If you've noticed for over a year now I usually don't talk about work. I use vague terms to discuss some of the things going on, like if I'm busy or not.

This entry is a little different, but still is as vague as possible - don't want to get dooce'd.

I never feel helpless at work at all unless something happens to my ID Badge and I can't get in to the four doors to get to my desk from the parking garage. Four. To go to the bathroom, I need to go through one of those doors. I HATE having to ask someone to borrow their just to be able to go to the bathroom. There was a time at the end of March that my card didn't work for a week. A WHOLE FRIGGIN' WEEK without a card. That was hell. There was one night after most of the people had left when I had to go to the bathroom, and - I'm sure you agree - doing that takes precedence over trying to find someone still in the office that will let you borrow their card. I had to wait 15 minutes for someone to come to the door and let me in.

To add fuel to the fire, the card reader stations are mag-stripe readers and not proximity readers (for you non-dweebs out there, that means I have to take my card and swipe it through a reader, like a credit card, instead of just touching - or getting close to - a reader that'll read a certain radio frequency that gets bounced off the card) And there's at least one of these readers - specifically the one between bathroom and office - that doesn't read well, so it can take up to 5 or 6 swipes to get the reader to recognize the card and unlock the door.

Well, it started again this morning - I could get in some doors, but not the last two. After a while, I started to find out that this was happening to other people as well - all of us are contractors. I had nightmares of this. People are telling us that it could be the cards or could be the reader because the "system" shows that we are active.

After we demonstrated what was going on to another person, all of a sudden the cards work. We didn't see any work done on the reader, so it had to have been a "system" thing.

I hate the feeling of being locked-out. It's almost that feeling of not being wanted, that you're not part of the group. And this is happening often enough (my first incident was shortly after we moved-in here at the beginning of the year), that anytime the system "hiccups", I start to panic.