Sidetrek: Grouchy

I'm having one of those days when nothing seems to be going as well as you'd like. It's not a BAD day, per se, it's just: You expect something to happen, and then something comes along with a little 'story twist' that says, nope, ain't gonna happen how you expect, your stress level goes up just a mite higher as you deal.

Starts off in the morning with work...
Expected: Not supposed to be working this Saturday. Supposed to have a three day weekend + a leave day I took, hoping to make it a nice peaceful four day stretch.
Twist: Yesterday, I get informed I need to come in to do a 'special' presentation.
Well, ok, fine, I'll get a half-day off some other time, so much for my nice peaceful four days...

Expected: Presentation to start at 10am. Over by 11am, stone until time to go home.
Twist: Oh, the previous speaker is speaking so longwindedly he took up half an hour more, it'll be later on in the day.

Fine. Just have to deal with rising stress levels from idiots who can't anticipate how many notes to print, and so keep asking us, as the venue hosts, to do errand boy work and photocopy MORE. I did this twice (20 copies of 8 pages, double-sided, 5 copies of 16+ pages, double-sided) for someone, another person had to make more of the first, and then my bosses' boss was also being too nice to said idiots and made even MORE photocopies for said idiots, and didn't even manage to catch our presentation. Cos she was photocopying and stapling stuff. Wow. :(

Expected: Audience to leave for refreshment break. We move into vacated auditorium to set up our presentation.
Twist: Said disorganized meeting host idiot (the one who kept begging for photocopies) rushes out in a tizzy. Oh noes, the caterers are late! How do we keep them entertained? Can you guys start your presentation first?!

My boss, naturally, blows a fuse at this. We need set up time, after all. What kind of fucking schedule do you guys have around here? We're caught in the middle, trying to be polite to the meeting host, while our bosses have had enough of this rubbish and want to be a little difficult. Personal stress levels rising...

Expected: Finally, the caterers manage to arrive just in time. Audience is shooed out for food. We move in to set up our stuff.
Twist: Just as I am setting up our laptop, screwing in the projection cable, the idiot meeting host hurries over with a group going "Oh, could you give us that projection cable...We want to have an AGM now." We go, "Huh? Now? Here?" She goes, "Yes. Now. Here."

"..."

What? Can't you see on your own damn schedule that our presentation is supposed to be HERE. NOW. And that we were lurking outside the auditorium for the past 1.5 hours waiting for our set-up time. Suddenly, you've made an unconsulted decision to use OUR time for your AGM. *rolls eyes*

We're supposed to be having concurrent presentation sessions at five different venues right now. 4/5s of your previous audience are having their proper workshops as planned. Our audience is now a captive audience for your precious AGM (which will only take 5-6 minutes, no worries!)

Anyhow, long story short, we FINALLY get our presentation over and done with, and we FINALLY retreat back upstairs leaving the meeting hosts to be disorganized without involving us any further, bitching bitterly about said idiots. Time flies by, we go home.

Expected: Me, I'm very happy because yesterday, I telephone stalked Tec-Drome and found out that yes, DDO is finally out on Friday, and that you can come collect it any time. So I ran over to Sim Lim and picked up DDO, cackling with glee.
Twist: I install DDO. No problems. I try to sign up for a billing account. The "submit" button doesn't seem to work. Oh, maybe it's my 'accept no cookies' settings for IE. I flick billing.turbine.com temporarily to the trusted zone. Still doesn't work. Odd. I try using Firefox with everything enabled. Newp. I run to the forums and find out the billing server seems to be down.


"..."

I'm trying to PAY you, and you don't even want my MONEY. *sniffs* So much for DDO anticipation until their stupid billing server comes back up.

Well, I spent the time looking at the DDO forums. I'm mildly worried because there seems to be a huge controversy over how to play a cleric. The healbot vs battle cleric, healer vs emp defender debate, appears to be going strong whichever MMO you go to. Goddamn Everquest. Your gaming tropes are permanently ingrained into a substantial subset of the population.

After reading all those stories, I think I'm just going to have to grow a thick skin, and resign myself to being kicked out of groups, no matter what I do or don't do. Don't heal? Get kicked. Heal too much, run out of mana points, can't heal anymore, then party dies? Get kicked. Swing a weapon in the wrong group who wants healz0rs to be good lil healz0rs? Get kicked.

I think it's just a human emotion to be a little fearful of rejection, to want to make people happy with you and like you, that you want to be perfect and respected and be called a god (of healing or of whatever). I'd like to be a good player who won't get kicked. Especially in such a team reliant game as DDO.

But I also don't want to be a healbot. There's a word for that. It's called, go play Guild Wars and get a computer-controlled healer henchman. They are happy to spam heals ad nauseam. If you die with one of those, and still want a 'real' human being, then you're evidently being so stupidly leeroy jenkins that only a real human can pull your fat out of the fire.

So I guess I'll have to stop wanting to be so perfect, but still recognize my emotions for being what they are. It's ok to want to seek approval. It's only not OK if you think getting approval from online gamers will validate your existence, and vice versa, if rejection from others online will crush your self-esteem flat or something.

It's a game. With social interaction. We're going to have fun learning something new. We'll make mistakes, laugh about it, disregard the uptight idiots and meet people who are a little less starched in the shorts about things. In the end, it'll even out. Birds of a feather flock together. I want to befriend those who aren't obsessed number-crunching min-maxers that are out to dictate how other people play their characters.

Whatever. Worse come to the worse, I'll rack up such a lousy reputation on the cleric that I'll just have to delete it and start anew, with more wisdom about how to cleric properly, that can only come through firsthand gameplaying experience. :)

Now if only the STUPID BILLING SERVER would stop being broken.