First off, HAPPY ST. PATTY’S DAY! Yay for wearing green and getting drunk! I actually get to go to Legoland today, and while I’m out, you can enjoy a Pantoum.
Back in December 2010, I wrote about my vacation in which I got called almost every day and my boss dressing as a super hero, and I wrote a pantoum about him cleaning the fridge. Looking back, I did the form wrong, only honoring the rhyming scheme of the copied lines instead of using the lines verbatim. I fixed this to express WHY I’M SO GLAD IT’S THE WEEKEND:
BECAUSE I F#*KING HATE DATA ENTRY & HAD TO DO IT A LOT!
I was forced to enter hundreds of names and emails into Constant Contact, which is the data entry cousin of the timesheet dragon. So, to divert myself from insanity and self loathing, I wrote a pantoum…
Pantoum – a form of Malayisan folk poetry with stanzas of two rhyming couplets. The 2nd and 4th lines become the 1st and 3rd of the next, and the last line is often the same as the first.
I don't know what I was meant to do in life, but this totally is NOT it!
The Data Entry Game
A monotonous lobotomy,
all day the keyboard goes clickity-clack,
syncopating my mental disharmony,
and I’ll never get these hours back.
All day the keyboard goes clickity-clack,
as I enter dates and numbers and names,
and I’ll never get these hours back.
That’s the data-entry game.
As I enter dates and numbers and names,
I twitch and fidget and grumble and cry.
That’s the data entry game,
to look at yourself and wonder “why?”
I twitch and fidget and grumble and cry,
as the list goes on and on and on,
you look at yourself and wonder “why?”
then stifle a bored and ominous yawn.
And the list goes on and on and on,
and I wish my eyes could copy and paste,
as I stifle a bored and ominous yawn,
and think to myself “Oh what a waste.”
Oh, I wish my eyes could copy and paste,
to relieve this secretarial sodomy,
but instead I think to myself “Oh what a waste,”
and continue this monotonous lobotomy.
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