, colored and worn slate is my personality.  It’s my character.  It’s my loves, my hates and my realizations.  It’s who I am and if you want to leave that behind, if you want to start yourself anew, then you have more serious problems than you could ever imagine.

But me, I am who I am and my home is now a reflection of that.  A little cluttered, a little girly, a little geeky.

Then I started connecting more with other women in the industry: developers, gamers, enthusiasts.  Bitches, whiners, strong individuals, innovators.  I realized something so fundamentally obvious that it struck me as odd that I tried so hard not to see reality.  While we are all individuals, we can not be labelled with a pretty pink bow or a blue ribbon.  Who we are, especially as gamers, is not defined by our gender, our age or our role in this amazing industry composed of so many unique people.  Rather, who we are is defined by one very large and liberal label: Gamer.

As I read more game news regarding girl gamers and regarding women depicted in games, I realized that there are people I agree with and people I strongly disagree with.  One of the latter is actually a girl in game journalism.  She’s gotten quite a bit of positive and negative reinforcement for a recent piece examining Bayonetta.  A piece that I vehemently disagree with.  Her writings, among other female writers I’ve encountered, led me to question my association with such a specific sub-category of Gamers.  The dramatic difference in opinions solidified the fact that just because we share a label that is both loved and hated by so many, we are not kindred spirits.  We likely will never be.

This made me re-examine the label I so proudly applied to myself.  I am still happy to associate with the Xbox Gamerchix as I have found some amazing people through it.  I am now just happy to label myself as a Gamer, but I have to make this clear: this is not because I agree with all of them, this is not because I am like all of them and this is not because I feel compelled to back them up.  This is because we all share a passion which is so intimately intertwined with our lives that many of us don’t know what we’d do without them:  we love to game.

I am hoping that WordPress will be nicer, simpler and gentler.  So far so good.  I’m also planning on re-merging my gaming blog with my personal.  I don’t update often enough so both sites end up looking rather dead!

Your patience is appreciated (if you even bother to come anymore ) as I find the look and feel that suits me best.