Are you busy?

This is something that has always bugged me: Someone calls, or IMs, or walks in my office and says, "Are you busy?" My answer is always, "I don't know, it depends. What do you need?" The right way to ask the question is, "Do you have time to help me with something?" or, "Are you too busy to help me with something?" I will almost always say, "sure, I can help you," or maybe, "I can help you in a few minutes once I finish what I'm in the middle of." But "Are you busy?" is just so irritating. I'm always busy doing something, and if I'm not, what does that say about me? "Nope, not doing a thing, just sitting here taking up space."

Someone asked me today, "are you at maximum capacity?" Here again, it depends. Why are you asking? Do you want to offload a client to me, or do you just want to talk something through? I can definitely talk, but I'm probably not willing to take on another client unless there's a really good reason for it. "Maximum capacity" is dependent on what you want me to do. Maybe I'm being too literal, but there are just certain things that set me off.

Another one is being asked to "like" all those Facebook pages like "if you can't afford a 20% tip, don't go out to dinner," or "I'll have a Diet Coke with my quarter-pounder, I'm on a diet." Why are people so freaking judgmental? I know they're just silly things, but frankly, who cares? If you want to publicize that you like it, fine, but why ask me to join you? And who has so much time to spend on Facebook during the day anyway? Rather than continue to be irritated every time I read one of those, I finally figured out all I had to do was hide the people who do it. My brain is now much calmer.

Now get off my lawn!

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